Black Earth - Black Archaeology - Black Times - TOL - 31Oct2005
- From: "Stefan Lemieszewski" <stefanl@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 6 Nov 2005 06:37:51 -0800
http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=139&NrSection=3&NrArticle=15210
Transitions Online
31Oct2005
Black Earth, Black Archeology, Black Times
By Ivan Lozowy
KYIV, Ukraine | Ukraine's beleaguered and cash-starved archeologists were
entitled to view Viktor Yushchenko's election to the presidency either as a
beacon of hope or a symbol of its problems.
Before he became president, it was Yushchenko's hobby to spend his free time
gluing ancient pots and plates together, which he would then hang on the
walls of his house.
But this avid amateur archeologist could also have been seen as a symbol of
the crimes of amateurism. Yushchenko admitted that once while visiting the
Kazakh place of exile of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine's greatest poet, he
ripped off a stone from a local fortress as a memento.
Still, that was an amateurish and minor misdeed by Ukrainian standards, for
ransacking archeological sites has become professionalized and widespread.
Pass a car pulled over to the side of a Ukrainian road or a group searching
the ground and the underbrush in the distance, and there is a reasonable
chance that someone is scrabbling around to find a piece of Ukraine's
cultural heritage. Sometimes, even the bulldozers and trucks working in the
fields may belong to criminal gangs on a systematic hunt for bounty to sell
on a thriving black market. Step out of the car and ask what they are up to,
and they may well flash a police badge. What they find will probably then
go, according to Wolodymyr Husak of Ukraine's Interior Ministry, to secret
auctions held in the dark of night.
THE BLACK EARTH'S BOUNTY
"Black archeology," as unofficial digs are referred to, is so common partly
because Ukraine's famously rich "black earth," once known as the "bread
basket of the Soviet Union," is also rich in historical treasures. Perhaps
the most famous find came in 1971 when a Ukrainian archeologist literally
stepped on a gold pectoral, a finely-wrought semi-circular gold breastplate
depicting Scythians at work, their herd animals and mythical beasts such as
gryphons. Herders and war-like, the Scythians' war with the Persian king
Darius is described by the Greek historian Herodotus, but they came to real
prominence in the fourth century BC after they moved from the Near East to
the territory of modern Ukraine, where they built a mighty kingdom.
There is a ready market for what emerges from the ground; indeed, unofficial
estimates put the value of the "black archeology" market at hundreds of
millions of dollars per year. Yushchenko's private passion for the past is,
it seems, shared by many of Ukraine's new rich. They have proved ready and
willing to pay good money to decorate dachas and even local restaurants with
archeological rarities, and the number of buyers has grown thanks to Ukraine
's economic recovery over the past five years.
Many of the unsanctioned digs are headed by so-called field commanders,
writes the Institute of Archeology's magazine: "overly independent
archeologists who conduct huge excavations and sometimes even trade in, so
to speak, shreds of our fatherland (specifically, its history)." Most of the
official archeologists who moonlight in this way, the magazine claims, have
"gone into business" or politics.
Pillaging has become so widespread it even acquired its own public face.
Exhibits of Ukraine's treasure trove of archeological finds are rarely
organized by government institutes, but they are - in increasing numbers -
being organized by private collectors.
Official archeologists can only look on in envy. The Institute of Archeology
's Mykhailo Videjko said of one exhibition in 2004 of ceramic models of
shrines that "there is nothing like this in the National Museum of History
nor [the National Museum] of Archeology. These objects completely change our
view of the quality of architecture during the era when they were created,
namely 3700 BC, or almost 6,000 years ago."
The entrepreneur who organized that event, Serhiy Platonov, has held a
number of public exhibitions of his private collection of objects, some of
them thousands of years old.
Some of his artifacts may eventually find their way into the public domain.
Platonov claims to have already donated 1,315 objects in his collection to
the state (how many remain in his possession he does not say), though he
depicts the state as an ungrateful recipient: his objects are apparently
still languishing in their packaging.
Platonov's donation is a rarity - and his call for black-market auctions to
be legalized hardly indicates a guilty conscience at the impact that private
collectors are having.
Even if some artifacts do eventually make it back into the public realm, few
will be of much value to archeologists. From an archeologist's point of
view, most of the objects preserved in private collections have lost their
primary archeological value: it is impossible to say where they were found,
much less in what position relating to other objects, at what depth and so
forth.
Then there are the objects that are ruined. Objects whose black-market value
is lower - such as human remains - are usually destroyed. Gold and other
precious metals are often melted down.
The nature of the market encourages historical losses on a large scale.
Profits are high, and the barriers to entry are low. The literal barriers to
entry - to the sites themselves - are also minimal. Since Ukraine's
historical sites are well-known, anyone with a shovel can potentially search
for finds with little chance of being caught. One of the largest and
best-known sites in southern Ukraine, for instance - a 42-hectare site near
Kherson, where Greek settlers built a colony in the 4th century BC - is
guarded by just two militiamen. Those willing to use more than a shovel will
find that the gold, silver and other objects uncovered by a good-quality
metal detector - at $800, a hefty sum for ordinary Ukrainians - swiftly pays
back the investment. This ensures that the low end of the "black archeology"
market is very active. In the meantime, uncovered bones are tossed aside,
sites trampled on, and excavations left to the mercy of the elements.
