by Craig Childs
“We would never do this today, of course,” Haskell said. “There are many different nondestructive techniques that could be used now.”
Like many curators I have met, Haskell seemed preternaturally attentive, as if standing on the tips of her toes with a pen, ready to scribble a catalogue number across my forehead and slap me in a drawer. Her presence at my side every time I moved down the hall was a constant reminder of how carefully these artifacts have been curated.
Haskell led me around a corner, where we found a segment of a Hopi mural propped on a shelf. Facing it, in shocking contrast, was an artful raven from the Northwest coast. She made a surprised sound when she saw the two. The raven was dark and brazenly animist; the Hopi work seemed flowery, otherworldly.
She hurriedly picked up the flat piece of Hopi mural and carried it to a nearby table, where she rested it faceup.
“I’m sorry,” she said to me. “Things need to be kept in better order. Those two shouldn’t be together.”
She paced quickly down an aisle to a woman, a museum technician, who was sitting at a table writing labels.
“Who’s been working in the murals?” Haskell demanded.
The technician looked up, eyes focusing on Haskell. An apologetic response followed.
Returning, Haskell explained the museum has strict protocols and having two different cultures together like that, even in storage, is not allowed. “We keep Pueblo artifacts with Pueblo artifacts, Northwest with Northwest,” she said.
At this level of curation, discriminations are even subtler than that. Depending on requests from various cultural groups, artifacts may be treated on an individual basis. Some are kept covered, some are positioned to face a particular cardinal direction, and some are kept out of view of women. Here in the underworld of a museum, science and the sacred meet. Hopi representatives have come to the Peabody on occasion and left offerings of fresh tobacco and cornmeal that the museum carefully monitors. Technicians place the offerings in plastic containers to prevent contamination but make sure to leave holes in the tops to allow the offerings to interact with the artifacts in what might be called a spiritual manner.
If there is any way to properly curate plunder—including objects removed by bona fide archaeologists decades ago—it seems to be this. The museum has become a kind of church, a kiva, where Haskell and I moved in our long white coats like abbots of another age.
Not all public collections are this fortunate. In 2004, looking for certain specimens, I visited Wendy Bustard at the Chaco Museum Collection in Albuquerque. She and I pulled open cardboard boxes and felt down through plastic sacks in a basement with shelves and boxes stacked sixteen feet high, under white ceiling tiles piss-stained from broken plumbing upstairs. Bustard was not simply embarrassed by the condition of her collection, she was mad. She wanted something far better and was not getting it, her budget falling short of what was needed to keep the repository at even a marginal level.
At the time of my visit, Bustard had little financial support as she oversaw one million artifacts stored in six different federal repositories. She had pointed at the notebook in my hands and said, “Write it down. Somebody needs to hear that our collections are not doing well. I don’t even have the funding to hire a curator.”
But things soon turned around for her. As a National Park Service institution, Bustard’s collection was unexpectedly granted federal funding shortly after my visit, enough for entirely new storage and research laboratories situated on the University of New Mexico campus, a success story complete with a new curator.
But good news is thin these days. One conservator told me, “No one in the museum world has enough money, not even the Smithsonian. People are struggling to get $150,000 grants, and still it covers nothing.”
A recent study of objects held in public trust in the United States found that of 4.8 billion items, including 44 million feet of archival records (more than 8,300 miles of manuscripts and maps), 820 million specimens are in need of help—some urgently. Meanwhile, 1.8 billion artifacts remain in unknown condition, many unchecked since the day they were put in storage. The study concluded that action is needed to prevent the imminent destruction of up to 190 million objects. Redundant soil samples are being thrown out, while stocks of ancient coins, pots, and statuary are taken from storage and liquidated for cash in a procedure known as deaccessioning. (According to national museum standards, proceeds from deaccessions can be used only to better the existing collection.) Even the Peabody at Harvard has felt the pinch, which is a very bad sign for all the museums down the line. Money tends to go to other projects first.
After we left the murals, Haskell and I walked across campus in our lab coats, past a lunch truck with faculty standing in line. On the other side of a parking lot stood a metal structure three stories tall, the museum’s ceramics storage. As we climbed stairs to its second-story entry, she explained that the adjacent science lab had been pushing to expand, which would require three feet of new foundation space, which in turn meant that the entire ceramics storage facility would have to come down. If the building were to be demolished, artifacts would need to be relocated, at a cost of about $10 million. Relocation did not mean transferring them to a new facility, however, but scattering them to more affordable locations throughout the city, where access would be greatly diminished. This did not happen, though, not this time. The science lab expansion was eventually halted, the ceramics collection allowed to remain. But as funding leaks away from museums, the threat hovers. What has taken thousands of years to accumulate in one place could easily be thrown back to the wind as a country’s priorities shift through the decades. Though museums are one of the safest places to keep what has been already gathered, it is not certain that they will endure. A woman overseeing a government-owned collection of historic American artifacts kept in a barn once said to me, “Every time the wind blows through those crevices you just know it’s going away.”
