High Crimes: Studying the Illicit Antiquities Trade in the Bolivian Andes

Donna Yates, "High Crimes: Studying the Illicit Antiquities Trade in the Bolivian Andes", Day of Archaeology 2013 July 26, 2013:

The past is what we say it is, and we believe that the physical remains of the past are important. That they are worthy of being preserved as tools of both memory and identity. When they are ripped from their contexts and sold on the black market, everyone loses. We are all robbed because we will never get to know the information those objects contained. “Neocolonialism” is a word that is bandied about quite a bit in Bolivia: it is a word that even people with no education know. The illicit antiquities trade is a prime example of neocolonialism. When objects are stolen from vulnerable areas of the developing world and moved into the hands of rich people in the developed world, we perpetuate an unjust imbalance. We keep people down.

All the time shielding what is going on by paternalistic platitudes about altruistically "caring for" what the (necessarily "corrupt" and "ignorant") Brown Folk of the ("under"-)developing world cannot.