Existential Themes Take 3
Reinvention: Los Angeles and Greece
I was harvesting some late cherry tomatoes and basil in the garden, wondering whether the resurgence of the cucumber plants that followed the hot and sudden Indian summer would yield any fruit, when I saw something flapping in a slow and languorous fashion. It was a monarch, alighting on some butterfly weed. I was delighted and spoke to the monarch in the voice I reserve for apologizing when I mistakenly break a plant, interact with babies, or speak to our cat. However, the thrill of seeing the monarch is, like so many of my interactions with the natural world in recent years, tempered by a hollow and unpleasant sensation: an ominous thud or sudden weight in my stomach and chest. I can’t disconnect the joy from the knowledge that the monarchs, like so many animal populations, is plummeting, careening toward extinction. The present is obliterating the past.
Los Angeles
We returned recently from Los Angeles, a city that has been reincarnated so many times that most of us don’t know who first populated the area. Amidst the unrelenting sunshine and vast expanses of concrete surrounding our rented apartment I spied a monarch sailing by, investigating the plants in the garden next door. Our building’s rear garden was gone. In the 1930’s and 40’s developers erected this triplex with an architectural nod to the Spaniards, who had a controlling interest in Los Angeles for a time, and laid down a concrete driveway next to the building and all the way around the back in one long ribbon. In homage to the mighty automobile you could drive immediately alongside someone’s kitchen or bedroom and pull right into the broad garage assigned to your apartment unit. Greenery was relegated to a small embankment in front of the building. The squat house next door, with a deep garden and planting suited to the arid climate, was the exception that lured the monarch.
Do the monarchs know they are at the end of the line? Did the Native Americans who populated the great broad basin of Los Angeles and the Channel Islands know? For about 10,000 years they hunted on land and sea, gathered food, and traded with other tribes before their rapid demise — over less than a century — at the hands of European explorers and conquerors, Mexico, and then the United States. Flora and fauna were plentiful and the Los Angeles River and ocean were generous. The Kizh (pronounced “Keech” or People of the Willow Houses as they called themselves, also known by others as Tongva, and named Gabrieleño or Gabrielino by the Spanish after the nearby San Gabriel Mission) numbered 5,000 to 10,000 in some 31 villages. 1 (see notes for further details)
The beginning of the end occurred in October of 1542. Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Spanish conquistador, pulled two ships into San Pedro Bay, part of the current port of Los Angeles. Cabrillo found the Kizh settlement of Yangna and named the area “Baya de los Fumos”or Bay of Smokes, due to smoke from the hearth fires settling in the basin, one of the frequent wildfires, or the native practice of controlled burning to stimulate the growth of grasses and herbs, invite elk and deer, and increase the acorn harvest.
Cabrillo may have appeared friendly to the Kizh, but he was well versed in annihilation — a sheep in wolves clothing. A quarter of a century earlier, Cabrillo had helped conquer Cuba, then worked alongside Hernando Cortès attacking the Aztecs in their capital of Veracruz, Mexico, bringing about the downfall of the empire. It turned out subjugating the Aztecs was not all that difficult… disease dealt the worst blow: 15 million Aztecs, 80% of the population, succumbed to enteric fever due to the Spaniard’s importation of Salmonella. Cabrillo seemed to have an immense appetite and skill for conquest. After annihilating the Aztecs, he managed plantations, shipyards, and gold mines in Guatemala and Honduras. Enslaving local men and gifting the women and girls to his soldiers and sailors, he wasn’t above “going native” (producing a number of children with a Guatemalan woman before importing a Spanish wife).
The Spanish voyage along the California and Oregon coast was propelled by fear of losing the colonial competition to the British Empire, dreams of untold riches, an insatiable quest for gold, and the search for a Northwest Passage. In many ways, not much has changed. Each new wave of arrivals to Los Angeles is chasing a dream of fame and fortune. Cultures clash and mix, invention and reinvention continue, and the past is often buried, sanitized, or simply forgotten.
