Robert Goldwater Library blog

Reconstruction of Obelisk of Axum Begins

via BBC News, June 6, 2008

Ethiopia starts restoring obelisk 

Work has begun to restore a historic obelisk in Ethiopia's ancient city of Axum, after it was returned from Italy.

The Axum Obelisk, a symbol of Ethiopia’s identity, was looted by troops in 1937 during Italy's brief occupation of Abyssinia.

Italy returned the 1,700-year-old monument in 2005, after decades of negotiations between the two countries.

The obelisk, which weighs more than 150 tonnes, had to be cut up into three pieces to be taken to Ethiopia.

The officer in charge of its restoration says the process of assembling the giant monument is slow and complicated.

"This strong granite monolith has suffered a lot of trauma in its life and it is not in very good shape so assembling it is a very delicate and complex operation," Nada al-Hassan told the BBC.

"We had to invent a way to assemble the pieces without harming them and respecting the delicate historic artefacts we are dealing with," she said.

The obelisk has weathered years of damage from pollution and a lightning strike in 2002.

The process of reconstruction is being overseen by the UN cultural agency, Unesco.

In 1947, Italy signed a pledge to the UN to give back the obelisk - seized by troops under Italy's fascist leader Benito Mussolini - but did not return it until 2005.

Berns Reached Machu Picchu 40 Years Before Bingham

via BBC News, June 6, 2008

Machu Picchu ruin 'found earlier' 

A team of historians says the lost city of the Incas, Machu Picchu, in Peru was discovered more than 40 years earlier than previously thought and ransacked.

Machu Picchu, now Peru's biggest tourist attraction, was famously believed to have been discovered in 1911 by US explorer Hiram Bingham.

The ruins are the crown jewel of Peru's archaeological sites in Peru and draw thousands of tourists every day.

Machu Pichu carries symbolic value for Peru's indigenous people.

It was built by one of the last Inca emperors, Pachacutec, in around 1450 and kept secret from the Spanish conquerors who invaded about 100 years later.

Now the story about its discovery by the western world has been shaken up by a team of historians who say a German businessman looted its treasures more than 40 years before.

They say the adventurer, Augusto Berns, who traded in Peru's wood and gold, raided the citadel's tombs in 1867 apparently with the blessing of the Peruvian government.

He had set up a sawmill at the foot of the forested mountain on which Machu Picchu stands and systematically robbed precious artefacts which he sold to European galleries and museums.

Only when one of the historians found a map in Peru's national museum were his activities traced.

Until now it has been believed that Hiram Bingham, an American academic from Yale University, brought the Inca city to the attention of the world in 1911, although local people clearly already knew of its presence.

Mr Berns had a far less noble objective and researchers are now trying to find out how many artefacts he spirited out of the country at a time when there were no known archaeological expeditions in Peru.

Sadly more than a century later, Peruvian archaeological treasures are still being looted by grave robbers and sold on the international black market.

Where tourism meets cultural heritage

Reblogged from the NY Times (via Associated Press), April 10, 2008:

Easter Island: Statue Vandal Fined $17,000

< Chilean Investigative Police released this photo showing the damage to the right earlobe. (AP Wirephoto via CNN)

A Finnish tourist who chipped an earlobe off an ancient statue on Easter Island two weeks ago for a souvenir is being allowed to go home after paying a $17,000 fine and agreeing not to return for three years, the police said. At the request of prosecutors, he also wrote a public apology for damaging the 13-foot-tall moai, as the statues are known.

Previously reported more fully on CNN.com/World.

Yale and Machu Picchu: the never-ending story

Eliane Karp-Toledo, former first lady of Peru and currently a visiting lecturer at Stanford University, contributes an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. In it she questions Yale University's commitment to the 'memorandum of understanding' signed by the government of Peru and the university to repatriate archaeological objects from Machu Picchu collected by Hiram Bingham III (Yale '98) and housed at Yale. Her objection hinges on Yale's request to retain some artifacts for 99 years for research purposes.

Karp-Toledo's objection to the memorandum has been previously noted, in Yale Daily News, as early as last September.

• You can read a nice running commentary on the negotiations here.
• Read our previous post (Aug. 2007) on the agreement.

Symposium examines human remains in museums

This weekend the Musée du quai Branly hosts a two-day symposium entitled Des collections anatomqiues aux objets de culte: conservation et exposition des restes humains dans les musées (or, "From Human Remains to Cult Objects: Conservation and Display of Human Remains in Museums"). The symposium, which is open to the public, will be held February 22 and 23 in the Théâtre Claude Levi-Strauss at the Musée.

Each of the four round tables will cover a different aspect of the problem (titles loosely translated from the French):

• Repatriating human remains: Why, for whom, under what conditions?
• Do human remains have a place in museums today?
• The status of human remains from the legal, ethical and philosophical points of view
• How to get along? Institutional mediation

A fuller description (pdf) is also available online.

