Diamond miners find shipwreck

Geologists prospecting for diamonds off the coast of Namibia have stumbled on a 16th-century shipwreck. The ship’s cargo included copper ingots, elephant tusks and a hoard of Spanish and Portuguese coins. Cannon parts and astrolabes, navigational devices used to measure the angle between the sun and the horizon to establish latitude, were also found.

Dieter Noli, who provides archaeological advice to diamond cartel De Beers, says the ship’s history is likely to be documented.

Noli said the large amount of copper could mean the ship had been sent by a government looking for material to build cannons. Trade in ivory was usually controlled by royal families, another indication the ship was on official business. On the other hand, why did the captain have so many coins? Shouldn’t they have been traded for the ivory and copper? “Either he did a very, very good deal. Or he was a pirate,” Noli said.

The discovery is intriguing in itself, and also because it shows how big business - especially mining and engineering companies - come into contact with archaeology, and how they deal with it. In this case the miner was Namdeb, a joint venture between De Beers and the Namibian government.

The company had cleared and drained a stretch of seabed, building an earthen wall to keep the water out so geologists could work. Noli said one of the geologists saw a few ingots, but had no idea what they were. Then the team found what looked like cannon barrels. The geologists stopped the brutal earth-moving work of searching for diamonds and sent photos to Noli …

From what’s written it appears that Namdeb acted responsibly by allowing the wreck to be investigated. This might be down to the Namibian government’s involvement in the project. Mining News reports:

The discovery was made inside the Namdeb Mining Area 1, which is only accessible with permits issued by the Ministry of Mines and Energy and the Government’s Protective Resources Unit. This protective zone ensured that the wreck was secure, allowing it to be thoroughly researched.

Whether there was a systematic, documented rescue excavation is not clear.

What can be said is that De Beers, whose product depends solely on its public perception, have done a good PR job and have received extensive media coverage. Heritage destruction is often accompanied by spin, in the form of media releases, superficial assessments and buying off academics with petty grants. That is not necessarily happening here, but it does happen.

There’s a term in the environment movement - greenwash - that describes how companies project or spin their ethical credentials, or make superficial gestures, whilst not taking any real steps to be more green. I’m not saying that this is such a case, but let’s beware also of heritagewash.

 

Kokoda saved (what about Burrup and Tamar?)

Just in time for Anzac Day, the Australian government has signed a ‘Joint Understanding’ with the government of Papua New Guinea to protect the Kokoda Track from a planned mine [link].

The statement from Environment Minister Peter Garrett says:

“Through that agreement, Australia and PNG have agreed to preserve the historic values of the Kokoda Track, maintain the integrity of the Track and the special qualities of the trekking experience, which has become an important rite of passage for many Australians.”

This is a victory for opponents of a plan by Australian company Frontier Resources to build a copper mine on an iconic site of Australian military history. It also seems to address the concerns of local New Guineans who hoped to benefit from the project. But it again raises the question. Why is the government going to such lengths to protect this site while, in Australia itself, places of outstanding natural and cultural importance are unquestioningly sacrificed to big industry?

Two tales of tablets

Two news stories on the ancient Near East: One is a report on recent excavations of a Babylonian settlement south of Baghdad [link]. The other announces that several Sumerian clay tablets are to be sold at Bonham’s in London [link].

They’re both stories about clay tablets. Or rather one is just about clay tablets: it describes how old they are, what the cuneiform text says, the price they might fetch at auction, and who owns them (don’t fret, they were collected in the ’50s, it’s ancient history). What the article doesn’t say is where they’re from.

The other article is all about where they’re from.

“We have dug up a sectional sounding covering more than 20 square meters and have come across fascinating finds,” said Muhammed Yayha, an archaeologist with the provincial Antiquities Department in the Province of Diwaniya. The fascinating finds include four graves: “two of them had half of their bodies buried in the wall of a house and the other half in an urn. The two others had iron nails in their hands, feet and necks indicating that they might have been executed…”. The digs have also unearthed a 30kg duck weight, cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals.

Oldest dated artefacts in Australia found

Excavations on a mining company-owned site in the Pilbara region of western Australia have unearthed lithics dating from 35,000 years BP. 

“The oldest-dated stone artefacts are a core and associated flakes that have a radiocarbon age estimate of 35,000 years,” said US archaeologist W. Boone Law.

