The Nature of the Cultural Property Debate: LA Times Lapse, Wallwork 'Answers' his Critics

The ladies from Trafficking Culture are getting really agitated about law student Adam Wallwork's vacant LA Times op-ed. These Glasgow academics seem surprisingly unprepared to cope with antiquitist nonsense. One of them tweeted naively last night:

@kyrikmk is right. Peter [Tompa] is indeed praising it on his blog! That actually surprises me.

Wow. I would say she's still a lot to learn about what antiquity dealers and their supporters write and why. Has she ever looked more carefully at what stories paid lobbyist Tompa writes about, how and why? If she had, she'd not be at all surprised to find this is precisely the sort of anti-regulation and anti-archaeological story Mr Tompa would pick up and try to spin as an authoratative 'study' (instead of analysing it properly).

Meanwhile several of the Glasgow folk have been having a go at explaining where the article's underlying methodology has gone wrong (Donna Yates, Teressa Davis - Damien Huffer too) but Mr Wallwork is not buying any of  that. Rather then addressing (after understanding) the comments he has received, he merely arrogantly repeats his conclusions in two comments: here and here. Astoundingly he asserts: "The likelihood that these declines are unrelated to cultural property laws is approximately (sic) 0.000000000000000024 percent". I think Donna Yates sums it up well when she addresses him:

looking down the list here as well as the discussion going on via twitter and blogs, you have some of the top experts in the field of cultural property and heritage law/research commenting on your work. As a student, this is not the sort of criticism you should take lightly [...]

Ah, but he has a 'yes' from Peter Tompa and his sidekick John Howland firmly on his side. Here young Mr Wallwork is considered to have discovered more evidence compromising to world archaeology, and Tompa and Howland are obviously going to ride this story for all it's worth (to them). Such is the cultural property debate with single-minded collectors and their supporters.

Meanwhile, if you want to see an immeasurably more informed view than Mr Tompa's on a blog, try Tess Davis, 'LA Times OpEd Distorts Both Archaeology and the Law', IntLawGrrls, April 7, 2014.

There are valid criticisms of patrimony laws, for example, that by their very nature they conflict with the concept of a shared “World Heritage.” And Mr. Wallwork is entitled to his opinion. But this opinion did not appear in a blog, or even just an obscure law review, but the pages of a major national paper. [...] Wallwork himself can be forgiven (he may even still be a law student according to his online profile). But we must ask how a piece like this — full of factual inaccuracies and logical fallacies — made it out of the editing room and onto the breakfast tables of hundreds of thousands of people?

Indeed, that is a most interesting question.