by Craig Childs
“We paid two thousand dollars online,” Art said, chuckling. “It’s actually worth more around ten thousand.”
The Internet has lately become a key resource for buyers, and although many scholars feared this would drive the market through the roof, according to Charles Stanish of the Department of Anthropology at UCLA, it has had the opposite effect. Sellers have started making more fakes, which has had a surprisingly chilling effect on the looting industry. Stanish noticed the change around 2000. He said that “the local eBayers and craftsmen can make more money cranking out cheap fakes than they can by spending days or weeks digging around looking for the real thing.” The reward for illicit digging, he noted, decreases every time someone buys a “genuine” pre-Columbian pot for $35 plus shipping and handling.
Forgeries are becoming so good that even experts are having trouble weeding them out. One forger in Italy was caught exposing his vessels to radiation at a cancer treatment ward so they would pass the thermoluminescence tests that determine age (they even slipped past experts at the British Museum). And there was the 2002 uproar over the “James Ossuary,” a stone that supposedly proved the existence of Jesus’s brother. After receiving high marks from key scholars, it turned out to be an ancient blank tablet that was later inscribed, the letters carefully brushed with patina so they would blend in. The deception ruined entire careers.
Despite all this, Art swore he was not being duped. “My eye has gotten better at spotting forgeries,” he insisted. “This one is the real thing. There’s just something you can detect in a fake, something wrong with it. I’ve gotten to where I can spot one from across the room.”
Art drew out a book of artifacts from a museum in Mexico. He opened it to a page displaying a photo of the very effigy jar I held in my hands.
“See?” he said. “It’s real.”
Looking at a museum artifact identical to this one, I was not sure how to respond. Had it been stolen? Confused, I glanced at Art, hoping he had a good answer for me.
“Look more closely,” he said.
I did. The vessel in the book looked identical, until I realized the two were actually opposites of each other, like bookends.
“Is the photo reversed?” I asked.
“No,” Art said. “They’re different. Look at these lines here, and here. They don’t match up. These were made as a pair, twins.”
I puzzled for a moment, wondering if fakes have become this good. I said, “From the same grave, you think?”
Art smiled as if I were finally reading his mind. “Exactly. That’s what I’ve thought, too.”
“Then how were they separated?”
“Who knows? Maybe they were excavated at two different times.”
I said, “The museum would know where it came from.”
Art nodded silently.
“You’re sure it’s not a fake, a replica of the original?” I asked.
“Who would reproduce an exact opposite?”
Later, Art would ask me not to mention the name of the museum to anyone. He laughingly added that he and Betty preferred to keep out of the limelight.
Holding the round clay woman in my hands, I asked, “Would you ever turn this over, so the two could be paired up?”
Art looked at me, startled.
One of the world’s great collectors, George Ortiz, describes how and why he is affected by antiquities: “The vision of certain objects struck me viscerally, then they came to fascinate and move me, I let them speak to me, I let their content and spirit nourish me.” In this sense, the love for artifacts is about the object itself and what it emotionally conveys. This is what rankles many scholars and archaeologists, that the object is seen as art, with no real need for detailed social, cultural, or geographic context. Collectors go more by feel. What they feel is historicity.
Historicity means historical authenticity. It is a quality that objects possess, the difference between last night’s bottle cap and a medallion carried around the neck of a conquistador. When a thing has seen centuries, it builds up historicity. When a copy of the Magna Carta sold at auction for $21.3 million, it was not the paper itself or the hand-lettered words on it that fetched such a price, but the sense of what it was. The concept is best explained in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.
She said, “What is ‘historicity’?”
“When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn’t. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing.”
The Coopers’ house was filled with historicity. Hundreds of vessels led up and out of a sunken living room into big display cases standing against the walls. There were even pots in the kitchen; the Coopers’ refrigerator was topped by a row of painted jars, all bird effigies, likenesses of macaws and parrots that reminded me of the tawdry chickens and roosters you often see in American kitchens.
I asked him what he would eventually do with it all. Art turned to me and pleaded, “This collection has to be taken as a whole, a sum of its parts. I don’t want it piecemealed.”
One has to wonder what was piecemealed to get these artifacts together in the first place. How many grave assemblages were scattered for his archaeological rhapsody? The plan, Art said, was to bequeath the collection to their heirs in the hope they would keep it together. Yet this collection will probably be scattered again to feed other collections, just as John Eaton’s was.
I asked Art if they had considered bequeathing the collection to a museum, which might keep it intact longer. Art said he would not let that happen. He fears that certain vessels might be confiscated in federal raids targeting unsavory dealers. He wants them together, here, telling a story he reads each time he passes through his house.
I found myself simultaneously accepting of and disgusted by the Coopers. There are arguments that favor them, such as the idea that material history is not the sole possession of institutions. Everyday citizens should not be barred from such a direct connection with the past. Souren Melikian, an erudite arts correspondent, wrote in the New York Times, “Private connoisseurship is the crucial element that paradoxically guarantees the freedom of looking at art other than by institutional decree, in an environment, lighting and presentation included, that is not predetermined.”
