Preliminaries: Unprovenanced Objects, Looted Artifacts, and the Problem of Authority

Before discussing the Han board MSS case study, a few preliminary comments are warranted concerning terminology and the problem of looting. I will begin with the most basic question: what actually counts as a “looted” artifact? Recent discussions on the professional ethics of working with looted artifacts in the early China field have focused predominantly on the bamboo-strip manuscripts acquired by the aforementioned institutions.Footnote ⁷ A point that may be obvious, but still deserves reiteration, is that scholarship on early China has long incorporated unprovenanced objects of other types too, including most prominently oracle bones and bronze vessels, and continues to do so.Footnote ⁸ One example of particular import – if genuine – is the X Gong xu (rendered variously as Bin or Sui Gong xu 豳/遂公盨) vessel the Poly Art Museum acquired in 2002.Footnote ⁹ The unprovenanced vessel bears an unique inscription, which both mentions the cultural hero Yu 禹and employs language reminiscent of the Shangshu 尚書. Since its publication, the X Gong xu vessel has inspired an international conference in its honor (Dartmouth College, 2003),Footnote ¹⁰ been featured in numerous publications, and is included in a source book of ancient Chinese bronze inscriptions translated into English.Footnote ¹¹ Discussions on professional ethics apply equally to the use of vessels like the X Gong xu, or any other unprovenanced object.

Terms like “unprovenanced,” “unprovenienced,” or “purchased” – the latter of which I adopted in my previous article but have since discarded – are useful descriptors for such artifacts because they acknowledge that the given piece may not be looted, but potentially a forgery instead.Footnote ¹² Not all “unprovenanced” objects are looted. Similarly, when it comes to a “looted” artifact, it would be imprecise to limit our focus to merely the absence of details on provenance (as implied by “unprovenanced”), or the fact that it was acquired from an antiquities market (as implied by “purchased”). That is to say, not all potentially “looted” artifacts are unprovenanced or purchased. The designation of an act as looting, rather, depends on a transgression of authority in an artifact’s discovery and/or possession. Any disturbance of past material remains, even if done following the most cautious scientific archaeological methods, is inevitably destructive and entails a degree of loss. The question really is who controls access to cultural heritage, decides what merits protection and what loss is tolerable, and then sanctifies best practices for that access and protection. Answers to these questions are open to challenge, as examined further in Section 2 by Glenda Chao and Section 3 by Mercedes Valmisa.

Consider, for instance, the mixed legacy of Aurel Stein. His expeditions to Central Asia in the early twentieth century and recovery of numerous manuscripts – most now held in the British Library – won him knighthood in the British Empire, as well as scholarly accolades, a few explicitly awarded for his contributions to archaeology.Footnote ¹³ Stein sought permits for his fieldwork, kept detailed records of his finds, for which provenance is meticulously documented, and went to great lengths to distance his research from the exploits of mere “treasure hunters.”Footnote ¹⁴ Yet numerous Chinese intellectuals, both at the time and still today, characterize Stein as a looter who plundered cultural relics from the region.Footnote ¹⁵ There are many factors behind these starkly divergent characterizations of Stein and his work, but what I wish to highlight here is how ambiguity over authority created a space for this controversy. During Stein’s expeditions, scientific archaeology was still in its infancy in China; political instability unsettled the region and indeed the world; international agreements over the appropriate stewardship of cultural heritage did not yet exist; and, crucially, a newfound Chinese nationalism came into conflict with European and Japanese imperialism, a point Chao also emphasizes.Footnote ¹⁶

Of course, the situation today is dramatically different. Archaeology is a well-defined discipline in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with institutional structure and professional guidelines.Footnote ¹⁷ The PRC government has passed strict laws aimed at the protection of cultural heritage – for example, the Law of People’s Republic of China on the Protection of Cultural Relics (中華人民共和國文物保護法), last amended in 2007.Footnote ¹⁸ Treaties such as the 1970 United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1995 International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects provide additional guidelines for both domestic and international regulation of the antiquities trade.Footnote ¹⁹ For decades now, a dialogue has taken place over how to legally and ethically handle unprovenanced objects and combat the problem of looting, with the participation of archaeologists, museum curators, art collectors, learned societies, politicians, lawyers, and other stakeholders all across the world.Footnote ²⁰ Clear authorities exist to whom one may appeal for direction on access to and the preservation of cultural heritage in China.

Ethical concerns might be raised to challenge these authorities, and conflicts between authorities likewise complicate assessments of what constitutes a “looted” artifact. A PRC law declares state ownership for all cultural relics remaining underground within its territory, with government permissions required before excavation and granted only to projects led by trained archaeologists. This prioritizes the scientific exploitation of past material remains as a public good, with archaeologists granted privileged access to cultural heritage. While safeguarding the scientific study of the past is undeniably an admirable goal, a risk remains both of mobilizing cultural heritage for nationalistic agendas and of disregarding nonarchaeological interests in shared cultural heritage.Footnote ²¹ Should local families in China have a right to decide if the ancestral graves of their village are excavated and, if so, what happens to the artifacts recovered therein, by nature of being (or claiming to be) lineal descendants of the tomb occupants? Taking these questions seriously also begins to acknowledge the socioeconomic realities, raised by Chao and Valmisa, that compel locals to participate in looting for fiscal gain.

Governments are not always responsible custodians of cultural heritage either. A lack of enforcement or corruption can undermine well-intentioned laws. Certain PRC policies have elicited strong censure as well, including recently the treatment of Uyghur cultural heritage.Footnote ²² If a state’s laws or activities are themselves deemed unjust, how might this impact treatment of artifacts procured in ways that subvert their authority? Indeed, critics of the acquisitions of bamboo strips by Peking University and other state-owned institutions might point to the PRC government’s condoning of the purchases as unjustifiably incentivizing looting in the name of repatriation, and therefore a case of irresponsible custodianship of cultural heritage. Similar doubts may be cast on the authority of international agreements. The 1970 UNESCO Convention in essence grants amnesty to artifacts already on the market prior to the treaty, creating an – ultimately arbitrary – division of legitimate versus illegitimate antiquities for trade.Footnote ²³ This arbitrary division may not be acceptable to everyone, complicating decisions about which artifacts merit boycott – for example, with debates concerning Stein’s Dunhuang MSS, or over sales of the Old Summer Palace bronze zodiac heads, whose repatriation has generated great controversy (to be mentioned shortly).Footnote ²⁴

All of this, of course, begs yet another question, indeed the question that Chao uses to frame Section 2: who has the right to arbitrate which authorities are just and ethically merit compliance? There has been little public debate within China over the ethics of studying unprovenanced MSS. That research on these artifacts, including on the Han board MSS, has continued unabated by Chinese scholars, may signal, on the whole, tacit acceptance of the salvage principle. This tacit acceptance may also be dictated by the political environment in China as well, where public dissent could be politically cast as unpatriotic.Footnote ²⁵ On one hand, without the participation of Chinese stakeholders, one may rightfully disapprove moralizing statements on the stewardship of China’s cultural heritage by non-Chinese parties based in European or American institutions, even if well intentioned, as echoes of hypocritical cultural imperialism.Footnote ²⁶ On the other hand, this concession accepts the nationalistic narrative claiming all cultural heritage in China belongs to a Chinese nation-state; and if this political impetus is restricting the participation of Chinese stakeholders, then those outside of China are uniquely positioned to offer dissent.Footnote ²⁷

A Case against Studying the Han Board Manuscripts: Market Catalyst Critique

The Han board MSS are unprovenanced objects that, if genuine, were most likely looted. For the market catalyst critique, authentication is irrelevant. The major concern is whether or not the Han board MSS derived from the antiquities market, having been procured in a way that transgressed authorities (PRC, UNESCO, etc.) deemed just. Very little information is provided in Xinjian Han du about the circumstances surrounding any acquisition of the boards. The “Preface 前言” by Liu Huan only divulges: “In the autumn of 2009, I was fortunate enough to inspect a collection of wooden boards at a friend’s residence in Beijing, and obtain photographs of these artifacts.”Footnote ²⁸ It is unknown if the Han board MSS were sold illicitly at market, but when facing an absence in details about how Liu’s friend came into the possession of these boards, the ethical imperative falls on an assumption that they were sold illicitly.Footnote ²⁹ Regardless, researching these objects signals a willingness to tolerate such ambiguity, which still legitimates working on unprovenanced objects that could participate in the illicit antiquities trade. To rephrase, then, best practice is to assume a transgression of just authority in cases that lack clear documentation to the contrary.Footnote ³⁰

In the case of the Han board MSS, the anonymity of the party in possession of the boards presents more pressing issues than those encountered in my prior discussions of the Peking University Han bamboo strips.Footnote ³¹ Peking University is a state-owned institution, which, in its acquisitions of bamboo strips, intervened in a domestic market to secure objects originating in China and pertinent to China’s cultural heritage.Footnote ³² Although details surrounding the Peking University acquisitions remain opaque to the public, as a state-owned entity, presumably the university operated under the blessings of the PRC government as a form of repatriation.Footnote ³³ Of course, as Goldin warns, repatriation still impacts the market for illicit antiquities.Footnote ³⁴ Yet despite these complaints, care for the Peking University bamboo strips has been subjected transparently to PRC law thereafter: the acquisition was announced in the media, the data published or being published, the artifacts now conserved in a state-owned institution and, moreover, made accessible, to both researchers and the broader public.

