Word: etruscans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...from TIME correspondents in Italy, Turkey and Switzerland, he wrote this week's Art story on archaeological thievery. Hughes brought to the story a firsthand knowledge gained while he was living in Port' Ercole, Italy, in 1964 and 1965. It was an area settled by the ancient Etruscans, and was honeycombed with tombs. "Every farmer you met had an ancient pot or two in his house," Hughes recalls, "except the ones who were off in Tuscania making fakes. Tomb-robbing was the local cottage industry." Hughes made his contribution to the local economy. Buying Etruscan pots from farmers...
...racket in Italy involves a couple of thousand fulltime, professional tombaroli or tomb robbers, most of them peasants who know their land intimately. They work in teams. There are, for instance, at least twelve organized groups plundering the Etruscan sites in Cerveteri. Their scorn for official archaeologists is extreme...
...furor began when the New York Times, advancing further in its holy war against the Met, charged that the vase was booty dug up by grave robbers at an Etruscan site north of Rome in 1971 and illegally sold to an expatriate American named Robert E. Hecht Jr. He in turn, so the story went, smuggled the vase out of Italy and sold it to the Met. In 1970 UNESCO adopted a draft prohibiting illicit traffic in art objects. The calyx krater would come under that provision, and both the U.S. and Italy have signed the pact...
...involve big money. When the collection of Texas Oil Millionaire Algur Hurtle Meadows was declared largely a collection of fakes by the Art Dealers Association of America, Meadows' investment, valued at $5,000,000, depreciated overnight into a collection of junk. The Met's own famed Etruscan warriors, proudly exhibited for 28 years, were relegated to the basement when it was discovered that they were skillful forgeries produced by a Roman tailor back...
...Indian metalworkers of the Navajo, Zuñi and Hopi tribes. The similarity between the old and new is at times so striking-as with Edival Ramosa's curlicue aluminum and silver necklace-that some of the New Jewelry, says Lyon, "would have been more acceptable in Etruscan times...