“Museums just aren’t priority,” Haskell said as she swiped a magnetic key and the door released. Inside, the first thing we saw was a stone jaguar, a Mayan carving put here because it had nowhere else to go. We slid past and entered a miraculous arena of ceramics. A space the size of a high school gymnasium was packed floor to ceiling with pots on three separate levels. Through the metal-grate floors you could see from one level to the next. As we clanked down a staircase and turned across the floor, I found myself overtaken with a bit of vertigo, staring up and then down at thousands of slender-handled jars, brown-clay effigies, and bowls stacked inside each other (foam cushions nestled between each). The profusion was stunning.
Seeing the look on my face, Haskell said, “I feel the same way every time I come here.”
I had never seen so many vessels in my life. It looked like a china factory warehouse, only each of these was a priceless artifact.
We set off looking for pots collected from Awat’ovi. It took a while, since it is nearly impossible for any curator to recall the location of each artifact in a given collection. Part of what took so long, though, was Haskell’s evident pleasure as she paused, admiring random and attractive vessels, then slipping on cotton gloves to lift them from their shelves. I was pleased to be with her, taken by her enthusiasm. I have heard private collectors accuse professionals of being heartless overseers of their stockpiles. Haskell was far from that. She thanked me for getting her out of the office, saying that she appreciates every opportunity she gets to enter the collection.
“This one always catches my eye,” she said, picking up a white jar the size of a watermelon, its surface bolted with black symmetrical lightning. “It’s hard to just walk by it.”
I recognized the jar from a report I’d seen, a Peabody paper from the late 1800s.
Excitedly I said, “It’s from a site down near the Utah-Arizona border.”
Haskell smiled at me, and I felt for the first time that I was of some small use to her.
“It’s in this big arc of a canyon,” I contin
ued, “a long line of masonry cliff dwellings up in the sandstone, and some big springs, weeping walls full of maidenhair ferns. It’s quite a beautiful place.”
Setting the jar back on the shelf, she said, “I hadn’t known.”
These items were too far north for Awat’ovi, and we continued down the aisles, picking through monochrome pots, until we reached a brilliant array of colors, jars as broad and stylized as flying saucers painted in reds, yellows, blacks, and whites. This was Awat’ovi.
As we picked out jars one at a time, rotating them overhead to see the smooth shapes of their bottoms, I felt as if we were breaking into a time capsule. We could see the very brushstrokes of potters who had lived when Awat’ovi was a huge and thriving pueblo, one of the largest in the Southwest. These vessels held the sounds of barking dogs and children running through plazas, the hard grind of stone on corn, and the mumble of old men sitting in wall shade.
Mindful of the threat posed by the nearby science lab, I wondered if this would be the last time these pots would be seen together. It would be a shame, I thought, but perhaps it was an inevitability. More than science labs threaten these collections. Foreign countries are leveraging the return of artifacts like the Euphronios and Aphrodite, while Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and other indigenous peoples occupying tiny remnant territories around the world are demanding repatriation of their stolen materials, the booty of colonialism and genocide. (After the passage of NAGPRA, the Peabody alone returned the remains of two thousand individuals and more than three thousand artifacts.) The steady collecting of centuries is beginning to recede.
At the same time, major museums around the world are being hit by costly thefts, sometimes perpetrated in broad daylight by armed men in ski masks, and sometimes by unscrupulous curators stealing from the inside. In 2006, $5 million in objects were found to be missing from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, leakage that turned out to have been partly orchestrated by curator Larisa Zavadskaya. While her collection was being inventoried by authorities to determine what was missing, Zavadskaya died of a heart attack at her desk.
Then there are the cases of utter devastation, such as the once-acclaimed National Museum of Afghanistan near Kabul, which was hit by rockets in 1993. An institution caught on the front lines of a factional war, its vaulted roof caught fire and crashed into the upper galleries. Later, soldiers and other looters sorted through the rubble, removing nearly two-thirds of the museum’s holdings, a priceless assortment of artifacts that ranged from Macedonian to Buddhist.
Consider also Iraq and the 2003 looting of the National Library and Archives, where 1.2 million books were destroyed. Next the Central Library of the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs, the oldest cultural institution in the nation, burned to the ground. Most famous was the looting of the National Museum of Iraq, one of the world’s largest repositories of Mesopotamian and Sumerian artifacts going back 7,000 years. For three days during the American invasion of Baghdad, hundreds of looters wandered the museum unchecked, shattering glass cases and beating down locked doors. Donny George Youkhanna, an Assyrian archaeologist who was museum director at the time, came back to find his desk in three or four pieces, his chair three hundred feet away, papers scattered two feet deep in his office. He said it looked as if a hurricane had hit from the inside. Prior to the invasion, he had had enough time to evacuate only the most portable top-shelf antiquities to vaults in the Central Bank. After that, more than thirteen thousand artifacts went missing in an anarchic furor, men smashing what they could not take. American forces had been carrying a short list of places to protect, and number two was the National Museum. The Ministry of Oil was number sixteen, near the bottom. Journalists at the time joked that the military must have read the list upside down: while the oil ministry was crawling with American tanks, no one showed up at the museum.