The Han board MSS, however, are held privately. Crucially, this means that the current possessor of the Han board MSS is not transparently accountable for their stewardship of the objects, and thereby skirts direct oversight, whether under PRC law or international agreements, including, for instance, restrictions over resale of the boards on the illicit antiquities market. Whoever now possesses the Han board MSS is an individual (or individuals) who we must assume has (or have) directly and actively engaged in the illicit antiquities trade already. Scholarship on the objects they possess could lead to their personal enrichment, such as by advertising the boards’ value for potential resale, emboldening their continued participation on the market. In other words, the Han board MSS present an especially precarious case, as the untrustworthy status of the boards’ current caretaker, the lack of transparency in that party’s future activities, and the possible continued circulation of the cultural heritage in their keep amplifies the potential negative impact of scholarship on the Han board MSS.Footnote ³⁵

Furthermore, the anonymity of the party in possession of the Han board MSS makes it difficult, if not impossible, for researchers to access the pieces for study or proper authentication. Control over data about the Han board MSS by an untrustworthy caretaker potentially biases scholarship on them. Moreover, by nature of being in a private collection, the Han board MSS are withdrawn from the realm of shared cultural heritage and cannot be enjoyed by the broader public. No appeal can be made to repatriation as a mitigating factor justifying the loss rendered by its negative market impact. Without the oversights established by PRC law or international agreements, there are no mandates for responsible stewardship of the Han board MSS, which, beyond merely the possibility of resale, also includes meeting proper standards for conservation, threatening the artifacts’ preservation. In light of this, and here responding to the salvage principle, the Han board MSS offer tenuous value as cultural heritage, owing to the difficulties faced in their authentication, their being withdrawn from public audiences, and their impermanence threatened through uncertain preservation. These are all substantial reasons to dissuade scholars from working with the Han board MSS, beyond those already discussed for collections acquired by state-owned institutions.Footnote ³⁶

For scholars who oppose studying the Han board MSS, the question then is how to act upon their convictions. A minimal approach is to avoid mention of unprovenanced objects or looted artifacts in print, a form of self-censorship.Footnote ³⁷ If the objective is to not advertise these sources, then it follows that indirect mention of the objects should be avoided as well, which is to say, refraining from citing secondary scholarship that uses these sources, in whole or in part, or, taken to an even greater extreme, secondary scholarship drawing from yet other studies that utilize these sources, and so forth ad infinitum. Otherwise, one is building upon insights and arguments derived from the unprovenanced objects or looted artifacts. But as Michael Friedrich (in discussion with Ondřej Škrabal) has recently warned, “there is little chance any more of disentangling the results obtained from genuine finds and dubious evidence.”Footnote ³⁸ Unprovenanced objects have become so thoroughly integrated into secondary scholarship on early China, untangling their influence is now largely futile at a practical level.Footnote ³⁹

The qualification “in print” is important as well, as it concedes that there is a lack of control over the audience for published statements, offering access to scholarship to a broader public, who potentially engage in the illicit antiquities trade. There are certain audiences, however, with whom it might be beneficial to reference unprovenanced artifacts: consultation with law enforcement or policymakers, students for teaching purposes, and scholarly exchange with other experts deemed responsible custodians of cultural heritage, for example, audiences who it may be hoped do not participate in the illicit antiquities market. Is it acceptable to discuss unprovenanced artifacts in more controlled and private settings, such as a classroom, or during a professional talk in a closed venue? A judicious decision must be made about how much information and which audiences are deemed dangerous enough for censorship. One may argue that even this short Element unduly advertises the Han board MSS, merely by describing their content or giving a citation to where the data have been published. Furthermore, if discussion of unprovenanced artifacts is permissible only for certain audiences, an obligation arises to ensure participation is restricted to that targeted audience, which is not always feasible.

Another consideration is how individual researchers – the most limited of audiences – should manage their own access to data on unprovenanced objects. This bears less on the argument that working on the Han board MSS incentivizes looting, but rather concerns transparency in scholarship. For those scholars convinced by the market catalyst critique, does personal reading of the Han board MSS risk biasing their knowledge in ways that may then, knowingly or not, change how they view other data in the field?Footnote ⁴⁰ For example, the Han board Cang Jie pian includes explicit numbering on the boards, partially confirming prior reconstructions of chapters and chapter order, while also providing a more complete picture.Footnote ⁴¹ Having seen this manuscript, even if a scholar excises all references to the Han board witness in print, their frame of reference for the Cang Jie pian has been fundamentally altered. Should that frame of reference influence their interpretation of the text, even if only in subtle ways, then the lack of citations to the Han board MSS muddles their scholarship for uninitiated readers.Footnote ⁴²

These questions pertain mostly to individual choices on how best to conduct or present our own research in the form of self-censorship. Already, however, these choices begin to potentially impede upon the open scholarship of others, such as denying students access to developments in the field. Even more aggressive approaches could be advocated to prevent the engagement of other scholars with unprovenanced objects as well. This includes, at the level of individual researchers, refraining from citing other scholars’ work that directly engages with unprovenanced artifacts, thereby limiting their audience; or, more dramatically, censoring all work of such scholars as a form of protest; refusing to accept money from funding bodies that have supported research on unprovenanced objects previously; and not affiliating with presses and journals who publish data and studies on such objects. Institutionally, as Goldin notes, many publishers in other fields have policies in place that actively censor pieces featuring unprovenanced artifacts, and it appears that similar thinking has begun to take root for some publishers of early China monographs as well.Footnote ⁴³ Other forms of institutional boycott may include, for example, funding bodies refusing to issue grants for projects featuring unprovenanced objects; or universities not hiring candidates based on prior and/or planned future research on them.

These more aggressive forms of protest take seriously an understanding that, to be effective, silencing scholarship on unprovenanced or looted artifacts should aspire to be universal. It does little good for a handful of scholars to cease publishing on unprovenanced objects or looted artifacts, only to have the rest of the field continue to discuss them widely and advertise their value.Footnote ⁴⁴ Here we may press the market catalyst theory to another extreme. The study of any bamboo-strip and wood-board manuscript, including scientifically excavated specimens, advertises the value of this class of artifact.Footnote ⁴⁵ Though this avoids the direct legitimation of unprovenanced objects or looted artifacts through providing “authentication and expertise” on those specimens, it still serves as a catalyst for the market and thereby can “aid and abet the sale of illicit antiquities.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Similarly, the licit trade in antiquities likewise establishes market values, from which the illicit trade may take a model. Should limits, therefore, be placed on the study or trade of any antiquities, as promoting the value of and legitimating ownership over the past?Footnote ⁴⁷ This obviously leads to an untenable position that eschews study of the past in any form because it contributes to commercialization of the archaeological record. The point, however, is not to travel down this admittedly slippery slope. Rather, I wish to highlight that a compromise must be made between educating about the importance of China’s past, and the risk that others will abuse the value this scholarship generates.

Furthermore, these more aggressive approaches also encroach upon basic principles of academic freedom and raise thorny issues over a conflict in “common goods,” namely perceived best practices for the preservation of cultural heritage versus “the free search for truth and its free exposition.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Whatever benefits may be derived by marginalizing scholarship on unprovenanced objects and looted artifacts in these ways, by design, this marginalization alienates colleagues and promotes a divisive academic environment, rendering a lasting effect on our field. Even at the level of self-censorship, one risks an increasing disconnect between their work and those of peers who do choose to research unprovenanced objects or looted artifacts, with communication between them potentially untenable. For example, scholars researching the Han board Cang Jie pian may begin to refer to content by chapter numbers unknown to those ignoring this manuscript. Obviously, the more aggressive forms of protest more directly and forcefully antagonize colleagues and institutions. Are these tolerable growing pains that the field must go through in order to correct its course, for the sake of preserving China’s cultural heritage? Or would they merely add additional stress upon a small field (which outside of China already has a tenuous existence) to chase an ultimately unattainable goal (i.e., universal boycott of working with unprovenanced objects and looted artifacts) for the sake of unproven and/or marginal impacts on the illicit antiquities trade? Sadly, those most vulnerable within this conflict of interests are graduate students and early career researchers, just starting out in the field, who do not have the safety net of tenure but must face restrictions over the sources they study, the grants they can apply for, the publishers who might accept their work, and potentially even the positions to which they may be hired.

