Who Owns Objects?: The Ethics and Politics of Collecting Cultural Artefacts

by Eleanor Robson, Luke Treadwell, Christopher Gosden

Who owns cultural objects? and who has the right to own them? The contributors to this book have thought long and hard about the ethics and politics of collecting, from a variety of professional archaeologist, museum curator, antiquities dealer, collector, legislator. The book is the outcome of a series of lectures and workshops held in Oxford in October-December 2004. It brings together some stimulating and provocative opinions, that would not usually be found together; archaeology and cultural heritage students rarely come into contact with antiquities dealers or collectors, for instance; museum curators rarely get to know the production processes and rationales behind the legislation and ethical codes they have to abide by. The aim is to provoke thought and debate on this topical and sensitive subject area.

Table of Contents

Introduction and Acknowledgements Smoke and Mirrors ( Neil Brodie )
Overview and Assessment after Fifty Years of Collecting in a Changing World ( George Ortiz )
Archaeologists, Collectors, and Museums ( John Boardman )
Barriers or Bridges? Museums and Acquisitions in the Light of New Legal and Voluntary Codes ( Paul Roberts )
Who Owns Objects? A View from the Coin Trade ( Ursula Kampmann )
Who Owns Objects? A View from the Antiquities Trade ( James Ede )
Cultural a Contribution to the Debate ( Nicholas Mayhew )
Recent UK Measures against the International Illicit Trade in Cultural Examining the New Regulatory Framework ( David Gaimster )
Repatriation and its the Glasgow Experience ( Mark O'Neill )
Index

156 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2006

About the author

Eleanor Robson is a Reader in History and Philosophy of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University, vice-chair of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Robson is the author or co-author of several books on Mesopotamian culture and the history of mathematics. In 2003, she won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for her work on Plimpton 322, a clay tablet of Babylonian mathematics; contrary to previous theories according to which this tablet represented a table of Pythagorean triples, Robson showed that it could have been a collection of school exercises in solving quadratic equations. She has also been widely quoted for her criticism of the U.S. Government's failure to prevent looting at the National Museum of Iraq during the Iraq War in 2003.