it’s been a while since I did a really thorough SSH playthrough and i don’t claim to have an in-depth understanding of provenance so apologies of any of this isn’t 100%
CCCC carving - north - part of an exhibit of locally excavated precolombian artifacts. so this one is probably legit, an artifact uncovered in new mexico.
rutherford - south - the article in joanna’s office says prudence’s great-grandfather found it on a dig in ‘the amazon jungle’ in 1898, and that she considers it a ‘family heirloom’. sus by modern standards be 19th c archaeological practices are basically always thus, but assuming she can demonstrate it’s been in her family for decades she’s legally in the clear (generally anti-antiquities-trafficking laws only apply to objects removed from their country of origin after the UNESCO convention of 1970).
de landa/museum storage piece - east - henrick’s notes say it was found in cuba in 1652, paper on joanna’s desk says it’s on loan from ‘el museo cultural’ in san francisco. so uh… likely looted during the spanish colonial period.
daddle - west - henrik’s notes say it was found in 1753 in costa rica, sold at auction in NYC to shoe polish tycoon H.A. Daddle in 18–.
pacal - king - does not have a documented history pre-1940. also sinclair might have murdered the last owners. i’m not sure how exactly we’re meant to believe that they’re falsified - maybe we’re supposed to understand that lack of pre-1940 documentation as evidence something was hinky? while that’s not exactly true-to-life I can accept that as a basic understanding. (hotchkiss-and-tell points out that the book explicitly said the docs were fake bc they included zip codes that didn’t exist yet, but i don’t think the game ever states this outright. irl art and antiquities with provenance records that begin in the 40s-50s are often sus because of the enormous campaign of looting undertaken by the nazis during wwii, but that usually applies more to pieces that are european in origin).
smugglers - copan fool - found by smugglers on an illegal dig in copan, honduras shortly before the events of the game and then illegally trafficked across borders and into the US. I uh. I kind of really want to know how nancy explains that one. sure, finding the lost scribe’s work might have improved relations with mexico, but nancy might have royally fucked relations with honduras forever?
one thing that the game fails to touch on is that while all collectors are expected to act within the law, private collectors have far less stringent ethical guidelines than museums/institutions do. public collections, by virtue of being, well, public, are exposed to far more scrutiny than those in the hands of private individuals. so prudence can make her carving into a necklace, or poppy can include hers in one of her own works - as the legal owners of the carvings they can do with them as they wish, while museums are required to preserve the artifacts that they house and to make them (and information on them) available to scholars and researchers. i’m surprised that there’s not more scrutiny or denunciation of the ethics of private collections in SSH.
i actually find prudence’s attitude way more odious than poppy’s. prudence’s ‘regard’ for the south key is entirely centred on possessing this rare artifact as a status symbol. she brags that it was ‘carved by real Maya hands’ but then she ads it to her mother-in-law’s ruby necklace to ‘add a piece from [her] own family to balance out the energies and … make it [her] own.’ to prudence the carving is just… a family heirloom, totally removed from it’s real cultural significance.
meanwhile poppy’s point is kind of - entirely critiquing that whole mindset imo. the daddles possessed the west key for about as long as the rutherfords owned the south key, and for that time theirs functioned in the same way - as basically an empty status symbol for wealthy people who hold no connection to it’s history. poppy’s art is entirely about critiquing that ownership/collector mindset - and including the carving in 'deadly midnight snack’ can be read as a furtherance of that critique. she hates when people see art as 'merchandise,’ so she takes the carving, coats it in the shoe polish that allowed her ancestor to purchase it in the first place, and puts it back into the world, now as part of the dialogue about live and dead art and ownership and meaning. we can debate whether poppy is the right person to do this, but the fact is irl artists have done exactly this for at least 100+ years.
idk, i find poppy’s attitude far more palatable and understandable than prudence rutherford’s.
