Archaeologists everywhere lament the looting of objects and even the legal collecting of objects that separates them from cultural context, the surrounding evidence. A museum in Tulsa is filled with jumbled Native American artifacts, some very beautiful, that were dug out of mounds in Illinois and elsewhere, thus forever separated from their contexts, and all but useless now in reconstructing the native history. Indeed, they are knicknacks. When archaeologists take something from a dig they always note very carefully its exact location in the dig, and can reconstruct the whole site with maps, etc. that can reveal the genealogy. Art museums are usually dealing with known works from known contexts. The history of each object is knowable or within reach. But to take an object away from an archaelogical site, without exact mapping, etc., is like tearing a word from a book, making it highly unlikely that it can ever be put read again in its original syntax.
The two types of museums, the archaeological and the art, have different functions and sources, and mostly different types of objects studied for differing purposes. A tiny cylinder seal fragment in the Oriental Institute can be as valued in its collection as El Greco's Assumption is in the Art Institute's. Nothing's skewed except your reasoning on this issue. WC to apply the > word "knickknack" to everything in the collection > of the Oriental Institute of > Chicago -- OUCH!!!! . Such an approach to cultural history > is a bit skewed.