Wendy Seltzer on Mukurtu Contextual Archiving

My earlier post on this development sparked a lively discussion on the icommons list. Here is a great post on the topic by Wendy Seltzer :

reblogged via WendySeltzer.org, 1/11/08:

Mukurtu Contextual Archiving: digital "restrictions" done right

Filed under: culture, commons — wseltzer @ 10:37 am

I'm accustomed to thinking of digital restrictions in the U.S. intellectual property context. We’re told that DRM use restrictions are trade-offs for getting material in digital form, but generally, the trade is a bad one for the public.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive Kimberly Christen helped the Australian Warumungu community in Tennant Creek to construct puts digital restrictions in a very different light. 

As Kim described when I met her at a conference over the summer, the Warumungu have a set of protocols around objects and representations of people that restrict access to physical objects and photographs. Only elders may see or authorize viewing of sacred objects; other objects may be restricted by family or gender. Images of the deceased shouldn't be viewed, and photographs are often physically effaced. When the Warumungu archive objects or images, they want to implement the same sort of restrictions.

They wanted an archive that was built around Warumungu protocols for accessing and distributing materials (in many forms). One of the first mandates was that everyone had to have a password so that they could only see materials that they were meant to see based on their family/country/community status.

Kim's response was to help construct a digital archive with access controls — ACLs based not on copyright but on the various elements of a person's community status. Your identity sets your view-port into the archive; the computer will show only items you have permission to see. The community can thus give objects context in the online archive similar to that which situates them offline. As an object’s status changes, the database can be updated to reflect new rights or restrictions.

Yet the Mukurtu's form of "DRM" is fragile.  Users are encouraged to print images or burn CDs, which have no controls built-in.

People can also print images or burn CDs and thus allow the images to circulate more widely to others who live on outstations or in other areas. In fact, one of the top priorities in Mukurtu's development was that it needed to allow people to take things with them, printing and burning were necessary to ensure circulation of the materials.

Unlike copyright-DRM systems, which fall back to the most restrictive state when exporting or communicating with "unsigned" devices (such as blocking all copying and breaking or lowering playback resolution on high-definition monitors), this one defaults to granting access.  It's up to the people using the system to determine how new and unknown situations should be handled.

Because the Murkurtu protocol-restrictions support community norms, rather than oppose them, the system can trust its users to take objects with them. If a member of the community chooses to show a picture to someone the machine would not have, his or her interpretation prevails — the machine doesn’t presume to capture or trump the nuance of the social protocol. Social protocols can be reviewed or broken, and so the human choice to comply gives them strength as community ties.

One of the lessons of the recording industry lawsuits and growing shift from DRM'd music is that community norms don't support current copyright law. Rather than fight copyright norms with bad code, we should learn from the Warumungu and build code (and law) to support social practice.

Further good news: Kim says she and Craig Dietrich will be releasing the archive's code as Free Software.

Aboriginal archive's new DRM: Cultural Solution?

via BBC News,  Tuesday, 29 January 2008 (thanks Nicole!):

Aboriginal archive offers new DRM

A new method of digital rights management (DRM) which relies on a user's profile has been pioneered by Aboriginal Australians.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive has been developed by a community based in Australia's Northern Territory.

It asks every person who logs in for their name, age, sex and standing within their community.

This information then restricts what they can search for in the archive, offering a new take on DRM

Dr Kimberly Christian, who helped to develop the archive, told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme that the need to create these profiles came from community traditions over what can and cannot be seen.

"It grew out of the Warumungu community people themselves, who were really interested in repatriating a lot of images and things that had been taken from the community," she said.

"You find this a lot in indigenous communities, not just in Australia but around the world... this really big push in these communities to get this information back and let people start looking at it and narrating it themselves."     Where to look

Dr Christian, who is an assistant professor based at Washington State University, stumbled across the idea of the archive by chance after meeting a group of missionaries who had digitally archived photos of the Warumungu community since the 1930s.

After loading them onto her laptop, she took them back to Tennant Creek and set up a slideshow - where she noticed that people turned away when certain images came up on screen.

For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Meanwhile images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families.
   

Offline website

"The way people were looking at the photos was embedded in the social system that already existed in the community," she said.

"People would come in and out of the area of the screen to look when they could look."

This threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a traditional sense, but also how people would access it depending on their gender, their relationship to other people and where they were situated.

Dr Christen and her team of software developers came up with what is described as "a website that's not online", containing photos, digital video clips, audio files, digital reproductions of cultural artefacts and documents.

The system has also been designed with a "two-click mantra" in mind, making the content easy to access for those with low computer literacy skills.

Images are arranged in their own categories, with content tagged with restrictions.

The project believes it has established a cultural solution as well as an opportunity for Aboriginals to collate much of what was once lost. The hope of the project's designers is that as culture and traditions change, history can be rewritten and changed by people themselves.

King Island Mask Returned to Ghost Village

King Island Shaman's Mask at the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum. Photo: Laura Samuelson / AP file. The King Island Shaman's Mask, which was returned to Alaska by Marilyn Lewis of Port Townsend, Wash. A Lewis relative took the ancient mask from Alaska more than a century ago and she wanted to get it back to its rightful owners.

via msnbc.com [thanks Nicole!]:

Ancient mask returned to Alaska ghost village
Four decades after it was abandoned, King Island gets sacred surprise
By Rachel D'Oro, Associated Press
Fri., Jan. 18, 2008

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Four decades after it was abandoned, King Island holds an almost mystical pull for former inhabitants and their descendants, its crumbling homes still perched on stilts, clinging to the steep, rocky terrain.

