About That Sarcophagus in Your Living Room…

SMU is hosting a conference later this week that they’re calling “The Future of the Past: Ethical Implications of Collecting Antiquities in the 21st Century.” I like to imagine it as getting Indiana Jones, his slimeball French rival, and those crazy Nazis together in a room. You know, something like this.

But to see how the university is describing it,
 

Archeologists and anthropologists, international governments, museum curators, antiquities collectors and dealers are caught in a pitched battle over the ethics of collecting and displaying historical treasures. SMU will corral some of the combatants into the same room this week for a conference expected to generate passionate debate over stewardship and public access to history’s greatest treasures. WHAT: “The Future of the Past: Ethical Implications of Collecting Antiquities in the 21st Century”WHEN: Thursday and Friday, Oct. 18-19, 2007

WHERE: Panel discussions at Hughes-Trigg Student Center Theater, Southern Methodist University

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Donny George Youkhanna, Ph.D., director general of the Iraqi Museums from 2003 to 2006 following the looting of the Baghdad Museum. Youkhanna will speak at 8:15 p.m., Oct. 18, in the O’Donnell Lecture and Recital Hall of the Owen Arts Center.

Other speakers will include art dealers, collectors, museum directors and curators, representatives of source cultures, archaeologists, art historians, legal scholars and ethicists. The conference is being sponsored by SMU’s Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility, in association with the SMU-in-Taos program.

Topics to be covered include:
• Key controversies affecting the collection of antiquities
• The complexities of museum/private collector relationships
• The fate of antiquities with unknown or problematic origins
• The impact of claims from international governments on the antiquities trade

For schedule and speakers, please visit here.