September 4, 2000
CONTENTS:
- Urban Sprawl: Threat to Archaeology?
- Boston museum spurns Dutch bid for Nazi-owned art
- Watching the Detectives
( Scholars at area museums face an enormous, often tedious task: searching out records to trace the Nazi-era ownership of their works.)
Urban Sprawl: Threat to Archaeology?
By PAT LEISNER, Associated Press Writer
NORTH PORT, Fla. (AP) - A marine archaeologist who has excavated prehistoric artifacts from an ancient sinkhole fears urban sprawl will destroy the site, and along with it, evidence that man roamed Florida 12,000 years ago. The latest find resembles a miniature sling shot, or bow, with grooves on the handle as if something had been tightly wrapped around it. It's white oak, a strong wood, and appears to have been used many thousands of years ago as a tool of some sort.
``At the present time we have nothing to compare it to so we don't exactly know what it is,'' says John Gifford, a University of Miami archaeologist who has been excavating Little Salt Spring since the early 1980s. His student team also brought up a pointed oak rod, slightly burned on one end. Gifford believes it might have been used thousands of years ago to generate friction to start a fire - Boy Scout fashion. For more than 12,000 years the quality of water in the spring has been preserved, providing what Gifford believes is a window into the earliest period of the Paleo Indians.
Many centuries ago they migrated from Siberia across the Bering land bridge between ice caps to Canada or along the Alaskan coastal route to the New World. Evidence has been found that they inhabited Chile 13,000 years ago. ``That's far south of us and about 1,000 years older than what we've found,'' says Gifford, who teaches at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami.
He calls Little Salt Spring one of the most intriguing archaeological sites in North America. It is part of a 112-acre tract donated to the university in 1982 by then-General Development Corp.
The area, once in the middle of nowhere, now sits in one of the fastest growing areas along Florida's Gulf Coast midway between Sarasota and Naples. The city of North Port, 75 square miles, had a population of 15,000 in 1995. Planners believe that number could reach 25,000 this year. In the past five years the city has grown out to meet the site. A golf course sits within one-half mile of the spring, a regional high school and performing arts center are under construction nearby, a master planned community with nearly 2,000 units, an office park and town center is expected to surround it.
With such development, Gifford fears it's only a matter of time before runoff ruins the water chemistry of the spring and the treasured organic artifacts will be lost forever.
Student James Byrne spent two weeks in June excavating the site where the rod and bow were found. He hung upside down, 40 feet underwater in the pitch black darkness, from a makeshift platform held together with a framework of PVC pipe. Students went down for 90 minutes at a time, using a buddy system of two divers. They videotaped their work space. Then they vacuumed the 10-centimeter site with an underwater dredge made from a hose that pool cleaners use. The artifacts found were brought to the surface.
The mud they removed stayed underwater and was carried by hose to a deeper part of the spring and dumped.
``There's nothing comparable,'' Byrne says. ``But in the back of your mind you're always thinking of the alligators and snapping turtles that are here.'' Byrne, 29, of Miami Beach, spent nine years as a diving instructor in the Caribbean and Hawaii before going back to graduate school last August for marine resource management to care for the aquatic environment.
The spring, which reaches a depth of 200 feet, is 75 yards wide and has an hour glass shape beneath the surface. While it is about one-tenth as salty as sea water, it is known as a fresh water oasis. It is fed underground by a flowing spring. The lack of oxygen in the water has preserved artifacts over the centuries.
In ancient times the spring served as a watering hole, attracting man and beast.
Not far away is an underwater burial site where excavations years ago turned up human remains of native Americans 5,000 years old. A ledge in the spring about 85 feet deep has yielded evidence of a saber tooth tiger and a giant tortoise killed with a wooden stake which Gifford says carbon dating has placed at 12,000 years old.
The artifacts excavated from the spring he put in distilled water until they could be transferred to a chemical solution for protection. They are extremely fragile. Should they dry out they would turn to dust within 48 hours, Gifford says. If squeezed, they would collapse like cardboard.
Gifford took the charcoaled stick back to Miami for carbon dating. Little Salt Lake was 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico 12,000 years ago. Today it is about five miles. After the Ice Age ended about 18,000 years ago, water in the oceans rose 300 feet, covering a large area of the western coast of the Peninsula.
Roger Smith, a state archaeological researcher who worked at the site 25 years ago, said pollution is a concern.
``It's a world class prehistoric site - well preserved because it's underwater,'' he said.
Likewise, fellow underwater archaeologist Michael Fraught of Florida State University, said a proposal that people were at the spring 12,000 years ago is reason enough to press on with research at the site.
Carol Cunningham, North Port's economic growth specialist, said the city wants to ensure preservation of its natural environment.
``The city is interested in preserving these natural gems and if there is more we should be doing we'd be interested in knowing about it,'' she says.
On the Net: http://www.rsmas.miami.edu
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Boston museum spurns Dutch bid for Nazi-owned art
Joan Gralla
NEW YORK, Aug 28 (Reuters) - The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has rejected a request by the Netherlands for a painting stolen by Nazi Marshal Hermann Goering, a letter provided to Reuters by the World Jewish Congress showed on Monday. ``Landscape With Burning City,'' a 5-by-10-inch (13-by-26-cm) Flemish oil painted around 1500 by Herri met de Bles, is claimed by both the Dutch government and Christine Koenigs of Amsterdam, who says it was looted from her grandfather, Franz Koenigs, a Christian banker.
