Welcome news that the Yorkshire Museum has acquired the Ryedale Hoard. The 1,800-year-old collection of ritual artefacts discovered in North Yorkshire in May 2020 went for auction earlier this year.
The museum acquired the hoard thanks to a large donation from an American supporter. Its pieces include a bust of Emperor Marcus Aurelius and are said to be among the finest known from Roman Britain. They are due to go on display next spring.
Found along with the bust were a statuette of the god Mars and – previously unseen among recovered Roman artefacts in the UK – a plumb bob, the hoard (shown here) sold at Hanson’s auctioneers for £185,000. (Photo courtesy of Hanson’s)
Help prevent trafficking in Afghanistan’s cultural heritage
The Afghan crisis has given rise to serious concerns about the fate of the country’s heritage under the Taliban. Some media reports claim the Taliban have pledged to protect cultural heritage sites and artefacts and to prevent looting. Others raise fears that what happened to cultural heritage previously under the Taliban may happen again.
Illicit digging for artefacts can destroy important archaeological sites, something the art market does not want to unwittingly facilitate. Allowing such artefacts to enter the market compromises the legitimate art and antiquities market and goes against our trade associations’ professional and ethical standards, which are reflected in our written codes.
The art trade must be prepared to do what it can to ensure that any illicit cultural property coming out of Afghanistan does not make its way on to the market. To that end, as trade associations we will continue to alert our members and others to the heightened risks involved. We will continue to support law enforcement in publicising news of stolen and trafficked items to prevent them from entering the market.
The Antiquities Ministry in Afghanistan comes under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior Affairs. The current acting Minister of the Interior is Sirajuddin Haqqani, a terrorist wanted by the FBI and with a bounty of up to $10 million on his head. Because of this, governments must also be careful about returning artefacts to Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Signed,
Art And Antique Dealers League of America (AADLA, USA)
Associazione Antiquari D’Italia (AAI, ITALY)
Antiquities Dealers’ Association (ADA, UK)
British Antique Dealers’ Association (BADA, UK)
Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art (CPGA, France)
Czech Association of Antique Dealers (AS, Czech Republic)
Federación Española de Anticuarios (FEA, Spain)
International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art (IADAA, Int’l)
Kunsthändlerverband Deutschland e.V. (KD, Germany)
LAPADA the Association of Art & Antiques Dealers (LAPADA, UK)
Syndicat National des Antiquaires (SNA, France)
Syndicat National des Maisons de Ventes Volontaires (SYMEV, France)
In his statement to his peers, government whip Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay said the government hoped to bring clarity to what was required under UK law by the changes.
Some of his fellow peers argued that revoking the law in full meant weakening the UK’s defences against crime. However, Lord Parkinson said the EU legislation would create “complexity and confusion” at borders, and two important reasons persuaded the government to go for full revocation.
The first was that “the provision applies to almost all cultural goods created or discovered in non-EU countries, regardless of their age, value or date of export, and because there is no requirement in the regulation for any person to provide evidence to demonstrate either lawful export or unlawful removal from the country of creation or discovery”.
This meant that in the event of a claim of unlawful export, it was not clear where the burden of proof would lie or what evidence would be required.
“These issues could result in cultural goods being delayed or detained at the border, and might deter people from importing cultural goods to sell in the UK art market or museums from lending objects for exhibitions in this country.”
Success of existing legislation
The second reason for revoking the law was that provisions the UK already has in place are proving successsful.
“The effectiveness of our existing legislation was demonstrated very recently, when we returned to Libya a statue which had been unlawfully removed from that country and which was found and detained by HMRC at Heathrow Airport. This is only the most recent example.”
In the latest round of consultations with the EU over the upcoming 2025 enforcement of the import licensing regulations, the ADA and others have been at pains yet again to demonstrate how unworkable the legislation is.
The objection is not to the protection of borders and fighting crime, but to the impossibility of the compliance demands, the net effect of which would be to destroy much of the art market within Europe. It is this aspect that those objecting to the revocation in the Lords do not seem to grasp.
So far the European Commission has signed serious concerns raised in previous consultations, including earlier this year.
Still not resolved is exactly what documents will be required for legal import. Article 8 (1) d of the draft legislation states that “Other types of documents to submit in support of an import licence application may be, but are not limited to the following” before listing 11 different types of document that must be submitted for approval.
Numerous other problems remain within the draft legislation, from uncertainty over the number or location of customs offices to how property would be marked, as well as very onerous compliance measures that would make a vast number of imports uneconomic.
In what is arguably the most significant article on cultural heritage in the past month, Peter Tompa’s Art Newspaper comment on July 22 explains what is wrong with US policy and how to begin to put it right.
Tompa, a cultural heritage lawyer and the executive director of the Global Heritage Alliance, analyses the United States’ approach to cultural policy and how that affects attitudes and the market.
At the heart of his argument is the need to deal with the in-built bias against the market among the advisory and decision-making bodies that help formulate policy in the US. He targets, in particular, Memoranda of Understanding that ramp up import restrictions come up against Constitutional rights.
“These restrictions deeply concern collectors and the trade because they do not focus only on artefacts proven to be illicitly exported, but also embargo any items of a similar type that enter the US from legitimate markets, particularly those in Europe,” Tompa writes.
