William St. Clair's article in 8 International Journal of Cultural Property 391-521 (1999) raised questions about the cleaning of the Parthenon marbles in London in the 1930s and about Elgin's so-called bribery of Turkish officials. The latter is here dismissed as normal practice. An account is given of the building and purpose of the Parthenon, its history to the end of the eighteenth century, then of the marbles taken to London and of those left in Athens. The cleaning is judged to have been no more than the comparable treatment of marbles in other museums, though vigorous in places, the intention being to make them intelligible to the visiting public, but resulting in no serious loss of detail or academic value. Finally, a personal viewpoint is given of the purposes for which ancient art is conserved, along with criteria for the optimum place of display for collections of cultural property of more than local importance in human history.

While the threat to the underwater cultural heritage from the treasure salvage industry is widely recognised, the approach to 'protection' ranges from absolute prohibition to the sale of state licences to the highest bidder. Even the former raises difficult problems of enforceability and the choice of mechanisms to determine whether in situ preservation is the preferred option for any particular wreck site. The common law jurisdictions have tended to prefer a regulated salvage regime, in which the courts themselves have a role in considering whether appropriate archaeological methodology is applied to the recovery of historic artefacts. This article examines the legal and economic basis of such an approach and evaluates whether the underwater cultural heritage has derived any discernible benefit from this judicial creativity. Inter alia, it concludes that the legal framework is itself flawed by uncertainty and that the deliberations of the court are hampered by procedural deficiencies.