News & Events

UNC Asheville to Host Lecture, “Stealing the Past: Collectors and Museums of the 21st Century”

October 24, 2011

Anthropologist Richard Leventhal will present a lecture titled, “Stealing the Past: Collectors and Museums of the 21st Century,” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, in UNC Asheville’s Ramsey Library. The talk is free and open to the public.

Leventhal will discuss the looting from archaeological sites, churches and museums for sale to collectors and museums in wealthy countries. Leventhal is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Curator of the American Section of the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. He asks, “What would people in the United States say if one day we woke up and found that the Liberty Bell had been stolen and was in a museum of another country?”

This lecture is co-sponsored by the WNC Chapter of the American Institute of Archaeology and UNC Asheville’s Department of Classics. For more information, contact Laurel Taylor at 828.251.6290.