Who Protects Antiquity? Three Models

Who protects antiquity? Apparently, highly-educated, middle-aged white men in dark suits, I couldn't help thinking as I entered the Proshansky Auditorium at the CUNY Graduate Center last Wednesday evening. The suits, James Cuno, Lawrence Rothfield, and Lawrence Coben, moderated by Joel Allen, were gathered on the stage to debate just who is responsible for protecting our ancient heritage and, an even more problematic question, how to go about doing so. As a newcomer to questions surrounding antiquity and its preservation, I learned a lot.

Each panelist had a different take on the crisis facing antiquity today and a different proposal to solve it. Cuno passionately decried the ascription of national boundaries to the archaeological remains of peoples or civilizations, which knew no state lines. The artificial nationalization of artifacts, he argued, keeps nation states from understanding their role as stewards of antiquity, with an obligation to act in their best interest, even when it means relinquishing objects and sites to foreign museums, universities or teams of archaeologists. For Cuno, something like the bygone practice of partage, whereby foreigners were allowed to excavate sites in return for sharing the spoils with the source country, would be a way to save and study the world's treasures.

Rothfield focused on the problem of looters who are pillaging important heritage sites. He led us through an economic analysis of the looting process, blaming the prevalence of looting on the incentives created by collectors (individual and institutional) who put a premium on particular objects. The result was a negative externality: the destruction of the sites of ancient heritage at the hands of profit-seeking thieves. Taking his economic logic one step forward, Rothfield proposed that the demand side should bare the cost of the externality in a tax that would feed into a global antiquity protection fund. This fund would then be used to cover the cost of securing sites in source countries with low capacity to do so on their own.


Lawrence Coben, an archaeologist who directs the Sustainable Preservation Institute (SPI), took the responsibility of protecting antiquity to the community level. For him, the biggest problem facing antiquity was not looting, it was poverty. If the poor communities living near or on archaeological sites have an economic incentive to protect them (instead of, say, growing crops on them or selling the land to developers), they would be more inclined to own the preservation of these sites. This is the foundation of SPI's "new preservation paradigm" which sees investment at the community level as the most effective and sustainable way to preserve world heritage, while often driving economic development where it is sorely needed. William Easterly would approve.

My personal perspective led me to favor Coben's bottom-up approach over Cuno and Rothfield's, but all three got me thinking. Cuno's premise that antiquity belongs to us all and we must all preserve it rang true to me, yet he seemed to use this notion to defend an outdated (and often asymmetrical) preservation model instead of thinking about new, and more politically viable, ways of partnering with source countries. Even if consensus were built around antiquities as a global commons (like, say, clean water) it would face the same hurdles as environmental preservation.

Rothfield's tax idea was highly innovative and placed the financial burden for preservation on those with financial privilege in the antiquities market, relieving source countries or other players. Yet, as Cuno pointed out during the Q&A, taxing collectors could create adverse incentives along the way, and Coben argued that in many impoverished source countries foreign aid money is often squandered by corrupt officials. Personally, I questioned the political feasibility of paying to arm antiquities sites while many of these countries lack police forces to protect everyday citizens. It also seemed an incredibly difficult task to coordinate efficiently.

Finally, Coben's method, while most convincing (for me), had several flaws--by appealing to a community's economic needs, what happens if sites cease to provide revenues? Also, what is the opportunity cost (to communities) of preserving these sites and who gets to decide where to draw the line? Is Coben's model, in which a Northern NGO sets the agenda for poor communities in the developing world by providing technical assistance and grants to meet it as paradigm-shifting as it would appears?

I left Wednesday's panel feeling unsettled and unsure of the future of antiquities and ancient world heritage sites--not because these three experts didn't have some compelling and passionately-defended ideas (they did), but because I sincerely doubted that the political will needed to embark on any of their strategies on a global scale exists. Rothfield did mention that the World Bank was moving towards taking the preservation of ancient sites into account on its the large-scale development projects. Getting such a powerful entity to institute policies to protect antiquity seemed like a big step for proponents of preserving heritage sites. Yet, Coben was pessimistic about any large-scale attempts at preservation and criticized a (in his opinion) failed Inter-American Development Bank effort to transform a an archaeological site into a cultural heritage tourism destination.

The fact that IADB had messed up seemed all the more reason for preservation advocates to push for new, more effective policies at the level of development banks and other multilateral institutions. Otherwise, the debates risked staying in academia, or, in the case of SPI, risked exerting enormous effort only to be undermined by larger powers.

Photo: Etched-in graffiti at the site of the pyramids at Giza that I observed during my visit to Egypt in 2009.