While this can affect legitimate market activity, dealers and collectors are not the only interested parties here: “…recent MOUs with some Middle Eastern and North African governments, such as Turkey and Egypt, have riled the representatives of displaced minority religious and ethnic groups, whose personal and community property has been seized by those same authoritarian governments.”
Tompa acknowledges that the US rightly has a significant duty to take a leading role in fighting the looting of cultural objects, especially as part of its recognition of ethnic and religious minorities. But he argues that this can be done in a more effective way that is also less damaging to legitimate market interests.
His advice?
Firstly to broaden the representation on Washington’s influential Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC). Currently, it has no market professional on it. “The sole representative of the trade is a collector, and no dealers have been appointed to the committee for years,” he explains.
Import embargoes are also too broad and bloated rather than targeted at where the potential problem lies, and they do not help protect vulnerable sites. The incoming US Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Lee Satterfield, who will oversee this sector “should refocus current import restrictions back to narrow ranges of culturally significant items that have proven to be illicitly exported,” argues Tompa.
His third priority is for the US government to give at least as much consideration in policy formation to ethnic minorities and exiles living abroad as it does to foreign state interests.
“The assumption that nations are great protectors of cultural property is all too often misplaced,” he writes. “In countries where minorities have been driven into exile by authoritarian governments, it makes no sense to recognise the rights of those governments to the material culture of displaced communities.”
How far Tompa’s concerns will be listened to is not clear. What is clear, however, is that cultural property protection is not a standalone issue; it is clearly tied up with international economic and political interests that can dictate policy in what is an area of soft-power diplomacy. Because of this, the valid public interests within the cultural sphere continue to be at risk.
When Eurojust announced that a Belgian collection of nearly 800 Apulian artefacts valued at €11 million had been seized and returned to Italy, it appeared to be a major victory for the Carabinieri and EU law enforcement.
However, dig deeper and all is not what it appears.
At the heart of this case is a stele, which has been part of this collection for decades. It had some missing features that matched fragments on display in a museum in Puglia. The implication? The stele must have been exported illegally: “The missing part enabled authorities to make a link to the artefact displayed during the expositions and led to the Belgian collector,” Eurojust explains.
What came next sounds dramatic: “At his premises, the investigators found the main part of the tombstone and were able to match this to the parts displayed in the Italian museum. During the investigations, a further vast collection of illegally excavated artefacts and pieces of pottery was found, dating to between 600 and 300 B.C..”
Establishing judicial co-operation between the Belgian and Italian authorities led to the entire collection later being shipped to Italy.
However, despite the claims, questions remain over what really happened.
A separate source has told IADAA that far from being shown to be illicit, the collection was shipped to Italy “for further research”, with claims that it was illicit and seized coming only after the shipment had taken place and without any evidence being provided to support the claim. The shipment included artefacts from Turkey, with no explanation as to why they were being seized by Italy.
As CNN reported, “the stele was listed in the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Rath Museum in Geneva, Switzerland, from November 1993 to February 1994, and an exhibition at the Mona-Bismarck Foundation Museum in Paris, France, from March 1 to April 30 1994.”
Applicable laws appear to have been ignored by the authorities
Article 7 of the European Union’s Regulation 93/7, which applied at the time, stipulated that Italy would have one year to file a claim for its return. It did not do so. Even under the updated Regulation 2014/60, which extended the claim period by three years, the current Italian claim is at least 25 years too late.
It is also odd that the authorities state that an investigation helped them identify the collector when the collection had been published and exhibited for decades. The collector had even published his name in association with it in the process.
Regardless of the stele itself, questions remain over other items in the collection. Most notably, the numerous black figure Attic vases have origins that are particularly difficult to establish, making it highly unlikely that any evidence exists to show that they were obtained or exported illegally.
Meanwhile the Art Newspaper’s coverage sheds some more light on what appears to have happened. According to its report, “782 items were identified in the collection that could be considered Italian national heritage, and as such had been exported illegally”.
“Could be considered”? And “as such”?
What this appears to reveal is that the collection – the owner is not a dealer despite the headline – has been deemed illicit because of its quality and importance, not on the grounds of illicit export.
Did the Art Newspaper correspondent ask the authorities what actual evidence they had that the collection was illicit? If so, what was it?
Italy’s first comprehensive cultural heritage law restricting exports (Law No 364/1909) came into force in 1909. Unless the Carabinieri, Eurojust and other law enforcement are in possession of evidence that the items in this collection were exported against the law after that date, the seizure would appear to have been made on no more than supposition. If so, a legitimate collector has been deprived of his long-held collection, valued by the authorities at €11 million, as a result of what would seem to be no more than nationalism and cultural piracy.
At the very least it would seem reasonable for the authorities to publish their evidence in such a significant case.
Due process must be protected: if the collection has been looted, then it has been rightly returned; if not, then significant reparations need to be made and a public investigation launched into how such a miscarriage of justice can not only take place but be promoted by the authorities in such a misleading way.
Following her involvement in the February conference to mark 25 years of the UNIDROIT Convention, ADA chairman Joanna van der Lande was invited to contribute a major article on the history of the antiquities trade, including the issues that have dogged it over the years and how attitudes have developed along the way.
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