WYWH: Review of “Cultural Property: Current Problems Meet Established Law”

By Jill A. Ellman, Esq.

On March 27, 2015, the Lawyers Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (LCCHP) and the Penn Cultural Heritage Center hosted the conference entitled Cultural Property: Current Problems Meet Established Law  in Philadelphia. This was the sixth annual conference for LCCHP, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to safeguarding cultural heritage, and the attendees included attorneys, archaeologists and other individuals interested in preserving cultural property. Four panels tackled ongoing issues including the problem of archaeological site looting, museum responses to the legal environment and collecting ethics, due diligence in provenance research, and emergency responses to the current crisis in Syria.

Patty Gerstenblith (Distinguished Research Professor of Law, DePaul University), commenced the conference by presenting on the adequacy of U.S. law, policy and practice in averting the international trade of looted objects. Gerstenblith explained that as looting of cultural property, a worldwide phenomenon, motivates by economic gain from source countries, cutting the demand for such objects in destination markets might be the only way to stem it. She described the vulnerability of archaeological sites, which consist of multiple layers of objects that reconstruct entire time periods and civilizations. Once looters destroy these sites, the context of the objects contained within are misunderstood or lost. See, e.g., Euphronios krater. While scholars are able to piece together the painter, potter, writing and characters represented on the Euphronios krater, information regarding the person buried in the tomb, including the food ritual burial practices as well as the health and age of the person, remain a mystery. Additionally, Ms. Gerstenblith explained that the abrupt stripping of objects from the ground results in the loss of knowledge of authenticity and purpose of those objects, such as the case of looted Cycladic figurines, which appeared on the art market in the 1950s.

Ms. Gerstenblith addressed existing laws aimed to combat illicit trafficking and trade of cultural property, including the UNESCO 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (implemented by the United States through the enactment of the Cultural Property Implementation Act in 1983). Ms. Gerstenblith emphasized that even if an object is seized at the U.S. border and returned to the source country, it is still a loss for humanity because the context of that object is displaced. The ultimate win would be for the object to stay in the origin country. Efforts to train and provide expertise that would stem the flow of exporting objects in the originating country are therefore more effective for the preservation of cultural remains.