>
>I suspect that the only way to get WGBH to pay any attention is to get
>someone at
>the Boston Globe or New York Times excited enough to write an article.  Anyone
>have any contacts?
>


Try Brian MacQuarie at the Boston Globe:  617-929-3046, [log in to unmask] (I
think, or [log in to unmask]).  He does a lot on archaeology and works with
the city archaeologist here and may have a sympathetic ear.

I have learned that Antiques Roadshow is being taken over by Skinner
Auction House and the head of Skinner is going to be the new host,
replacing Chris Jussell.  I don't have contact info, but it seems to me,
after watching the most recent episode of Antiques Roadshow during fund
raising here, that it may be the producer who needs to be informed about
such things as the UNESCO convention and so forth.  In the Boston area WGBH
aired a special edition of AR for this month's pledge-raising extravaganza
(didn't we just go through this, with all the dratted combinations of
tenors and riverdancers and self-help nonsense?).  In one segment aimed at
showing us how the producer decides to put an item on the air, one of her
appraisers assured her that he knew he had an authentic item from the site
of Tikal because it had a museum accession number on it!  It seemed likely
it was an accession number from the Yale Peabody Museum, if I heard
rightly.  I think that any archaeological object with a museum accession
number should be something they keep OFF the air given the likelihood it
was stolen or otherwise removed from a legitimate collection, but clearly
this is not an opinion that the road show producers share.

The Antiques Roadshow is the most successful program WGBH has ever aired,
bringing  an unprecedented audience (those of us who like to be informed
about old things and others taking time off from watching Who Wants to Be a
Millionnaire), and it will be a hard nut to crack.  I know some of the
appraisers are great friends of archaeology, but for the most part the
emphasis is on giving the public what it wants.  But public television's
main mission is to educate and enrich in ways beyond the purely financial,
so I think we need to keep hammering away at the importance of grasping
opportunities to fulfill their educational mission.  I suspect that the
effect might be to keep the antiquities evaluations off air if we can be
annoying enough about it.


Mary C Beaudry
Associate Professor
Department of Archaeology
Boston University
675 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215 USA

tel. 617-353-3415
fax 617-353-6800

http://www.bu.edu/archaeology/faculty/beaudry/beaudry.html

Field School in the Outer Hebrides:
http://www.bu.edu/archaeology/faculty/beaudry/fs_heb.html