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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > May/June 1999

The Great MFA Exposé

But will it stop archaeological looting?

By Hershel Shanks

Last year, on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s, the lead story on the front page of The Boston Globe was not about President Clinton’s impending impeachment trial in the Senate, nor about Saddam Hussein’s effort to shoot down American planes over the no-fly zone in northern Iraq, but about the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, known locally as the MFA, which, according to the newspaper, was buying looted antiquities. Two days earlier, the author of the article, Globe reporter Walter V. Robinson, received the first Public Service Award of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) for earlier […]

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Footnotes

1.

My economist friends tell me that relegating the purchase and sale of looted antiquities to the black market would likely increase their price. The competition for looted pieces would be just as intense as long as there were a significant number of buyers. So the price would go up because (1) the costs of making transactions would increase and (2) the product would be rarer. No longer could people see the items in a museum; the only way to enjoy them would be to buy them—on the black market, at prices perhaps even higher because the objects could no longer be viewed elsewhere.

2.

See, for example, Frank Moore Cross, “King Hezekiah’s Seal Bears Phoenician Imagery,” BAR 25:02; Hershel Shanks, “Leading Archaeologist Chastised for Publishing Artifacts in Private Collections,” BAR 23:06; P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., “In Private Hands,” BAR 22:02; and Nahman Avigad, Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Jeremiah: Remnants of a Burnt Archive (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1986).

3.

See “AIA: ‘Okay to Publicize Grants from Antiquities Collectors’,” Strata, BAR 24:05.

4.

See Avner Raban, “Stop the Charade: It’s Time to Sell Artifacts,” BAR 23:03.