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mayhapSo, like all right-thinking people, I bit my nails for months over the incredible treasures in the Iraqi museum in Baghdad. (A series of particularly moving posts and attached discussions took place on Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog [![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
nielsenhaydent] that Neil Gaiman [officialgaiman] linked to.) We all moaned about how Rumsfeld couldn't be arsed to have enough troops to keep the museum safe (and each other and everyone else safe, for that matter).
Alas, what's done is done in that regard. I was, however, lucky enough to hear Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, the man in charge of picking up the pieces, speak at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, and he's good people. I fangirl him along with my professor, who pimped the speech heavily in class.
It's not incidental that the NYU Institute of Fine Arts is on E. 71st St., a good ways from the Washington Square campus, and located in a mansion that formerly belonged to James B. Duke. They maintain their distance from the whole messy business of "undergraduates" and "scholarship", preferring on the whole to court "money" instead. Their extensive and invaluable art library is in our consortium catalogue, which only allows you to get your hopes up that you can get ahold of a book only to find that it is at IFA and they will not actually let you in to see it without extraordinary measures being taken.
Under Joan Connelly's aegis, however, five of we her students not only attended this evening, but were introduced to a number of important people who took our hands with varying degrees of willingness as we waited for the doors to be opened, having come early as she had suggested. In between, she pointed out and thumbnail sketched some of the people who were trickling, and then pouring in.
We were standing by the door, naturally. The director of the IFA actually asked her to make sure her students sat in the back, so sit in the back we did. Hmph. We didn't want to sit with your cash cows anyway.
Col. Bogdanos opened with a little flattery of his audience ("I wish I was smart enough to be an archaeologist, or pretty enough to be a curator") before moving right into a paraphrase of Mark Twain: "Anyone who attempts to bring politics into this will be shot." And fair enough. It's his job to determine what went missing regardless of who let it go missing, to build goodwill to make the amnesty program succeed regardless of who jeopardized that goodwill in the first place, et cetera.
On one level, what we have here is a gigantic crime scene, and Bogdanos is our detective. The crimes took place between 8 April, when the last of the museum staff departed, and 12 April, when some of the museum staff returned. Hundreds of thousands of people have motives and opportunities, and no one really has an alibi. Now what?
Col. Bogdanos's team showed up on 16 April and started inventorying (an ongoing process -- they project that they'll be done inventorying the entire contents of the museum in 5 or 10 years) and disseminating photographs and descriptions whenever such were available. They also reconstructed the criminal activity that took place, which involved, loosely speaking, three groups: the Professionals, the Clueless Looters, and the Insiders.
The Professionals went straight for the display cases and just happened to remove 40 of the finest artifacts that had not been removed previously by museum officials. Eleven of these have since been recovered; 29 are still at large.
The Clueless Looters scooped up a lot of stuff from five of the eight storage rooms, literally. They would find marks in the dust of an arm making a sweeping motion off the shelf, and then find that stuff in a bag somewhere, dumped because the looter found something he liked better. These guys made off with 2,703 artifacts this way, only 254 of which have not been recovered.
Last but by no means least comes the sordid tale of the Insiders. This group entered the basement of the museum, which was sealed, by a super secret staircase which leads to a dead end brick wall unless you know how to open it. They walked through four connected storage rooms in the pitch dark without touching a single thing. They headed straight for the motherlode, in terms of lootable items in the possession of the museum -- a file cabinet filled with 100,000 coins and cylinder seals. Priceless, yet highly portable. They had the keys to these cabinets, naturally, being Insiders.
Then -- get this -- they dropped their keys and lost them in the stuff on the floor. They couldn't find them. They were no doubt quite upset. They burned some foam packing material for light, which worked admirably, aside from the fact that it gave off noxious fumes in the enclosed space and they still failed to find their keys.
So, they gave up and went for the 103 plastic boxes of further cylinder beads and pins that were right next to the file cabinets. They got away with 10,337 artifacts -- each bead in a necklace with 20 beads is an artifact, as is each piece of a vase that broke into 12 pieces, and their entire haul of tiny precious things would have fit in a good-sized backpack -- and 9,670 of these are still at large, quite likely owing to the fact that whoever is in possession of them finds them unobtrusive and easy to hide as he or she bides his or her time.
