2014 Blogging Archaeology eBook

Lydia (Roosevelt and Luke 2006). The kyathos was removed prior to thesale.The Geddes Sale of AntiquitiesIn 2008 the London auction house Bonhams attracted publicity forone of its upcoming sales by suggesting that a head from a fragmentaryRoman sarcophagus looked like Elvis (Bonhams 2008b). The sale was forthe antiquities collection of the Australian dealer and collector GrahamGeddes. The name Geddes was familiar as it appeared on anannotated copy of a Sotheby’s sale catalogue reproduced in PeterWatson’s Sotheby’s: Inside Story (Watson 1997; see also Gill 2009e, 83-84).A study of the lots revealed that a large number of items, especiallyAthenian and South Italian pots, had passed through Sotheby’s inLondon at exactly the period when Watson had revealed materialspassing through the hands of Medici. The sale itself became moresignificant as it contained an Apulian krater that had passed through thehands of London dealer Robin Symes (see also Watson 2006). Therelevant lots were discussed on “Looting Matters” and on the eve of theauction a number of lots were withdrawn, including the cover piece forthe Bonhams magazine that celebrated the sale. Bonhams wereinterviewed for the press, but they did not appear to acknowledge thattheir due diligence process had failed to identify the link between theGeddes material and the Medici Dossier (Alberge 2008; Bonhams 2008a;Gill 2009e; Gill 2010b).The Impact of BloggingAs objects started to be identified in North American collections itbecame clear that there needed to be consolidated discussions inacademic journals. Christopher Chippindale and I published twodetailed analyses for the objects returned from Boston’s Museum of FineArts and the J. Paul Getty Museum (Gill and Chippindale 2006; Gill andChippindale 2007). One of the pieces that had not been returned to Italywas an Attic red-figured volute-krater in the Minneapolis Institute of Art(Padgett 1983-86 [1991]). By this point I was working closely with ChristosBlogging Archaeology Page 47