Rumblings of conquest grew louder in 1602 when SebastianVizcaíno, a highly successful Basque merchant adventurer, sailed up the coast from Mexico, exploring, mapping, and misrepresenting the suitability of the Monterey Bay as a shelter for the Manila galleons. His hyperbolic characterization of the bay was an effort to procure the lucrative command of these trading ships that sailed once or twice annually between the Philippines and Mexico. 2
It took more than two hundred years, a drop in the bucket in the history of the Kizh, from Cabrillo’s 1542 appearance until Los Angeles was overtaken by Spain. The Spanish were efficient. Similar to the planned communities that blanket the L.A. basin today, the Spanish crown initiated a scheme to colonize Alta California by establishing missions, presidios (military bases), and pueblos (towns).
Prior to setting up shop in southern or “Alta” California (so named because it was to the north), the Spanish had been busy in Baja California (now Mexico), where the Jesuits had built 17 missions in 70 years dispersed over 500 miles. The heyday of the Jesuits, however, was brief. King Charles of Spain, worried about the Jesuits’ accumulated wealth and influence, enlisted Gaspar de Portolà to assist with their ouster and the installation of the Franciscans. Portolà, as governor of Las Californias (Spain’s largely unexplored territory that included California, Baja California, and other parts of Mexico), was sent to occupy Alta California by land and sea, with Vizcaino’s fabled Bay of Monterey the ultimate goal.
In 1769 the Portolà expeditions (three ships plus two horse and mule trains) proceeded northward from Mexico like a slow-growing cancer. Two of the three ships reached San Diego with only a third of the crew surviving scurvy. Portolà himself travelled overland. Among the 64 accompanying Portolà were Father Junipero Serra and missionary Juan Crespi (who kept a famous diary), about two dozen light cavalrymen, 15 Catalonian volunteers, a military engineer/cartographer, a surgeon, and 15 Christianized Indians from the Baja missions (29 having deserted en route to San Diego). They explored widely up and down the coast and busted the myth of the suitability of the Monterey Bay.
Over the course of 64 years, Portolà and Junipero Serra erected a string of 21 missions from San Diego to Sonoma. Unwilling to risk too many Spanish lives and keen to avoid a repeat performance of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt by the Native Americans (400 colonists killed, 2,000 fled), they proceeded surgically by installing merely 2 priests and half a dozen soldiers per mission. With so little manpower, the Native Americans supplied the slave labor needed for each mission to become self-sufficient as well as sustain the presidios. 3, 4
Recently, our family took the long drive south from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, our vehicle stuffed with the belongings my youngest son would need in his college dorm. I was mesmerized by the dry plains stretching endlessly to the horizon, ringed in by undulating hills with golden summer pelts of dry grass. I watched small vortices of dust form miniature tornadoes on the dirt tracks at the base of the hills. For miles, a vast army of almond trees, pistachio trees, citrus trees, and grape vines marched in formation across the landscape — wondrous, foreign, and completely incongruous with the surroundings. The missions, it turns out, were the first to introduce large-scale agriculture to California.
In three short years the first four missions were completed in present day California: San Diego in 1769, Carmel in 1770, and in 1771 Jolon in Monterey County and San Gabriel (Misión de San Gabriel Arcángel) in Los Angeles. The San Gabriel Mission in Los Angeles was the most successful at converting the Native Americans, conducting no fewer than 25,000 baptisms, almost 400 annually, over its 63-year reign of terror.
From the Franciscan perspective, the missions were providing a divinely ordained service to the native peoples. En route to Monterey in 1775, Friar Pedro Font wondered what sin the Yuma had committed to deserve living “with such infelicity and unhappiness, in such nakedness and misery”, “being distinguished from beasts only by possessing the bodily or human form, but not by their deeds.” The Franciscans had the solution: salvation through conversion. As Font wrote “But considering that the mercy of God is infinite, and that so far as it is His part, He wishes that all men should be saved, and should come to the knowledge of the eternal truths, therefore I cannot do less than piously surmise, in favor of those poor Indians, that God must have some special providence hidden from our curiosity, to the end that they may be saved, and that not all of them shall be damned.” In a 1776 account by Font, alongside descriptions of the mission Indians’ physical characteristics (the women were “rather ugly”), he claimed that only volunteers were converted. According to Font, “the Indians are accustomed to live in the fields and hills like beasts” and the fathers would insist that Indians who “wish to be Christians” cease going to the forest. This benign depiction bore no resemblance to reality. 5
The missions were detainment centers at best, concentration camps at worst. Many of the priests, including Junipero Serra, who was sainted in 2015, routinely meted out physical punishment and torture. One of Junipero Serra’s letters to his superior celebrates the mission’s “success” as follows: “In the midst of all our little troubles, the spiritual side of the missions is developing most happily. In [Mission] San Antonio, there are simultaneously two harvests, at one time, one for wheat, and of a plague among the children, who are dying.” More Native American deaths meant more souls ascending to heaven.
