Sunday, 16 February 2020

Loot Busters Broken


Over on the Association for Collectors of Ancient and Ethnographic Art website in the Links page, Sue McGovern-Huffmann (presumably) gives a claim for and makes a claim about an organisation they promote:
Loot Busters The concept is simple: post photos of items reported stolen by governments and their representatives after 1970, to help locate them. And it works.
Click on the link and see how well.

Sadly, this was a private initiative run by a UK-based colleague and I hope that it manages to be revived. But this highlights the problem of teh totally ad hoc manner in which we as a society, deal with looting, and commercial and criminal exploitation of our archaeological heritage. This should not be up to individuals to take the initiative and try to do something and get information out there (in the UK: Looting Matters, Heritage Action, Conflict Antiquities, Elginism, PACHI and the now-gone Loot Busters). When is the UK - on its overcrowded island off the coast of Europe - going to treat this issue properly?

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