The Market for Mesoamerica

In 2009, a resident of Uaxactún, Guatemala, delivered a ceramic vessel to a private collector in the area. Looted and severely fragmented, the Maya antiquity was clumsily glued back together. The object was a rare find. It had been produced for a bloodletting ritual of a young man—there are few examples of Maya vessels created for this specific purpose. It also bears the signature of White Macaw, the scribe who made it, along with his portrait as a participant in the ritual scene. Wearing a white bird as a headdress, White Macaw immortalized himself in this elaborately decorated polychrome piece. The Sak Mo’ vessel, as it was called, was eventually professionally restored and displayed at several international exhibitions. While this object can be considered a salvaged masterpiece, like other looted antiquities it had been torn out of its archaeological context. Its provenience (the precise location where it was found) and its provenance (detailed history) were lost, hindering archaeological interpretations, among other problems.The antiquities market drives the sacking that causes the rampant destruction of Mesoamerican artifacts. Cara Tremain and Donna Yates's edited volume is an insightful and fascinating exploration of this international trade. Made up of ten essays written by museum curators, university researchers, and experts in law enforcement and policy implementation, the book covers a lot of ground: from marketing, collecting, forgeries, museum practices, auction houses, and ethical concerns to legislation aimed at stemming the trafficking in antiquities. The essays focus mainly on the twentieth century and, taken together, treat all of Mesoamerica, the cultural area that extends from central Mexico through much of Honduras. Like the trade in illicit drugs, the antiquities market is opaque; in fact, the trafficking in artifacts follows some of the same routes as the drug trade. As a result, many of the book's chapters read like detective stories, tracing the clues left behind by archaeologists, collectors (who are not just consumers but also tastemakers who shape the market), and vendors (we know little about those in the source countries).The United States, the main consumer of Mesoamerican antiquities, figures prominently in the book. Allison Davis traces the history of legislation between the United States and Mesoamerican nations and stresses the importance of promoting programs that engage local communities in protecting heritage sites. Focusing on Honduras, Christina Luke examines how the expansion of US corporations in Central America, especially the infamous United Fruit Company, led to the hemorrhaging of artifacts from the region from 1900 to the 1930s. American archaeologists used the company's infrastructure and diplomatic ties to appropriate artifacts that wound up in institutions like the Smithsonian and Harvard's Peabody Museum.It was not until the 1960s that the trade in Maya artifacts really exploded. Sofía Paredes Maury and Guido Krempel look at the history of some of these looted objects from Guatemala. As in other Mesoamerican nations, the lack of resources and weak government institutions make it difficult for Guatemala to protect artifacts and recover those that have been lost to plundering. A wonderful essay by James Doyle follows “the odyssey of Piedras Negras Stela 5,” from the Guatemalan site to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art via the collection of billionaire politician Nelson Rockefeller. Martin Berger pieces together the history of several mosaics from Puebla and Oaxaca, Mexico, that are now scattered in institutions throughout the world. Berger makes the case for studying artifacts that lack a secure provenience. Not doing so amounts to a “double-loss”; not only has their original context been lost, but by ignoring the objects we also “deny ourselves the possibility” of learning more from them (p. 113). A chapter by Tremain similarly tracks the distribution of Maya antiquities at Sotheby's through a study of auction catalogs.Ironically, scholarly research gives value to antiquities and feeds the taste for Mesoamerican art. Adam Sellen examines this dilemma, chronicling how he painstakingly put together an online catalog of Zapotec effigy vessels only to find that it is now used by auction houses to give looted objects academic legitimacy. Unfortunately, the internet has encouraged the growth of online sales and made it harder for scholars to monitor the antiquities trade. A lively essay by Nancy Kelker traces how the trade encourages the production of forgeries. A final chapter by Yates assesses the policies designed to regulate the flow of Maya artifacts to the United States since the 1970 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization convention that was created to combat the trade in cultural objects. Yates argues that policies are not working and must be reevaluated. While The Market for Mesoamerica has a comprehensive introduction written by Rosemary Joyce, it lacks a formal conclusion to pull together all this rich material. Nevertheless, the book offers a cutting-edge analysis of the antiquities market that should be of interest to archaeologists, museum professionals, and art historians as well as criminologists and sociologists. Lucidly written and full of images, it also proposes solutions to the illicit antiquities trade, which, like the drug trade, is heavily driven by the demand side of the market

Archaeology · Art · Barbarian · Carving · Context (archaeology) · Exhibition · Looting · Maya · Object (grammar) · Political science · Visual arts · White (mutation) · Archaeological Research and Protection · Computer Science · History · Law

• Lawfulness and Ethics around Cultural Property Auctions

  Open Access•Zara Ruiz Romero•International Journal of Cultural…•2020

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