Lee’s (free) List: What CultureGrrl is Reading

Hilt Fitting from the Staffordshire Hoard

I've given up trying to sell you links: No one's buying Lee's List, my failed quest for micro-donations. The best links in life are (alas) free:

---To Catch a Looter: On today's NY Times Op-Ed page, Roger Atwood, citing a Peruvian model as an example for Iraq, calls for citizen patrols of artifacts-rich sites as the best means to keep looters at bay. But nowhere does he say anything about compensating these antiquities vigilantes with anything other than "binoculars, cellphones, maybe a few dirt bikes and some basic training." They're supposed to be gratified by the notion that their locale may "benefit from the archaeological tourism that often follows such discoveries."

This brings to mind the happy news of Terry Herbert, a citizen archaeologist (more accurately, a metal detectorist) in Great Britain who stands to have a megabucks payday as a result of his spectacular find of Anglo-Saxon treasure, which he dutifully reported to the authorities. Here [via] is some of the professionally excavated Staffordshire Hoard that Herbert discovered. The British system of compensation for amateurs' finds is the best incentive against looting. (I discussed the citizen-archaeologist solution towards the end of my LA Times Op-Ed, Make Art Loans, Not War.)

---The highly controversial proposed Philadelphia art sales tax is (thankfully) dead. The Greater Philadelphia Arts Alliance has the story. As Gary Steuer, Philadelphia's chief cultural officer, writes in his blog, Pennsylvania's FY2010 budget, nearing passage, "is very much a "good news/bad news" scenario" for the arts:

The "arts tax" has been removed, and that is a good thing, and PCA [Pennsylvania Council on the Arts] has been preserved, which is also a good thing, but on the expense side the arts funding areas of the budget have seen some pretty significant cuts, and that of course is bad.

---Zahi Hawass got his five fresco fragments from the Louvre. Now the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities craves a long-term loan of the Rosetta Stone. Samer al-Atrush of the Telegraph reports that the British Museum "promised to consider Mr Hawass's request." Here's why Neil MacGregor, the museum's director, might think more than twice about it.