The American Association of Museums' (AAM) new guidelines on the collecting of archaeological material, urging US museums to research objects where provenance is incomplete or uncertain, have received mixed reactions from UK museums.
Maurice Davies, deputy director of the Museums Association and chairman of the working group which in 2005 produced the Department for Culture, Media and Sport guidelines on collecting and borrowing cultural material, said: "The AAM has leapfrogged us in having this extra guidance.
"Museums in the UK have introduced the idea of retrospective auditing for items that might have been illegally taken during the Nazi era, but for archaeology, it has not. Maybe we should seriously think about it.
"Perhaps the issue is serious enough for UK museums to think about whether they might work actively to identify illicit acquisitions that they should offer to return to their countries of origin."
Item three of the AAM's standards states: "In order to advance further research, public trust and accountabilty, museums should make available the known ownership history of archaeological material and ancient art in their collections, and make serious efforts to allocate time and funding to conduct research on objects where provenance is incomplete or uncertain."
The former research director at the now-defunct Illicit Antiquities Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, Neil Brodie, said the guidelines were something that UK museums should emulate.
Sally MacDonald, director of UCL Museums and Collections, said: "No doubt, people would argue that there are other priorities, but the debate would be interesting. It is something that all museums should consider. There would be significant resource implications, but we should be doing it anyway."
But Christopher Chippindale, a curator at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, said the guidelines went much too far, because if an object was acquired in the past with no history attached to it, it would be very difficult, in most cases, to discover anything new of significance about it.
"I don't think it is useful that a code of ethics states that this is what every museum should be doing if, in most cases, it is hard or impossible to do," he said. "It is just not useful."
Maurice Davies, deputy director of the Museums Association and chairman of the working group which in 2005 produced the Department for Culture, Media and Sport guidelines on collecting and borrowing cultural material, said: "The AAM has leapfrogged us in having this extra guidance.
"Museums in the UK have introduced the idea of retrospective auditing for items that might have been illegally taken during the Nazi era, but for archaeology, it has not. Maybe we should seriously think about it.
"Perhaps the issue is serious enough for UK museums to think about whether they might work actively to identify illicit acquisitions that they should offer to return to their countries of origin."
Item three of the AAM's standards states: "In order to advance further research, public trust and accountabilty, museums should make available the known ownership history of archaeological material and ancient art in their collections, and make serious efforts to allocate time and funding to conduct research on objects where provenance is incomplete or uncertain."
The former research director at the now-defunct Illicit Antiquities Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, Neil Brodie, said the guidelines were something that UK museums should emulate.
Sally MacDonald, director of UCL Museums and Collections, said: "No doubt, people would argue that there are other priorities, but the debate would be interesting. It is something that all museums should consider. There would be significant resource implications, but we should be doing it anyway."
But Christopher Chippindale, a curator at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, said the guidelines went much too far, because if an object was acquired in the past with no history attached to it, it would be very difficult, in most cases, to discover anything new of significance about it.
"I don't think it is useful that a code of ethics states that this is what every museum should be doing if, in most cases, it is hard or impossible to do," he said. "It is just not useful."