Until recently, little else remained of the island, an Inupiat Eskimo village, except for traditions, memories and artifacts scattered at museums around the nation. Then came word from a stranger nearly 2,000 miles away who said she possessed an ancient mask a relative brought back from Alaska more than a century ago.

On the back of the relic was a faint inscription: "Taken from a medicine man's grave on King Island."

The woman from northwest Washington e-mailed Charlene Saclamana, tribal coordinator with the King Island Native Community based in Nome, a city 80 miles southeast of the tiny Bering Sea island where many of its residents relocated.

Marilyn Lewis said she wanted to return the wooden mask to its rightful owners. Two weeks later, she traveled to Alaska to deliver the artifact, which is now on display at the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in Nome, named after the museum's late founder, a gold rush pioneer.

"It gives me and my family something tangible from our past. We've lost so much of the culture," said Saclamana, whose parents lived on King Island. "We were eager to have the mask back in our possession. We never had anything that well preserved from the island."

The island, home to about 200 people a century ago, was abandoned for various reasons. [read on...]

Photo: Capt. Budd Christman / NOAA Corps via AP. The deserted stilt village of King Island, Alaska, about 625 miles northwest of Anchorage, is shown in 1978. Four decades after it was abandoned, King Island holds an almost mystical pull for former residents and their offspring, its crumbling homes still perched eerily on stilts across the steep, rocky face of an unforgiving terrain.

Maori Mummy's Return...

Rouen Town Hall, via Associated Press: A drawing of the mummified, tattooed head of a Maori warrior at the Museum of Natural History at Rouen in Normandy.

via NYTimes, Arts, Briefly:

No Homecoming for Preserved Head

Published: January 3, 2008

A French court has barred the proposed repatriation of the mummified and tattooed head of a Maori warrior, Agence France-Presse reported. Last year a museum in Rouen, Normandy, where the head had been held since it was donated by a French collector in 1875, decided to return it to New Zealand as an “ethical gesture of respect” for the Maori people. But the French culture ministry intervened, arguing that the relic was part of France’s cultural heritage. On Dec. 27 an administrative court, in effect, blocked the transfer when it ruled that authorities in Rouen had failed to consult a scientific committee before withdrawing the head from the museum’s collection. Before their trade was outlawed, preserved heads of warriors with facial tattoos were popular with 19th-century European collectors.

more coverage:

French Debate: Is Maori Head Body Part or Art? - New York Times
PARIS, Oct. 25 — Since 1875, the mummified, tattooed head of a Maori warrior has been part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Natural History at ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/world/europe/26france.html 

French ministry blocks return of mummified Maori head ...
PARIS: For 132 years, the mummified, tattooed head of a Maori warrior has been part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Natural History in the city ...
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/25/europe/journal.php

Full Coverage French city vows to return Maori head - Newstin
A French court has barred the proposed repatriation of the mummified and tattooed head of a Maori warrior. ... No Homecoming for Preserved Head A French ...
http://www.newstin.com/sim/us/37034523/en-009-000793060 

BBC NEWS | Europe | France stops Maori mummy's return
A French court has blocked a museum's efforts to return the mummified head of a Maori warrior to New Zealand. The tattooed relic was acquired by a museum in ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7061724.stm   

New Zealanders in Belgium: Mummified head of Maori warrior from France
Mummified head of Maori warrior from France ... The mayor of a French city appears determined to return a tattooed and mummified Maori head to New Zealand, ...
http://newzealandersinbelgium.blogspot.com/2007/10/mummified-head-of-maori-warrior-returns.html

Aluka 2.0

via Aluka Blog:

Flickr, Facebook, and 2.0: Aluka Takes the Plunge
November 29th, 2007 by Michael Gallagher, User Support

Aluka now has a presence on both Flickr and Facebook!

Aluka has uploaded images to Flickr from both the African Plants, Cultural Heritage and Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa content areas. From African Plants, we have a collection of specimens, drawings, and photographs that will be sure to entice any botanist or lover of plants.

For Cultural Heritage, we have amazing images taken by Dr. Heinz Ruther from such World Heritage Sites as Lalibela, Kilwa Kisiwani, Elmina Castle, Great Zimbabwe, and Timbuktu. The image included in this post is Bet Giorgis at Lalibela.

For Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa, we have  covers from some important texts from and about the countries in the region, including Angola, Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa.

Come and take a look; feel free to add us as a Contact as well so we can build a network! To view Aluka’s Flickr slideshow, simply go to http://flickr.com/photos/15721258@N06/.

On Facebook (www.facebook.com), we have created a group called Aluka (catchy, isn't it?). To join our group, search in Facebook for Aluka and click Join Group. We have information about Aluka, contact information, and some representative images from the digital library. Please come and join, ask a few questions, maybe even make some comments; it goes a long way towards developing the Aluka community!