Word: etruscans
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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...
Since most Etruscan tombs are underground, they are found by pushing a steel probe into the earth or sometimes by stamping and listening for reverberations. Then a hole is opened with a pick and shovel and the prizes dragged out. Just two weeks ago, in the area of Cerveteri from which the Met's vase is alleged to have come, the police found one group at work; the robbers fled, leaving their haul of 51 valuable Etruscan objects behind...
...unreliable. Most certificates are manipulated. The Italians can raise a ruckus, as in the case of the Metropolitan vase. But if they cannot prove anything, their claims are worthless. Unless the Italian authorities can come up with something like a photograph showing a work of art in an identifiable Etruscan tomb, they don't have a leg to stand...
...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...