An excerpt from a lengthy piece in the New York Times about the Met's Levy-White collection:

In many ways, Ms. White is the profile of an ideal trustee, and not just for her financial largess. Beginning in the late 1980's, she and her husband, along with several other collectors like the Fleischmans, brought enormous energy to a Greek and Roman department that had for years been known for its lack of exhibition programming and its dry display of Greek vases, lined up neatly in rows. She has also been active on the board, serving on the acquisitions committee. (Another member of that committee is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, chairman emeritus of The New York Times Company.)

In 1990 the major Levy-White show at the Met established the couple's collection as one of the most spectacular of its kind. But by bringing it to world attention, the show raised serious questions in many quarters about how it was acquired.

The Turkish government contended that one object in the exhibition, part of a statue known as "Weary Herakles," was stolen in 1980 from an excavation site in southern Turkey. In 1993, the couple reached a legal settlement arranging the return of a group of Roman bronze objects that had been taken from a private farm in England before Mr. Levy and Ms. White bought them from a New York dealer.

In a lengthy study in 1999, two prominent British archaeologists, David Gill and Christopher Chippindale, determined that 93 percent of the objects in the Met's Levy-White show had no known provenance.

Unlike collectors whose interest in such objects is strictly aesthetic, Ms. White and Mr. Levy were also passionate about scholarship and research about the ancient world. In 1985 they began financing a major archaeological excavation in Israel that continues today. And a fund they established at Harvard to support publication of archaeological work has so far distributed $9 million to more than a hundred scholars.

Defenders of Ms. White say her support of archaeological work is an important resource and note that plenty of archaeologists, including Ms. Waldbaum of the Archaeological Institute, have participated in Levy-White-sponsored projects.

But such efforts have long been overshadowed by the couple's collecting activities, which many scholars say have contributed to the destruction of the archaeological record.

"They had a voracious desire to collect, and some of the pieces they have are extremely important," said Martha J. Joukowsky, a Brown University archaeologist and former collector who resigned from the board of the Levy-White publication fund to protest the couple's approach to acquiring antiquities. "But when you are collecting things that have not seen the light of day and are illicitly traded, then that's where I have a problem."

... so we've seen the auction houses being used to 'legitimize' sales of illicit antiquities (whether they were aware of it or not); you've got to wonder whether funds for archaeological publication might not similarly have been used. I wonder how long it's going to be before we see the names of some Classical archaeologists dragged into this.