Alex Barker, Arkansas Archeological Survey
"Archeology is..." series - November 2024
“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner, “it’s not even past.” While it’s easy to imagine the cultural heritage that archeologists study as a dry and purely academic subject, it has become one of the more contested resources in the modern world, and has grown from a topic for antiquarians to a geopolitical flashpoint. Heritage—real and imagined—plays a central role in defining identities, both individually and as communities or nations, and those who want to change the future must first change how people perceive their past.
Contested views of the past inform many latter-day controversies, from debates over the status of Confederate monuments to the repatriation of looted antiquities to other nations, from the recently-enacted STOP Act (Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony, intended to prevent the export of objects subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) to the destruction of archeological sites by terrorist groups seeking to both erase existing perceptions of identity and finance operations by selling looted antiquities. Heritage has shifted from a matter of remembrance to an international security concern and geopolitical resource.
Don’t think so? When I started working in archeology, the US had never had a criminal conviction for looting and trafficking in international antiquities. Today, Rewards for Justice, a program of the Department of Justice, offers rewards of up to $10m for information that will help disrupt terrorist financial networks supported by selling archeological objects.
Because heritage plays such an important role in how peoples understand their identity, it has become an issue of considerable diplomatic concern; countries wish to preserve and, to some extent, control their own patrimony. Sensitivity to these concerns by other nations is both pragmatic (allowing reciprocal protections of their own heritage) and strategic (as an extension of soft power, and to reduce threats fueled by trafficking in heritage objects). International law and treaties provide some protection for antiquities, primarily through the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.
But nations are only bound by the treaties they join; the US did not join the Hague Convention until 2009, and is not a party to the First or Second Protocol. States Parties might also take varying approaches to implementation. For example, nations wishing to have their patrimony protected by the US under Article 9 of the 1970 Convention need to conclude bilateral agreements with the US government through the Department of State. Agreements need to list categories of objects to be protected; each agreement is different, and each lasts only five years at which time it must be renewed or the protections cease.
I serve on the federal Cultural Property Advisory Committee, which reviews these bilateral agreements and advises the President (through officials of the Department of State) regarding whether to enter into such agreements, and kinds of items to be protected under an agreement’s terms. The Committee can also recommend the unilateral imposition of emergency import restrictions in certain cases.
Foreign nation-states are not the only governments for whom heritage is an issue of diplomacy. For Native American communities, negotiations over cultural heritage issues are often conducted as government-to-government consultations between federal authorities and tribes in their capacity as sovereign governments under the doctrine of tribal sovereignty.
These agreements and doctrines provide frameworks for diplomatic discussions regarding cultural heritage. What qualifies as an object of heritage, however, and who should control such objects, remains hotly debated—both between nations and within them.
Confederate monuments are one such example: for some, they are symbols of pride; for others, they are not only symbols of oppression and enslavement in the past but also continuing oppression, because most were erected during the Jim Crow era. In another example, NASA planned to launch a moon mission with private payloads, but among the 28 payloads were some from companies that provide memorial services by shipping human cremated remains. The Navaho nation sought to block the launch, arguing that the moon is sacred to many Native communities.
Diplomacy is key, because many of these topics have no clearcut answers. While laws and treaties provide useful frameworks for discussion, they sometimes differ and create competing and even contradictory understandings. Consider, for example, the case of human remains found along the US border with Mexico. If found on one side of the border, they are subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and their disposition is determined by lineal descendants or the descendant community; if found on the other side of the border—even if only meters away, they are national patrimony of Mexico and subject to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) rather than the descendant community itself. In such instances, archeology requires diplomacy in both its definitions—at the governmental level of managing and influencing international relations and at the individual level of dealing with people in a sensitive and effective way.
Like the past, diplomacy matters. Now more than ever.
Alex Barker is the Director of the Arkansas Archeological Survey. He currently serves on the Cultural Property Advisory Committee (Department of State) and is a former member of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Review Committee (Department of the Interior). The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Government.
