Leading Archaeologist Chastised for Publishing Artifacts in Private Collections

Cyprus’s most distinguished archaeologist, retired Antiquities Department director Vassos Karageorghis, has been harshly criticized for publishing privately owned artifacts obtained on the antiquities market and lacking known provenances in a catalogue of Cypriot terra-cotta figurines. Karageorghis’s “inclusion of a large amount of material from private collections raises several difficult issues,” declares Ellen Herscher, chair of the Cultural Properties Legislation and Policy Committee of the powerful Archaeological Institute of America, in an extensive review of the Cypriot scholar’s catalogue in a recent issue of the prestigious Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR).1 Herscher deplores “the role of […]