A Case in Support of Studying the Han Board Manuscripts: Salvage Principle

Held by an untrustworthy party who is not subjected transparently to PRC law or international agreements, not easily accessible to researchers or a broader public audience as part of shared heritage, and kept under uncertain conservation conditions, the Han board MSS face a tenuous existence. Yet, if the salvage principle is taken seriously, it is precisely the precarious situation in which the boards are now found that makes it even more urgent to document and study their data. This research may ultimately be the only way to rescue their intellectual contributions and restore them to a shared cultural heritage, as the objects themselves may not survive or otherwise disappear entirely from scholarly view. Furthermore, Zhonghua shuju has already published photographs and transcriptions for the manuscripts, while a number of Chinese scholars have published their initial appraisals of the manuscripts’ authenticity. Suppressing the circulation of these data now seems impracticable.Footnote ⁴⁹ These are the main arguments in support of studying the Han board MSS: they are cultural heritage in great risk; study of them may offer the only means of salvaging this heritage; and suppressing the data is impracticable, even should suppression be deemed the best course of action.

For scholars who accept these reasons and wish to study the Han board MSS, a different series of questions and complications arise, especially concerning authentication. As stated, according to the market catalyst critique, authentication is irrelevant. According to the salvage principle, however, and concerning unprovenanced objects in particular, in order to justify intervention into the illicit antiquities trade – in this case, by studying the Han board MSS, which presumedly were purchased via that market – it is vital to understand the nature of the cultural heritage being saved. Not knowing if the Han board MSS are indeed looted ancient artifacts or modern forgeries presents uncertainty that compromises their value for scholarship. Conducting research on the Han board MSS could in fact prove actively detrimental to the field of early China studies, beyond the incentivization of looting, should they be modern forgeries treated as ancient artifacts. This introduces false data that can perniciously influence interpretations given for other legitimate ancient artifacts. Let me emphasize, however, that even if the Han board MSS are demonstrated to be modern forgeries, they still represent meaningful cultural heritage, just of a different sort: they could tell scholars much, for instance, about contemporary imaginations of early China.

Authentication must be prioritized when treating unprovenanced objects. Yet practical limitations befall those who study unprovenanced objects and consequently face this imperative to authenticate. The three pillars of authentication are provenance tracing, connoisseurship, and scientific testing.Footnote ⁵⁰ With institutional collections like that of Peking University, provenance tracing is hindered by the absence of details over how the manuscripts were acquired. As for connoisseurship, not all researchers are able to handle strips personally; moreover, access to the unprovenanced objects themselves may be restricted by the institutions or logistically inconvenient (especially for those based outside of China).Footnote ⁵¹ Finally, with scientific testing, decisions over if and how to conduct tests like radiocarbon dating are made by the institutions holding the pieces and must take into account costs and the artifacts’ welfare. Thus obstacles exist for researchers in each of these three pillars.

With the Han board MSS in a private collection, these obstacles are exacerbated. Nothing is known about how the Han board MSS were acquired, and very little is known about their current caretaker (beyond a connection to Beijing), making provenance tracing futile for most scholars besides those, like Liu Huan, who are personally familiar with the collector. Access to the object, again, is severely restricted; this too makes arranging scientific testing difficult, if not impossible. Unlike a public institution, an anonymous collector is not beholden to any standards of academic ethics and can both control and/or manipulate the data made available to scholars when pursuing authentication.

Previously I have urged, as a generalized methodology, the identification of unanticipated, novel features on unprovenanced objects whose later confirmation on scientifically excavated artifacts can help establish a positive authentication.Footnote ⁵² This approach, however, does not accommodate negative appraisals (that is, identifying an object as a forgery), and in seeking “novelty” must prove an absence, which is a tenuous claim. Furthermore, authentication is inevitably a matter of “degrees of confidence” without absolute certainty. It is left to each researcher’s discretion to determine what threshold evidence must pass to establish confidence and legitimate the object as a proper subject of responsible scholarship.Footnote ⁵³ This is, of course, what Chinese scholars and Sinologists have done for centuries now, considering, for example, the uncertain textual histories behind many works in the received corpus.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Valmisa argues in her section of this Element, many texts, newly unearthed and transmitted alike, are but “a well-informed reorganization of available materials within reasonable possibilities” by modern scholars (or, I would add, historical actors in various stages of a text’s life), making them, in a sense, of “our creation” (emphasis by Valmisa).

Can minimum standards be established for this judgment? Is it enough to rely on the connoisseurship of experts? What if those experts are employed by the institutions that acquired the unprovenanced objects, or, in the case of the Han board MSS, hint at having a friendly relationship with the anonymous party or their colleagues – conflicts of interest, an issue Valmisa also has raised? Is it reasonable to expect every scholar to pursue their own detailed authentication of the unprovenanced artifacts they research, with the immense cost of time and energy this would entail? If not, then as Valmisa argues and as supported by Chao, transparency is imperative, which includes matters related to acquisition and access to materials, which are absent in the case of the Han board MSS and vague still for most institutional collections. Preliminary comments about the authenticity of the Han board MSS, primarily the Cang Jie pian, have been made by Zhang Chuanguan 張傳官 and other scholars.Footnote ⁵⁵ No scientific analysis, such as radiocarbon dating, has been conducted, however, and new archaeologically excavated parallels are still awaited.Footnote ⁵⁶

A more troubling question is how far to accept a mandate to salvage threatened cultural heritage already circulating illicitly. Indeed, taken further, this mandate could serve as justification for direct scholarly participation in the antiquities trade, purchasing unprovenanced objects and looted artifacts for study and donation to public institutions. Consider, for instance, the purchase and donation of Old Summer Palace bronze zodiac heads by Stanley Ho (in 2003 and 2007), or Cai Mingchao’s disruptive bid (in 2009), which were praised as patriotic acts of repatriation and protest in Chinese media.Footnote ⁵⁷ A similar logic previously bolstered European imperialist extraction of antiquities from China, Africa, and other regions, arguing that this was, in effect, salvaging the remnants of past civilizations important to world heritage from the uncertain stewardship of modern uncivilized caretakers.Footnote ⁵⁸ If the market catalyst critique, when taken to the extreme, calls for forgoing the handling or study of any antiquities, the salvage principle, when similarly exaggerated, points to an unfettered market.

An unfettered market is clearly problematic, but I feel greater consideration is merited for finding ways to allow nonarchaeological interest groups to access cultural heritage while preserving archaeological context. Much of the discussion on the professional ethics of working with unprovenanced objects and looted artifacts has focused on mollifying demand for illicit antiquities while concurrently controlling the supply through strict legal enforcement.Footnote ⁵⁹ On problems surrounding mollifying demand, in my prior article, I noted the enduring history of looting and complex motivations behind this, including, for instance, even the material value of items, like bronze vessels, made from precious metals.Footnote ⁶⁰ I also questioned the sway my research may have on market dynamics, namely the degree to which legitimation of these objects raises their value and generates demand. Here let me clarify: my point is not that colleagues in China ignore English scholarship.Footnote ⁶¹ Rather it is that the influence English scholarship has over public opinion in China and, specifically, on those actors directly involved in the looting trade (from the locals who help first dig up the artifacts, to the criminal networks that transport them, to the dealers and finally the end collectors) is less significant than the value it generates for advancing human knowledge and the restoration of potentially lost intellectual value. The glorification of tomb robbery conveyed by the novel series Daomu biji 盜墓筆記 and its TV and movie adaptations has a far greater audience and wider influence on the market, I suspect, than my niche English-language academic articles ever will.Footnote ⁶² This, of course, does not absolve scholars from a responsibility to voice contempt for looting and highlight the immense value of archaeological context in research; doing so can still minimize whatever negative effects scholarship has on the market.Footnote ⁶³ But instead of eliminating academic study of the unprovenanced objects, a focus on public outreach efforts may prove more effective.Footnote ⁶⁴

Like any market, however, the trade in illicit antiquities is a function of not just demand, but also supply. This trade is comparable to (and indeed often concurrent with) that of other illicit goods, such as that of drugs or, as Valmisa discusses in her section of this Element, the trafficking of exotic animals and animal products.Footnote ⁶⁵ On controlling supply through strict laws, Christine Alder and Kenneth Polk have noted that “one lesson that is available from criminological analysis of international illicit markets is that where demand remains at high levels in economically rich nations, it is naïve to assume that much can be gained by prohibitive legislation in source countries.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Pushing a market underground, moreover, brings a plethora of further issues, from making the traded objects harder to track (with a loss in public education and cultural exchange as artifacts are whisked away into private collections), to encouraging the creation of organized criminal networks and increased political corruption.Footnote ⁶⁷ To relieve this dynamic, work needs to be done on minimizing demand for illicit antiquities (as championed by the market catalyst critique), and a role remains for criminal and civil law, both as symbolic ethical statements and as actual forms of deterrence.Footnote ⁶⁸ At the same time, constructive avenues should also be pursued to open supply in ways that preserve archaeological context, even if just in the short term, to allow for a lasting redirection of demand.Footnote ⁶⁹