The Museum of Fine Arts says it wants to return the painting to its rightful owner, once it is determined who that is. The head of the museum, Malcolm Rogers, has declined to hand the painting over to the Dutch State Art Collection in the meantime. ``Although that would be a convenient resolution from the MFA's perspective, we believe that it would be inappropriate, given that the Dutch government is itself one of the competing claimants to this painting,'' Rogers wrote the Netherlands government on Aug. 15, according to the photocopy of a letter provided by the World Jewish Congress.
In the copy, Rogers urges the Netherlands to agree to binding arbitration, a process he says Koenigs has accepted. Spokesmen for the Boston museum and the Dutch Embassy in Washington were not immediately available for comment. FAMILIES ENLIST GROUP'S AID
The Dutch government holds hundreds of artworks that have been claimed by Holocaust families, some of whom have turned to the Jewish advocacy group for help in pushing their claims.
Franz Koenigs died in mysterious circumstances in May 1941 in Cologne, according to his granddaughter. He owned more than 2,100 old master drawings and works by Rubens, van Gogh and Cezanne.
The drawings were claimed as collateral against an outstanding bank loan, and the bank was said to have changed the security to include all his French drawings and art on loan to the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam, including the met de Bles.
On a part of its Web site (http:/www.mfa.org) devoted to ``European paintings provenance research,'' the Museum of Fine Arts says the disputed panel was transferred to an Amsterdam art gallery in April 1940 and sold to Goering two months later through an intermediary.
Somehow, the site continues, the work went from Goering's residence near Berlin to a New York gallery, from which the museum bought it in 1946. The museum says it consulted Dutch authorities in 1948 after learning the panel had been part of Koenigs' collection but ``the Dutch government did not pursue the matter at that time.''
Koenigs says her grandmother asked the Dutch government on Sept. 22, 1945, to return 47 artworks stolen by the Nazis, including ``Landscape With Burning City,'' but did not receive a reply to her claim.
Watching the Detectives
Scholars at area museums face an enormous, often tedious task: searching out records to trace the Nazi-era ownership of their works.
By DIANE HAITHMAN
(abbreviated. Full story at: http://www.latimes.com/news/asection/20000903/t000082720.html
Melinda R. McCurdy often finds herself alone in the hushed, high-ceilinged rooms of the mansion that is the historic centerpiece of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. The 29-year-old UC Santa Barbara art history grad student, whose small office is tucked away behind the tall shelves of art catalogs and books at the San Marino estate, says she's come to enjoy the solitude. Her summer internship, which began in early June, started out as a standard assignment for a budding art historian: Research the "provenance"--the ownership history--of the Huntington's British paintings in preparation for a catalog of the collection, a resource that would mostly be used by other art scholars.
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In late June, the Getty Museum became the first local institution to go public with the results of its completed 1933-45 provenance research, compiled in cooperation with the Commission for Art Recovery of the World Jewish Congress and the Art Loss Register, two important resources for WWII provenance data. The museum posted special Web pages identifying paintings with gaps. Of the Getty's 425 paintings, 250 are listed. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art began its research shortly after the association guidelines came out, hiring a full-time researcher, Amy L. Walsh, to examine 300 to 400 paintings (out of about 800 in its holdings) that changed hands during the war era. The museum plans to unveil the results of its Nazi-era provenance research on its Web site in late September or early October. Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum also hired a researcher, and plans to complete and make available the results of a preliminary phase of research by the end of September. The Huntington also plans to post its provenance information at some point in the future. The UCLA Hammer Museum is further behind; it has put two coordinators to work researching sources of grant money to hire a staffer for WWII provenance research.
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The increased focus on looted art is a natural offshoot of the newly heightened focus on Holocaust-era crimes. The end of the Cold War and the release of previously inaccessible German records have sparked the effort, and the aging of WWII survivors adds to the pressure. One such survivor in Los Angeles is 84-year-old Maria Altmann, an Austrian-born member of the Bloch-Bauer family, who continues to sue for restitution for several important paintings by Gustav Klimt, valued at $150 million and since the war in possession of the Austrian government. Also spurring the museums on are several high-profile legal cases in United States and abroad. Making headlines around the time the guidelines came out were claims seeking the surrender of Egon Schiele's "Portrait of Wally," which had been on loan to New York's Museum of Modern Art from an Austrian museum, and Matisse's "Odalisque," at the Seattle Art Museum, valued at $2 million.
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Provenance research is complicated, time-consuming, expensive--and, admitted the Getty's Gribbon, "at some level, it's deeply boring. I would hope that the results are interesting, but the process is not. It's not a matter of sleuthing on street corners; it's a matter of going through catalogs." The Norton Simon's Campbell said that the push to close the gaps has created a demand for researchers with specialized skills. "They're very hard to find, we've all started networking," she said. "You not only have to be fluent in three languages, but you have to have a great knowledge of the art-dealing activities in Europe [before the war] in the 1920s and '30s." It's mostly a matter of establishing a paper trail--through museum catalogs, art indexes, sale and auction records, photos, and even personal correspondence. Sometimes, the only way to confirm provenance is to contact the galleries involved in a transaction--many of which have gone out of business. For various reasons, some art donors or sellers may have requested anonymity, further complicating the chase.
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Los Angeles-area museums are so deeply immersed in the process of identifying and filling gaps and creating Web sites that they have not begun specifically to address the issue of restitution. All say that they will respond on a case-by-case basis according to the museum association's guidelines--but thus far none has been faced with claims. All say they welcome any ownership leads their Web sites may produce. But is that enough?
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