October 2021 Research Update

Amici!  It is now November!

I am going to try to keep this update brief (we'll see if I succeed); as you might have guessed from the last few weeks on ACOUP, things have been quite busy.  October is always a substantial 'crunch' month as midterm exams and papers start coming in at the same time that applications for academic jobs are due and the interview process starts up .  This October has been no exception.  Though I will say that while the academic job market on the whole seems to have been quite bad this year, I do have the luxury of having had at least one interview to worry about, which is better than not having one.

That said the month hasn't been all grading and job stuff.  The piece of mine that was in editing last month on training auxiliaries appeared in Foreign Policy early in the month.  I have another short piece on classical tyrants and modern insurrections which I can currently shopping around for an outlet.  More on that when I have more on that.  On the podcast front, my podcast with Adrian Bonenberger is, I think, still in editing (I suspect he's dealing with the same October crunch I am!), but another podcast I recorded with the folks over at the strategy-gaming podcast Three Moves Ahead is out; we talk mostly about how strategy games tend to privilege the perception of the state, but the conversation wanders in a number of handy directions.  Judging by the twitter response, we seem to have a lot of overlap between my readers and their listeners!

I do want to note, to members of the ACOUP Senate, I have not forgotten you and I hope to have the first Senate poll on post-topics up for voting this week or next (and we'll likely see another bunch of Referenda ad Senatum questions sometime this month).

Finally, I think we can merge the scholarship progress report with the musing of the month.  The progress of our nomadic Roman mail armor article has been slowed down by provenance issues.  As you may recall from last week, we were going to try to target the American Journal of Archaeology with the article.  The AJA recently adopted a set of rules whereby authors should verify the provenance of any artifacts they discuss in the journal.  In particular, artifacts need to be able to have their ownership traced to 1973 or to the original excavation.

The problem here is the antiquities black market.  Archaeology as a discipline really began in the 1800s with archaeological investigations into the Greek and Roman past.  These excavations, which tended to be supported and financed by the great European imperial powers of the day (Britain, France, Germany, etc.) tended to also take whatever they found back to the big museums of those countries (which is why so many of the great works of Greek and Roman antiquity are in large state-run museums in Paris, Berlin or London).  After WWII, it was recognized that this kind of looting of heritage objects was a problem and that the final say about the legality of the export of ancient artifacts (items of 'cultural heritage') ought to go to the country in which they were found.

As you might imagine, most countries adopted laws whereby the export of items of cultural heritage found within their borders was heavily restricted or entirely illegal.  People want to keep their history - and moreover, these objects also encourage things like tourism.  However, those restrictions also gave rise to the antiquities black market; demand for Greek and Roman artifacts, both by museums and wealthy collectors didn't go away.  So in 1970, 141 states got together and ratified the UNESCO 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, which I'm just gonna call 'the UNESCO convention' (UNESCO is the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

The UNESCO convention first formally grandfathered pretty much all antiquities which were already held by someone prior to 1970.  If you've ever wondered why no one can force the British Museum of the Louvre to give all of their stuff back (like the Elgin Marbles or the last Caryatid!) this is why.  As you might imagine, that grandfathering was necessary to get any of the countries sitting on huge piles of antiquities which were, quite frankly, stolen in the 1800s to sign on to the agreement.

(An aside: the question of repatriation of these objects is fraught.  Organizations like the British Museum will point out that they have far more resources and incentive to encourage scholarship and study of their materials and moreover that, in many cases, had they exported their collections back to their countries of origin - often places like Iraq, Sudan, Syria, etc. - these priceless objects would likely have been destroyed.  And there is some truth to that, as unfortunate as that is.  On the flip side, a lot of these objects really were effectively stolen and it is hard to justify, for instance, keeping one of the Caryatids in London when the rest are perfectly safe in the Acropolis Museum in Athens; but then your British Museum is going to point out that the moment they give one thing back, they're going to have to give everything back and also they will quietly point out that Greek museums are generally miserable for scholars to work with, a fact that is, I'm afraid to say, often true.  It is a tricky question with few good answers.)

In theory, then, the 1970 UNESCO convention made further looting of antiquities illegal.  In practice, while any good archaeologist abides by the convention, the politically chaotic conditions in many countries means that the antiquities black market still has ample supply.  Often in conflict zones not only are museums looted but locals or militants with metal detectors will pillage known archaeological sites; the late Roman fort at Dura-Europos in Syria, one of the most important archaeological sites for our understanding of the Roman army anywhere (arguably the most important; certainly in the top 5) was essentially completely destroyed by looters during the Syrian Civil War (mostly looters aligned with ISIS, naturally).  Those looted objects flow out to the antiquities black market.

Which brings us to the AJA's policy.  They don't want to be a party to the exploitation of looted antiquities and importantly don't want to get involved in the reputational laundering of illegal antiquities (whereby a looted artifact gets published in lots of prestigious journals).  And so in the last few years they have instituted a requirement that authors do some legwork to verify that all of the things we discuss are legit.  For nearly everything in my article this was easy: I either had the original excavation report or the object had been in a museum collection since pre-1973 (the AJA's cutoff date).  Doing this legwork should, if everyone in the chain was behaving like good scholars, be fairly quick and easy since the chain of citations for every object out to link back to the excavation site report except in cases where the objects have been out of the ground a very long time.

But.

You knew there would be a 'but' right?

An important part of the article turns on the shape and fighting characteristics of the Greek kopis (or machaeira).  Very few examples of this type of sword still exist, so the argument had to rely quite heavily on two such swords currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the MET) in New York.  One might normally assume that the ninth most visited museum in the world would, of course, keep sufficient records to make sure they comply with the UNESCO convention.  One would assume.

But the provenance listed on the online catalog for these two swords extends only back to 2001 when they were purchased from a private dealer in New York.  Frankly, I knew when I started how the rest of this bit of theater would go.  I started emailing the MET, once a week, every week (directing the emails to their department of Greek and Roman antiquities, which I know to have custody of these swords because I have asked them for information on these very objects before) requesting more detailed provenance.  And of course the museum staff has ghosted my requests, because - I am left to assume - the answer is they don't have any provenance before 2001 but obviously don't want to admit that in writing.

That leaves my draft in a tricky position.  I can ask the AJA if I can simply acknowledge the insufficient provenance on these objects and discuss them anyway; if I understand the editorial policy, the answer to that question is probably 'no.'  I could tear both objects out of the article (along with the picture of them I had planned to use) but that actually makes it hard to talk about the structure of the kopis effectively.  Or, I could take my article to a different journal which will let me leave the objects in.

Unfortunately the job market leaves me little ground with which to stand on principle, so chances here are that I will first ask the AJA if I can use the objects and then, if told no, take the article elsewhere, assuming I don't have a miracle whereby the MET actually answers my question with a complete chain of provenance that reaches back before 1973.  The whole thing is frustrating and it is infuriating that even 'respectable' museums with lots of resources continue to purchase antiquities with insufficient provenance and then just hope that no one notices (and generally, no one does).

And that was the month.  We broke 800 patrons in October (the number always fluctuates around the end of the month, so we might be a bit above or below 800 when you read this) which is just incredible.  Thank you all for supporting my work, both the blog and my research work.

And here is Ollie, helping to reorganize my books, mostly by being about to tumble half a dozen of them to the ground: