Archaeological remains - who cares?

[lisa]

I would never return right now, say, the Ishtar gate to Irak...actually..the more we could cart away from there the better.

I hope you're being facetious. Iraq is one of those cases where we should be devoting our energy to protecting items that are being torn out of the ground for the sake of a little profit. It's just one of the many disasters America has brought down on that country. There should be more patrolling of sites and museums in danger and a bigger crackdown on the art market--the looting going on is against international law for a reason.

To play devil's advocate: The Ottomans sold the Parthenon marbles to Lord Elgin. There is some argument about whether Elgin took more than he was entitled, but it was all legal, as Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire at that point, and the sale is still legal even though the empire no longer exists. There is no proper court in the world that would not say the BM is legally entitled to keep them. Although the Greek argument would be that Greece did not want to be part of the Ottoman Empire, the reality is that it was. The Romans themselves looted art from dependant provinces in their own time, but they wouldn't have seen it as looting--those territories "belonged" to them. We rightly, hopefully, see that as bad behaviour to be prevented now, but it wasn't then.

Archaeological and museological ethics are as complicated as in any other discipline. There is generally no right or wrong answer, just prevailing points of view that change over time. I like this debate even though it usually gets my blood boiling