Leading Archeologist Chastised for Publishing Artifacts in Private Collections

Hershel Shanks, 'Leading Archeologist Chastised for Publishing Artifacts in Private Collections' Biblical Archeology Review  23:06, Nov/Dec 1997

Cyprus’s most distinguished archeologist, retired Antiquities Department director Vassos Karageorghis, has been harshly criticized for publishing privately owned artifacts obtained on the antiquities market and lacking known provenances in a catalogue of Cypriot terra-cotta figurines. Karageorghis’s “inclusion of a large amount of material from private collections raises several difficult issues,” declares Ellen Herscher, chair of the Cultural Properties Legislation and Policy Committee of the powerful Archaeological Institute of America, in an extensive review of the Cypriot scholar’s catalogue in a recent issue of the prestigious Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR). 

I presume archeologists would prefer people not to know about how much good collectors can do by saving, preserving and displaying history in their homes. It seems to me that jealousy might also play a large role here.