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Ecuadorian Comments - Sale Of Artifacts Decried

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Parent Issue
Day
25
Month
April
Year
1975
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Donated by the Ann Arbor News. © The Ann Arbor News.
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Ecuadorian Comments

Sale Of Artifacts Decried

BY NANCY DUNN News Staff Reporter

Condemning what he called a “war on the culture” of his country, a top Ecuadorian museum official came here yesterday to probe what he termed the illegal sale of pre-Columbian artifacts at the Forsythe Galleries since November.

Hernan Crespo, director of the National Archaeological Museum in Quito, said the sale of that country’s cultural artifacts outside Ecuador has been forbidden since 1945.

Daniel L. DeGraff, owner of the galleries, told The News today that he hasn’t seen the law and didn’t know of it.

Since November, a collection of small terra-cotta figures produced by Ecuadorian natives on the Pacific Coast of South America some 2,500 years ago have been offered for sale at the galleries, located in Nickels Arcade, at prices ranging from $20 to $1,800.

DeGraaf told The News in December that he acquired the collection from a young Greek archaeological student who excavated them under government supervision. All of his finds were taken to authorities in Quito, DeGraaf said, where they were sorted and he was allowed to keep some of them. DeGraaf said he has never been to Ecuador but the young digger, he said, assured him he had government permission to do what he did.

Crespo’s museum, affiliated with the government’s Center Bank, approves government contracts with diggers from other nations. No diggers are allowed to dig for commercial finds, he said. Any
artifacts which are allowed to leave the country are permitted to be taken only for limited periods of time and only for research or exhibit.

Crespo, who said he was “indignant" when he learned of the Ann Arbor sale, said he is sure that the digger who removed the figures from the country did not have permission to do so.

Crespo said he learned of the Forsythe sale when an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., was alerted by a member of the U-M’s Museum of Anthropology curatorial staff. The Ecuadorian consul in Detroit was asked by the Ecuadorian ambassador to contact DeGraaf and investigate.

Galo Torres, the Detroit consul, said he met twice with DeGraaf earlier this year in an attempt to learn who had done the digging and exporting of the items. He and Crespo met again Thursday with DeGraaf, who refused to tell them who had supplied him with the collection.

DeGraaf said today that “they’re putting a lot of pressure on me,” and he complained that he has been harassed by local people since the collection was first displayed.

He said he told Hernan and Crespo yesterday that the problem is stopping the export of such items from Ecuador, and he pledged to cooperate with them in discouraging it. However, he said, similar items are offered for sale by the world’s largest international art auction house, Parke-Bernet. Although he said he wouldn’t move to acquire artifacts from countries like Ecuador directly, he said he has no qualms about buying them from sources like the Parke-Bernet catalog where they are listed with prices and descriptions.

Calling the controversy a “sticky mess” for him, DeGraaf said he wonders why “they’re zeroing in on us here."

In a letter to Torres in early March, DeGraaf reiterated his intention to consider future purchases from private collections, noting that he has “the legal right to sell them in this country.”

Hernan said Ecuadorian officials are attempting to have U.S. laws enact a reciprocity ban to forbid the import and sale of such artifacts here, a sanction he said exists in the U.S. for some Latin American countries.

Hernan told The News that the Forsythe Collection is “important but not unique” in its significance in Ecuadorian history. They have cultural value, not economic value for Ecuadorians, he said.

"We would like to stop whatever artifacts are coming out of Ecuador,” Crespo said. “If there is an international organization to get objects out of Ecuador, we would like to stop it.”

“It is a kind of cultural patrimony, a heritage,” he said, and removal of cultural artifacts is a loss to the “integrity of the country.”

DeGraaf refused to say how many of the artifacts remain from the collection, but in March he sent Torres a price of 22 of the figures, with the highest priced item listed as a $1,400 figure. DeGraaf said he offered to negotiate with the Ecuadorian government to sell them the items but they did not respond.