Arguments against the Coopers tend to be more far-reaching. Their lust for artifacts results in unrecorded sites being permanently destroyed in order to feed a greed-driven and object-based market. Beyond the damage on the ground, most professional conservators would find the idea of keeping pre-Columbian pots in a kitchen—exposing them to heat, steam, and grease—tantamount to vandalism. Unlike elite professional repositories, the Coopers’ house is not kept at an even 55°F, nor is there a hydrometer registering steady 70 percent humidity.
I felt an impulse to alert the museum in Mexico to the missing twin effigy jar, or at least to mention to authorities the name of a dealer possibly working as a pothunter in New Mexico. But that would have been a violation of the Coopers’ hospitality. They wanted me to see what they had gathered and their efforts at preservation. That, I respected. Confiscating their collection and transferring it to the black hole of a lockdown facility seemed ludicrous.
For this moment the vessels belong to the Coopers. This is their context, the place they are most deeply appreciated. This house is now a finely decorated tomb, a wealth of carefully chosen history that Art and Betty have gathered around themselves. I felt grateful that they had let me in and that they were so free with their enthusiasm. Indeed, they wholeheartedly believed they were doing the right thing.
Art urged me to touch anything that caught my eye, beckoning me to hold vessels in my hands and examine them for however long I wished. He wanted me to fully appreciate them. Even among museum curators I had never seen such passion: each object was tenderly cradled in Art’s hands as he passed it to me and then took it back.
The question of whether private collections should be allowed is almost irrelevant. While they are often crimes of degrees, a matter of steps from ransacked archaeological sites, they are not going away. Ancient things have always moved from hand to hand. They do not belong to a black-and-white ethic, rather they are part of the myriad relationships that arise from our fascination with the past and its objects. These artifacts do not merely serve our wide-ranging purposes. They manipulate us as well.
We retired to the porch for tea. In the sunshine Betty laughed and admitted that they had no idea such issues existed when they had begun collecting in the 1990s. They hadn’t suspected so many scholars were opposed to private collection. She eyed me and said, “I am curious what you think.”
“I think it’s a mess,” I said. “Once you touch it, once it’s out of the ground, there’s no one right thing to do. I don’t think anyone can honestly take the moral high ground.”
Betty smiled and said, “Exactly.”
I said, “One way or another I think we are all thieves.”
Art bristled at that. He said, “That’s not quite what we mean. We consider ourselves more temporary custodians.”
“Yes,” I conceded. “Of course.”
I figured every whole pot in their collection had come from a grave. Does it matter how long ago? The ground is being emptied so that these things can be possessed. This isn’t just about stewardship. It is an obsession that runs the gamut of our desires.
CHAPTER 12
PUBLIC TRUST
I have relished museums. There is a silence they offer, a hush that saturates the air. Even museums where mothers shout for their children, where waves of toddlers rush chattering through exhibits, even they have private, interior vaults that shut out every sound but your own footsteps. Some museums sound like vast air ducts, some like the inside of tombs still sealed. There are darkened spaces where lights flicker on as you enter a storage room filled chockablock with artifacts, and those lit like chemistry labs, not a shadow lurking among perfect rows of vessels.
However artifacts found their way to museums, by whatever subterfuge or illusion, they offer an experience close to what I have gotten in the wilderness, ducking behind a boulder to find a hidden jar. In a museum you roam from hall to hall, drifting through the past in whatever form suits you, whether you see the hands of ancients or the chiseling work of archaeologists and looters. Rather than languishing in the half light of private collections, artifacts in museums are a common wealth. Institutional storage rooms are available to anyone with the credentials to gain access and crack open the next mystery. When Patty Crown discovered chocolate residues inside pre-Columbian vessels from New Mexico, it was the first evidence of chocolate ever found in North America, a major leap in understanding the relationship between the Southwest and Mesoamerica. She found this not by digging fresh specimens but through years of searching the back rooms of museums, sorting through thousands of vessels and sherds. There are discoveries to be made in these halls.
Museums contain so many objects that what a visitor sees on display is, on average, a mere half a percent of the institution’s holdings. The remainder is sequestered not because of greed, but by necessity. Exhibiting everything would be chaos, with the beauty of individual artifacts eclipsed by sheer volume. Even Thomas Hoving thought some of the Met’s halls were overloaded, contending that only the best items should be shown. Everything else should go into storage that’s restricted to scholars, he said, safe from the uninformed masses who cannot tell Euphronios from Lydos.
Given a choice, if artifacts could not safely rest in the ground, I would have them in museums. There are so many; encyclopedic museums like the Met, where one returns again and again and always finds something new, or the well-stocked regional museums such as Edge of the Cedars in Blanding, Utah, the most comprehensive displays of Anasazi peoples. If I had to choose one institution for its overall tenor, the place I have most appreciated, it would be the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose public spaces are weighted with an irresistible stillness. Since 1868 the Peabody, one of the oldest museums in the world devoted solely to human antiquity, has occupied an expansive Victorian manor on the Harvard University campus. There are no stuffed rabbits, triceratops parts, or pressed plants—only human artifacts, six million of them when you count the collection at the bead-and-sherd level.
