Safeguarding the Treasures

The Reagan Administration has moved effectively in recent days to dramatize in two different ways its determination to control the looting of archeological sites in developing nations and to help other nations protect their cultural monuments. This sort of leadership gives impetus to the international effort to root out those who profit from illicit traffic in art.

For the first time, emergency rules of the Cultural Property Implementation Act have been invoked to bar imports into the United States of artifacts from the Cara Sucia region of El Salvador. The region, rich in such ancient art treasures as stone and ceramic censers, vases, figurines, flutes, effigies and bowls, was the site of a culture that flourished for three millennia from 1500 B.C. until the year 1550.

In addition, officials from Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras have been given a two-week tour of major U.S. institutions that can be helpful to them. The tour was led by Ann Guthrie, executive director of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee of the U.S. Information Agency that is responsible for implementing the program.

Looting of archeological sites remains a problem with no easy solution because the artifacts are stolen before they are catalogued and tracing them is enormously difficult if not impossible.

Stolen art works pose different problems, they learned. Some nations have no inventory of their art works. The World Monuments Fund in New York has demonstrated how this can be done, however, by sponsoring an inventory of the Andean church paintings of Peru. The International Foundation for Art Research promised the visitors use of its Stolen Art Alert through which, just a year ago, three ancient works of art, one a head of Socrates stolen from Hadrian’s Villa outside Rome, were returned to Italy. But none of the treasures stolen on Christmas Eve, 1985, from the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City has been recovered. And there is increasing evidence that some thefts are done to order for corrupt private collectors and may never be traced unless they re-enter public art markets, according to Miguel Angel Corzo at the Getty Conservation Institute at Marina del Rey.

“We were learning also,” Corzo commented after the visitors had left the Getty Conservation Institute. The nations of Latin America, with limited resources, face enormous tasks in preserving the monuments of their ancient civilizations and of the colonial period. There are problems of maintenance, restoration and conservation. Getty sponsored a two-month workshop last summer in Mexico City for 14 painting conservators from eight Latin nations and plans other projects in other fields of conservation.

The visitors had further instruction in two unusual problems. At Mesa Verde National Park, they learned how artifacts and monuments can be protected while being made accessible to large numbers of visitors. And, at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles they were introduced to computer technology that uses video discs to compile an inventory that can be shared with other institutions.

USIA’s Guthrie said this tour will be followed by others to assist art preservationists from other nations, and so it should be.