We welcome you with a mission summary of Present Preservation. Thank you for stopping by!
Present Preservation is devoted to a greater good for the arts and antiquities. We want to provide an open resource for sharing and discussing all that civilization and the arts have afforded us through the centuries. The inherent good in appreciating our human story is the ultimate driving force of this platform. Here’s what you can find:
- World news in trading, trafficking, recovery, and restoration of art and antiquities
- Commentary on the trade – ethics, regulations, and calls for change
- Feature articles on scholars and other leading figures
Who are we? To be honest, I’m just one person. I should tell you I’m not one of our great archaeologists out and about excavating in the field; I’m not a professor in Fine Arts or Historical Preservation; I’m not Indiana Jones. But maybe it’s the single greatest thing that each person, from every walk of life, bears a human connection to what we find in excavations, what we see in museums, and what the story of Homo sapiens has to say for itself through our relics. The “souvenirs” we keep through the ages speak to a raw humanity in each of us – which transcends borders, creed, race, and all else we’ve devised over millennia to segregate identities.
History truly belongs to each of us in all its contexts and origins. It is for this reason and so many others that scholarship and preservation are critical. We owe it to ourselves to learn – from each artwork and artifact we may be so lucky to stumble upon – that each of us is one off-chance in all the infinitely possible ways which personhood can manifest. Neither distance, language, nor color are excuses to feel separated from any chapter in our story.
I hope you can identify and immerse some part of yourself in something you see here. Thanks again!
Present Preservation 