Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in a Quest to Fix a Toilet | Hacker News Reader

Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in a Quest to Fix a Toilet

nytimes.com

108 pointstimr43 comments

Hopefully he's not just selling artifacts on the black market, which is the most common outcome for private findings.

But yeah, southern Italy is all like that. Loads of houses in major cities like Naples or Rome will have a hatch in the basement, leading to what are basically unprotected archeological sites. Local authorities often have to turn the other way, because the cost of properly handling all this stuff would be prohibitive. These are living and bustling cities, you can't just turn them into museums.

Hopefully he's not just selling artifacts on the black market

I understand your point, but why not?

Isn't the British Museum basically loot from all over the world? Wikipedia claims it has "8 million works". So maybe less than 1% is on display? And Britain isn't about to give any of that stuff back.

So when an empire steals it's OK, but when "the little people" try to make a few bucks to cover costs, that's bad?

Anyway, I'm just saying that it might be "better" in some sense to allow these artifacts out to collectors than to have them stored away in boxes in the locked storage areas of a museum.

I think the British Museum's response would be that their objects are on display for the world for free, rather than hidden away in a private collection; and that researchers can also get free access to the works not on display. They'd also say that they are better placed to conserve their collection over the next few centuries than other collectors.

How many significant figures do you need before the proportion of the world population that has seen any object in the British Museum rises above zero?

At those scales, everything is zero. But the important thing is the potential to see an object. If the Rosetta Stone is sold to an anonymous private collector, I have practically zero chance of ever seeing it, no matter who I am, what I earn, or where I live. But if it's in a public museum, then my access is much greater.

The counter-response is the Elgin Marbles issue. The Greeks want them back, to put on public display in their native location, the Acropolis.

The Acropolis is important enough in Greek culture that during their war of independence, they supplied the enemy with ammunition so it wouldn't be destroyed. The Turkish garrison was low on ammunition, so started pulling apart the columns of the Acropolis to get at the lead joinery. The Greeks supplied them with enough lead to stop that from happening.

http://www.ahistoryofgreece.com/revolution.htm

What better place to see ancient Greek sculptures than the very temple they were built for, curated by people who honour that location? It's not like the British Museum doesn't have other items to put on display...

Because when they're sold on the black market, they don't usually maintain an accurate archaeological context.

To give an example, a particular Roman coin might be only moderately rare and valuable but finding it in a context where you can determine the date and place it was dropped and who might have owned it is valuable information that doesn't usually follow black market artefacts around (because it's proof of a crime).

If private collectors wanted to buy these things after they've been dug up and catalogued and somehow that tracking data could follow the object so that we still have it 100 years from now nobody would care.

> finding it in a context where you can determine the date and place it was dropped and who might have owned it is valuable information that doesn't usually follow black market artefacts around (because it's proof of a crime)

Is it? I'd guess that that sort of information doesn't follow black market artifacts around because the black market is just generally shady. I'd expect that any evidence of crime would quickly wash out, for the following reason:

I recall reading a post on Language Log (here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4120 ) about finding a cuneiform tablet at an "estate sale" in Seattle. The author brought it to an expert on the ancient near east and was surprised to have it confirmed as genuine.

There were indignant comments on the post, to the effect that obviously nobody in the US could legitimately own a cuneiform tablet from ancient Mesopotamia. So why wasn't this guy violating the law? And the very sensible answer was that a law prohibiting the ownership of old objects would mainly have the effect that people fearing discovery would destroy their antiquities, simultaneously removing all evidence of any putative crime and preventing anyone from ever learning anything from what used to be a (semi-)valuable artifact.

It's harder to destroy a metal coin than a block of clay, but most artifacts, like bones, statues, and inscriptions, don't pose such difficulties. Is it really illegal to own an old coin while not being illegal to own an old document?

edit: rereading the comments, it seems that owning these old things frequently is illegal, although interestingly owning the same item might or might not be illegal depending on the details of how you obtained it (not the details of where it came from). But I'll leave my comment up because I think the ideas expressed have some merit, although they don't entirely source to the comment thread that I "remembered" them from, and are a little more hypothetical and less factual than I originally thought.