Wiser persons have taken advantage of the no questions asked amnesty program, where, true to form, they ask no questions, although they are asked many, mostly along the lines of "If my friend had a friend, and this friend had a friend who cousin who met a guy who maybe had some stuff, what would happen to him?" The answer, of course, is "nothing". They just want the stuff back. They followed up on all the tips, drank interminable cups of tea with community religious leaders and the like, and seem to have done a damn good job getting people to trust them, which is saying something.
Some more numbers: 1,731 artifacts have been recovered through the amnesty program in Iraq. A further 1680 were recovered in raids and other seizures, 912 of those in Iraq and a further 768 elsewhere in the world. (All of this is as of 16 September 2003.) Exactly one artifact, a cylinder seal stamp, was recovered by a completely unofficial amnesty program in the U.S., when some guy contacted Col. Bogdanos when he was in New York. He asked, does the Amnesty program exist here? Sure it does, Col. Bogdanos temporized. He picked up the artifact at a crowded coffeeshop during the day in midtown as the guy instructed, although this guy probably should have taken better notes from his spy novels, because he turned it over in an envelope with his name on it.
He's rather less happy with the members of the art community who are cooperating with and enabling the smuggling going on now. The phrase "at your peril" was invoked, as was "it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when", and the room grew distinctly uncomfortable. The boulder-sized man sitting next to Joan, who just had a $1,000,000 gold statue that was found in his house repatriated to Italy, allegedly began shaking.
God only knows we could use more people, with as much power as he has, equally devoted to stemming the illicit antiquities trade. This was what impressed me most about this guy.
Afterwards, we attended the reception, where we had wine and very fancy cheeses at NYU's expense and chatted with Joan's friends, especially the freelance FBI agent who did her security clearance who also, among other things, teaches scuba diving. He was an interesting fellow, indeed. We also posed for a picture with Col. Bogdanos, which I have been promised a copy of. Perhaps, if I don't look too dreadful, I shall scan it.
nielsenhaydent] that Neil Gaiman [officialgaiman] linked to.) We all moaned about how Rumsfeld couldn't be arsed to have enough troops to keep the museum safe (and each other and everyone else safe, for that matter).Alas, what's done is done in that regard. I was, however, lucky enough to hear Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, the man in charge of picking up the pieces, speak at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, and he's good people. I fangirl him along with my professor, who pimped the speech heavily in class.
It's not incidental that the NYU Institute of Fine Arts is on E. 71st St., a good ways from the Washington Square campus, and located in a mansion that formerly belonged to James B. Duke. They maintain their distance from the whole messy business of "undergraduates" and "scholarship", preferring on the whole to court "money" instead. Their extensive and invaluable art library is in our consortium catalogue, which only allows you to get your hopes up that you can get ahold of a book only to find that it is at IFA and they will not actually let you in to see it without extraordinary measures being taken.
Under Joan Connelly's aegis, however, five of we her students not only attended this evening, but were introduced to a number of important people who took our hands with varying degrees of willingness as we waited for the doors to be opened, having come early as she had suggested. In between, she pointed out and thumbnail sketched some of the people who were trickling, and then pouring in.
We were standing by the door, naturally. The director of the IFA actually asked her to make sure her students sat in the back, so sit in the back we did. Hmph. We didn't want to sit with your cash cows anyway.
Col. Bogdanos opened with a little flattery of his audience ("I wish I was smart enough to be an archaeologist, or pretty enough to be a curator") before moving right into a paraphrase of Mark Twain: "Anyone who attempts to bring politics into this will be shot." And fair enough. It's his job to determine what went missing regardless of who let it go missing, to build goodwill to make the amnesty program succeed regardless of who jeopardized that goodwill in the first place, et cetera.
On one level, what we have here is a gigantic crime scene, and Bogdanos is our detective. The crimes took place between 8 April, when the last of the museum staff departed, and 12 April, when some of the museum staff returned. Hundreds of thousands of people have motives and opportunities, and no one really has an alibi. Now what?