Some of the looters were common thieves who filled sacks as quickly as they could with jewels, vessels, and parts of statues knocked off with baseball bats. Others were far more methodical, showing up with glass cutters and keys. These men knew exactly what they were after: artifacts that would move quickly on the market. They reached the inner rooms by breaking in through a small screened window and from there walked past replicas of artifacts that would have tricked the general public. Youkhanna said he thought smugglers had been carefully preparing for that day, with artifacts perhaps sold even before the invasion started.
In those first days, as Baghdad rang with explosions and gunfire, Youkhanna encountered a breed of looter he had not expected, a group of young men who went into the museum with everyone else, indistinguishable from crazed hoi polloi. They had grabbed nine major pieces, and a few days later approached Youkhanna and one of his curators. They had, they explained, been able to save some of the artifacts. The young men said that the looters had been armed with guns and knives, and there had been no sense opposing them. Instead, they simply blended in and like everyone else hauled off what they could. Once the young men were assured that the nine pieces would be safe, that the museum was again secure, they brought them back bundled in fabric. They weren’t the only ones. Soon a man and his brother brought artifacts he had been able to salvage, slipping into the museum along with the rampaging crowds.
For Youkhanna, the return of each artifact was crucial. He told me that archaeology is the substance of history. “Without these documents—whether statue or clay tablet—we would be lacking proof. Each one tells us the story. It tells everything in a pure language.”
The Baghdad museum’s losses have been trickling back in, over half of what was originally stolen returning within five years. Items have surfaced in raids and stings, and in the suitcases of American attachés passing through customs, trying to get relics home. In 2008, Jordanian border officials alone seized 2,466 figurines, vessels, beads, seals, coins, and scrolls. But most of the key missing pieces have gone underground and will not appear again for a generation or two. Some will vanish entirely to the caprices of war and trade, destroyed by fire, lost at sea, melted down for gold.
Museums, Youkhanna said, are only as strong as their doors. Asked what could be done, he replied, “Metal doors, bigger locks.”
How long can anything be expected to last? Museums add centuries of life to artifacts, and perhaps some will make it farther, there is no telling. The idea of posterity is sweet, but we seem to be holding artifacts for now rather than the future. Savor this moment of rare assemblages as if we have come to the end of history and gathered as many pieces as we could.
The next day, I asked Haskell if she would take me to the final layer of occupation at Awat’ovi, the Spanish mission that came just before the fall. We returned to the museum and climbed stairs until we encountered the angle of the roof, where she showed me to a disconcertingly small door. Haskell unlocked it and we ducked into the Metals Room, a repository of medieval items: spears, blades, shields, and long, pointed instruments used during the Crusades to disembowel Muslims and Christians alike. Low, steep-angled ceilings threw the room’s dimensions askew. We crouched toward the back, dropping to our knees at a set of drawers. Inside were cubbies from which Haskell removed a small manila envelope labeled “door hinge.” She poured it out on a sheet of white paper. All that was left were flakes of rust and powder.
“I guess that’s a door hinge,” she said.
I was surprised to see so little intact material, but considering that the artifact came from a sacked mission that had burned down and was left to weather for a couple of centuries, this was not bad. If it had been higher priority, the museum would have kept the hinge’s remains in a plastic container, but this was only one tiny industrial object tipped into an envelope, holding just enough shape for me to see that it had once been a fixture. Every envelope Haskell opened contained something similar: buckle, latch, bolt. The Hopi gave the Peabody murals, pots, and turquoise jewelry, while the Spanish offered rust.
Then something solid appeared. She slipped a coin-sized met
al disk from its envelope onto paper. I reached out to turn it over.
“Ah!” Haskell stopped my bare hand. “Skin oils,” she warned.
She used the edge of the paper to flip over the disk, revealing a corroded but recognizable image of Christopher, patron saint of lost travelers. The medal had been found on the floor of the mission, and I wondered who had been the last to hold it before it was uncovered by the Peabody’s expedition. I was transported to Awat’ovi, to the attack at dusk, just as the sky began filling with stars. As shouts and screams poured through the pueblo, I imagined Anglo missionaries understanding how big a mess they had gotten themselves into. I saw the medal clutched to the breast of a man with eyes wide in horror, praying for his life, hearing shouts and pounding on the wooden doors. Then the doors would have crashed open as warriors broke through, blowing out the candles.
Is there any better justification for a museum’s existence than allowing lost worlds to come back to life like this? Time is reborn here. In this confounding room, with its peculiar ceiling and its weapons, I had found the end of my inquiry. I had witnessed the long life and sudden death of a magnificent pueblo, a place I previously knew only as mounds of dust and broken pottery at the edge of a mesa, a place where I had longed to know what had been in the ground.
As Haskell slid the pendant back into its envelope, I thanked her. Then I thanked her again, hoping she would understand my gratitude for her devotion, for holding the memory of this pueblo together when it was not even hers to begin with.