[Archport] Antiquities not just another brick in wall

["Paulo Monteiro" <pmonteiro@ntasa.pt>]

Antiquities not just another brick in wall

The Sydney Morning Herald, March 19, 2010

 

Our parents had taken us to Pompeii, the Roman town frozen in the moment it was buried in lava on August 24, 79AD. It was 34 years ago, on a bright winter's day, and we wandered the streets, peering in shops and tiny houses, and envisaged life before Vesuvius struck.

Visitor access was almost unfettered: few guards, no security cameras. We were respectful, even as young teenagers, but we spied an American tourist who was not. I have never forgotten watching transfixed as he used his pocket knife to prise a handful of tiny, coloured tiles from the wall and trouser them, a souvenir of one of the world's most wondrous archaeological sites.

In 1976 cultural mores had yet to shift into the sophisticated and protectively conservationist responses we apply to heritage sites now. The American man was an ass then, and things have changed now.

Or have they?

Last weekend, standing beside the mighty Hadrian's Wall at a site in a farmer's field in Northumberland National Park, I watched open mouthed as a similar scene repeated itself. It wasn't blatant pilfering but Pythonesque stupidity. A distinguished, white-haired English matriarch, dressed in the clothes of the seasoned rambler, tried to haul herself on top of the wall to get a better view.

First she dug her heavy boots into the masonry to get a grip. When that failed, she used her walking stock to scrape a foothold. Her efforts continued, and a shower of dust accompanied each clumsy manoeuvre.

Abominably, she was not alone - dozens of others did the same at a spectacular event, organised by British heritage authorities, to highlight the need to preserve Britain's biggest, longest monument.

Archaeological bodies are so worried they spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to illuminate the entire structure to illustrate the wall's significance as a fragile, 117-kilometre long structure.

It seems extraordinary that while Hadrian's legacy is taught in schools worldwide, its keepers have to tell the 47 million visitors who come to see it that they mustn't touch the thing, let alone climb it.

This cavalier attitude has struck me often as I've travelled throughout Europe: heart-breaking splashes of graffiti on the walls of Venetian palazzi, oblivious adults leaning against the fragile colours of an ancient fresco in a chapel in Croatia, camera-toting tourists ignoring ''no flash'' signs near The Last Supper in Milan, a child in the Louvre allowed to hang off a marble statue before a ferocious guard rightly lambasts the parents. In Iceland a guide told me of the tourist caught trying to remove a stone from the fireplace of a Viking long house.

These are seeming misdemeanours in the scheme of the damage done by the illicit antiquities trade - a world market estimated by a 1999 UN report at $US7.8 billion a year. Yet petty pilfering is different only in scale to looting, an ancient problem first documented when the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs were found opened and their treasures lost - to private collections.

In Britain, pseudo-archaeologists and treasure hunters with metal detectors are increasingly problematic. More caches of ancient treasures are dug up by sleuths equipped with ever more sophisticated equipment.

Just last week in Northumbria, local papers reported that an amateur group had unearthed a trove of Roman gold, including a pot of gold coins apparently inscribed with the Emperor Hadrian's head. While legislation regulates who can benefit from such finds, amateur excavation means mapping, documenting and contextualising of the treasure is not done. That severely erodes historians' ability to analyse the discoveries and their importance.

Worse, some finds can be lost forever if funds cannot be raised to acquire the artefacts for public institutions. An astounding stash of Anglo-Saxon gold artefacts - now known as the Staffordshire hoard - was found by a man with a metal detector on a farm last year. If £3.3 million ($5.5 million) cannot be found by April 17 to secure it for local museums, he stands to gain as the collection is dispersed and sold to private collectors.

Increasingly, British archaeological faculties have come to the conclusion if you can't lick 'em, join them. They are exploring ways to reach out to amateurs, educating them on how to record, map and document their finds. Harm minimisation for antiquities.

At Hadrian's Wall on Saturday night, I was proud - and sure - of one thing: if it had been an Australian historic building or a site of Aboriginal - or natural - significance, those climbers wouldn't have lasted a minute at the hands of the crowd.

Paola Totaro is the Herald's correspondent in Europe.

 

 

PAULO ALEXANDRE MONTEIRO

 

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