[MSN] book review: The “Keros Hoard”: Myth or Reality? Searching for the Lost Pieces of a Puzzle.

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The “Keros Hoard”: Myth or Reality? Searching for the Lost Pieces of a Puzzle, 
by Peggy Sotirakopoulou, with contributions by Y. Maniatis,
K. Polikreti, E. Dotsika, and I. Tzavidopoulos. Pp. 354,
figs. 375, chart 1, tables 84, diagrams 6, drawings
95, maps 4. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
€60; $80. ISBN 0-89236-837-3; 960-7037-79-0
(paper).

In the early summer of 1990, Felicity Nicholson showed
me a selection of fragmentary Cycladic figures from the
“Keros Haul,” as Getz-Gentle (Personal Styles in Early Cycladic
Sculpture [Madison 2001] 141 n. 134 [hereafter PS]) has
proposed terming this body of material. They were about
to be auctioned by Sotheby’s in London. This experience,
perhaps more than any other, was a catalyst for the article,
written with my then Cambridge colleague Christopher Chippindale,
“Material and Intellectual Consequences of Esteem
for Cycladic Figures” (AJA 97 [1993] 601–59). The shameless
way that these looted antiquities were auctioned—and the
sensational headlines in the London papers calling for the
sale to be stopped—foreshadowed the revelations of sleaziness
that surrounded that specific auction house in 1997 (P.
Watson, Sotheby’s: Inside Story [London 1997]).
The Keros Haul represents about one-third of the corpus
of marble figures from the Early Bronze Age Aegean. The
corpus of Cycladic figures has been corrupted by fakes; few
pieces, perhaps 15%, have come from secure archaeological
contexts. Thus, the publication of a catalogue of 254 fragments
(including a single “vase” fragment) is significant for
Cycladic studies; not all are illustrated, and the present locations
are not always known. The “Haul” itself gained public
prominence in the 1976 Karlsruhe exhibition, “Kunst und
Kultur der Kykladeninseln im 3. Jahrtausend v.Chr.” (organized
by J. Thimme), and was then discussed by Getz-Preziosi
in Antidoron (Karlsruhe 1983), the Festschrift for Jürgen
Thimme. It is said that the fragments—torsos, thighs, and
feet of mostly female figures—may have come from the site
of Kavos at the western end of the small island of Keros, just
to the southeast of Naxos.
The authority for attribution to the Keros Haul has been
the work of Getz-Preziosi/Getz-Gentle (41 [hereafter Getz]).
Sotirakopoulou presents the fragments in two main sections:
those once in the notorious Erlenmeyer collection, and those
that followed a different route through the antiquities market
(ch. 3). There is disagreement over what should be placed
within the murky definition of the Haul. A Late Spedos head
in the Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri–
Columbia (inv. no. 76.214), was reported by Getz in
the exhibition catalogue Early Cycladic Art in North American
Collections (Richmond 1987, no. 81 [hereafter NAC ]) as “reputedly
found on Keros.” It is excluded from this catalogue
because the museum insists that “the object was purchased
in 1976 and that there is no evidence to associate it with the
‘hoard’” (42).
But how many of the fragments in the catalogue came
with an authenticated statement or signed receipt that the
piece had been looted from Keros? Are fragments excluded
because an admission by the museum concerned would be
embarrassing or compromising? The commentary on a nearcomplete
figure that passed through the Erlenmeyer and
Spyros Metaxas collections states, “It is uncertain whether
the figurine belongs to the ‘Keros Hoard’” (Keros no. 10).
So why is it included in this catalogue, which seeks to be definitive?
Keros-like fragments have also been emerging on
the market in the last decade—should they be added to the
corpus? Four torsos were once in the hands of John Hewett
in London, three of them in the early 1970s, and then resided
apart in the Sadler collection and in the private collection
of the art critic David Sylvester before re-emerging in auctions
at Sotheby’s in London (26 February 2002, lots 5, 26,
27; 31 October 2003, lot 16). Should the torso (“property of
