[Aztlan] Olmec Art portfolio

[Jorge Pérez de Lara]

Thank you, Robert and well said.

I tend to cringe a bit when confronted with overly purist positions  
regarding unprovenienced artifacts.

It is a well-known fact that many major, respectable museums have  
unprovenienced artifacts in their collections (Mexico's world-famous  
National Museum of Anthropology prominently included). While it is  
deeply regrettable not to have all the information on an object (which  
can only be obtained through controlled excavation), many things are  
also true, such as: a) there is sloppy archaeological work that  
destroys almost as much information as it saves; b) a lot of the  
information obtained by publication-challenged archaeologists never  
sees the light of day and when archaeologists die, their excavations  
are as good as large-scale looting; c) many archaeologists impose  
their personal or political agendas on their work, further adding to  
problems a) and b); d) even looted artifacts can still be loaded with  
useful, recoverable and usable information (think of how much  
epigraphy, iconography and our knowledge of ancient Mesoamerican  
mythology have benefitted from Maya vases and of how incredibly useful  
—not to mention beautiful— Justin Kerr's collection of freely  
available rollout vase photographs is, even though it fundamentally is  
composed of unprovenienced pieces).

Yes, in an ideal world, all archaeological pieces ought to be the  
product of good archaeological work. But faulting someone because they  
make available objects that are not reminds me of the Savonarolan  
position of a well-known Maya scholar that "all looted pieces should  
be ground to dust as utterly useless for research". Puhleaase...!

Jorge


On Jun 22, 2009, at 2:10 PM, Robert Evans wrote:
> Mr. Schmidt,
>
> Yes, ideally all of the vast quantities of artifacts that are stored  
> in
> darkened storage rooms would be accurately and beautifully presented  
> on the
> web.
> And yes, the portfolio in question is less than absolutely perfect.  
> But I,
> like many other amateurs with no academic training, enjoy, learn  
> from, and
> greatly appreciate Mr. Ruggeri's unpaid, labor intensive devotion to
> bringing these fascinating artifacts to our computer screens. The  
> good does
> not have to be the enemy of the perfect.
>
> Robert Evans
> revans at atoda.com
> http://www.atoda.com