"Radical Archaeologists"? Not any more

One of the common complaints of the Black Hat Guys is that the campaign against the no-questions-asked trade in antiquities is being run by a group they label "radical (read "rabid") archaeologists". It strikes me that this is not really the case; the focus seems to have shifted in recent years.

An early symptom of this shift away from a purely archaeological approach to the problem of looting was when criminologist  Simon McKenzie published his "Going, Going, Gone: Regulating the Market in Illicit Antiquities" in 2005. More recently was a book on a related topic by lawyers Janet Ulph and Ian Smith ("The Illicit Trade in Art and Antiquities"). While many US lawyers writing on the topic have a somewhat ambiguous approach and it is difficult to see on which side of the fence they in reality sit, there are others whose positions on resource preservation are clearer. Most notable among the latter is Rick St Hilaire (who for his pains to present the issues objectively frequently pejoratively gets labelled an "archaeoblogger" by those of a certain mindset among his colleagues).

The academic study of looting, while still being present in (too few) academic archaeology departments (mostly in the UK and US), now seems to based in other milieus. We have the Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law at the DePaul University College of Law and there is the Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (Washington DC). Over the past two years we have been watching the development of the "Trafficking Culture" research group in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Glasgow (Simon Mackenzie, Neil Brodie, Suzie Thomas, Donna Yates, Tess Davis, and their associates and students). Damien Huffer is a Visiting Research Fellow with the Institute of Criminology, University of Sydney, Australia.

This somewhat undermines the stereotypical slur of the dealers' lobbyists that this or that government is going hand-in-hand with "radical archaeologists" (or "archaeologists" are forced to adopt a "radical cultural property nationalist" stance to stay hand in hand with nationalist governments whose excavation permits or funds they need). Instead the debate has moved on from the concern about looting alone, to concerns about the movement of material within the global market which is being increasingly seen as to some extent an illicit one, and one that has become increasingly criminalised (to the extent that it is now percieved as a real social threat). While this is very useful (for fighting it), I think that in concentration on criminal networks and functioning of the commerce, we need not to lose sight of the effects of looting on the archaeological record. For me the problem is reflected in the title of the book by Neil Brodie and Kathryn Walker Tubb, 'Illicit Antiquities: The Theft of Culture and the Extinction of Archaeology' (One World Archaeology). So, instead of the whole issue being pursued due to the insistence of mythical "radical archaeologists" I would argue that archaeologists should be careful that their concerns are not  marginalised in future development of the study of the illicit antiquities trade.