Can other interest groups, nonarchaeological in nature, obtain greater access to a shared resource – cultural heritage – that shifts the enduring demand of consumers away from an underground illicit trade to a licit market? Patrick O’Keefe raises three options: disposals from collections, the enhancement of procedures for dealing with chance finds, and the distribution of finds from new excavations.Footnote ⁷⁰ For example, in England, metal detecting is a popular and established hobby that potentially threatens archaeological context. The Treasure Act and the additional Portable Antiquities Scheme (hosted by the British Museum) help accommodate this interest group, both through a code of practice and dictating that finds are reported and left in situ for archaeological excavation by trained officials, but also outlining fair compensation to be given to metal detectorists who report their discovery.Footnote ⁷¹ Similar guidance is lacking in PRC law, where no space has been made that could accommodate such a hobby and compensation is left at the discretion of local officials.Footnote ⁷² Another avenue is working with commercial enterprises, beyond the salvage archaeology of cultural resource management, where privately funded projects (inclusive of international interests)Footnote ⁷³ apply for PRC government permits and include trained archaeologists on staff for the collection of scientific data, but then also have a negotiated claim to a part of the finds for circulation in the legal antiquities market.Footnote ⁷⁴ This is, in a sense, pursuing an alternative “temporary harm” to achieve “long-term collective benefit,” as discussed by Valmisa. Archaeo-logical remains arguably are safest when left untouched in situ, as even scientific excavation is destructive and the methods employed today inevitably pale when compared to the technology of tomorrow. It is feasible, however, that the losses realized through managed and publicly documented excavation, which contributes in part to a licit market, may prove preferable to simply abandoning important data from looted artifacts already in circulation.

To Research or Boycott the Han Board Manuscripts?

In handling unprovenanced objects or looted artifacts, a scholar must “weigh between, on the one hand, the material and intellectual losses that may be suffered in the future by further incentivizing looting and, on the other hand, the material and intellectual losses we will suffer imminently by neglecting looted artifacts already on the market, as well as the future loss of neglecting those that may surface later.”Footnote ⁷⁵ This position is comparable to the conditional salvage principle, as Alison Wylie formulated (and critiqued) in her discussion of archaeological ethics: “Archaeologists should do what they can to salvage information from looted data insofar as it promises to be of scientific value, despite the loss of context and associations, and insofar as these interventions do not exacerbate the threat to archaeological resources posed by commercial exploitation (directly or indirectly).”Footnote ⁷⁶ As opposed to the absolute in Wylie’s second condition on exacerbating commercial exploitation, a relative valuation is necessary since even the study of legitimately and scientifically excavated artifacts can impact the market. It will always be a judgment call over precisely how much of a negative influence one is willing to tolerate.Footnote ⁷⁷

In the case of the Han board MSS, for my own part, I believe there is sufficient cause for concern to abstain from their dedicated study. This decision hinges on the lack of proper authentication, however; not necessarily the fact that they are in a private collection.Footnote ⁷⁸ Being in a private collection introduces new variables to weigh. There is, from the perspective of the market catalyst critique, the added risk of an untrustworthy caretaker who is not transparently accountable to PRC law or international agreements and potentially stands to profit from resale on the illicit antiquities markets. Yet this appears matched by the added urgency, according to the salvage principle, of the objects’ precarious circumstances. Scholarship on the Han board MSS becomes an even more necessary means of rescuing the intellectual contribution of cultural heritage that now survives but stands imminently on the brink of being lost forever.

Systematic data on looting and shifts in the illicit antiquities market for wood and bamboo-strip manuscripts, such as the Han board MSS, are lacking, and the extent that scholarship impacts market dynamics – conceding that it does indeed have some impact – is unknown.Footnote ⁷⁹ At best, anecdotal evidence and comparison to case studies for the trade in cultural heritage from other regions of the world allow for speculation.Footnote ⁸⁰ It is hoped future studies can address these issues, and Chao provides insights for how to move forward in this regard. Until then, however, I favor salvaging a known quantity (e.g., the cultural heritage represented by the unprovenanced objects, here the Han board MSS) over attempting to preemptively rescue an unknown quantity (e.g., future losses of cultural heritage).Footnote ⁸¹ The Han board MSS are extant, they represent cultural heritage in threat, and have important information to share that can advance knowledge about China’s past. It is unknown what losses may be suffered in the future, owing to the incremental incentivization supplied by studying the Han board MSS and adding to a larger collective body of scholarship on looted manuscripts. Goldin warns against underestimating the impact of scholarship on looted manuscripts, rightfully cautioning that “disregarding hidden costs does not reduce them” and usually “defer[s] the reckoning to future generations.”Footnote ⁸² Yet overestimating the impact of scholarship on looted manuscripts is also harmful, and necessarily so, both in the present and to future generations, by suppressing the production of knowledge and essentially forfeiting extant cultural heritage.

This judgment, however, is premised on the authenticity of the Han board MSS as Han-period artifacts that testify to ancient scribal practices. Without proper authentication, and with the salvage principle in mind, the nature of the Han board MSS as cultural heritage is uncertain. They might be looted ancient artifacts that bear invaluable data for the study of early China; they could equally be modern forgeries, which while significant perhaps for study of contemporary imaginations of China’s past, would confuse and mislead scholarship on early China. Although initial analyses by scholars such as Zhang Chuanguan hint at a positive authentication as Han-period manuscripts, the threshold, in my opinion, has not yet been met to confidently treat them as genuinely ancient artifacts. That threshold likely will not be met until and if further scientifically excavated data appears in the future that can corroborate the Han board MSS data. Likewise, no sustained argument has yet been raised proving the Han board MSS to be modern forgeries. In light of this uncertainty, I will only make reference to the Han board MSS with extreme caution and with note of their compromised status.

The prior discussion has raised more questions than answers. Even should future studies provide more systematic data about the relationship between research on unprovenanced objects or looted artifacts and the incentivization of the illicit antiquities trade, many of the dilemmas encountered demand both treating the specifics of each case individually and ultimately applying rather subjective decision-making based on one’s beliefs and value systems. This ranges from the sorts of authorities deemed just, to the risks taken when educating about the value of the past, to how far one is compelled to go to act upon their commitments. Appreciating this subjectivity, here I can only advocate, following Wylie in her discussion of the Society for American Archaeology’s ethics policies (especially Principle No. 1), that researchers embrace a sense of “stewardship” to guide their contemplations on what limitations should be placed over scholarship on unprovenanced objects and looted artifacts.Footnote ⁸³

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Glenda Chao and Mercedes Valmisa for their collaboration, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for their guidance. Many other colleagues commented on earlier drafts, and I am very grateful for their insights and corrections. This section of this Element was composed during a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at SOAS University of London. As a disclaimer, the statements expressed herein are given in a personal capacity only. This work is not affiliated with my current position at the Library of Congress, nor does it reflect views endorsed by the Library.

Introduction

The destruction of cultural heritage is endemic to much of the world, and debate over how scholars ought to approach the use of unethically procured source materials is ongoing. China is certainly not unique in the world by any means when it comes to being a victim of looting because its long civilizational history has made it a very rich source of art and material culture for collectors, museums, and enthusiasts worldwide.Footnote ⁸⁴ Likewise, the Chinese state is not unique in facing seemingly insurmountable challenges when it comes to protecting its cultural heritage.Footnote ⁸⁵ My contribution to this conversation will address the question of whether to use unprovenienced sources in research from two related perspectives. The first is historical and focuses on how ethical decisions about using unprovenienced materials for research on early China is determined by the history of antiquarianism and the development of archaeology as a discipline in China.Footnote ⁸⁶ The second perspective is about the consequences of this history for how we make ethical decisions in our research, which necessarily involves discussing who the proper custodians of cultural heritage in China are and where their responsibilities lie. I argue that different stakeholders within the realm of Chinese archaeology, including the Chinese government, Chinese archaeologists, international scholars, and regular consumers of antiquities both within China and abroad, each bear a portion of the responsibility of protecting China’s intangible cultural heritage. We have to consider wider structural and institutional factors related to how Chinese archaeology and early China studies have developed as fields of study in order to better determine best practices for each interest group. I close with a brief discussion about what steps can be taken in the future to begin to ameliorate the problem of looting from which these ethical questions arise. I ultimately propose that it is the valuation of cultural heritage across stakeholder groups that matters most in beginning to change the situation for the better.

