‘The Good Collector’

About a year ago, an argument broke out during a good dinner at Cape Town. We were all part of WAC4, the meeting of the World Archaeological Congress, and one night some of us gathered in a fish restaurant on the waterfront as guests of the publisher Edward Milford.It was one of those dinners where you can move around and sample new company as you wait for the next course. So I did not hear this particular argument begin, and tuned in only when it was well underway. There were two main contestants, though others occasionally chipped in. One was Professor Susan Keech McIntosh, from Rice University in Texas: her main work as a field archaeologist has been in Mali, with its shocking history of cultural plundering by Westerners. Her opponent was Professor Aron Mazel from Cape Town, director of the South African Cultural History Museum.Susan McIntosh was proposing that a creature known as the Good Collector should, could and did exist, and that archaeologists should take the species seriously. Aron Mazel remained steadily sceptical. Their debate, conducted amicably, none the less went to the heart of the problem which inflames everyone concerned with public archaeology: the trade in illicit or unprovenanced antiquities, and the scientific and ethical minefields which surround it. This, it seemed to me, was exactly the sort of controversy which Public Archaeology was designed to pick up and run with.I asked Susan McIntosh to make her point in more detail, and invited others to comment on her thesis

Archaeology · Art history · Epistemology · Media studies · Skepticism · Sociology · Archaeological Research and Protection · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · History · Philosophy