In most countries, the law will not punish citizens for owning artifacts, just force a surrender of such material to authorities (with various degrees of compensation, depending on the country). This is done exactly to avoid the risk of destruction.

Buying and selling outright are banned only in order to guarantee preservation of artifacts; and if you ban an economic transaction, you have to make sure that there is an economic punishment that is greater than the expected profit, of course, in order to align incentives -- that is inevitable.

>And the very sensible answer was that a law prohibiting the ownership of old objects would mainly have the effect that people fearing discovery would destroy their antiquities, simultaneously removing all evidence of any putative crime and preventing anyone from ever learning anything from what used to be a (semi-)valuable artifact.

If the owner had a record of exactly where it had been taken from, what other objects were found alongside it (and where those objects were now) and other contextual information then it would implicate whoever dug it up in the first place, which in most places is a crime. You could argue that maybe we should make it a crime to excavate or sell an artefact without that record and make the actual digging legal. That would probably run into some issues of practicality though.

To give a concrete example of this, fragments of Roman amphorae (wine vessels) are pretty common and not super valuable unless they're very unusual. Roman amphorae found in South India tell us something about long distance trade in the classical world.

The British Museum does a lot of work cataloguing artefacts so they're available for scientific study, as well as doing their doing their own research into techniques to date objects, preserve them or to figure out how they were made.

Private collectors would be unlikely to do the same.

Money is an excellent system to determine what things are really important to us as a society and what are not.

If we are not willing to pay enough taxes, and allocate these taxes in such a way so that museums can outbid private collectors on black market, doesn't it mean that we, as a society, don't care about these artefacts as much as private collectors? I'm not saying that this is how it should be, I'm just trying to get to a real reason of this status-quo. And if private collectors care more (= willing to spend more money on it), it is just fitting that they're getting the most of it.

It does not mean we don't care, but that there other competing interests we care more about that private collectors does not need to worry about, and that most governments can't compete on disposable income with the combined fortunes of private collectors.

Apart from what was already discussed, regarding the role of museums in preservation etc, we also have to be realistic: historical context is important.

It's not like the UK government is still tasking diplomats with buying random artifacts for the glory of the British Empire. There was a time when acceptable practices were different. We're not going to punish people for "crimes" committed 200 years ago, are we? We might as well disband the Catholic Church outright and pillage the Vatican, built on "ill-gotten gains" throughout the centuries (well, isn't that an appealing prospect, now that I think of it...).

Once you go down that route, could all museums in the world please send back their Italian Renaissance paintings, we better throw them in a dark closet at the Uffizi so nobody can see them, it's not like Italy has so many of them that they can afford to exhibit and preserve less than 10% of them at any given time, right?

In most cases, these "ownership disputes" are just instruments of foreign policy. I'd argue that preservation and availability should trump "ownership" pretty much all the time.

Going back to the preservation aspect: think of what's happening in Iraq and Syria at the moment. Historical artifacts of immense value are being lost to contemporary squabbles. Would it have been so bad to store those in a basement of the British Museum, away from the madness of humanity?

Well, the US is still being held responsible for slavery even though that was outlawed 150 years ago, right?

Just because it happened long ago doesn't mean that the current government can abdicate any responsibility for reparation. The UK government should at least attempt to return the relics it has warehoused to their origins if they are under stable rule.

> US is still being held responsible for slavery

Should an African-American individual petition the US government to be resettled to Africa and compensated for the trouble, would the US government agree to pay? I don't think so. The US government is responsible for the enduring consequences of segregation, which ended less than 50 years ago in most of the country and is a separate issue from slavery, albeit strongly related. In the same way, the current UK government is responsible for preserving the artifacts it inherited so long ago and (theoretically) work towards a world where the Greek people will never be forced to sell their belongings because of economic hardship.