A Historical Approach to an Ethical Question: Antiquarianism, Archaeology, and Nationalism in China

The big question this collaborative Element is trying to answer is relatively straightforward: is using unprovenienced materials in early China studies and Chinese archaeology ethical? The answer, however, is much more complex than simply yes or no because of the historical conditions under which the field of early China studies and Chinese archaeology have emerged, which we must first understand.

Ethics and the Legacies of Imperialism and the Birth of Scientific Archaeology in China

Modern archaeology in China has roots in the antiquarian tradition as jinshixue continued as an elite pastime well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁸⁹ During the late Qing period, concepts of heritage preservation were introduced from Western imperialists and were adopted by the Chinese state in its efforts to modernize and to retain centralized control over the country. In this process, antiquarian traditions of preserving, protecting, and studying objects from the past were folded into state-sponsored policies aimed at preserving “national heritage,” which itself was a new concept that emerged as a rhetorical and symbolic tool to mobilize the Chinese populace in the transformation of China into a modern nation-state.Footnote ⁹⁰ Scientific archaeology, with its emphasis on empiricism and fieldwork, was introduced within this same context of national self-rediscovery and self-strengthening in the face of Western imperialism, and was spurred on by the desire of many intellectuals to use the idea of fugu 復古 (“returning to the ancient”) not to venerate the past, but to help process and appraise the social, political, and cultural fluctuations they were experiencing as well as to find a fresh path to national progress.Footnote ⁹¹

Ironically, the earliest archaeological projects undertaken during this era were collaborations between European archaeologists and Chinese archaeologists who were trained in the West, such as the excavation of Yangshao 仰韶 village in 1921 led by geologists Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874–1960) from Sweden and Yuan Fuli 袁福禮 (1893–1987) from Henan. In this case and in many others, European, American, and even Japanese institutions involved themselves by providing funding to take part in the work, which had the side benefit of allowing these institutions direct access to excavated artifacts. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, imperialists like Aurel Stein benefited from the relative weakness of the Qing state to remove large quantities of cultural relics from sites he “discovered” at Dunhuang 敦煌 in Gansu 甘肅province. By the late 1920s, however, the reach of imperial greed was beginning to be checked by Chinese archaeologists as described earlier in this Element, leaving imperial powers only partnerships as an avenue to attempt to acquire the pieces for which the international art market was beginning to clamor.Footnote ⁹² While not all international partnerships were poorly intentioned, some high-profile early ones were, and falling-outs usually concerned the custodianship of excavated artifacts, whether they could be removed, who owned them, and thus who had the rights to them.Footnote ⁹³ These examples illustrate the complicated entanglements between nationalism, Western imperialism, and the appreciation and collecting of cultural relics both domestic and international that influenced the development of antiquarianism into scientific archaeology and cultural heritage protection in China in the early to mid-twentieth century.

Moving forward, I do not believe that scholars can continue to comfortably ignore this connection. We might not have the power to recover original in situ contexts, and thus it might be just as well that we continue to use these collections because otherwise they would have been looted for nothing (academically speaking), but we should at least acknowledge the problematic histories of these collections when we use them. To be clear, I am not advocating that we disregard all work that has been done with the help of previously looted artifacts. I am simply suggesting that there are ways we can incorporate recognition of our privilege within ongoing work. One good example is Adam Smith’s study on the Ernest K. Smith collection of Shang 商 divination inscriptions at Columbia University where he devotes a section to the history of the collection, pointing out especially its dubious connection with a supposedly stolen box of bones and shells from the Yinxu 殷墟 excavations that were halted in 1929.Footnote ⁹⁴

Ethical Operators: Who Are the Custodians of Cultural Heritage and What Are Our Responsibilities?

One of the major takeaways of the history just outlined for scholars today is the realization that we are inextricably bound up in the web of structures that make up the current system in which cultural heritage is being unethically exploited. This does not mean that it is our fault, or that the responsibility for changing the system lies solely with us. In Foster’s words, the key issue is who controls access to cultural heritage and who decides and sanctifies best practices. As I argue in what follows, several main interest groups bear different portions of the responsibility of acting as custodians and gatekeepers of China’s cultural heritage; these include the Chinese government, Chinese archaeologists, and international scholars. Consumers of antiquities and regular Chinese citizens need to be mentioned as well. I say that each group bears a portion of the full responsibility because while there are overlaps in the roles that each group has regarding their ideal mandate, custody of cultural heritage is the responsibility of an entire system and a network of groups of individuals rather than any single group alone.

Conclusions: Where Do We Go from Here?

The most immediate answer to the question of whether we should use unprovenienced artifacts and texts in our scholarship is to say that in an ideal world, we could legislate the problem of looting away so that new sources only come to us through scholarly and scientific means; certainly many aspects of China’s situation would benefit from more nuanced and careful policymaking. To think through what kinds of new legislation might be beneficial, we can draw upon work that has been done previously on analyzing and quantifying the current market for antiquities worldwide. Tess Davis, for example, has analyzed more than twenty years of information from Sotheby’s Auction House’s sales of Indian and Southeast Asian Art in New York to show that despite the 1970 UNESCO Convention, the vast majority of Khmer art auctioned by Sotheby’s likely has an illicit origin.Footnote ¹²³ Similarly, Elizabeth Gilgan has utilized Sotheby’s catalogs of pre-Columbian artifacts in order to propose a framework for a bilateral agreement between Belize and the United States under the 1983 Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act.Footnote ¹²⁴

While Davis’s and Gilgan’s works represent aspects of the market for antiquities in the West, they are not targeted toward quantifying the scale of actual looting in source countries. On the other hand, Ricardo Elia has examined a broader range of sources to understand the looting, sale, and collecting of Apulian Red-Figure vases from northern Italy.Footnote ¹²⁵ In addition to quantifying the sale of these antiquities using market data, Elia relies on information from archaeological reports as well as publications from Italian law enforcement agencies to try to get a sense of the amount of looting, but he concludes that the true scale of looting might be impossible to determine using documentation alone. He concludes that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of tombs would have to have been looted to supply the number of known Apulian Red-Figure vases currently in worldwide collections.

The early China field can learn several things from these examples. First, while we are unlikely to be able to document the scale of looting using written testament and data alone, we might fruitfully comb site reports, which usually mention instances of previous looting, to calculate the number of sites impacted. The second thing we can learn from these examples is that market data are most useful for quantifying the consumption end of the illicit antiquities trade network, specifically in identifying types of antiquities that fetch high prices and their likely origins. Given that the current memorandum of understanding between the United States and China covers artifacts dating from the Paleolithic period until the end of the Tang Dynasty (ca. 75,000 BCE–907 CE), as well as monumental sculptures more than 250 years old, more specificity as to what specific types of objects seem to be in most demand and in most frequent circulation might help advocates push for additional legislation, or at least give us an idea of what kinds of archaeological sites might need the most protecting.Footnote ¹²⁶ Ideally, we should also do this kind of market analysis on the domestic consumption of Chinese antiquities to see how it compares with international demand. Today, many auction houses, such as China Guardian in Hong Kong, publish their auction catalogs as well as the results of their sales on their websites, so it might be straightforward to create a robust database of information regarding the kinds of objects for sale, whether they have provenances or proveniences, and whether they are in high demand compared to other types of objects.

Ultimately, choosing whether to engage with unprovenienced artifacts forces us to confront the intersection of historical, methodological, and ethical issues that exist in the field of archaeology, and Valmisa raises the important point that what really matters is how our decisions impact peoples’ lives beyond the narrow realm of knowledge production, reception, and protection. To my mind, the issue comes down to how various interest groups value cultural heritage. Indeed, careful reading of most recent texts that address the issue reveals a common underlying theme of how the world values cultural heritage. For instance, Justin Jacobs’s main argument is that it was possible for Western imperialists like Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot to work with local communities in northwestern China to remove artifacts during the late Qing period and even into the early Republican period because each interest group involved, from Muslim laborers and guides to Confucian officials, benefited from the interaction based on their differential valuations of the antiquities.Footnote ¹²⁷ Interestingly, Jacobs also argues that it only became difficult for these interactions to happen once two things occurred. First, the power of Western-trained Chinese scholars based in Beijing grew sufficient to disrupt the plunder; second, local northwestern communities, fueled by the growing sense of nationalism during the 1920s and 1930s, became angry and mobilized against the removal of what they saw as their own cultural patrimony.Footnote ¹²⁸

Based on the evidence presented in this Element, it seems as though today, different stakeholder groups value Chinese cultural heritage in competing ways, from the Chinese state that sees cultural relics as symbols of national unity and political legitimacy, to Chinese archaeologists who, like international scholars, value artifacts for knowledge, but who also depend on cultural relics for their livelihoods to the point sometimes of needing to exploit them; from regular consumers for whom cultural heritage is entertainment, to collectors, who value art and antiquities as status symbols of personal prestige; and finally to the looters themselves, who value cultural heritage as a means of economic gain.

