The New Golden Age of Looting

There is a text ("The New Golden Age of Archaeology Is Right Now") floating around which seems older than the date attached to them, the earliest were from a week ago about the work of "Sarah Parcak-Space Archaeologist" (sic). Perhaps somebody else can locate the original version of "" and tell us the real date of publication. Much of it is already in the public domain, my interest today is in the bit on looting which seems worth highlighting, and asking, what are we (not "they") doing about this? 

Amid fascinating discoveries, archaeologists also use satellites to track and stop professional looters, who expertly find — and often destroy — unprotected sites and steal important artifacts to sell to collectors and dealers. Within the archaeological community, researchers believe looting is the world's third largest contributor to insurgency and criminal activity, but there are no globally accepted methods to track or curb it.  According to Parcak, looting is especially prevalent in Egypt, Syria and Libya following the Arab Spring in early 2011. But satellite sensing can help. "I started hearing rumors of site looting in late January 2011, and got high resolution imagery in mid-February," she says. "I could see hundreds of looting pits, and that was at just one site. Now, nearly three years on, we’ve counted nearly 10,000 looting pits and seen a nearly 1,000% increase in total looting." The estimated value of the items taken from these pits is between $1 billion and $2 billion. It's easy to identify the looting pits with satellite data, however, since they look nothing like the planned, precise excavation units. Parcak and her colleagues shared their results with Egypt’s antiquities minister, Zahi Hawass, and other members of the Egyptian government to find ways to protect and preserve archaeological sites. This could include crowdsourcing local reports of looting and monitoring sites early on.  "We are losing our past faster than we can map it," Parcak says. "Satellite imagery is the only way we can map the looting patterns effectively."

That high estimate will probably arouse opposition (in any case it'd be at the 'market' end, the collectors' contribution to the process, not what the artefact hunters and diggers get). I'd like to hear Ms Parcak justify it. I think off-the-ceiling comments like that treivialise the real problem, and of course allow the lobbyists for the dealers, to make their nasty comments intended solely to deflect attention from the real issues. My feeling is that 10000 holes for Egypt and Syria is too low a figure. There are single sites like Apamea which have a number of holes that must be (I am not going to count them) a substantial proportion of ten thousand.

Besides which the author who wrote "The New Golden Age of Archaeology Is Right Now" seems not really to have grasped several important things about the current position of archaeology in even just the English-speaking world. Its hard to speak of a "Golden Age" when many local authorities are reducing or scrapping their archaeological capabilities, skimping on museums and all over the world where there are collectable artefacts, sites are being looted for collectable left right and centre.

Vibgnette: it's all about the money...