Posted on 02/12/2011 8:41:59 AM PST by eleni121
One hundred years after American explorer Hiram Bingham took tens of thousands of artefacts from the Incan city of Machu Picchu back to his alma mater, Yale University is sending them home.
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
I thought that Nicolas Cage returned all those after finding them in National Treasure.
This is just another example of the Western disease-Political Correctionitis. The return of artifacts is but one more symptom of the ultimately fatal disease.
|
· join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic · subscribe · |
|||
Antiquity Journal & archive Archaeologica Archaeology Archaeology Channel BAR Bronze Age Forum Discover Dogpile Eurekalert LiveScience Mirabilis.ca Nat Geographic PhysOrg Science Daily Science News Texas AM Yahoo Excerpt, or Link only? |
|
||
|
· Science topic · science keyword · Books/Literature topic · pages keyword · |
|||
It doesn't mean borrowed - It means to belong to the entity that created it and paid for it. Not the entity that holds it.
Imagine your neighbor taking your lawn mower without your permission and holding it because he used it and spent some time and money fixing it...so now he tells you he owns it.
That is what Yale and the British Museum claim. That is BS.
Yale figure it out finally. Did the right thing.
I disagree that all antiquities should be returned to their countries of origin. It’s just more PC clap trap. The fellows who collected these object were often the first people to explore and discover these sites after they had lain in ruin for hundreds or thousands of years.
What’s next? Should we return all of North America to the Indian tribes?
Our culture values antiquities far beyond what most others do. Look at the recent riots in Egypt where priceless antiquities were destroyed. It is very likely that if every artifact in every major American and European museum were returned to what ever pathetic third world country it came from that in 1,000 years the vast majority of them would be lost to the world.
Man up and believe in the West and our manifest destiny a bit more, eh. It is not for the PC guardians of treasures secured by better men than them to give them away based on their pathetic bleeding heart liberal politics.
I’m shocked that a so-called Conservative would support such nonsense.
Re-think and re-write.
Ahh, yes, of course! The bulldozers! Somewhere here I’ve got a great picture of Hiram Bingham on a massive Komatsu D575A-3SD. Evidently Yale insisted that he completely raze Machu Picchu to lay the foundation for The Boola Boola Obelisk and Monument to White Man’s Cultural Hegemony. Fortunately a few illiterate Peruvian thieves at the site unwittingly managed to rescue a few shiny shards of their history, which they sold back to Bingham as souvenirs. I took a whole course on it at Berkeley.
Lots of tortured ifs ands or buts there.
I’ll give you a rule to live by my grandmother told me: if it ain’t yours sister - give it back.
During the war between the Greeks and the Turks, the Greeks stored ammunition in the Parthenon. It was blown up by Turkish artillery shells. It’s unlikely that the Parthenon frieze would have survived if it had not been removed to the British Museum.
My sympathies are certainly with the Greeks in that war for freedom. But they were still foolish enough to store their ammunition in the country’s single most important surviving monument, the Parthenon.
Of course, they were not alone in that. The Second World War destroyed many irreplaceable treasures, including many in London. And it was only with difficulty that Eisenhower restrained the British from bombing the Vatican and St. Peter’s.
“I’m shocked that a so-called Conservative would support such nonsense.”
Me too, actually. I’m right there with you.
So how does the Peruvian government own Incan artifacts? Using your logic they should go to the nearest Incan tribe I guess.
The point is that the ownership of these items had long ago ceased, they were literally lying buried by centuries of dirt and debris.
Laws, as the existed at the times the artifacts were removed to Yale permitted such things.
By the way American law does permit people to obtain ownership of things after using them for a long time, it is called adverse possession. It is why you should not let your neighbor put his garden on the edge of your property, less you lose title to it.
Apparently you haven’t studied history much.
I have a friend who has an intricate Mayan stone carving which stands about 18" high that he brought back from Honduras back in the early '70s.
His brother in Honduras was a sugar cane farmer and while plowing a new area on the plantation he unearthed a small mound which contained a number of these artifacts. Unfortunately they were all destroyed except for the one my friend brought back to the states.
That’s it. I’m coming to your house to steal all your dream-catchers and magic crystals so I can display them as remnants of a Silly People.
It was really worse than that. He paid off peasants to work at slave wages to dig-then paid off others to get more stuff like relics - bones...a real model of heroic exploration this hero of yours Bingham.
You’ve been watching too much Hollyweird.
Actually the Parthenon was blown up in a war between the Venetians and the Turks, and the Turks were the ones storing ammunition in the Parthenon—the Venetians knew it and deliberately targeted the building. That was in the 1680s, more than 130 years before the Greek War of Independence.
You got to think before your write. Holding stolen property is NOT a conservative value.
Jumping to conclusions is not conservative either but rather histrionics.
I'll never forget his last words to me:
I see you’ve gotten a response to your outright lies!
It’s not just liberals who lie is it?
You can claim ignorance if it makes you feel better-—
You got that right. This is just another cave in to 3rd Worldism. Third Worlders live more authentic lives so obey their demands. People here have gone soft. These artifacts were taken 10 decades ago when everything was a free for all. Others stole too but are not a well known punching bag so they remain unmolested
What you just saw in Egypt was the Euro and American media so in awe of yet more “authentic” 3rd Worlders. This media ginned up 50% of what went down. Without these excitable breathless dolts Mubarek would still be in power. Now the Muslim Brotherhood has a good shot at power.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