a New York Private Collector”) auctioned at Sotheby’s New
York on 13 June 2002 (lot 57) be added? The previous time
it appeared in those auction rooms, on 20 June 1990 (lot
19), it had traveled with the torso and legs of another figure,
which appears here (Keros no. 218 = lot 20).
A more detailed discussion of the dealers and galleries
who helped to spread material would have been helpful,
though there is an informative table, “History of the Dispersal
of the ‘Keros Hoard’” (263). A concordance of different
auctions, salesrooms, galleries, and dealers would have been
telling and could have shown the way that the alleged Haul
has been dispersed through the market, and indeed the way
some figures have been provided with a paper trail—the term
“laundered” springs to mind—even if they have lost their archaeological
context forever. The Haul is said to have been
acquired by an anonymous buyer (supposedly a conveniently
now deceased dealer, whom I shall dub the Keros Haulier),
who sold some fragments to Erlenmeyer while retaining
other pieces. The fragments were studied by Getz between
1968 and 1975 (though in PS 141 she says 1967): 140 pieces
in the possession of the Erlenmeyers and 167 still retained
by the Keros Haulier. It is suggested that the Erlenmeyers
acquired their fragments ca. 1955, though the earliest publications
appeared in AntK 8 (1965).
The proposal is also made that the fragments were acquired
perhaps as early as the 1940s (or 1930s)—is this more
than a convenient smokescreen? Although Getz (PS 141 n.
135) has reported that some of the fragments “were wrapped
in pre-World War II newspapers,” this is hardly conclusive
proof that the pieces emerged in the 1930s. Did the looting
take place in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the burst
of surfacing took place? There are a few pieces that are reported
to have been known before 1960 (Keros nos. 171,
180, 191, 231). Getz (PS 157, no. 8) reports that the fragmentary
torso and thighs in the Harmon collection in New York
(Keros no. 180) was formerly in the “Halphen collection”
and “acquired before WWII.” What is the evidence for this,
and on whose authority? Is there authenticated documentation?
Is it significant that one of the fragments (Keros no.
195) passed through Münzen und Medaillen, Basel, in May
1961 (and thence to the Binia Bill collection in Zumikon,
Zurich)? Is there a reluctance to identify who was really
involved in supplying these fragments? Material allegedly
linked to the Haul (and once residing in the Erlenmeyer
collection) continues to pass through the auction houses.
They were materials such as the four figures (including one
fragmentary male figure that may have been a flute-player)
from “a European Private Collection” that were, in fact, part
of the Spyros Metaxas collection, and some that were sold
at Sotheby’s New York on 12 June 2003 (lots 10, 14, 15, 17
= Keros nos. 10, 62, 117, 147).
One of the intellectual issues associated with the collecting
of Cycladic figures was the way that reported findspots
“floated” or developed. A Spedos figure in the Seattle Art
Museum (Keros no. 171), which is believed to have been in
the collection of Roland Levy “before 1954,” was said in 1987
to have been “[r]eputedly found on one of the small islands
southeast of Naxos” (NAC no. 36), and by 2001, to be from
“one of the small islands SE of Naxos, area of Herakleia” (PS
156 no. 7). The head from an apparently colossal figure in
the J. Paul Getty Museum (Keros no. 176), which came to
light in the A. Leuthold collection in 1964 and subsequently
moved to the Fleischman collection, was stated in 1987 as
“[r]eputedly found on Naxos” (NAC no. 43), but by 2001, was
stated as “quite possibly from the Keros hoard” (Getz in PS
178, pl. 97[a]). Pieces attributed to the Keros Haul need
not have been found at Kavos or even on Keros itself. They
may have just been added to the consignment of loot, part
of which perhaps came from Kavos, part from elsewhere on
Keros, part perhaps of new manufacture, that traveled from
the Cyclades to the Keros Haulier in Switzerland.