I have visited few missions in California, mostly because of my lack of resonance with Catholicism. But I have appreciated the architecture, the gardens, even some of the artwork. At no point did I think of the visits as a pilgrimage to a site where widespread genocide took place. I knew of the forced conversion of Native Americans and their mistreatment, but not the full extent of the nightmare. I wonder at my ignorance and worry about the generations of misinformed California children. 6
The town of Los Angeles was born a decade after the San Gabriel Mission was established. In 1781 governor Felipe de Neve erected “El Pueblo de la Reina de los Ángeles” using Indian mission labor. De Neve had considerable difficulty enlisting recruits to establish the settlement. He finally succeeded with the importation of 44 adults and their children from New Spain (Mexico), a racial and ethnic stew typical of the time (the recruits were categorized as mulattoes, Indians, mestizos, Spaniards, and Africans). Every time I address snail mail to my son, a freshman in the UCLA dorms on De Neve Drive, I cringe. I sincerely doubt that any of the students have the foggiest notion of the historical baggage tied to the name.
In the 52 years that elapsed between the establishment of the first Spanish mission and presidio and Mexican rule, thousands of years of indigenous California life, land, and history almost vanished; 37,000 Native Californians perished at the missions, 15,000 of them from disease. In 1821 there were brief glimmers of hope for the native peoples when Mexico threw off the Spanish yoke and, in a seemingly beneficial development, granted native peoples citizenship. When Mexico secularized the missions in 1834, most Franciscans fled, taking with them the mission valuables. For the next 12 years, the missions were sold off and looted, and mission pastures were carved up into large land grants or “ranchos” averaging 22,000 acres. The ranchos were awarded predominantly to white settlers, trappers, and hunters who were migrating west and to well-heeled, well-connected Mexican immigrants; a rare few Native Americans obtained grants to their ancestral lands. Beef and cattle hides drove the new economy and the engine that drove the missions also drove the Mexican ranchos: Native American labor. With their society in tatters and villages destroyed, most Native American converts had difficulty supporting themselves. Those who stole cattle for food were killed by Mexican ranchers.
Who knew that the Mexican rancho period and perhaps even some aspects of Spanish imperial rule would look good in comparison with the horrors that were to come for the Native Californians? The United States expanded westward, spurred by a population explosion and rising immigration. “Manifest Destiny” was invoked to justify the takeover (apparently God had ordained the spread of U.S. “democracy” and capitalism across North America), just as the divine mission of the Spanish to convert the native “heathens” or “barbarians” obscured the international game of economic chess underlying colonialism. Fearing immense potential losses with westward expansion, Mexico attacked the United States. The resulting Mexican-American war, waged from 1846 to 1848, led to Mexico’s defeat and the loss of a third of its territories.
Under U.S. occupation, the indigenous people suffered full-fledged genocide. We have never owned up to our barbaric past, never made meaningful reparations. In 1851, California’s first governor, Peter H. Burnett, noted in his second State of the State address “…a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct…” Of the 18 treaties negotiated with Native Americans between 1851 and 1852 (two of which were in Southern California), none were ratified by the senate. 7 The California legislature and public believed the treaties granted too much land, and valuable land at that, to the Native Americans. Had the treaties been ratified, indigenous Californians would possess 20 times more than the one percent of land they can claim today.
California settlers, along with prospectors and the military, were hell-bent on total extermination of the Native Americans. For 27 years (beginning in 1846 when U.S. settlers moved into Mexican California and ending in 1873 with the last official war waged against the Native Americans) massacres abounded; trophy hunting of native peoples’ heads and scalps carried richer rewards for many than digging for gold. U.S. Army expeditions and state militias murdered Native Americans outright, and local governments paid settlers to kill Native Americans and steal their horses. Southern California’s less violent land grab was short-lived as whites flooded into the area after the Civil War, violently wresting prized property from the Native Americans over several decades. As livestock grazed and trampled the land, mining polluted and silted up the waterways, and old growth forests were cut for lumber, no options remained for the native peoples but to retreat into the furthest reaches of the landscape where they could barely survive.
