On the Publication of Unprovenanced Artifacts

This week, the topics of discussion in class were the responsibilities of archaeologists, and who owns or should own the information (publication and excavation rights, etc). 

While for my presentation on the publication of unprovenanced artifact (focused mainly on cuneiform tablets, but arguing for all artifacts) I offered an extreme perspective in favour of publication, in reality I'm much more conflicted on the issue.

Cuneiform Tablet

The question at hand is: Should artifacts that have been looted or have no provenance be published? The case for cuneiform tablets is strong, since most of them are unprovenanced and tell us much about what we know about Near Eastern religion, society, culture, economy, etc. As Dr. Greene pointed out in class, these tablets are fascinating because, unlike the Mycenanean Linear B texts, they actually record literature– that is, letters, edicts, laws, etc., versus just economic records. 

I do believe it is true that if EVERYONE ignored unprovenanced artifacts, the illicit antiquities trade would cease to exist, as there would be no demand for these artifacts, and they would thus be unsellable. In a sense, this is what archaeological societies and journals strive to achieve through their restrictions on publishing and presenting unprovenanced artifacts.

On the other hand, unless everyone ignores these artifacts, are we really doing the public a favour by ignoring anything that has no archaeological context, no matter the uniqueness of the object?

Often times in archaeology a scholar will say that there is only one type of something, or that no type of some kind has ever been found. What if these were all under our noses, in storage limbo? How much information could we get from these objects? Should an object be forsaken of its importance just because it's missing archaeological context?

It's difficult to really argue absolutely for one side or the other. Some objects maybe should be ignored, in order to not bring prestige to their unfortunate situation (looted shipwreck items, anyone?), while others should be studied, in order for their unearthing to not be a completely total loss of valuable information. 

As with many other topics dealing with ethics and cultural heritage, I'm not sure that I can offer any conclusion, as the position is pretty subjective, and each person's take is truly dependent on a number of factors.