FYI although its Saturday afternoon, this isn’t an academic overwork humblebrag. I just really want to finish this book! I mean, my kids are great, but do they dunk on collectors of fake precolumbian antiquities as magnificently as Nancy L. Kelker?
In 2021, a Nepali monastery told the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that the museum possessed a sacred painting stolen from the monastery in 1967. The museum responded by offering to give the monastery a replica... if they would sign away their rights to the original. A 🧵
In August 1967, the American scholar Mary Slusser photographed the painting during an annual festival at the Yempi Mahavihara (also known as I Baha) in Patan, Nepal. In September, , as her diary shows, a dealer offered it to her.
In Nepal's Buddhist communities, sacred artifacts like the painting are owned jointly by their worshippers. They cannot be sold. Slusser's other writings show she knew this, and knew that it was against Nepal's law to export such artifacts. Still, she bought it.
Arguing that tales of dragons are evidence that dinosaurs lived in human times - humm. Arguing that anything Herodotus says was literal truth - nope. (Nice buff H-man, there, though.)
“by funding scientific studies on Native American human remains… federal agencies have created incentives for institutions to hold on to ancestors in ways that undermine the goals of NAGPRA…”
It’s not that they didn’t think about consulting tribes - it’s that they thought doing so was a bad idea for their research. Holy moly.
Inscriptions friends... is pecking out a circular letter form instead of carving freehand weird for ca. 530 BCE? (Context in next tweet.)
So, John Marshall buys this stele in fragments from 1902-1913: metmuseum.org/art/collection…. Marshall was offering £10 a letter for further fragments of the inscription, or £500 for the rest of it.
In 1907, here's the part of the inscription he has (left) and two more parts he's offered by a dealer in Athens (right). The new parts have the cautious circles.