Between 1846 and 1873 the indigenous population decreased from an estimated 150,000 to between 17,000 and 30,000. Before the arrival of the Spanish, the coastal Native California population was estimated at 133,000 to 300,000; in 1890 they numbered less than 17,000. Only 82 years elapsed between the Spanish setting up shop in San Diego and the last of the U.S. “Indian wars” in 1873. By the middle of the 1900’s the Tongva were nearly extinct.
Greece
When our family visited Greece this summer, I was struck by the parallels to California’s past, with similar layers of history, forgotten peoples, battles, and brutality. In the Biernacki museum in Athens, enchanted by an exquisitely wrought wreath of golden oak leaves and acorns from 4th century Macedonia, I thought of the California oaks and the thousands of years they sustained the indigenous people.
The story of Greece is the story of peaceful millennia, centuries, or decades punctuated by unimaginable upheaval and transformation. Everyone, it seems, wanted a piece of the pie. Neanderthals puttered around this region 700,000 years ago, leaving bones, tools, and pottery. A parade of civilizations with names we rarely utter or recognize made their entries and exits beginning four thousand years ago: Minoans, Myceneans, Dorians, Spartans. Each civilization blossomed and then went silent, leaving traces large and small. Each invader snatched what they pleased. Within Greece, the Spartans vied for power with the Athenians. Persia conquered Greece, and was then conquered by Macedonia. The Venetians made an appearance. The Roman Empire ruled for a mere 300 years before the Goths invaded and Greece became Byzantine, replacing the wild pantheon of super-hero gods with Christianity. Classical Greece, a period most of us associate with the country and considered the zenith of Western philosophy, art, architecture, engineering, you name it, was a mere blip in the larger scheme of things, albeit a blip that packed a punch.
Never much taken by the classical period in Greece, I was unprepared for the emotional impact the Acropolis, the remnants of the ancient city of Pericles dedicated to the goddess Athena, would have on me. As we ascended the citadel, the sound emanating from the theatre, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, was arresting. A symphony orchestra was conducting a sound check with three vocalists. The music bore directly into me, intense and personal. I marveled at the architecture of these acoustics from 161 AD. As we ascended further, our first view of the Parthenon in the early evening light struck me like a thunderclap. I gasped. The pillars loomed immense, elegant, and commanding, radiating a golden glow as if reproducing the sun’s last rays. I was in awe. 8
As we descended from the Acropolis, we walked along a lane of stately homes several hundred years old, brand new for Greece. The front door to one house had a doormat to the past, a thick transparent plexiglass cover that revealed an archaeological dig below, exposing the stone foundations of an ancient dwelling. We are all living atop the past. Los Angeles has buried much of its history. Yangna, the largest Tongva village, the village of the Keech, near downtown Los Angeles where Cabrillo made his debut in the 1500’s, is now under the 101 Freeway. At home in the East Bay, shell mounds of the native Ohlone surround us, but they lie beneath restaurants, shopping malls, and parking lots.
Greece has been in a free fall since 2002, when the Drachma was replaced by the new conqueror: the almighty Euro. Unlike past invaders who pillaged, burned, and transformed the land, the Euro is faceless and far stealthier. The highways are smooth and broad but the gas is unaffordable. Everywhere the frames of new construction, like skeletons, are open to the elements, the piles of building materials left to molder. Old houses, with collapsing stone tiled roofs sprout tufts of grass and trees. Shattered glass, mattresses and bed frames are covered in layers of dust and dirt, as if the inhabitants had fled on a moment’s notice from a volcanic eruption. These appear cheek by jowl next to beautifully appointed homes, grand hotels, and chic restaurants and cafes.
Even the recent past, by Greek standards, seems ancient. In the black and white photos of Greek life from merely 60 years ago, a sinewy couple walks on a hot dusty road alongside a skinny donkey burdened with heavy saddlebags. The couple sports crooked smiles and bad teeth, shabby clothes, and hands that tell of heavy manual labor. They are from a country long gone, transformed. The women are often clad entirely in black: kerchiefs, shawls, blouses, skirts, thick stockings, and sturdy shoes. Their faces are deeply lined and frowning as they fill jugs with water from the village fountain or bake bread. Barefoot children with dirty faces studiously observe the adults mending fishing nets or sit astride donkeys bringing the harvest in from the fields. The Greek Orthodox priests are the exception, unchanged over centuries. They appear somber, with long hair that is tied back, cascading dark beards and moustaches, and heavy black robes that end at their ankles. They move slowly and deliberately in clothes utterly unfit for the crushing heat of summer.
