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The "Looted Heritage" website provides some statistics from back in 1999 which make grim reading. They come from the (now defunct) Illicit Antiquities Research Centre at Cambridge University:
So, what has changed in the past 13 years? Has looting gone up or decreased? Has the antiquities trade taken any steps whatsoever to clean up its act in this time? Or has just about the only thing the antiquities trade and collectors done been to fight attempts to make them do so? ( I have the ACCG in mind here). The Syrian looters' jail terms will soon be over, and when they get out there's now a voracious market waiting for them to resume their activity. How many of the objects mentioned here have been recovered and the thieves and smugglers and dodgy dealers who handled them jailed? How many collectors buying precisely these objects have had any qualms, let alone problems with the authorities over this? Thirteen years have passed, what has been done about any of this?
The "Looted Heritage" website provides some statistics from back in 1999 which make grim reading. They come from the (now defunct) Illicit Antiquities Research Centre at Cambridge University:- Italy: 120,000 antiquities seized by police in five years;
- Italy: 100,000+ Apulian tombs devastated;
- Niger: in southwest Niger between 50 and 90 per cent of sites have been destroyed by looters;
- Turkey: more than 560 looters arrested in one year with 10,000 objects in their possession;
- Cyprus: 60,000 objects looted since 1974;
- China: catalogues of Sotheby’s sales found in the poor countryside: at least 15,000 sites vandalized, 110,000 illicit cultural objects intercepted in four years;
- Cambodia: 300 armed bandits surround Angkor Conservation compound, using hand grenades to blow apart the monuments; 93 Buddha heads intercepted in June this year, 342 other objects a month later;
- Syria: the situation is now so bad a new law has been passed which sends looters to jail for 15 years;
- Belize: 73 per cent of major sites looted;
- Guatemala: thieves now so aggressive they even looted from the laboratory at Tikal;
- Peru: 100,000 tombs looted, half the known sites.
So, what has changed in the past 13 years? Has looting gone up or decreased? Has the antiquities trade taken any steps whatsoever to clean up its act in this time? Or has just about the only thing the antiquities trade and collectors done been to fight attempts to make them do so? ( I have the ACCG in mind here). The Syrian looters' jail terms will soon be over, and when they get out there's now a voracious market waiting for them to resume their activity. How many of the objects mentioned here have been recovered and the thieves and smugglers and dodgy dealers who handled them jailed? How many collectors buying precisely these objects have had any qualms, let alone problems with the authorities over this? Thirteen years have passed, what has been done about any of this?
2 comments:
While this may be illuminating 13 years ago, these stats are way outdated to shed light on what's going on right now. Is the reason why you posted these because no news ones are available?
Well, if you read through to the end, you'd see that I was making the point of whether we have made any progress in locating those hundreds of thousands of artefacts we knew went missing over a decade ago (well, have we? No) and whether despite those shocking statistics which we have known about for so long, anything much has been done since they were published about sorting this out (again the answer is a negative one).
I think that really tells us something about the state of play here.
And the Cambridge institutiuon that produced those figures has been closed down for a goodly while now, and it was pretty unique in what it was trying to do. The Glasgow team however includes a project: "Measuring the international market in illicit cultural objects"
http://traffickingculture.org/projects/measuring-the-international-market-in-illicit-cultural-objects/
which should produce the up-to-date numbers you seek.
But of less importance than the "numbers" is what we intend doing about it - for the answer until now from all sides seems to be "well, nothing much".
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