Field archaeologist Eric Meyers of Duke University has called for public pressure to halt BAR’s publication of artifacts that surface on the antiquities market, known in scholarly parlance as unprovenanced objects. “It is time for people of good will everywhere to demand that magazines such as Biblical Archaeology Review not publish unprovenanced materials,” Meyers wrote in the January 6, 2005, edition of the Raleigh News and Observer.
Meyers writes as if BAR goes into the shops of antiquities dealers and locates unprovenanced objects to write about. Let us be clear on what Professor Meyers is talking about: For him, BAR is really a stalking horse for the eminent scholars whose work we publish—people like André Lemaire of the Sorbonne or Kyle McCarter of Johns Hopkins University or Dennis Pardee of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago or Felice Israel of the University of Genoa or Pierre Bourdreuil of the Collège de France. Sometimes articles describing unprovenanced materials that appear in BAR are written by such highly admired scholars themselves, and sometimes BAR reports on the research of these scholars published in other periodicals.
Why doesn’t Professor Meyers attack these scholars directly instead of using BAR as a cover?
Professor Meyers doesn’t attack BAR alone: His target is all “magazines such as Biblical Archaeology Review.” Again, BAR serves as a peg on which to hang censure of others—periodicals such as the Israel Exploration Journal, Revue Biblique (a publication of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem) and the French journal Semitica. Why doesn’t he attack these periodicals directly? Why does he mention only BAR? Apparently, fearful of attacking his colleagues in the academy, he uses BAR as the fall-guy.
The “Three Shekels” ostracon, a receipt for a donation to Solomon’s Temple, was first published in French in Semitica. Subsequently, BAR published an article in large part based on the scholarly coverage in Semitica. But so did another magazine—Near Eastern Archaeology, a publication of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Meyers does not mention this, perhaps because he himself is a past president of the organization and had himself been editor of the magazine.
Meyers does allow an exception to his non-publication rule: If “the country in which the artifact was found … decide[s] … it is worthy of publication, … the country can choose where it might be published.”
A moment’s reflection will demonstrate that this suggestion is pure narrishkeit. In effect the decision to publish or not would be relegated to the various antiquities authorities, hotbeds of bureaucracy and politics. Moreover, antiquities authorities are usually controlled by field archaeologists, the chief critics of the antiquities dealers and museums that display unprovenanced finds. Whether there is an element of jealousy on the part of field archaeologists who often labor in the hot sun only to uncover unexciting finds is uncertain.
In any event, should we allow Iraqi antiquities officials to decide if the looted cuneiform tablets from Iraq should be published (and where)?
And what if we don’t know in what country the unprovenanced find came from? The Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, were found both in what is now the West Bank and in Israel. At the time the West Bank was claimed by Jordan. Whose antiquities authorities should make the decision?
Further examples are unnecessary to demonstrate the absurdity of this suggestion. Not unsurprisingly, no other scholar has taken up Meyers’s suggestion. It is a one-man proposal.
Field archaeologist Eric Meyers of Duke University has called for public pressure to halt BAR’s publication of artifacts that surface on the antiquities market, known in scholarly parlance as unprovenanced objects. “It is time for people of good will everywhere to demand that magazines such as Biblical Archaeology Review not publish unprovenanced materials,” Meyers wrote in the January 6, 2005, edition of the Raleigh News and Observer. Meyers writes as if BAR goes into the shops of antiquities dealers and locates unprovenanced objects to write about. Let us be clear on what Professor Meyers is talking about: For him, […]
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