Antiques Roadshow Ethics

The recovery of a Roman figurine head from a late-15th/early-16th century site near Toluca, Mexico is only interesting as an artifact if you know, without a doubt, that it came from a North American context prior to the conquest by Cortes.

Which is why, on a Monday evening in February of 2000, you might have heard archaeologists all over North America screaming at their television sets. Normally, most archaeologists I know love Antiques Roadshow. For those of you who haven't seen it, the PBS television show brings a group of art historians and dealers to various places in the world, and invites residents to bring in their heirlooms for valuations. It's based on a venerable British version of the same name. While the shows have been described by some as get-rich-quick programs feeding into the booming western economy, they are entertaining to me because the stories associated with the artifacts are so interesting. People bring in an old lamp that their grandmother had been given as a wedding present and always hated, and an art dealer describes it as an art-deco Tiffany lamp. Material culture plus personal history; that's what archaeologists live for.

Unfortunately, the program turned ugly on the February 21st, 2000 show from Providence, Rhode Island. Three utterly shocking segments were aired, three segments that brought us all screaming to our feet. The first involved a metal detectorist who had looted a site in South Carolina and brought in the slave identification tags he had found. In the second segment, a footed vase from a precolumbian site was brought in, and the appraiser pointed out evidence that it had been recovered from a grave. The third was a stoneware jug, looted from a midden site by a guy who described excavating the site with a pickaxe. None of the appraisers said anything on television about the potential legalities of looting sites (particularly the international laws concerning the removal of cultural artifacts from central American graves) let alone the wanton destruction of the past, instead putting a price on the goods and encouraging the looter to find more.

The Antiques Roadshow was deluged with complaints from the public, and on their website they issued an apology and a discussion of the ethics of vandalism and looting.

Who owns the past? I ask that every day of my life, and hardly ever is the answer a guy with a pickaxe and spare time on his hands.

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