Opinion Why museums should start digging

This year saw the end of the five-year-long trial of Marion True,a former antiquities curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Getty is hardly the only American institution to be accused of buying art of dubious origin. In recent years,the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,the Museum of Fine Arts,Boston,and the Princeton University Art Museum have all returned contested works of art. Even when museums have the best of intentions,some of the works they buy have passed through the hands of underground suppliers. It’s hard for museums to avoid the black market partly because there is so little legitimate excavation going on that can yield new finds. Sadly,when an object is taken from its original site without documentation,context is lost. And in archaeology,context is everything: it tells us an object’s age,its likely place of manufacture and its everyday use. This lack of information makes it harder for collectors to determine if an object is fake,while even authentic works,in the absence of the context of their discovery,become mute witnesses to our irresponsible acquisitiveness. But there is one thing museums could do that would put looters and smugglers out of business while uncovering more of the world’s cultural treasures at far lower cost: excavate archaeological sites themselves. Today this might seem a strange idea,but it’s exactly what museums like the Louvre and the British Museum did in the 19th century. Of course,back then there was no distinction between possession and ownership,and many countries lost significant pieces of their heritage as a result. Eventually,museums could no longer act this way. In Italy,for example,a law passed in 1909 subjected all archaeological finds to government regulation,while later laws made new finds the property of the state. So today’s museums can’t,and shouldn’t,go back to the 19th-century model. But they could create partnerships with the states where we know these promising archaeological sites exist to sponsor excavations and to help provide proper scientific oversight when artifacts are unearthed. Excavation is the lifeblood of archaeology. Without it,museums can only recycle exhibitions of well-known masterpieces. And despite two centuries of digging,much more remains to be discovered than has yet been found. If only ownership could be separated from possession,then museums might strike a deal with countries like Greece and Italy. Here’s how it would work: The countries of origin would own anything that was excavated there and keep most of the finds on display in local partnering museums. But the museum that sponsored the dig would be allowed to borrow a percentage of the finds and exhibit them. Eventually,all the finds from a site would be exchanged on a rotating basis between the country of origin and the museum,which would pay the expenses and insurance. Where should museums and investors begin? Well,there’s the tomb of Antiochus of Commagene at Mount Nemrut in southeast Turkey. Farther afield one could add Pataliputra in India,reputed to be the most populous city in the world in the third century BC; or the tomb of Qin Shi Huang,China’s first emperor. Qin erected thousands of realistic terra-cotta statues around his tomb; these Xi’an Warriors have been famous since they were first discovered in 1974. But the excavations have thus far touched only a small,peripheral part of the site. Even the famous Pompeii remains a mystery,with a third of the city still underground. Finds from these sites and the scores more like them around the world have filled many rooms in our museums and have contributed enormously to our understanding of everyday life in antiquity,yet we have much more to learn. It’s not too late for museums to start digging. BERNARD FRISCHER