Sculptures from Djenné (Ethical question)
The two sculptures above are known as part of the Djenne sculptures that were found in the Inland Delta around the Niger River and were produced around the thirteenth to fifteenth century. The sculpture on the left is an archer and the one on the left is a warrior on a horse, although both sculptures have some damage from the years they still are in well condition for their age. These two sculptures are just a few examples of the many that were recovered in this region and there isn't a whole lot of information linked to them.
"Because the majority of these works emerged via market forces during the 1970s and '80s, as opposed to via archaeological excavation, little is known about their original context, their functions, or the populations who produced them. Scholars have little sense of the scope of the corpus or its regional distribution and are at a loss to understand chronological relationships between sculptures." (Dyke, V. Kristina)
Since there isn't much information tied to these sculptures there is obviously a lot up for debate and speculation. When it comes to their purpose and what they might have meant to the artists, we don't and won't know full heartedly. This makes the art that much interesting in my opinion, because everything is up in the air and you can gather several different point of views. Even though all context might be lost with an artifact there are still ways to pull information from it. Doing several tests on the artifacts and cleaning them may produce some newfound context. Obviously if a site has been looted there is no real way to gather history about these sculptures because a huge part of where an object comes from is the archaeological evidence. So once an object is taken from the origin without documentation or any form of studying, you can't learn the true story or history of the piece. Having sculptures like these placed in the art market won't make it any easier for us to learn anything from them as they aren't being studied in the right way.
https://www.scantix.com/series/djenne-terracottas/
https://law.emory.edu/eilr/content/volume-32/issue-3/comments/art-conservation-saving-great-works.html
https://cool.culturalheritage.org/jaic/articles/jaic36-01-004_2.html
I liked this post, it was very interesting, and helped me understand, why somethings, some objects are left without a story to go with them. The fact that there are a numerous amount of these figures, yet no back story is really interesting. Like you said, it does make objects like these cooler to look into because there is little known about them, that fact makes these figures more important.
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