> The UK government should at least attempt to return the relics

Why this obsession with the British Museum, when the Louvre and other institutions are as full of less-documented loot as the BM? Are we holding the British responsible for keeping better records than others? There are tons of US and European museums with similarly-acquired catalog that are never really criticized for it. The Nike of Samothrace is so much more beautiful and powerful than anything the BM holds, but its location has never been much criticized. Could that be because modern Greek governments have had better relationships with France than with the UK? It's all just foreign policy by other means, usually by people who won't care about these relics the minute they've had their way.

I personally think the best location for artifacts is among people who will cherish them and help the world see them and understand them. As an Italian, I think half of the relics we currently mis-preserve should probably be sold to people who would do a better job. The recently-located Imperial Port of Rome will likely never be fully excavated because we wouldn't have any money to preserve it as it would deserve, and the same happens every day for magnificent stuff all over Rome. I think that's a much more pressing issue than bickering about stuff we've already studied to death.

To your second point there has always been a contingent in the museum community who opposed the reparation of artifacts. This is not to say they may lament the means of acquisition but feel that the artifacts would be better protected in a more stable or better funded place.

This group has been given more attention as of late. Especially with the rate of destruction currently occurring in parts of the middle east (re: ISIS). But even in other areas of the world this a concern. I've herd it said by some that artifacts returned to Peru cannot be fully accounted for. Admittedly, this was second hand, but it seems quite logical knowing a thing or two about the backlog of even the most funded museums.

Logic of a rich pirate: my stomach is full so now onwards piracy is banned.

"Would it have been so bad to store those in a basement of the British Museum"

Well that made me think. The looting of the Iraq Museum always made me sad. Much of it is the common heritage of all people on earth.

You do realize that a great deal of the Vatican museum collection is art sponsored (patronized) by churchmen, right? From money generally voluntarily donated to the Church?

So not quite so ill-gotten as you imagine?

It depends on your definition of "money generally voluntarily donated to the Church". Catholic history is full of shenanigans, from selling access to Paradise to taxing peasants for working the land to "tweaking" inheritance laws all the way to waging wars (since the Church was a real Nation State for hundreds of years, committing its fair share of nation-state-scale atrocities). The Sistine Chapel wasn't paid with Sunday hats, if you know what I mean.

The Louvre museum: the world's largest collection of Napoleon's captured loot.

This is way more common that you could think.

In Rome, for example, road works are normally delayed an awful lot for this.

Yes, that's why Rome does not have a proper subway system. Could you imagine London or Paris without a proper subway? That's Rome.

Rome is much smaller than the cities you mentioned.

the conurbation is smaller, the city of rome itself is in fact larger than paris and london, I believe.

Conversely, both Rome itself and its urban area have far fewer people than either Paris or London, which combined with the larger area, makes the density even less of a problem.

I don't know, man- Rome proper's population is larger than Paris', with approximately 2.9 million residents.

London, however, is indeed much larger.

Welcome to Europe. Dig up a car park, find a king ;)

Or go to a beautiful wee island and find 48 Scottish, 8 Norwegian and 4 Irish kings...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iona

There's nothing in that article about any kings.

"The abbey graveyard contains the graves of many early Scottish Kings, as well as kings from Ireland, Norway and France... In 1549 an inventory of 48 Scottish, 8 Norwegian and 4 Irish kings was recorded."

Or an unexploded bomb. :(

If anyone is wondering, that's a reference to the finding of the skeleton of king Richard III of England under a car park in Leicester:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-21063882

> City officials, sensing a major find, brought in an archaeologist, even as the Faggianos were left to do the excavation work and bear the costs.

Whelp, I think I found yer problem right here...

Being Italian and accustomed to such stories (and very much an ancient and medieval history enthusiast, so not dismissing the importance of this discovery) my curiosity goes to the hypothetical menu of Trattoria Faggiano.

Best headline of today :)

Another day of software development

> So Mr. Faggiano enlisted his two older sons

How did he manage that? Surely it was his two eldest sons and do I get a job at the NYT now please?

I'm assuming you are trying to confuse older in the context of the father, saying the sons are older than the father?

Wouldn't the 'older' be limited in context to his group of sons?

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