The lack of protection for such important sites demonstrates that this era
of ransacking is not just due to market forces, but also to neglect by the
state. In Rivne, the new governor appointed by Yushchenko has created a
separate service - similar to park rangers - to patrol and protect cultural
sites. There is, though, no national equivalent. At the national level,
there have been some efforts to protect the national heritage, but most
remain on paper. In 2000, long after the explosion of "black archeology"
began, Ukraine's parliament adopted a cultural heritage law by which the
state became rightful owner of all man-made objects located underground. All
archeological finds were therefore to be turned over to the state; in return
the finders would receive 25 percent of the value of the find. There have
been few takers. Even worse, some experts complain that, to this day, no
procedure for handing in archeological finds has been established. It is not
even clear where finds should be sent to. Nor have Ukrainian governments
done much to stop the flow of objects from Ukraine's archeological sites to
private collectors in and outside Ukraine.
While the government may lay claim to all finds, it does little to find
these treasures. In the late Soviet era, the Institute of Archeology
organized around 400 excavations every year; however, since independence, it
has had received so little money from the state that it has organized no
more than a hundred in the entire period from 1991. Work underway in the
early 1990s was in some cases abandoned.
Even so, archeological discoveries in Ukraine are coming faster than the
official institutions can deal with. For example, geologists working in the
Crimea claim to have uncovered seven pyramids, the largest 45 meters high,
laid out in a straight line across the peninsula.
Money is too tight even to spend on some of the nation's foremost sites. In
September this year repair workers uncovered the foundations of a church in
Kyiv's St. Sofia cathedral complex. For want of materials, technology and
money, archeologists decided to re-bury the church.
The sad irony for archeologists is that interest in archeology is widespread
among the Ukrainian public and not just among wealthy buyers.
Some of the discoveries made since 1991 are re-shaping Ukrainians' knowledge
of their country's history. For example, the capital, Kyiv, is officially
considered to have been founded in 482. However, since independence this
date has undergone review. Primitive settlements along the River Dnieper in
the Kyiv area date from 20,000 years ago and Kyiv is now thought to have
been founded no later than 1500 BC.
One of the periods that is arousing the most interest is the "Trypillian
civilization," which dates from the Neolithic era starting from 6000 BC. The
Trypillians had a developed and varied farming culture, made elegant
decorated ceramic pots (of which Yushchenko has some fragments), and
practiced elaborate burial rituals. The remains of some 2,000 Trypillian
sites are said to lie under Ukrainian soil, some with several thousand
buildings and home to tens of thousands of inhabitants. They are among the
largest settlements from that period to be found anywhere in the world.
Sharply worded discussions of questions such as "Were Trypillians
Ukrainians?" have seized the public's attention. As in any debate, there are
two sides, with one side often extolling the richness and depth of history
of the Ukrainian nation and the other trying its best to bring the first
side down to earth or, at least, round to its point of view. In 2004, for
instance, a series of articles written by Ivan Zayets claimed the
Trypillians were "proto-Ukrainians." This thesis was sharply criticized by a
number of Ukrainian archeologists, among them Leonid Zalizniak. In a
response published by the Dzerkalo Tyzhnia newspaper, Zalizniak disputed
whether the Trypillians were native to Ukraine, arguing instead that the
Trypillian civilization was "an expression of the unique world of the oldest
agricultural nations of Europe, known as the Balkan-Danube Neolithic."
That Zayets is a member of Yushchenko's Our Ukraine faction in parliament
also indicates the political resonance such issues have outside the
specialist community.
But, despite the risk of a political overlay, recent archeological finds
indicate it might be risky to dismiss Zayets' hypothesis as mere
myth-making. Zayets' assertion that the Trypillian civilization forged by
Ukrainians' ancestors was the most advanced agricultural society in Europe
at the time has received serious support from findings at the so-called
Stone Mound, a rich collection of petroglyphs (rock carvings) from 9000 BC.
Located in southeastern Ukraine, the Stone Mound houses tens of thousands of
carvings in over a hundred caves.
(Some enthusiasts for the notion that Ukraine was the cradle of civilization
claim that the carvings are samples of a "proto-Sumerian language," an
assertion of huge implications. Others have mused about that possibility
before: the British archeologist and discoverer of the royal tombs in the
ancient city of Ur, Sir Leonard Woolley, posited that the Sumerians may have
migrated from somewhere in the area north of the Black Sea, i.e. from
modern-day Ukraine.)
.. AND HISTORY LOST
With archeologists, the public, and politicians all interested in exploring
Ukraine's history - and with that history rapidly being lost - there could
seem to be strong reasons to spend money on archeology.
But despite the general interest, self-preservation rather than the
conservation of culture and history is the prevailing concern of Ukraine's
intellectuals and the public.
That also holds for Yushchenko. Under fire for failing to institute reforms
and to meet the expectations raised during the Orange Revolution, Yushchenko
is making the economy a priority. For now, the pressing problems of Ukraine'
s rich archeological heritage must wait, just as - apparently - Yushchenko
no longer has time to spend on his collection of ancient potsherds.
The mender of broken pottery has yet to prove he can restore Ukraine's
archeological system to its pre-independence status. The tragedy is that by
the time he or anyone else finds time and money for that, many more pots
will have been shattered and priceless treasures of Ukraine's history lost.
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