In a Box: The case of the ossuary and the rules of archeology.

The final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark shows workers boxing the Ark of the Covenant and wheeling it into the middle of an impossibly huge warehouse -- an object of incomprehensible significance is lost forever. It's a bit of ironic humor at the end of a rollicking movie.

What's not funny, however, is that the same fate might have awaited the most interesting Biblical object to surface in some time, a first- century ossuary with a tantalizing inscription: "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." If these words are authentic, they represent the earliest historical reference to Jesus outside of the Bible. And yet the most important professional organizations for scholars in the field of Biblical history have policies that ban them from studying the object or even acknowledging its existence.

That's because the ossuary -- a limestone box that might have housed the bones of James -- emerged from the antiquities market rather than an archeological excavation. Somebody had looted it and sold it. Robbing ancient sites is illegal everywhere, but it is not always against the law to traffic in old objects with a shadowy past. About 15 years ago, an Israeli collector of antiquities bought the James ossuary for a modest price. He didn't know of its importance until recently, when he let French epigraphist Andre Lemaire take a close look. Lemaire's conclusions vouching for its authenticity were released on October 21, and they have gripped the imagination of Christians (and others) around the globe.

The Archaeological Institute of America and the American Schools of Oriental Research would prefer that they hadn't. The AIA and ASOR publish the most influential scholarly journals in their field and host the most important conferences. They also have rules against taking note of objects that lack a legitimate provenance -- these items can't be written about in their publications or discussed at their meetings, at least not until an unaffiliated journal has explored it first, breaking the embargo. It conveys a bizarre sense of moral purity, not unlike refusing to open a Playboy centerfold but peeking after it's been displayed. More critical, though, is that this attitude threatens to deprive us of real knowledge about the past.

Everybody who cares about the study of history agrees that the looting of archeological sites is a menace. There is nothing new about it. Ancient objects are looted because people and museums want to own them, and a robust trade in antiquities has arisen to meet these desires. But "the field of archeology is substantially injured by people who loot," says Patty Gerstenblith, a law professor at DePaul University and a former trustee of the AIA. "Collectors and dealers provide the incentive to engage in this practice." Colin Renfrew, a prominent archeologist at Cambridge, is even more blunt: "Collectors are the real looters."

In 1985, the Getty Museum bought a 2,500-year-old Greek statue without a provenance for an estimated $10 million. Does injecting so much cash into the antiquities trade actually promote looting? Surely it does. Yet there's no easy way to suppress it -- and the hope that it might be eliminated is not realistic. The notion that a scholarly boycott can have any impact is sheer fantasy.

Items of unusual interest inevitably appear in the marketplace. In 1947, a Bedouin boy went searching for a lost goat in the hills near Qumran. He didn't find his goat, but he did come across a cave full of ancient manuscripts. In Bethlehem, he and a friend hocked a few of them for about $14. Other caves were eventually found to contain more than 800 manuscripts -- and today the Dead Sea Scrolls are recognized as the most important cache of Hebrew and Aramaic documents ever uncovered. The Israeli government now owns most of them, and they are available for scholars to study -- but only because a kid looking to make a buck (or a shekel) looted them and a few buyers knew they were valuable.

Archeologists would much rather find objects in the ground. For them, the context of a site is often more important than its content. "A piece of charcoal might be of greater importance than a hoard of gold coins," Avner Raban of the University of Haifa has written. Scholars want to know all sorts of things: How were the objects arranged, where did human hands last touch them, what's that charcoal doing there? Archeologists look for answers when they conduct scientific excavations. Just as a new car loses value the moment it leaves the lot, ancient objects lose archeological value when they're moved. Looters simply grab and run, which also diminishes the worth of a site as a whole: It is no longer a pristine conduit for information about the past. Imagine if the ossuary box had been discovered during a proper dig. There might have been bones inside. "Maybe somebody could have done a facial reconstruction of James, or even a DNA analysis," notes Larry Herr of the Canadian University College in Alberta. (Armenian Christians claim that James's bones rest in their Jerusalem cathedral.)

An archeologist didn't uncover the ossuary, so opportunities to learn more about it are gone. It will also have permanent doubters. According to one theory, the box itself is old but the inscription phony. "The only way to guarantee something's genuine is to dig it up," says Ellen Herscher, a Washington, D.C.-based archeologist affiliated with the AIA. Adds Gerstenblith, the DePaul professor, "The box [by itself] really doesn't tell us much we didn't already know because most people accept the historicity of Jesus."

It may be unfortunate that professionals did not excavate the ossuary, but it is fortunate that the thing exists at all. The precise relationship between Jesus and James is an old debate. Protestants tend to think they shared the same parents; Roman Catholic theologians, sticking to their belief in Mary's perpetual virginity, have suggested that Jesus and James were cousins. The words on the box would seem to cast doubt on this latter interpretation, though it remains possible that Jesus and James were children of the same father but not the same mother (which is what the Eastern Orthodox Church teaches). At any rate, it gives scholars and the rest of us plenty to mull over.

But for an unconventional channel, the public might have remained in the dark about the box. Andre Lemaire published his research in Biblical Archaeology Review, a maverick magazine that ignores the dictates of the AIA and ASOR and presents scholarly information to interested lay readers. Its editor, Hershel Shanks, abhors looting -- as well as the attitudes of the professional organizations. "Many academics like to vilify the antiquities market," says Shanks. "They need to realize that there are bad collectors and good collectors. The bad collectors are the ones who buy things and stash them in their basements. The good ones open their collections to researchers and eventually donate what they own to public institutions."

Demonizing collectors as a class simply increases the incentives for the good ones to turn bad and the bad ones to stay that way. It's no accident that the owner of the ossuary has chosen to remain anonymous. He's trying to be a good collector by letting the world know what he owns, but he also doesn't want to be attacked as a grave robber by academic archeologists.

Scorn for the antiquities trade may actually complicate the problems archeologists want to address. If the marketplace were legitimized, more collectors would conduct their business in the public eye. That would hurt forgers because buyers would place a greater emphasis on authenticated items.

The real answer is not simply to tolerate the market but to embrace it by permitting the direct sale of artifacts to the public. This is apostasy among many professional archeologists, but the benefits would be enormous. If they were allowed to sell some of what they dug up, they would have more money for the protection of existing sites and the exploration of new ones. Most looters are peasants trying to earn a little extra money; they might be just as glad to be hired as diggers at excavation sites.

This would solve another problem. Museums around the world are running short on space to store all the items that archeologists unearth. The University of Arizona museum, for instance, has 20,000 pieces of pottery kept out of sight in two old buildings that lack proper environmental controls. "About a third of our collection has been damaged, and there are collections elsewhere that have been completely destroyed by this same process," said museum official Miriam Nickerson in the Arizona Daily Star. The situation is even more desperate in developing countries. It would make sense for them to discriminate between which objects must be held and which might be sold.

It's been said that archeologists handle priceless objects for poor pay. If they could attach a few price tags, though, we'd all wind up the richer for it.