https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9936-6461
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ABSTRACT
Provenance research in museums has traditionally been reactive and focused on singular objects with dubious histories, such as colonial-era acquisitions, Nazi-looted art, and objects with active ownership claims; the ‘crimes’ we expect to see. But what if what we think we know prevents us from seeing the bigger picture within and across museum collections? We argue that a machine-learning approach to provenance could allow the detection of broader patterns of unethical or even criminal behaviour that are embedded in the relationships underpinning museum collections. To demonstrate the potential of a machine-learning approach, we present a computer-assisted model that predicts plausible patterns and connections, ‘leads’ or ‘hot tips’, derived from a dataset of unstructured texts concerning the antiquities trade. Preliminary results have revealed what may have been a multi-decade scheme involving the donation of low-value Latin American antiquities to museums as a form of ‘reputation laundering’ potentially in advance of criminal fraud. We believe that such patterns could not be identified by an approach to museum provenance that is restricted to known problems within individual institution, demonstrating the need for innovative provenance tools and approaches that consider the complex networks within which museum objects exist.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank representatives from The Brooklyn Museum, The British Museum, The American Museum of Natural History, The National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Gallery of Australia for engaging with us for this research: your openness to share information about the objects in your collection is inspirational and warmly appreciated. We would also like to thank the organisers and attendees of the events Science Diplomacy as a Tool for Tracking Cultural Property Illicit Trafficking in Mexico City, Herkomstonderzoek in Nederland in Amsterdam, Contested Knowledge, Contested Objects in Munich, The Market for Latin American Antiquities in St Gallen for providing us with expert feedback on earlier stages of this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
Our computational notebooks and our original knowledge graph CSV file are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7506971 and may be run using Jupyter on a personal computer, or online via Google’s Colab service; for use on a personal computer, a GPU is recommended. Source code for our use of the OpenAI large language model to create a knowledge graph is available from: https://github.com/XLabCU/gpt3-relationship-extraction-to-kg; Archived source code at time of publication: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7860733 (Graham, Yates, and El-Roby Citation2023). In that latter repository, the original code for ‘python_api.py’ is copyright Sixing Huang released under the MIT License. Our additional code (‘split_resize.sh’) is released under the MIT No Attribution License.
Notes
1. We do believe that the objects we discuss here, at least the authentically ancient ones, were likely illegally looted and trafficked, yet for many reasons these crimes are unprovable within our current system.
2. As an example of ‘vectors’, consider the two-number vector [40.65, −73.95] which represents a location and direction in physical space, the latitude and longitude for Brooklyn, bearing north and west of the Equator and the Prime Meridian, a two-dimensional vector
4. where it sometimes goes by the name ‘link prediction’; we do not use that phrase here because it suggests formal network analysis, which this method is not.
5. The interested reader may consult or re-run our original code and data at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7506971
6. e.g., in the André Emmerich Gallery Records and André Emmerich Papers held in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
7. Only a small number of the leads were like this. These ‘false leads’ stem from the fact that the knowledge graph is not a complete representation of the world, and that proximity in the multidimensional space is necessary, but not sufficient.
8. In this article, ‘low value’ refers only to monetary value within the art market, it is not as a statement about cultural meaning.
9. We append ‘−style’ onto the descriptors of these objects because we suspect some to be fakes and, as unprovenanced pieces, we do not believe listed places or cultures of origin should be treated as accurate.
10. Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven, 8 April–18 September 2022, https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/guadalupe_maravilla
11. We have not included the 1979 donation to the National Gallery of Victoria on this list because the objects were not donated in Patterson’s name, and we know the end-goal of the donation was inflated tax relief. That does not mean the NGV donation is unconnected to the others. Prior Patterson donations may have made the Australia scheme possible by allowing Patterson to project himself as a reputable dealer with objects in reputable museums.
12. The National Gallery of Australia informed us that Patterson offered the museum several other items in 1979/1980 but the museum did not consider them to be of suitable quality for the collection.
13. The Minneapolis Institute of Art is the only institution that has not aided in our queries about Patterson donations, having not responded to our multiple emails.
14. Patterson was reportedly also trying to sell fake Maya murals in Switzerland at the time.
15. These are the earspools and vase presented in 1 previously.
16. We saw his donation of an Olmec-style bowl (69.169.1) and a Maya-style bowl (69.169.2) in the museum’s 1970 annual (The Brooklyn Museum Citation1969) and then online (https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/95986 and https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/95987). Merrin appears to have made three other donations of low-value Latin American antiquities to the museum prior to that donation: 63.237, 67.208, 68.219.
17. In 1968: catalogue numbers 30.3/1146, 30.3/1147, 30.3/1148, 30.3/1149, 30.3/1150, 30.3/1151, 30.3/1152, 30.3/1153, 30.3/1154, 30.3/1155, 30.3/1215, 30.3/1216, 30.3/1217, 30.3/1218, 30.3/1219, 30.3/1220, 30.3/1223; in 1969: 30.3/1247, 330.3/1248, 330.3/1249, 330.3/1250, 330.3/1251, 330.3/1252. We note that 30.3/1154 and 30.3/1155, fresco fragments that we believe were looted from Teotihuacan, and 330.3/1252, a mutilated Maya stela, are significantly more valuable than the other items. Merrin also made donations in 1965: 30.3/1000, 30.3/1001, 30.3/1002, 30.3/1003; in 1966 30.2/1054, 30.2/1055, 30.2/1056, 30.2/1057; and in 1992: 30.3/2578, 30.3/2579, 30.3/2580.
18. 24/3347 and 24/3352 donated in 1970; the museum purchased a higher quality antiquity from Merrin that same year 24/3351. Perhaps the donations sweetened that deal.
19. A Peruvian textile donated in 1981, 81.1093; the museum purchased several other antiquities from Merrin in the years before and after this donation so, again, perhaps the donation was a deal sweetener.
20. Anyone who has information about a connection between the two: please get in contact with us.
21. In summer 2023 this research was presented at a conference of The German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology held in Munich. Patterson was thought to be a Munich resident at that time, and the authors somewhat fancifully hoped that he might come to our keynote, part of a session on Mesoamerican cultural objects, so that we could discuss our findings with him. Sadly, he was not in attendance.
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Notes on contributors
Donna Yates
Donna Yates is an Associate Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology at Maastricht University. Her research the transnational illicit trade in cultural objects, art and heritage crime, and white-collar crime. She currently the PI of the Trafficking Transformations project which explores how objects such as antiquities, fossils, and rare wildlife influence criminal networks and inspire crimes. She is a founding member of the Trafficking Culture research consortium and the creator of several digital projects on culture crime. She has conducted fieldwork in Latin America, Asia, and Europe and has advised governments and agencies on combating the illicit antiquities trade.
Shawn Graham
Shawn Graham is a professor of Digital Humanities at Carleton University. He has won several awards and grants for his research on topics such as the online trade in human remains, the computational reconstruction of ancient sites, and the graph-theoretic representation of historical events. He is the founder and editor of Epoiesen, a journal for creative engagement in history and archaeology. He is also the author of several books, including An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology and Failing Gloriously. He blogs at www.electricarchaeology.ca and shares his code at github.com/shawngraham.