“There are at least 12 stone artefacts buried up to 10 centimetres below the 35,000 year date, inferring the site is much older. We do not know the age of the earliest artefacts, but based on the rock shelter stratigraphy, it is likely around 40,000 years.”

[see the news article here]

Garrett fails to halt heritage destruction

The headline sounded good: Garrett steps in to protect ancient Pilbara rock art. But if you read the article, it says nothing of the sort.

The Australian environment minister thinks “it’s highly regrettable that there’s been any destruction of rock art.” He makes encouraging noises about the value of Aboriginal heritage. However, the main point of the article is not about halting the destruction caused and planned by Woodside Petroleum, but whether federal or state government has control over planning decisions in certain parts of western Australia (where there are massive mineral and fossil fuel deposits). Seeing as national environmental or heritage listing is constantly over-ruled by corporate considerations, this seems a little irrelevant.

Peter Garrett, singer with the band Midnight Oil and onetime radical advocate of environmental and indigenous causes is now in a position of real power. But the compromises he has made - recently advocating for the hated dredging of Port Philip Bay and going along with the nonsensical woodchip plant in Tasmania - seem to show he has little of the ideological convictions he once espoused. Failing to call an immediate halt to the demolition of ancient landscapes in western Australia reflects this.

It would be great to be proved wrong and for the government to take real steps to preserve sites and places of outstanding cultural significance. Not just instituting superficial heritage assessments to tick boxes, but genuine conservation schemes. There’s not much to be optimistic about though: long time heritage campaigner Robbin Chapple thinks that federal control over development in the region would be like “putting Dracula back in charge of the blood bank.”

Bottle collectors: looters or ‘unsung heroes’?

An old toothpaste pot might not sound like treasure. But a nineteenth-century lid found by a ’bottle collector’ digging at a derelict site in St Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne, is said to be worth more than $10,000 Australian. The find is reported in the Herald Sun newspaper, which describes how treasure hunters have descended on the coastal building site, despite the digs being illegal and a state law that prohibits the sale of finds older than 50 years.  

 

But as the bottle collectors say, they are retrieving material that would otherwise be destroyed.

The diggers, who would not give their names, said they had asked for council permission to methodically excavate the site.

“The council didn’t give us permission to save the history,” one said. [...] Collectors believe the site will be excavated mechanically for underground parking and whatever is buried there will be lost.

‘Bottle collector’ is the term given to treasure hunters who dig at historical sites in Australia. There has been much anguish over how to limit the damage done by these looters and how best to regulate and legislate. In her fine book Uncovering Australia (2002), Sarah Colley described how “Heritage Victoria (the agency responsible in that state) has recently introduced an amnesty on some bottle-collecting activities and is working to educate people about the damage their activities can do to important historical sites - while devising ways archaeologists and collectors can work together for mutual benefit.” (p.125)

But the problem remains, and the gulf between treasure hunters and archaeologists is wider than ever. A 2006 report by the Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology [pdf] highlights the “large collecting clubs of metal detectorists and bottle collectors who illegally excavate and sell their finds.” (p.15) The impact of their activities is “devastating” and “second only to works of major infrastructure development in its significance.”

“Currently the collectors not only have a belligerent attitude to government and a perceived view that government is trying to deny them the right to go and collect but they fear prosecution. Thus if they find an intact site which they know contains rare items they do not disclose where they found them to any authority, fearing they will be prosecuted for digging the sitle, will have their objects confiscated, and will be prevented from going on the land in the future as it is locked up. There is no incentive to inform and no encouragement from government that such behaviour would be rewarded. In a desperate effort to protect the resource authorities have threatened prosecution to offenders as the only reward for reporting.”

Grand Larceny

The looting of the Radya Pustaka Museum in Indonesia has to be one of the more audacious art thefts of recent years. The crimes, very much an ‘inside job’, were revealed when a guide at the museum noticed that artefacts had gone missing. She was fired after raising the issue, but on a later visit to the museum, she saw that some of the exhibits had changed size and colour! 

Lambang Barbur Purnomo, An Indonesian archaeologist, started to investigate and found that several of the collection’s stone and bronze statues were in fact copies that had replaced the originals. Last month Lambang was found murdered. He had started to expose a scandal that involved the Indonesian royal family, political and business elites and international auction houses and collectors.

The breathtaking story is reported in Australian newspaper The Age.

