Carlos Museum ‘sleuth’ solves mysteries of ancient artifacts

Several times a year, Annie Shanley is invited to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to help customs officials determine if artifacts they’ve confiscated are ancient objects, brought illegally from their homelands, or mere replicas.

Shanley has developed expert knowledge of the world of antiquities trafficking through her roles as associate registrar and provenance researcher at Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum.

That expertise comes in handy during her airport advisory visits. 

“It’s so much fun,” she says. “And something that really impresses me [about the customs officials] is their earnestness to learn more about these objects, to identify, ‘How could I tell that something’s fake?’”

In a case of sculptures from Cameroon that resembled culturally significant artifacts, “Some were broken, and the wood was brightly colored and smelled fresh,” she says. “So we knew they were made recently for the tourist market.”

And a box of ceramics that looked to be from ancient Greece?

“The pigment and design were flaking off in little, thin slices,” Shanley says. “That’s not how ancient pottery would behave.” 

Other objects prove to be authentic. That’s when authorities step in, to determine who is culpable — and to return an artifact to its homeland.

Her expertise landed Shanley on the first episode of season 10 of “To Catch a Smuggler,” a reality drama on Disney and Hulu, about illegal items found by airport customs officials. (No spoilers here!)

Sometimes, her investigations at the Carlos Museum uncover their own intriguing stories.

Shanley spends her days delving into the long lives of the items in the museum’s collection, from their origins at the hands of ancient artisans, through their excavations hundreds of years later — and beyond. 

As she works with experts in the Emory community and around the globe to learn more, she adds to what is known about how antiquities move through the world today, through both legal channels and illegal. 

A tale of international smuggling 

The Carlos Museum’s display label for a shiny black vessel known as the Apulian volute-krater explains not only its ancient history, but its more recent trafficking misadventures.

A krater is a large, two-handled ceramic vase. This one hails from Apulia, a region in southern Italy once colonized by ancient Greeks. “Volute,” meaning “spiral” or “scroll-like,” refers to its dramatic curving handles. 

The two-foot-tall vase bears painted illustrations of human figures that tell an ancient Greek story otherwise largely lost to time. That makes it an ideal vessel for cross-disciplinary study at the museum.

For years, photos of the krater were featured in banners and postcards advertising the Carlos Museum. 

“She was literally the poster child,” says Shanley, who refers to every object in the museum’s collections with a tender care that often resembles personification. 

The Carlos’ purchase of the vessel in 1994 “was thoughtfully considered for its time,” she says, noting that many scholars had written academic papers about it. 

An art dealer told the museum that a well-known private Swiss collector had cared for the krater since the 1960s. 

But in 2021, the Italian Ministry of Culture contacted the Carlos Museum with news. Two Polaroid photos of the krater had been found amid documents that authorities had confiscated from Giacomo Medici. 

Medici was an Italian antiquities dealer convicted in 2004 of smuggling stolen ancient artifacts. His arrest yielded evidence of a sophisticated trafficking network, including some 3,600 images of items that authorities spent years sifting through. 

If the krater was a stolen artifact, it was a potential bombshell, Shanley recalls thinking.

Poring over correspondence from the original purchase, she saw the name of a man who had served as an agent for the French art dealer the museum had worked with.  “He was still alive. He lived in Europe,” she says.

She emailed him and asked about the krater’s origins. 

“He wrote back immediately,” she recalls, “and said, ‘Oh, yeah. That came from Hydra Gallery in the early 1980s.’ I was floored.”

Hydra Gallery was the antiquities business Medici had co-run. 

“And we realized: The provenance [or backstory about the krater] that we’d been given? That simply wasn’t true,” says Shanley.

The Swiss collectors hadn’t had the krater since the 1960s, contrary to what the dealer had told Carlos Museum. Instead, they had purchased it from the Hydra Gallery in the 1980s. 

In 2023, Shanley and Henry Kim, associate vice provost and director of the Carlos Museum, flew to Italy and met with Italian officials to discuss this and other provenance cases. 

The facts were clear: Italy was the krater’s rightful owner.

If an item is found to have been illegally excavated or removed from its owner or nation of origin, then the Carlos Museum returns it, a process known as “repatriation.” 

The museum transferred ownership of the krater to Italy. Officials there allowed it to remain at the Carlos on loan.  

“We want to tell everybody about it because it’s an important lesson,” says Shanley. “We’re learning about our collection. And as a university museum, one of our jobs is to tell people, ‘Yes, there is theft and trafficking. Here is how we work to avoid it, and here is how we address it when we do uncover it.’”

For Shanley, a professional museum sleuth, no case is ever truly closed. 

“You never know what new sources will be uncovered that lead you to reassess something you have,” she says. “As long as the objects are still around, their stories are being written.”

‘Falling in love’ with provenance

As an undergraduate student at Bucknell University, Shanley says she wanted to be Clarice Starling, the mystery-solving FBI rookie from the book and film “The Silence of the Lambs.” 

“But then I figured out pretty quickly, that’s not really what forensic psychologists do,” she says.

After Shanley graduated with a degree in psychology and a minor in classics and ancient Mediterranean studies, a professor suggested she go on an archeological excavation in Egypt. 

The trip was a revelation for Shanley, who had read a picture book about Queen Nefertiti on repeat as a child.

She earned a PhD in Egyptian art and archaeology at Emory in 2015. As a graduate student, she worked in the Carlos Museum’s registrar’s office, which tracks and manages its objects. 

“I fell in love with researching and caring for the collection,” says Shanley, who became the museum’s provenance researcher in 2020. 

It’s rare for a university museum to designate a single person to study its objects’ complete histories. But Kim has made provenance a top priority at the Carlos Museum, and he calls Shanley’s work an “essential” part of that. 

Stricter standards, more knowledge

Between 2020 and 2023, Shanley led the creation of a searchable, illustrated online catalogue featuring detailed information about every item in the museum. 

The digital catalogue helped a team of Danish archaeologists work fast to reunite a fragment of a ceramic cup from ancient Sparta with five matching pieces housed at the Carlos. That connection also demonstrated that the Carlos fragments had been looted from the archaeological site. An exhibit at the museum, “One Broken Cup and Three Fanta Cans,” on view through 2029, tells the fragments’ unlikely story. 

“I’m really fortunate to be able to do this work and to do it at Emory,” says Shanley. She credits the museum’s successes in provenance work to “the trust the administration places in staff as professionals to make decisions.”

Today, the Carlos Museum’s standards for acquisition are stricter than they were when it acquired either the krater or the ceramic fragments. And that has led to some complex conversations.

“We have a lot of really great donors and supporters, and we have had to tell people that, ‘Yes, 20 years ago, we would have taken these objects from you, but now we’re not able to,’” says Shanley. “We try to take it as an opportunity to educate our members and our donors so if they are still collecting, they can do so more responsibly.”

“At the end of the day,” she adds, “we’re all here because we love these objects and we love the stories they’re able to tell. Protecting them and sharing their history is what we’re here to do.”