Treasures Pose Ethics Issues for Smithsonian

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/arts/design/smithsonian-sunken-treasure-show-poses-ethics-questions.html
By KATE TAYLOR

Amid mounting calls by scientists for the Smithsonian Institution to cancel
a planned exhibition of Chinese artifacts salvaged from a shipwreck, the
institution will hold a meeting on Monday afternoon to hear from critics.
The contents of the exhibition, ³Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon
Winds,² were mined by a commercial treasure hunter and not according to
academic methods, a practice that many archaeologists deplore, equating it
with modern-day piracy.

In an April 5 letter to the top official at the Smithsonian, G. Wayne
Clough, a group of archaeologists and anthropologists from the National
Academy of Sciences ‹ including Robert McCormick Adams, a former leader of
the Smithsonian ‹ wrote that proceeding with the exhibition would ³severely
damage the stature and reputation² of the institution.

The members of the National Academy of Sciences are not alone. In recent
weeks organizations including the Society for American Archaeology, the
Council of American Maritime Museums and the International Committee for
Underwater Cultural Heritage, as well as groups within the Smithsonian,
including the members of the anthropology department and the Senate of
Scientists at its National Museum of Natural History, have urged Mr. Clough
to reconsider.

The exhibition was conceived by the government of Singapore, which owns the
artifacts, and Julian Raby, the director of the Freer Gallery of Art and the
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian¹s two Asian art museums. It is on
display in Singapore through July and will then travel internationally.
Although the Smithsonian says it has not made a final decision, the
exhibition ‹ which includes glazed pottery, rare pieces of early
blue-and-white porcelain and the largest gold cup ever found from the Tang
Dynasty (618-907) ‹ is tentatively set to arrive at the Sackler in the
spring of 2012.

Monday¹s meeting was called by Mr. Raby and Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian¹s
undersecretary for history, art and culture. A final decision about whether
to proceed will likely be made in late May, according to a Smithsonian
spokeswoman, Linda St. Thomas.

The probable historical importance of the shipwreck, which was discovered by
fishermen off Belitung Island in Indonesia in 1998, has only inflamed the
debate.

The ship, which is believed to be Arab, was filled with a cargo of
ninth-century Chinese ceramics and gold and silver vessels. Its discovery
suggests that Tang China had substantial sea trade with the Middle East;
scholars had previously thought that the trade routes were primarily over
land, along the Silk Road.

The exhibition ³brings to life the tale of Sinbad sailing to China to make
his fortune,² Mr. Raby said this year. (Mr. Raby declined to be interviewed
for this article, according to a spokeswoman, because he wanted to keep an
open mind for Monday¹s discussion.)

Archaeologists, however, say that because the shipwreck was commercially
mined within a period of months, rather than the many years that a more
structured archaeological excavation would have taken, much of the
information it might have provided about the ship¹s crew and cargo was lost.
Kimberly L. Faulk, a marine archeologist and vice chairwoman of the
nongovernmental Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology, said in an
e-mail that by proceeding with the exhibition the Smithsonian ‹ which is a
research institution as well as a network of museums ‹ would be violating
its own set of professional ethics and promoting the looting of
archaeological sites.

Commercial treasure hunting is a high-stakes world. Companies sometimes
spend millions of dollars searching for and mining a shipwreck and then
cleaning up the finds in the hope of selling the artifacts for a huge profit
at the end.

The company that salvaged the Belitung wreck, Seabed Explorations, is run by
a German engineer, Tilman Walterfang. In the early 1990s Mr. Walterfang was
a director at a concrete company in Germany when his Indonesian employees¹
stories about the rumors of shipwrecks lying on the bottom of the ocean in
Indonesia prompted him to move across the world.

Although a 2001 Unesco convention outlawed the commercial trade in
underwater heritage, Indonesia has not ratified it. (Neither has the United
States.) Indonesia allows commercial mining of shipwrecks as long as a
company is licensed and splits its finds with the government.
In an e-mail Mr. Walterfang said that when fisherman first discovered the
shipwreck in early August 1998, the Indonesian government, fearful of
looting, ordered Seabed Explorations to begin an immediate round-the-clock
recovery operation. It started within days.

Although Mr. Walterfang eventually brought in a pair of archaeologists,
including one, Michael Flecker, who wrote two journal articles about the
ship, Mr. Walterfang conceded that, from an academic standpoint, ³the
overall situation would without doubt be described as Œless than ideal.¹ ²
After fielding interest from China, Seabed Explorations sold the majority of
the 63,000 artifacts recovered to a company owned by the Singapore
government, for $32 million.

The Indonesian government kept slightly more than 8,000 objects from this
ship, along with $2.5 million and finds from another ship excavated by Mr.
Walterfang. Some artifacts have ended up on eBay and other online sites; Mr.
Walterfang said that these were probably looted by fishermen while the
recovery process was halted for the monsoon season, between December 1998
and March 1999.

Mr. Walterfang was dismissive of the exhibition¹s critics, suggesting that
the exhibition was being used as a ³Ping-Pong ball in yet another political
game for the social climbers in Washington, D.C.²

Mr. Flecker, the archaeologist who studied the ship, argued in a 2002
article in The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology that the purist
approach of many archaeologists was not practical in developing countries
like Indonesia, where governments are poor and the risk of looting is high.
In those circumstances, he wrote, archaeologists and commercial salvagers
should cooperate ³to document those sites and the artifacts recovered from
them before too much information is lost.²

But in the eyes of archaeologists like James P. Delgado, the director of
maritime heritage at the United States Department of Commerce National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, allowing any of the finds from an
excavation to be sold betrays the most basic aspects of research, in which
³sometimes it¹s the smallest things that we come back to that make the great
leaps forward.²

Mr. Delgado said he wished the Belitung shipwreck had been academically
excavated. But unlike some of his colleagues, he said that instead of
canceling the exhibition, the Smithsonian could use it to educate the public
about the consequences of the commercialization of underwater heritage.
If, however, the exhibition merely celebrates the discovery without
addressing the problematic context, Mr. Delgado added, ³there will be a
clear message to Indonesia² that these practices ³are fine,² and to other
countries with rich maritime heritage to ³engage in these things and sell it
off.²