 

The case raises interesting questions about what happens when state custodians and members of the ruling class want to flog off a nation’s heritage. It also highlights yet again the complicity of international auction houses, in this case Christie’s, in the looting and theft of antiquities. Hugo Kreijer, southeast Asian art advisor to Christie’s, accompanied the museum’s head and an antiquities broker, as they photographed objects that were earmarked for reproduction and transportation. He insists that the king gave permission and protests that “the idea was to preseve the statues so everybody could enjoy them, to bring them to a modern museum.”

North Sea Neanderthals

An important group of Neanderthal flint axes, mammoth bones and other artefacts has been found just off the coast of East Anglia. The material is part of a growing body of evidence for submerged prehistoric landscapes in the North Sea, being brought to light in the course of dredging.

The axes – one of the largest groups ever found – were spotted by a keen-eyed amateur archaeologist when a consignment of North Sea gravel arrived at the Dutch port of Flushing.

The Independent reports that a joint research programme, and possible World Heritage listing, will be discussed at an international meeting of archaeologists in Holland this week.

Detailed archaeological research at the bottom of the North Sea would be likely to solve a host of Stone Age mysteries. It should help establish when Britain was recolonised by humans after a 100,000-year uninhabited period. It may also reveal for the first time the full technological capabilities of Neanderthal Man, because preservation on and in the sea bed is extremely good. Wooden, stone and bone implements have almost certainly survived.

PAS safe for now

The Portable Antiquities Scheme will have its funding maintained at £1.3 million for the next year, according to the British government. In December last year there was a backlash to the announcement from the Museums Libraries and Archive Council that funding for the scheme would be cut by 25 per cent. The scheme now appears to be safe for the time being.

Even those with reservations about the PAS’s promotion of metal detecting as a legitimate form of historical enquiry objected to the proposed funding cut, which would have brought an end to the scheme. There is little doubt that the PAS staff have been highly effective and have built up an important resource. Over 300,000 objects have been catalogued and the scheme has stimulated several excavation and research projects.

But problems remain, concerning the value of this information, and the ethics of legitimising unsystematic treasure hunting. What precedent does this set in trying to combat looting in Britain and throughout the world? In what direction is it leading the practice of archaeology? Now seems a good time to have some frank debate about whether the current regime is working, and whether private treasure hunting should continue to be promoted through government funded bodies.

Assessing the ruins of Iraq’s archaeology

The British army will assist a British Museum initiative to assess damage to archaeological sites in southern Iraq, the Art Newspaper reports. “The British Army’s role in the cultural project will be to facilitate specialists coming out from the UK to south-east Iraq, to liaise with Iraqi civil contacts, and to assist where possible with contracts for work required, underwritten with a degree of funding,” said Major Tom Holloway.

There’s some commentary in The Guardian by Maev Kennedy, who calls Major Holloway’s stated aim to leave a positive cultural legacy in southern Iraq “ambitious.” That’s an understatement. Since September 2007, British soldiers have been garrisoned in Basra airport. Their complete withdrawal from the country can’t be too far off. Supposedly they are able to chaperone people carrying out basic heritage assessments, but whether they could facilitate long term protection and restoration policies is another thing.

Much effort has gone into chronicling and to some degree trying to rectify the colossal damage that the US invasion of 2003 caused to Iraq’s cultural heritage. But, unsurprisingly, initiaves overseen by occupying armies that caused such damage and destruction in the first place, are viewed with some scepticism. There is a danger that the ”legacy” of British archaeology in Iraq will again be associated with imperialist appropriation, rather than more positive achievements (of which there were many).

How can archaeologists operate ethically in times of war and occupation? It was the subject of a conference in 2006, and will be a theme at this year’s World Archaeology Congress, where the ‘Archaeologists at War taskforce’ will report back on its aim to ”investigate the role of archaeologists in situations of armed conflict around the world, and explore the ethical dilemmas and the social and political consequences and effects arising from that involvement.”

It is vital that recent heritage destruction in Iraq is documented and assessed as soon as possible. And in practical terms, this requires the involvement of occupying troops. It must be painful for archaeologists, all too aware of the imperialist exploits and cultural indiscressions of the past, to be perceived as perpetuating this tradition. But such perceptions are insignificant compared with the urgent need to accurately gauge the damage and start to restore Iraq’s shattered culture and cultural institutions.