Colin Renfrew and the Illicit Incantation Bowls of Iraq. A true archaeology story.

One of our greatest archaeologists has gone to that great dig in the sky. Many are telling stories about him. Here is one that says much about who he was.

University of Cambridge

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The archaeology world is mourning the November 24 death of Colin Renfrew, a giant in the field whose contributions were both broad and deep. Renfrew was one of those scholars who was often right even when he was wrong, in the sense that his thinking about archaeological issues frequently helped to frame critical debates. His arena was prehistory, especially the prehistory of Europe; he is probably best known by the public for his theories about the origins of the Indo-European language family, although his work touched on many other issues as well.

I first encountered Renfrew in the early 1990s, when, as the Paris correspondent for Science, I took an interest in European archaeology and anthropology and covered a number of new discoveries in France and beyond. I read Renfrew’s superb book Before Civilization, about how the radiocarbon dating revolution of the 1950s had overthrown conventional thinking about the chronology of megalithic monuments (like Stonehenge) in Western and Central Europe, showing that they were thousands of years older than previously thought.

Sometime in the middle 1990s, when Science began to indulge my passion for archaeology on a much more regular basis, I contacted Renfrew for comment on a story. He quickly became one of my key sources on articles about prehistory. I saw him often at archaeology meetings; he was always responsive and cordial, and as time went on we became friends.

Renfrew figured heavily in some of my most intensive archaeology coverage, especially in a chapter devoted to archaeological theory in my book about the Neolithic, The Goddess and the Bull, and in pieces I did for Science and for Scientific American about Indo-European language origins—a debate in which his theory that this language family had spread with the rise of farming in the Near East played a central role (even if he may have turned out to be wrong about it.)

Now he is gone, a great loss to the world of archaeology. But his passing means that I can now tell a story that I could not tell while he was still alive, one that I think provides some insights into who he was.

The general practice in journalism is that while a reporter must protect a confidential source while they are still alive—even if it means defying a court and going to jail—once the source has passed their identity can be revealed, as long as no one else (such as a family member) would be harmed by the revelation.

One of Renfrew’s biggest passions was his fight against the looting of archaeological artifacts, which has been a bane to our understanding of many ancient sites. In 2007, Renfrew contacted me and asked if Science would be interested in such a story. It concerned a collection of pottery bowls, called incantation bowls, that were being housed and studied at University College London (UCL.) During the 5th to 8th centuries CE, people living in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) would bury these bowls, inscribed with biblical passages and other incantations in Aramaic, under their houses to ward off evil demons. About 2000 of these bowls exist today in public and private collections.

One of the biggest such collections, which included about 650 bowls, was owned by a Norwegian businessman named Martin Schøyen. Schøyen had loaned the collection to UCL, where it was being studied by two scholars. But beginning in 2003, questions had been raised about the provenance of the bowls, starting with a documentary aired on Norwegian public television that suggested at least some of the incantation bowls had been looted from Iraq during the first Gulf War.

In 2005, UCL set up a committee of inquiry into the matter, appointing three scholars—including Renfrew—to look into it. The committee’s investigation concluded that the bowls most likely were taken out of Iraq illegally sometime after August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Schøyen then apparently acquired them from dealers in London. While the 94-page report found no evidence that Schøyen himself had known they were looted, it sharply criticized UCL for taking custody of the bowls without looking into their provenance.

When Schøyen found out about these conclusions, he sued UCL to get the bowls back. As part of a settlement, UCL agreed not to publish the committee’s report. (All of these events are related in the story I published in the October 26, 2007 issue of Science, for those who have access or can get access to the journal.)

Renfrew, who in 1996 had founded Cambridge University’s Illicit Antiques Research Centre, was of course outraged by the suppression of the report and the details of the committee’s lengthy investigation. So he leaked a copy to me, under the condition that I would not identify him as the source.

But UCL of course knew who had given it to me, especially since Renfrew then agreed to be quoted liberally in my story for Science. He didn’t seem to mind very much that UCL suspected him, as long as he could maintain plausible deniability. UCL’s lawyers immediately wrote to me demanding the return of the report, an email I passed on to Science’s then news editor, Colin Norman, and the journal’s attorneys.

We agreed to return the report to avoid any further legal trouble. But of course I copied the entire thing and kept a copy until fairly recently. I hinted to Colin Norman that I was doing this. He knew me well enough to know that it was the kind of thing I was likely to do. His only response was that he did not want to hear about it.

Renfrew and I had a couple of exchanges about the report over the next year, although I do not recall doing any other articles about the incantation bowls. But in late 2009, I saw a news story reporting that Renfrew—a Conservative who had been named to the House of Lords in 1991—had risen in that body to quote out of the suppressed report. In astonishment, I wrote to Renfrew to ask about it. Here is his reply, dated November 1, 2009, in full.

Dear Michael,

You are quick off the mark!

I was able to make those quotations from the Report under
parliamentary privilege, and they are now in the public domain and can
be quoted.

The full Report is now in the Library of the House of Lords, but I
am not at all sure that this gives it parliamentary privilege. It does
mean that it can be accessed (by appointment) by members of the public,
and they may well be able to make copies.

I suspect, however, that if they quote from it publicly, they may
receive standard letters from Mr. Schoyen's lawyers. I hope nonetheless
that such quotation will occur, since it ought to be in the public
domain. So progress is limited - but it is progress.

Good to hear from you.

All the best.

Sincerely

Colin

Renfrew and I would go on to have many other exchanges, as well as conversations at archaeology meetings, in the years afterwards. He was a man of strong convictions, one who was willing to act on those convictions if he saw the need to.

For reasons that I have documented in numerous articles about misconduct in the sciences (including archaeology and anthropology) in the years since this episode, these are not qualities everyone in the field can claim. That makes Renfrew’s passing an even greater loss.

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