Other than the priests, echoes of that remote era appear rarely in Greece today. When they do, they look as out of place as a stunned refugee arriving on the shores of some foreign land after a treacherous journey. On the Pelion Peninsula, in the small seaside resort of Agios Ioannis where the incoming tide rolls the rocky pebbles in a gritty unending chorus, people stroll on the promenade above the beach in minimal bathing suits, shorts, linen shirts, and diaphanous dresses. Children eat ice cream, lovers kiss, parents push strollers, and older couples stride purposefully. Every morning the past appears in the form of a small elderly woman wearing an apron and short sweater, her hair in an untidy bun. She arranges two plastic molded chairs under the shade of a gnarled tree, props her legs up on one chair and sits in the other, spreads out her bag of thread and needles, places some hand-rolled cigarettes, an ashtray, and cup of coffee on a small table, and resumes her needlepoint. She looks up occasionally to survey people ambling along the promenade and to eye the patrons of the local gyros restaurant. Now and again, a friend warmly embraces her. In the late evening, she is still there, and again the next morning, dragging her plastic chairs to her preferred spot.
In the bustling town of Kalabaka, near Meteora in central Greece, at the foot of immense rock pedestals crowned improbably by 14th century fortress-like monasteries built by monks fleeing the invading Turks, an older woman enters the bakery. She is the height of a child, with a kerchief on her head, a vintage skirt, and sturdy shoes. She places her order quickly, as if eager to flee. She is so incongruent with the other patrons, it is hard not to stare.
On Skopelos, an island in the Sporades chain on the Mediterranean side of the country, we make our way up narrow alleys above the bustling waterfront. Centuries of footfall have worn the cobblestones smooth. We enter a careworn building, lured by a chalkboard advertising “Ice Cream made with real milk” in an unsteady hand. Inside is a hybrid bakery and sitting room where everything is sepia-toned: a faded calendar, an antique radio, comfortable chairs with pillows, family photos, some framed paintings, several cases of baked goods, and a freezer filled with tubs of ice cream. A grandmotherly woman is eager to answer our questions, but speaks almost no English. The shop bears no resemblance to the brightly lit air-conditioned bakeries with sparkling glass and chrome display cases arrayed on the boardwalk.
So here we are: the new, the old, and the ancient caught in an endless sometimes lovely, sometimes lethal dance. We hurtle forward, covering and uncovering the past. Would that exposing our history could ensure a beneficent future.
Notes:
1. Beautiful maps along with the history of Los Angeles’ native peoples can be found here: https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-tongva-map/
The most compelling and outstanding account of the Bay Area’s native peoples can be found in Malcolm Margolin’s “The Ohlone Way” originally published in 1978. It is essential reading for a deep understanding of indigenous life in California. Be sure to acquire the most recent edition containing a meaningful and poignant 2003 afterword and 2014 preface.
For a must-read memoir and history of the author’s Ohlone, Costanoan, and Esselen family, see Deborah A. Miranda’s 2013 Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir.
2. The route of the Manila Galleons avoided those claimed by Portugal and the Netherlands. Spanish galleons landed in Acapulco, Mexico on the west, hauled the goods overland, and sailed from the eastern port of Veracruz to Spain. The Manila galleons were busy doing then what the Internet does today: making the world a smaller place by spreading ideas, information, styles, and goods between far-flung locales. Over the course of 250 years, China, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India funneled a cornucopia of prized goods to New Spain and Peru, and from there onward to Europe: spices and silk, ivory and amber, porcelain and fans. In return, silver mines in Mexico and Bolivia provided the ingots demanded by Ming China as payment, as well as sought after products from the Americas such as cocoa, tobacco, watermelons, and potatoes and the red carmine dye from the bodies of little scaly insects (cochineal) that feed on cacti. En route east, olive oil and wine from Europe and North Africa were added to the lucrative cache. Besides goods, a more heinous cargo was transported in the form of Asian and African slaves, a commodity that, along with enslavement and indentured servitude of native populations in the Americas, drove the voracious economic engine of colonial Spain. The galleons were wildly profitable, but plying the seas was fraught with illness, death, and danger. About one galleon was lost at sea each decade and many on board the galleons succumbed to scurvy and other diseases.