As a member of the scholarly community, I feel that the way researchers value cultural heritage, as knowledge-generating source material that should be accessible and beneficial as an education tool for everyone, ought to be the most prevalent valuation. I therefore also think that these values should be the foundation upon which policies and personal desires rest. Since this is the case, I come down on the side of using unprovenienced sources if we can be reasonably certain of their authenticity, and if the narrative a scholar wishes to write necessitates their inclusion. I do not necessarily adhere, however, to the idea that not using these sources does a disservice to scholarship because, as stated earlier and with reference to Valmisa’s section of this Element, I believe there is room within the field to think more thoroughly about what kinds of narratives about early China we can and want to create.

In the same vein, I believe heritage stakeholders and interest groups should hold more open discussions about what value ought to be placed on cultural patrimony, and which stakeholder groups should take precedence in decision and rulemaking on the subject. The current situation in which looting takes place in China indicates that top-down legislation, with the state dictating the value of archaeological artifacts and immovable architecture, does not do enough to protect and preserve cultural heritage. Nor does international legislation like the 1970 UNESCO Convention, which serves mainly to limit looted objects from traveling across national borders. Additionally, the monetary value placed on antiquities, especially authenticated ones, as Goldin reminds us, continues to be a major problem that incites looting.

I believe that ideally, local communities in China who recognize the cultural patrimony in the environments around them should determine the value of cultural relics. This belief is influenced by Jacobs’s arguments about the valuation of antiquities, by the work archaeologists have done to include descendent communities at Sipan in Peru, and by Ko’s emphasis that archaeology and cultural heritage can be collaborative processes rather than purely representative of either science or state.Footnote ¹²⁹ Everything else, from administrative apparatuses to the advice and consultation of expert scholars both domestic and international, should serve to facilitate, guide, and carryout the wishes of those communities. I am not naïve enough to believe, however, that the monetary and symbolic values of antiquities held by collectors and states respectively, can simply be wished away, especially given how powerful entities like wealthy individuals, wealthy private institutions, and especially states are compared to scholars and local communities. Nor do I think it likely that scholars, especially international ones, have the power to immediately or quickly affect how these powerful individuals and institutions operate.

It is important that we, as scholars from outside of China, focus on positive engagement with local communities when we work with them through being transparent about our methods and intentions in our scholarship. We should also respect their need to use whatever land we are working on for their livelihoods, and try to advocate with and for them, so that as much as possible of the proceeds of the presentation and display of their cultural relics go back to their communities. Empowering local communities while advocating for changes to legislation and educating on the scholarly rather than monetary value of cultural heritage may be the next best actionable steps we can take.

Intrinsic Factors: Epistemic and Methodological Issues

A first important intrinsic factor leading to potential epistemic and methodological problems is that artifacts of unknown origins, as it is the case by definition with unprovenienced materials, may be forgeries. We rely on experts to authenticate unprovenienced materials and, as much as we may and should trust these authentication efforts, there is always a risk of error. Scholars working on unprovenienced materials that have been wrongly authenticated will produce false knowledge – that is, theories that appear valid but are based on false evidence and that may mislead scholarship for years to come. We could also question authentication processes in terms of conflict of interests: a purchasing institution may have strong private interests in authenticating materials that have already been acquired.Footnote ¹³¹ While the risk of working in forged materials exists, a more pervasive problem is that, even if unprovenienced materials indeed are authentic, we have surely lost their archaeological context hence crucial data and evidence for identifying and interpreting them. For example, we don’t know whether an acquired manuscript bundle is missing bamboo strips that the seller didn’t retrieve or the buyer hasn’t purchased, whether it was sitting near other texts or artifacts, who the owner or user of these artifacts was, what evidence for dating we are missing, so forth – a point both Foster and Chao also make.Footnote ¹³²

To further complicate the issue, Foster makes the relevant point that all excavation, whether by the hand of a trained archaeologist or by an untrained looter, is destructive – data are always lost. The question then becomes: what data are worth saving and what data can be sacrificed? The criteria looters use to make this decision are varied, though probably mostly economic. But let’s not forget that archaeologists also approach digs with certain research questions in mind or a job at hand, such as salvage, that could be challenged from a different set of criteria.

I believe that both of these intrinsic problems (the risk of forgeries and the unavoidable loss of context and data) call for employing valid methodological practices rather than for the rejection of the materials. With regards to authentication, we must rely on professional expertise while advocating for transparency. If we are to trust experts’ competency and institutions’ interests in authenticating unprovenienced materials, we must demand transparency in communicating both the conditions of acquisition and the methods of authentication. Such transparency is not now enjoyed in the case of Chinese unprovenienced materials.Footnote ¹³³ This information is key to understand the artifact that we are studying, and it may also help us establish trust (or distrust) in a particular artifact, cache, or institution. Of course, as Chao has further problematized in our discussions, we must also ask whose expertise is to be considered valid to settle an authentication case. Who is to be considered an expert? Is one expert’s opinion enough or should decisions be reached by committee? But regardless how we answer these questions, most important is to demand and enforce transparent communication on standards, definitions, methods, and practices throughout the identification of materials of interest, purchase, and authentication processes.

I personally find the loss of context of discovery a more intellectually stimulating problem, especially with regards to reading Chinese manuscripts.Footnote ¹³⁴ The fact remains that, even if a text has been authenticated by an institution and by experts who have transparently communicated the processes for acquisition and the methods of authentication (and which we deem worthy of trust), we may still find ourselves with a bundle of written bamboo strips whose order is unclear, which may contain two or more texts or be missing key sections, and so forth. We must treat this artifact as what it is: incomplete evidence. And we know that evidence lies at the heart of knowledge claims. In the traditional definition of knowledge, we need evidence to differentiate between knowing as the creation of justified true beliefs and simply guessing right by luck. Something becomes evidence for a belief when it enhances its likelihood, acceptability, or justification. In this light, we need the evidence that is missing from an unprovenienced text in order to justify any beliefs that we may form toward such text. For example, if we don’t have evidence that the acquired materials represent a complete text, or that it’s a single text as opposed to sections from two or more texts, it’s difficult to justify reading the materials as a self-contained unity.

In light of this fundamental epistemic issue intrinsic to unprovenienced materials, how can we ensure the validity of these materials for the production of knowledge? Rather than rejecting unprovenienced materials as defective evidence, we must engage in appropriate methodological practices that account for their uncertain and potentially incomplete status. Crucially, I suggest that the validity of our scholarship in this case lies with identifying, acknowledging, and transparently communicating both the limitations and affordances of our materials, of the methodologies that we are employing in their study, as well as of our tentative results.

Before we can make newly found manuscripts publicly available, we must have recourse to philological, philosophical, historical, material, and literary arguments to reconstruct textual versions within available possibilities. As much as these reconstructions are fruitful in imagining possible texts that may have existed at a certain point in history and the connections that can be drawn between the new reconstructed text and the larger tradition, we are not justified to make any firm knowledge claims with regards to this text as an ancient or historical text. We can only make knowledge claims with regard to this text as our creation, a well-informed reorganization of available materials within reasonable possibilities, which may result in a fictional text. However, that isn’t a practice that I have ever seen in the Chinese or sinological academic contexts. Most commonly, scholars who work with reconstructed texts, including myself (whether it is their own reconstruction or the editorial team’s), are interested in making knowledge claims regarding the acquired reconstructed text as a historical text, not as a newly created one. We engage in the reconstruction of the documents lost in transmission similarly to third-century poet Shu Xi 束皙, who, regretting that the Odes were not complete, proceeded to “fill them out.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Shu Xi did not see himself as inventing the lyrics of the lost ritual songs; he was remembering how they must have once been in accordance with the original intentions of the sages.Footnote ¹³⁶ Is that how we envision ourselves in our engagement with the past? Do we aim at accurately reconstructing “how things were” or “should have been”? In her section of this Element, Chao follows up on this point by asking some crucial though challenging questions. Is it perhaps our time to start relinquishing the idea that the ultimate goal of scholarship consists in reconstructing a historically accurate past? Can we entertain new avenues of research that better fit the limitations of our sources, and, I’ll add, that challenge a naïve realist conception of the past? Is there merit in accepting that our work is not a replication of the past but a responsible rewriting of new narratives?

I answer all these questions in the affirmative. Insofar as scholars are mostly interested in making knowledge claims with regards to the reconstructed text as an ancient or historical text (a text supposed to have existed at certain point in history), I argue contra Shu Xi that any claims must be articulated as purely speculative in the most traditional sense of speculation: as creative possibilities that may or may not be proven or falsified in the future depending on access to new evidence.Footnote ¹³⁷ By virtue of lacking sufficient evidential support, one must suspend judgment regarding any definitive knowledge claim and propose hypotheses in a speculative manner. Jumping to conclusions (such as firmly establishing that reconstruction R represents an original historical text) is simply not reasonable in the face of insufficient evidence. Because we are missing key evidence to make judgments – for example, we cannot either verify or falsify the hypothesis that there are bamboo strips that have not been acquired – we cannot either confirm nor disconfirm, and hence there is no conclusive final judgment. Speculation is our only intellectual strategy to deal with this material by fruitfully putting to use all of our knowledge and skills – that is, paleographic, philological, historical, literary, philosophical, and so forth.

