Antiquities and Native Soil
Posted Oct 8, 2007
Hiram Bingham photographed this excavation of a human skeleton in a cave at Machu Picchu during the Yale University and National Geographic Society-funded expedtion of 1912.
In the last few days two major contentious situations involving estranged antiquities were more or less resolved. I’m talking about the agreement between the Italian Cultural Ministry and the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles which arranged the return to Italy of 40 artifacts and the agreement between Yale University and the Government of Peru to return what Hiram Bingham III collected at Machu Picchu almost one hundred years ago.
National Geographic gave its first archaeological grant to Bingham in 1912 to fund his return to Machu Picchu and continued to fund him for several years. What the Society got out of it was a highly popular April 1913 National Geographic Magazine article and a longstanding fruitful relationship with Peru and scientists working there. What Yale got was over 380 museum quality specimens and thousands of other artifacts that it displayed at the Peabody Museum or used for research.
It wasn’t until recently that National Geographic became aware that the Machu Picchu collection at the Yale Peabody Museum was a loan and should have been returned to Peru. Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the Society, investigated the terms of the agreement with Peru and Yale and one could say he was responsible for triggering a lengthy cascade of events that finally led to the recent agreement.
It took seven years for Yale to come around. Why? Admittedly there are complexities in all cases involving antiquities. In the Getty case, for example, the 40 objects came from different sources and the Getty wasn’t about to hand over objects worth millions without checking to make sure of the facts. But still, it appears that Italy had to threaten to break relations with the Getty Museum before there was action. And Peru had to threaten to sue Yale.
There are numerous other examples of countries that have been less successful in retrieving their heritage, despite threats. The “Elgin” Parthenon Marbles are still in London, aren’t they? And Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, still has not managed the return of the Nefertiti bust from Berlin. These prominent cases may be resolved some day through agreements like the ones reported above.
Another controversial case involves the Persepolis Fortification Archive (see map), a collection of thousands of cuneiform tablets from Iran that are in the U.S. for research. Victims of a 1997 Hamas terror bombing in Jerusalem argue that since Hamas was funded by Iran, the tablets should be seized and sold to raise the $400 million in damages awarded by a court (with Iran not present to contest). National Geographic is funding the scanning of the tablets to facilitate their return to Iran as soon as possible, but at this moment Iran is fearful that its cultural heritage, loaned in good faith to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in 1936, will never come home.
All of these situations have a common denominator: the artifacts left their country of origin. In some cases, this occurred illegally and in others there were clear agreements in place. The UNESCO convention (Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property) establishes guidelines which should, in principal, protect the cultural heritage of countries from illegal antiquities trade going forward. There are still problems implementing this, as the Getty situation illustrates, but what about cultural property that left countries illegally or under murky circumstances before 1972, when the convention was ratified? If 114 ratifying countries now agree that “…the transfer of ownership of cultural property is one of the main causes of the impoverishment of the cultural heritage of the countries of origin of such property,” then perhaps more countries and institutions holding such “transferred” artifacts should be more helpful in facilitating the return of cultural material when it is requested.
If you know of any cultural material that should really get back home, let’s hear about it. If you have pix, send them to stonesbonesnthings@gmail.com.
Posted by Chris Sloan Comments (2) Filed Under: archaeologyEmail this post
Feathers for Velociraptor
Posted Sep 30, 2007
Greg Paul's prescient illustration of a Velociraptor with quilled arm feathers (on the left) was prepared almost twenty years ago. © Gregory S. Paul
Isn’t it interesting that a high-power trio of scientists, Alan Turner of Columbia University , Pete Makovicky of the Field Museum (an NGS grantee) and Mark Norell of the American Musuem of Natural History have now identified quill knobs on a Velociraptor ulna (see Science )?
It was not so long ago that such a claim would have generated an outcry from a vocal minority of scientists who opposed the hypothesis of a bird-dinosaur link like Storrs Olson of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History and Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but I haven’t heard a peep, have you? I remember that Feduccia threatened to cancel his subscription to National Geographic he was so incensed with an article we published in 1998 on the dinosaurian origin of birds. I don’t know if he ever followed through on that, but when National Geographic published an article including “Archaeoraptor,” a fossil dino-bird that turned out to be a faked composite of two skeletons, he and his other colleagues of like mind screamed bloody murder (partly because they were suspicious of all “dinobirds,” but also because the creature had not yet been properly described in a scientific journal).
I have the dubious distinction of having written that article article back in November 1999 and remember distinctly the sharp tone of Storrs Olsen’s open letter which he sent to numerous scientists and which was reported heavily in creationist web sites as evidence against evolution. It was addressed to Dr. Peter Raven, chairman of the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. I present here a couple choice bits from that letter:
“With the publication of "Feathers for T. rex?" by Christopher P. Sloan in its November issue, National Geographic has reached an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated, tabloid journalism.”
and
“The idea of feathered dinosaurs and the theropod origin of birds is being actively promulgated by a cadre of zealous scientists acting in concert with certain editors at Nature and National Geographic who themselves have become outspoken and highly biased proselytizers of the faith. Truth and careful scientific weighing of evidence have been among the first casualties in their program, which is now fast becoming one of the grander scientific hoaxes of our age—the paleontological equivalent of cold fusion. If Sloan's article is not the crescendo of this fantasia, it is difficult to imagine to what heights it can next be taken.”
I don’t know what happened to vocal opposition of this sort. Olson, Feduccia and their colleagues were dutifully quoted by journalists in almost every news article on feathered dinosaurs back then. But as evidence to support the hypothesis has been pouring in, those opposing views quoted so often before in news media have trickled to nothing. So discoveries like the quill knobs on a Velociraptor are reported without mention of controversy.
Yet, this particular discovery should be controversial and generate discussion. Not because a dinosaur had feathers, but because it raises the nagging question of why a non-flying dinosaur had quilled feathers? Quilled feathers, as opposed to downlike “protofeathers” are necessary for flight in birds. There are the standard explanations for why they might appear in flightless dinosaurs: display, thermoregulation, and lift when running up inclines, for example, but another explanation is that quilled feathers are on Velociraptor because it was secondarily flightless, like penguins are today.
I’m sure that many paleontologists will remember that Greg Paul, who published Dinosaurs of the Air: The Evolution and Loss of Flight in Dinosaurs and Birds in 2002, has long argued that just because birds descended from dinosaurs doesn’t mean that the relationship can’t be reversed to produce flightless dinosaurs that descended from birds.
This new debate won’t be resolved anytime soon, but it will be interesting to hear the differing viewpoints. In the meantime, I’m interested in finding the earliest published illustration of Velociraptor that shows it with quilled arm feathers. What’s printed above is the earliest one I could find. It is by paleontologist Greg Paul and appeared in his book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World published in 1988. It is reprinted here with Greg's kind permission. Send anything you think might be earlier to stonesbonesnthings@gmail.com.
Posted by Chris Sloan Comments (11) Filed Under: palentologyEmail this post
Dmanisi Early Human Reconstructed
Posted Sep 21, 2007
In the current issue of Nature you’ll find a much-awaited report on the bodies (as opposed to the heads) of the folks that lived at Dmanisi in Georgia (the former Soviet Republic) about two million years ago. The report was much-awaited because only the heads of four of the individuals discovered there have been thoroughly reported. That left many of us wondering what their bodies were like.
We knew their brains were small and early estimates of their height and weight showed they were small in body as well, but we didn’t have a good sense of their body proportions or skeletal details from the neck down. And the reason why we cared about their bodies so much was that a paradigm was about to be broken.
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