3. The missions engaged in construction, farming, animal husbandry, and production of domestic goods. One indication of their success can be found in mission grain and livestock statistics: 22,000 tons of grain produced in 1783 and 75,000 tons in 1800; 4,900 head of horses, mules, and cattle held in 1783 which increased to 95,000 livestock of all types by 1805.
4. Native Americans were not entirely docile. The San Gabriel Mission was targeted at least twice. It was first raided in 1771, the same year it was built, and after mission soldiers raped a Tongva woman. In 1785, Toypurina, a 24-year-old medicine woman and spiritual leader of the Kizh, fomented a plan to kill the mission Spaniards. Native men from six nearby villages advanced with bows and arrows but the attack was foiled. Toypurina became a legend, yet the remainder of her life was not pretty: after several years of imprisonment, she was baptized, then sent to the mission in Carmel. Several years later she married a Spanish soldier, bore three children, and died at age 39 at Mission San Juan Bautista.
5. Curious Native American teenagers visiting the missions were forcefully prevented from returning home; wishing to reunite with family members, mothers and then fathers often followed the teens to the mission. Village life disintegrated. Living conditions were overcrowded and filthy at the missions, the diet was impoverished, and epidemics and death were widespread. However, the destruction was even more far-reaching: the loss of language, social structure, and cultural and religious practices doomed the indigenous people. Cattle and horses brought by the Spaniards decimated the native grasses and herbs, a critical food source, leaving few options for sustenance. Imported disease, overwork, and abysmal living conditions took the remaining toll.
For details on Native American life during the Spanish Mission period see Elias Castillo’s A Cross of Thorns; The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions https://eliasacastillo.net/ and https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/1978/january/impact/
6. I found this description of the elementary school curriculum, a testament to the unpardonable glossing over of our state’s history: “If you grew up in California, you probably learned most of what you know about the history of California Indians while you were in fourth grade. All that several generations of Californians learned of the state’s Native peoples can be summed up thusly:
California was originally populated by people who did not farm but made very nice baskets. The Spanish padrés arrived, and California Indians moved to the Missions to learn farm labor. Some of them died there, mainly because their immune systems weren’t sophisticated enough to handle modern diseases. By the time Americans arrived Native Californians had mainly vanished somehow. The Gold Rush happened and California became a modern society with factories and lending institutions. Finally, in 1911, Ishi, the last wild California Indian, wandered out of the mountains so he could live a comfortable life in a museum basement.
That fourth grade curriculum has improved somewhat in recent years…” (From one of the best sources about Native Californian history: https://www.kcet.org/shows/tending-the-wild/untold-history-the-survival-of-californias-indians
7. For details on the treaties see: https://www.archives.gov/files/publications/prologue/2013/fall-winter/treaties.pdf
For a compelling history of land ownership in California under Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. rule see: https://digitalcommons.law.utulsa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2654&context=tlr
8. Like a wounded veteran of multiple battles, the Parthenon was subjected to one assault after another. When the Ottomans ruled Greece, beginning in the mid-fourteenth century and spanning almost half a millennium, they converted the Acropolis to a garrison and the Parthenon became a mosque, complete with minaret. In 1687 the Venetians, whose rule of the Ionian Islands spanned the same centuries as the Ottoman rule of Greece, lobbed a mortar at the Parthenon and the gunpowder stored in the edifice exploded, obliterating the roof and causing widespread damage throughout. As if that weren’t enough, a Venetian admiral bungled an attempt to remove sculptures and, in the process, destroyed them when his pulley mechanism broke. Well-heeled Westerners flocking to the Parthenon in the 1600’s and 1700’s as part of their “Grand Tour” of Europe, participated in looting the past further, carting off antiquities purchased on the black market. In 1801, Lord Elgin took almost half the sculptural friezes on the Parthenon, filling 200 crates that set sail from Piraeus to the British museum, where the sculptures now reside.