There are two important points to make regarding speculation as an intellectual strategy. The first is that speculation doesn’t apply only to unprovenienced materials. Incomplete evidence characterizes much (if not all) knowledge. Nearly all inductive reasoning arrives at conclusions that go beyond existing evidence (unless the set of all evidence for an inductive claim can be proven to be all the evidence there is). And unprovenienced texts are not the only texts with partial, limited, or insufficient evidence. As pointed out earlier, scientifically excavated texts also experience loss and represent incomplete evidence. To different degrees, we encounter similar epistemic problems in the study of our received corpus too.Footnote ¹³⁸ The second point is that, though we speculate because of lack of sufficient evidence, speculation isn’t merely a second-class alternative for epistemic situations where a knowledge claim cannot be reasonably justified. Speculation is a fruitful exercise even in situations where crucial evidence is available – for example, archaeologically excavated manuscripts with a context of discovery (for which there is material evidence) and texts in the received tradition (for which there is historical evidence).

Pushing back against the evidence-first understanding of speculation in the sciences, Currie has recently proposed that speculative hypotheses not be judged in terms of evidential support, but on what he calls productivity: the wide range of epistemic benefits that a hypothesis might bring beyond its being well supported. In Currie’s words, “A hypothesis is speculative when it aims to be productive: its function is to provision epistemic goods through opening new research, or scaffolding the development of theories or experiments, or generating possibility proofs, or providing epistemic links to further knowledge.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Acknowledging the limitations of our research materials – importantly, not only the unprovenienced ones but virtually all of our materials to different degrees and extents – opens the doors to imagining new kinds of knowledge production that move beyond the attempt to reconstruct the past. The current pushback against evidence-first research could be put in dialogue with the legacies of the early twentieth century Doubting Antiquity (yi gu 疑古) movement in the broader context of challenging the foundations of the methodologies and epistemologies of early China studies.

I acknowledge that such challenges to a naïve realist reconstruction of the past may appear problematic to many, and that they may raise questions regarding the legitimacy of the scholarship based on such methodological praxes. A critic may ask, with Foster, in our speculative production of knowledge, whether there are any boundaries not to cross, some presumed historical anchors, some imagined ties back to the past through ambiguous transmission histories. For otherwise we could start composing our own texts à la Zhuangzi or as we presume that Confucius would have said (like many Chinese poets and philosophers have done before us). When does it stop being intellectual history or history of philosophy and it becomes our own contemporary literature, philosophy, or art inspired by Chinese sources? This valid concern should be assuaged by exploring, with Currie, some limiting conditions of productive speculation.

The first and most fundamental limiting condition, in Currie and Sterelny, claims that “speculation is a vice – is idle – when it is pointless: when it cannot or does not productively direct further inquiry; when it is not used to construct alternative scenarios to guide a search for evidence which would favour one at the expense of the other.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ A second limiting condition is that speculation must be truth-directed, which I understand in connection with the condition that speculation not only generates new ideas but gives us the opportunity to link together our bodies of knowledge and generate new coherent narratives with them. As Currie notices, “the generation of narratives is often highly constrained by surrounding knowledge.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ In this way, speculative generation of new narratives that deviate from the mainstream or traditional understanding of an issue generates new “spaces of plausibility.” Namely, speculative thinking makes room for new ways of determining how things hang together that weren’t plausible under the norms, assumptions, and expectations of previous frameworks. For example, it’s precisely the study of archaeologically excavated manuscripts that has persuaded many scholars that the interpretive framework in terms of authors-books-schools of thought is of limited and dubious applicability for the pre-imperial period. In this way, it becomes not only plausible but also fruitful to read early unprovenienced texts without the urge to assign them the label of, say, Confucian or Daoist, and to further generate a more general understanding of the intellectual and philosophical debates of the early period that isn’t tied to divisions in schools of thought. But in order to generate these new spaces of plausibility, speculative narratives must be coherent with other existing bodies of knowledge (as for example, our current body of knowledge on early Chinese textual formation and textual practices).

A final limiting condition for speculative production of knowledge is that our hypotheses be presented as speculative, namely to be judged in terms of their productivity and not as a theory to be primarily judged on its evidential basis. Whether it is with unprovenienced manuscripts that have lost their “habitats” or contexts of discovery, scientifically excavated manuscripts whose strips have deteriorated over time and whose intended divisions and continuities are not self-evident, or with received texts for which evidence regarding authorship, contexts of creation, use, transmission, and circulation may be forever lost (unless new archaeological excavations bring it to light), the guiding methodological principle should be full transparency to ourselves and to our readers about our own working assumptions. The transparency in admitting a hypothesis as speculative shifts the aims of an investigation and the materials’ affordances that may be identified and utilized for the production of knowledge.Footnote ¹⁴² Such transparency becomes even more of a methodological stepping stone to ensure the validity of our scholarship in the case of unprovenienced materials, where we face a radical lack of material and historical evidence to support our knowledge claims.

Extrinsic Factors: Ethical Issues

The second set of factors that we need to consider when making the decision whether to use unprovenienced materials in our research are extrinsic to scholarship itself insofar as they regard ethical issues that arise from the use of artifacts that may have been looted and trafficked. Problematizing the distinction that I establish between intrinsic and extrinsic sets of factors, Foster has pointed out that the intrinsic methodological issues previously discussed also carry ethical bearing for scholars. This is certainly the case, insofar as many scholars consider themselves obliged to abide by valid and appropriate methodological principles in their research (principles regarding transparency, charity, authenticity, etc.) due to our responsibility toward knowledge production. What I have characterized as intrinsic and extrinsic factors overlap in the sense of scholars’ moral responsibility toward the creation of knowledge discussed in the previous section (intrinsic-methodological) and the protection of our cultural heritage that we discuss in this section (extrinsic-ethical). Nevertheless, there is an aspect of what I characterize as extrinsic factors leading to ethical issues that escapes the range of the methodological discussions previously raised: the extent to which our decisions as scholars may affect other people’s lives beyond the realm of the production, reception, and protection of knowledge.

An important problem raised in this regard is that looting entails the destruction of our cultural heritage. Looters are rarely concerned with the conservation and protection of the past; whether due to lack of time, skill, expertise, or interest, they often destroy, lose, or misplace important data that professional archaeologists would have been capable to protect and conserve.Footnote ¹⁴³ Renfrew and others have argued that the looting and its associated destruction of potential knowledge will continue unless museums and other purchasing institutions adopt regulations not to purchase unprovenienced artifacts, for the trafficking of antiquities, much as any other type of commerce, is a question of supply and demand.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

As long as there is a market for looted artifacts, there will be looters making a living thanks to this market. The question is to what extent scholars play a role in this market. Do we have the capacity to affect the unfolding of the looting market dynamics? Brodie, Renfrew, Goldin, and others have argued that scholars who use unprovenienced materials in their research indeed encourage further looting.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ As long as scholars have an interest in and are willing to work with unprovenienced materials, institutions might have an incentive to continue purchasing looted artifacts. According to this view, we scholars are ultimately responsible for, or at least complicit with, the looting and the destruction of the cultural heritage, as a representative sector within the target group of stakeholders who benefit from the trafficking of looted materials.

Foster has counterargued that, in weighing between two types of losses – the losses of the cultural heritage that will presumably continue to be suffered in the future by incentivizing looting and the losses we would suffer by neglecting looted artifacts that are already available – the second outweighs the first. He applies the concept of rescuing from salvage archaeology – salvaging what has been spoiled to preserve and learn from it as much as possible – and concludes that choosing not to study these materials would incur an act of destruction of knowledge comparable to the looters’ act.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The morality of salvaging what has already been spoiled would be hard to deny if this were an isolated case. The problem is that, if we accept the hypothesis that the rescuing of looted artifacts leads to future lootings, salvaging creates an extended cycle of spoiled material and intellectual data in need of salvaging. Foster’s argument could be qualified as conservative insofar as it accepts an inimical status quo (looting and destruction of cultural heritage) and devises a strategy to minimize its harmful effects (rescuing) rather than proposing a solution to change the status quo (e.g., disincentivize looting). From an ethical perspective, an obvious objection to his argument would be to acknowledge that sometimes we need to accept a temporary harm, loss, or disadvantage, or forfeit goods, in order to enact change and enable a long-term collective benefit in the future. Some may argue that scholars must temporarily endure a partial loss of the cultural heritage and the knowledge production it affords in order to end looting and eventually be able to protect all of our cultural heritage.