Col. Bogdanos's team showed up on 16 April and started inventorying (an ongoing process -- they project that they'll be done inventorying the entire contents of the museum in 5 or 10 years) and disseminating photographs and descriptions whenever such were available. They also reconstructed the criminal activity that took place, which involved, loosely speaking, three groups: the Professionals, the Clueless Looters, and the Insiders.
The Professionals went straight for the display cases and just happened to remove 40 of the finest artifacts that had not been removed previously by museum officials. Eleven of these have since been recovered; 29 are still at large.
The Clueless Looters scooped up a lot of stuff from five of the eight storage rooms, literally. They would find marks in the dust of an arm making a sweeping motion off the shelf, and then find that stuff in a bag somewhere, dumped because the looter found something he liked better. These guys made off with 2,703 artifacts this way, only 254 of which have not been recovered.
Last but by no means least comes the sordid tale of the Insiders. This group entered the basement of the museum, which was sealed, by a super secret staircase which leads to a dead end brick wall unless you know how to open it. They walked through four connected storage rooms in the pitch dark without touching a single thing. They headed straight for the motherlode, in terms of lootable items in the possession of the museum -- a file cabinet filled with 100,000 coins and cylinder seals. Priceless, yet highly portable. They had the keys to these cabinets, naturally, being Insiders.
Then -- get this -- they dropped their keys and lost them in the stuff on the floor. They couldn't find them. They were no doubt quite upset. They burned some foam packing material for light, which worked admirably, aside from the fact that it gave off noxious fumes in the enclosed space and they still failed to find their keys.
So, they gave up and went for the 103 plastic boxes of further cylinder beads and pins that were right next to the file cabinets. They got away with 10,337 artifacts -- each bead in a necklace with 20 beads is an artifact, as is each piece of a vase that broke into 12 pieces, and their entire haul of tiny precious things would have fit in a good-sized backpack -- and 9,670 of these are still at large, quite likely owing to the fact that whoever is in possession of them finds them unobtrusive and easy to hide as he or she bides his or her time.
Wiser persons have taken advantage of the no questions asked amnesty program, where, true to form, they ask no questions, although they are asked many, mostly along the lines of "If my friend had a friend, and this friend had a friend who cousin who met a guy who maybe had some stuff, what would happen to him?" The answer, of course, is "nothing". They just want the stuff back. They followed up on all the tips, drank interminable cups of tea with community religious leaders and the like, and seem to have done a damn good job getting people to trust them, which is saying something.
Some more numbers: 1,731 artifacts have been recovered through the amnesty program in Iraq. A further 1680 were recovered in raids and other seizures, 912 of those in Iraq and a further 768 elsewhere in the world. (All of this is as of 16 September 2003.) Exactly one artifact, a cylinder seal stamp, was recovered by a completely unofficial amnesty program in the U.S., when some guy contacted Col. Bogdanos when he was in New York. He asked, does the Amnesty program exist here? Sure it does, Col. Bogdanos temporized. He picked up the artifact at a crowded coffeeshop during the day in midtown as the guy instructed, although this guy probably should have taken better notes from his spy novels, because he turned it over in an envelope with his name on it.
He's rather less happy with the members of the art community who are cooperating with and enabling the smuggling going on now. The phrase "at your peril" was invoked, as was "it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when", and the room grew distinctly uncomfortable. The boulder-sized man sitting next to Joan, who just had a $1,000,000 gold statue that was found in his house repatriated to Italy, allegedly began shaking.
God only knows we could use more people, with as much power as he has, equally devoted to stemming the illicit antiquities trade. This was what impressed me most about this guy.
Afterwards, we attended the reception, where we had wine and very fancy cheeses at NYU's expense and chatted with Joan's friends, especially the freelance FBI agent who did her security clearance who also, among other things, teaches scuba diving. He was an interesting fellow, indeed. We also posed for a picture with Col. Bogdanos, which I have been promised a copy of. Perhaps, if I don't look too dreadful, I shall scan it.