Sliding my hand down a wooden banister, I followed Susan Haskell, one of the Peabody’s many curators and technicians, to the first floor, striding across its polished surface with our white lab coats swishing around our legs. Haskell held a key ring as big as a manacle from which hung keys of many shapes and sizes—keys for deadbolts and padlocks, keys to open drawers, keys for safety boxes. She jangled one out, unlocked a door, and told me to watch my step. A wooden staircase descended through groaning furnace pipes. At the bottom another key opened another door, and Haskell ushered me into the dust-free North American Ethnographic Collections Area. The space sounded like the slow draw of large bellows. Its prime function being environmental control, its air was kept circulating, and its temperature and humidity were maintained as if everything were held in suspended animation.
I had come to spend a few days studying the remains of Awat’ovi, a legendary pueblo that stands on the dry and brindled mesas of northeast Arizona. A four-thousand-room settlement belonging to the ancestors of the modern Hopi, the pueblo has been reduced to windswept mounds where you can hardly walk without crackling across broken pottery. In the mid-1930s the Peabody did thorough work at Awat’ovi, excavating, mapping, collecting, and shifting artifacts to Harvard, some two thousand miles away.
We began with murals that had been peeled out of the ceremonial kivas. Haskell turned a corner to a wall hung with these fragmented paintings, stepping aside as if tipping open a curtain for me. Originally, the underground kivas of Awat’ovi had been elaborately painted from floor to ceiling with multicolored murals of rituals and life-size scenes from ancient stories. To excise the murals, Peabody workers excavated the kivas, cleaned the walls, and coated them with resin, which they then covered with burlap. When the resin dried, they pulled off the burlap and the murals came free.
We slowly moved from one to the next, studying their forms. Had they been top priority for conservation, they would have been laid flat in drawers and covered, but as one conservator told me, museum work is like triage: managers looking at limited budgets have to decide what is of prime concern, what is most fragile. The murals are doing fine on the walls. In fact, I was glad to see them positioned vertically, much the way they were when excavated. In an echo of ancient practice, they are hidden from public display in an underground space where people can come only by special permission. This is not so different from the tradition of kivas themselves.
I stepped close to a nearly-life-size woman rendered in sixteenth-century geometric form. She was detailed down to her pulled-back hair and the colorful weave of her dress. Her face looked like a mask.
The modern Hopi would never allow me into a place like this. Theirs is a culture rigid with tradition and orthodoxy, and ritual images are reserved for certain clans or societies. Many Hopi I’ve spoken with are simply bewildered at the way their ancestors and so many of their trappings are being dug up. It seems grotesque. Before coming here I had asked a tribal archaeologist if he thought there might be a problem with my seeing the murals. He laughed and said it would be different if I were Hopi and I had any idea what I was looking at. No, I could stare as I wished.
I moved closer to the masked woman and looked into the sly cuts of her eyes, all the while thinking she belonged to a clan or to a sacred society, part of the ritual fabric of people long dead.
“I hadn’t realized they were so detailed,” I said.
Haskell nodded.
Another figure with a mask held a long-tailed bird in his right hand and what looked like a tropical macaw perched on his shoulder. Brilliantly stylized, they looked l
ike early Hopi art deco.
Most painted kivas found in the Southwest have been destroyed by weather or vandals, and these are some of the few murals found intact. Their good condition is owed partly to the Spanish, who in the seventeenth century used the kivas as a foundation for a Franciscan mission. It is owed also to the native laborers who filled the kivas with clean sand before the mission was built, packing the murals neatly away as if for a long journey.
Another reason for the degree of preservation, besides the fact that they have been kept in a museum for the past several decades, is that Awat’ovi itself was eventually destroyed and left uninhabited. After construction of the mission, the pueblo fell to a sneak attack by an alliance of three rival pueblos, on a night when Spanish and native Awat’ovi residents alike were killed. Rarely do Hopi wage war, but when they do, it is thorough, designed to wipe a place and its people off the map. In this case, men of Awat’ovi were burned alive in the remaining kivas, and those trying to climb ladders and escape out ceiling hatches were shot with arrows. Women were marched away, many killed, some beheaded. Like a taboo, Awat’ovi was left untouched, its history allowed to sink into oblivion until the Peabody expedition arrived with shovels, trowels, burlap, and trucks. This is what artifacts in museums often mean. They are cut from places often left intentionally vacant: graves, tombs, and shrines. The intrusion gets blotted out by perfect lighting.
Haskell stood behind me, hands clasped at her back.
Looking closely at the paintings I said, “It’s probably best they aren’t on public display. I mean, the way the Hopi are with private matters.”
I felt torn in two, half of me relishing what the museum had collected, the other half back on the edge of a mesa, aware of a troubling vacuum underfoot. Though resin and burlap were state of the art in 1936, the technique is fundamentally destructive, allowing only one layer of paintings to survive. Often kiva murals were made a hundred layers thick, with one on top of the last. Excavators at Awat’ovi assiduously flaked off paint to reach the one mural they could best salvage. How many others were permanently destroyed in the process?