That said, one may question the impact of scholarship on incentivizing the illegal market on antiquities, which in my view makes for a solid argument in favor of using unprovenienced materials in scholarly research. As Foster also remarks, there are many consumers of looted artifacts beyond researchers, such as galleries and private collectors, so the looting and the illegal market would certainly continue to flourish even if scholars did not study questionable artifacts. As Davis has argued with the market on Cambodian art, responsibility to regulate imports must lie with purchasing entities and countries, not with the country where the looting is taking place and much less with individual actors such as the final consumer, given the demonstrated unequal levels of impact or lack thereof between these parties.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Scholars are arguably the least responsible agents in incentivizing looting, where responsible is understood as having an obligation to do something due to one’s actions having an impact on the course of events. There will always be buyers of looted artifacts and intermediaries and channels for looted artifacts to make their way into the hands of interested buyers of antiquities, even if scholars decided not to study these materials and even if countries and institutions imposed harsh regulations. The impact of scholars’ research on unprovenienced materials is not proven, and it might be quite inconsequential, which is why Foster calls for devising better ways to measure our impact on looting, and to track changes in looting and damage to cultural heritage. Generating data and knowledge on these areas is imperative to inform our decision.

When a scholar decides to individually refrain from using unprovenienced materials, this must be understood as a demonstration of principles or a personal protest against what one may deem unethical or illicit activity. This is a legitimate individual choice of no consequence for the illegal market of antiquities. As ethical actors, we all continuously make compromises, choosing which principles to upheld and which ones to bracket. We may tolerate the exploitation of Chinese workers so that we can enjoy our iPhones and yet declare ourselves unable to bear the suffering of animals in factory farming and opt for veganism. When merely individual, these stances rarely have an impact beyond the person who thus chooses to live their life. And importantly, these personal choices cannot be elevated to universal ethical norms, since they may bring (unexpected and/or unintended) consequences that, evaluated from a different perspective or set of criteria, make the solution worse than the problem. Think, for example, of the research showing that plant-based food doesn’t necessarily have a smaller environmental footprint, or the unintended but sometimes disastrous consequences of avoiding the purchase of certain products based on fair-trade criteria.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Moreover, if the role of scholars incentivizing the trafficking of artifacts via their research in these materials is indeed marginal, Foster’s salvaging argument gains renewed weight: in the face of the incapacity of our scholarly choices to stop the destruction of the cultural heritage, rescuing what has been spoiled certainly outweighs the intellectual benefits of holding a principled attitude. In this regard, a further argument in favor of studying unprovenienced manuscripts in particular is that specialized scholarly interests may incentivize the rescue and preservation of these ancient texts, which, without an academic market, probably wouldn’t be salvaged in nonprofessional and illegal archaeological excavations, in favor of retrieving art objects, which enjoy a much larger and profitable market.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ While our refraining from studying unprovenienced materials doesn’t help the cause against looting, our studying them once authenticated in transparent ways does have a positive impact in the world. Given our current understanding of the dynamics of the looting market, it’s clear that scholars should continue studying unprovenienced materials, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t demand change at a different level.

Indeed, if people will always be interested in purchasing antiquities, there will always be looters. The most effective way to minimize the major negative effects of looting (the destruction of the cultural heritage) while not harming local economies is to regulate the extraction of material goods. If we want to end looting as the type of illegal and destructive activity that it is today all around the world, measures such as regulations at the level of purchasing laws, punitive measures against looters or buyers, or attempting to disincentivize looting by not studying unprovenienced materials are not enough. Governments must first activate the broken local economies that drive large numbers of people to earn their livelihood through risky and dangerous illegal activities.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ As Foster also emphasizes, we need to understand the social realities that allow for looting.

There is something painfully hypocritical about placing blame in the looters as the perpetrators of a public harm that we academics and experts are responsible (and supposedly capable) to end. Looters are often the victims of corrupt and unequal socioeconomic systems, while they are just as legitimate inheritors of the past as we scholars are. In this regard, Zimmerman has noticed that, while archaeologists claim to act as stewards on behalf of the public, this public is far from homogeneous and may contain members who “have substantially different views of stewardship of the past than archaeologists.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ We must ask the question what public we intend to benefit by stopping looting. Scarre cites the example of the Umatilla tribe, who thinks that the only way to treat their remains with respect is to rebury them, against archaeologists who want to retrieve them and store them in museums. The public also contains individuals and companies with socioeconomic interests such as building a school or a business in a site for the immediate and long-term benefit of the local community, which they judge to be more pressing and important than the preservation of the past.Footnote ¹⁵² Scarre calls our attention to the fact that it’s difficult if not impossible to reconcile all interests. Even though he doesn’t seem to be thinking about the looters themselves at all, aren’t looters also legitimate part of the public? Aren’t the interests and priorities that lead to looting also of legitimate concern when considering a broader public engagement with past remains? The harms and benefits of the local communities involved in looting must be central to our considerations, since we are dealing with their lives and the handling of cultural heritage to which they have the most immediate connection (e.g. their own ancestral tombs).

Why should looters not benefit from their inherited past in the way that they need to? What is our claim to ownership of the values that must be upheld and the ways in which the past must be put to use? We may claim that we have a responsibility toward the future humans who will inherit partial and spoiled knowledge because we failed to protect it. Don’t we also, perhaps even more so due to the weight of actuality, have a responsibility toward living humans who are currently oppressed and need a way out of their situations?Footnote ¹⁵³ If we are to demand something from governments of purchasing countries in order to avoid increasing numbers of people joining the business of looting, there’s no reason to beat around the bush. Let’s point to the socioeconomic conditions that encourage looting in local areas, and focus our efforts on the amelioration of these conditions for the people whose lives are therein intertwined. And let’s offer viable alternatives for the communities that rely on looting to make a livelihood.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Would we be willing to actually end looting without providing looters with an alternative career path in order to support their families? Reflecting on the illegal hunting and trafficking of African animals, Zimbabwean zoologist Muposhin complains that “Zimbabwe is on its knees because of economic turndown, yet the international community expects our poor country to look after elephants and lions when we can’t even feed our nation.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ And he adds, “No one is coming to the table to say, ‘Yes, we want you to stop this hunting, but here is a budget and an alternative plan you can follow instead.’”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In our case, such an alternative is the regulation of looters as licit excavators of material goods. It has been proven in different trafficking markets that prohibitions and penalizations work much less efficiently than regulations and legalizations.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Following with our parallel of the market of hunting and/or trafficking African animals (or parts of them, such as elephants’ tusks), Namibia and Zimbabwe report better conservation and growing lion populations, respectively, as a result of regulating hunting as opposed to attempting to stop it altogether.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ In African countries with regulated hunting, legal hunting provides “crucial benefits for rural communities and conservation.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Indeed, should hunting be completely halted, it’s expected that Zimbabwe would lose a quarter of its elephant population.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Going back to looting, a regulated market of licit extraction of material goods, where looters become legal workers and there’s access to basic conservation training could provide a crucial incentive for locals to protect archaeological sites in order to make a livelihood.

Mentioning the case of the Lord of Sipán excavation in Perú, in our discussions Chao remarked that one strategy archaeologists have employed to curb looting on the ground level is to bring local communities into the archaeological process with dedicated programs of education and training so locals have a deeper connection with archaeologists in their communities and develop a sense of duty toward preserving the finds in their lands. The Moche mummies (Lords of Sipán) excavation seems to have been fruitful in creating within the local community a sense of responsibility and ownership such that destruction through looting is deterred. Beyond building a sense of obligation toward the protection of a shared past, Foster remarks, locals must be given substantial financial incentives and a share in the profits and opportunities that legal archaeology brings to the community. More radically, in my view, looters themselves should be retrained, protected, and compensated as legal workers if we are to provide them with a legal professional alternative and fully disincentivize the illegal extraction of material goods. There must ultimately be more benefit (not only necessarily financial, but also financial) in becoming a legal worker than in looting.

The Shenzi 慎子 already made this argument during the Warring States period (ca. fourth century BCE): if you want to get the best out of people, make them work for their own sakes, adapting to their needs, as opposed to forcing them to accommodate to yours. The relevant Shenzi passage reads:

If we want to prevent the harmful effects of looting, we need to provide an alternative to the many local communities that have adapted to rely on it to cope with their inimical socioeconomic conditions. By giving them an incentive to protect all of the archaeological past instead of destroying it while seeking for the most profitable pieces, we all win. Meanwhile, there is no substantial ethical reason scholars should collectively adopt as a norm not studying unprovenienced materials. Not studying these materials produces more harm than benefit, given that the incentive our research creates for reinforcing looting is so minimal within the complex and multilayered illicit art market. If we are concerned about the loss of cultural heritage and wish to have an impact on the development of the looting market, we scholars must think beyond purely scholarly choices and use our voices to recommend and instigate political actions.