South America on the Block:

The changing face of Pre-Columbian antiquities auctions in response to international law

By Donna Yates; Master of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, 2006

For my masters dissertation I collected and analysed nearly 20 years of Southeby’s auction catalogue data concerning South American antiquities auctions. My dissertation is available in full here.

As I believe that the information that I collected concerning these auctions can and should be used for further study, my Peru/Bolivia database is available here. If you use this database, please do credit me AND send me your findings! A warning: my main focus was on Bolivia/Peru. While material from Ecuador/Colombia was noted and entered into another database, they fell out of my area of expertise and any identification as being from one country or the other should be revisited. That said, contact me if you would like to look at the Ecuador/Colombia data.

If you are a researcher looking for access to these catalogues, I have copies of the South American portions of all of these as well as price lists. Please contact me about them.

Excerpt from Conclusion

During the course of this project it has become painfully clear that, due to several factors, the objects presented in the Sotheby’s catalogues are unable to expand our knowledge of the past. The lack of context information renders the artefacts unusable for academic study and the air of doubt that surrounds the provenience information that is supplied only complicates the already obscure information about the object’s past. Some might argue that a piece that is divorced from it’s context can still yield information about the iconography and craft making techniques of a certain culture, but almost any South American antiquity offered by Sotheby’s may be a modern forgery. As none of the artefacts encountered during the course of this study were excavated with their context recorded, one cannot assume they are of ancient origin and thus any conclusions drawn about their iconographic and technical qualities would be highly questionable. Thus it can be concluded that the trade in these unprovenienced and most likely illegal or illicit South American antiquities has actively prevented the public from becoming aware of the details of ancient cultures that could have been gleaned from the objects had they been properly excavated.

Due to the implementation of several forceful import bans, collecting unprovenienced South American antiquities is currently legally dangerous. The number of high profile seizures signals that that the bans are no idle threat. Despite this, the demand for the artefacts has not decreased. In fact, there is some evidence for an increase in the amount that buyers are willing to pay for South American objects which may indicate a greater demand. Despite the apparent profitability of the South American antiquities market, Sotheby’s reduced the number of artefacts they offered to a trickle in 2001, choosing to broker undocumented private sales. This cutback seems to be a result of the various scandals that hit the company at the time. Although the international agreements that came into effect may have been a factor in this cut back, they were most likely not the only factor. The tendency for archaeologists to see antiquities as outside of the normal art market and the internal issues of the auction house may result in researchers missing key information as to why changes occur in the market. The isolation of only one antiquities class sold a larger auction as seen in previous studies of this sort is problematic as well. We cannot continue to divorce the lots from their auction and full catalogues must be reviewed by researchers for meaningful conclusions to be drawn.

I do not wish to outright accuse Sotheby’s of anything illegal. I have merely highlighted ways that Sotheby’s, through opaque business practices and vague information, could have been deceptive in their dealing of South American Antiquities. I believe that Sotheby’s have earned their notoriety. Their sale of South American antiquities could be clean, but it is not. It could be transparent, but it is not. They could sell only properly provenienced objects and objects with clear ownership histories, but they do not.

In a sense, public auctions have been a blessing when it comes to the study of the antiquities market. Catalogues show what has surfaced, what people wish to buy, and what they will pay for it. The movement towards private and undocumented sales as uncovered in this study is truly frightening. It appears that we may no longer have the invaluable resource of auction catalogues to gauge what is truly going on in the South American antiquities market. A new strategy must be developed to track these objects and root out illegal practice before the market descends deeper into the dark recesses of back door deals and international crime.