Cut Back on Consumerist Tendencies to Protect our Knowledge of the Global Past.

Erin Thompson is a professor of fraud, forensics, art law and crime in the department of art and music at John Jay College in New York. She has a book coming out soon, “To Own the Past: How Collectors Reveal, Shape, and Destroy History”. Some idea of what that might contain is revealed by New York Times opinion piece ('Egypt’s Looted Antiquities' May 30, 2014) discussing the upcoming MOU request. 

it’s not enough just to watch for them at the border; we must also take steps to slow the demand for these pieces. Americans who help fuel the multimillion-dollar black market in antiquities are not just extremely wealthy individuals, building museum-quality collections. Since looters can go years without uncovering highly valued pieces, they sustain themselves on a steady trickle of small finds: coins, jewelry, vases, figurines, architectural fragments, textiles and manuscripts. These items are sold for a few dollars to a series of middlemen who inflate the price with each successive transaction. Still, the online price of an ancient coin is relatively cheap, as little as $20. Buying one of these coins or another small antiquity might seem insignificant, but it isn’t, in much the same way that buying a piece of ivory jewelry, no matter how small, isn’t worth the slaughter of a poached elephant [...] we need to change the desires of potential antiquities buyers. Public awareness is one big step: Consumers who start thinking about ancient coins as they think about ivory are going to do a lot less buying of antiquities that may have been looted. [...] [...] high demand encourages looters. Cutting back on our consumerist tendencies in the future is the best way to protect our knowledge of the global past.

She also suggests that the US Internal Revenue Service should refuse to allow tax deductions for charitable donations of antiquities without documentation of legal export "on the grounds that these antiquities are most likely stolen".