Yet the story of Kavos and Keros is, fortunately, not one
solely of destruction. Christos Doumas started excavations
at Kavos in 1963 in response to looting there, and, with his
permission, Sotirakopoulou presents a brief discussion, with
helpful quantitative analysis, of the 282 fragments from more
recent (1963, 1967, 1975) work at Kavos (ch. 5). It is striking
that 41% of the finds consisted of lower legs and feet, the
same percentage as for the pieces attributed to the Haul in
the Erlenmeyer collection. The links between the excavated
finds and the looted pieces are made by the joining of an ex-
Erlenmeyer piece in the Museum of Cycladic Art (Keros no.
119; C.G. Doumas, Early Cycladic Culture: The N.P. Goulandris
Collection [Athens 2000] no. 247) with a fragment in the Naxos
Museum. A leg formerly in the Erlenmeyer collection (Keros
no. 116; Doumas [Athens 2000] no. 282) seems to fit thighs
from the excavations. Joins between two looted fragments
are made (Keros no. 199). A head now in the J. Paul Getty
Museum, and once in the collection of Paul and Marianne
Steiner (NAC no. 83) who had acquired it in 1974, fits a torso
in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that had surfaced in an
anonymous private collection in 1967 before passing to William
B. Causey (NAC no. 82). The torso was “reputedly found
on Keros” (248); the head was without findspot. No joins were
made with the 35 fragments from the 1987 excavations at
Kavos. But were the figures broken at Kavos, or elsewhere?
Looted material will never provide the answer.
It is difficult to estimate the original number of figures at
Kavos, but it is likely to run into hundreds; 670 is suggested
(323). Marble analysis was conducted on 34 pieces from the
Museum of Cycladic Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum using
electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy and stable
isotope analysis (ch. 7). This suggests that there were three
sources of marble: one in northeastern Naxos, another on Keros,
and a third either in southeastern Naxos or on Keros.
The volume raises even larger issues. What do you do
with the alleged finds of third-millennium B.C.E. sculpture
(assuming that they are not of modern manufacture) from
a small island in the Aegean? Do you display them in an archaeological
museum in the Cyclades? Or is it enough to
purchase fragments at auction and “repatriate” them (10) to
the heart of the modern political state of Greece to display
them alongside other sculptures that have also been torn
from their original archaeological context in the Cyclades?
Elia, in his review of Renfrew’s The Cycladic Spirit: Masterpieces
from the Nicholas P. Goulandris Collection (New York 1991) in
Archaeology (46 [1993] 64, 66–9) and conveniently reprinted
in Archaeological Ethics (K.D. Vitelli, ed. [Walnut Creek, Calif.
1996]) suggests “the likelihood [is] that the Goulandrises’
collecting actually promoted the looting of Cycladic sites.”
Does a volume like this salve the conscience? Would the research
time and publication costs have been better spent on
publishing the excavated fragments that are known to have
come from Kavos? It is perhaps telling that (according to
the Museum of Cycladic Art’s Web site, http://www.cycladicm.
gr [accessed 22 August 2006]) the chair of the Cycladic
Art Foundation, one of the three institutions that published
this volume, is the collector Shelby White, whose links with
antiquities that have lost their archaeological context are
well documented (C. Chippindale and D.W.J. Gill, “Material
Consequences of Contemporary Classical Collecting,” AJA
104 [2000] 463–511; see also P. Watson, The Medici Conspiracy
[New York 2006] 126).
The Keros Haul is a sad and familiar tale, and it underscores
the reality, not the myth, of the corrupt nature of the
antiquities market (in spite of protests to the contrary). It
tells of the greed of private collectors and narrates the unprincipled
formation of museum collections of “ancient art.”
The material and intellectual consequences for collecting
Early Cycladic sculpture are massive (see D.W.J. Gill, rev. of
Personal Styles in Early Cycladic Sculpture, by P. Getz-Gentle.
BMCR 2002.09.24). Sotirakopoulou should be praised for
her desire to “focus on finding more efficient ways of fighting
illicit excavations and trade” (43), but archaeologists need
to open their eyes to the destruction of the archaeological
record. Collectors whose pursuit of antiquity encourages
looting need to be named and shamed; museums that fail
to ask reasonable questions when making acquisitions must
be exposed.

David Gill
centre for egyptology and mediterranean
archaeology
university of wales, swansea
singleton park
swansea sa2 8pp
united kingdom
d.w.j.gill at swansea.ac.uk

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