The Intellectual Consequences of Knocked-off Nok "Art"

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There is a brief article in New Scientist about an excavated terracotta Nok Culture head which is "one of the best-preserved examples of its kind ever discovered". I think it means in an archaeological investigation, museums and galleries are full of them. The terracottas (especially the knocked-off heads) are eagerly acquired no-questions-asked by collectors as they are among the earliest figurative art in sub-Saharan Africa. The excavated head was found (some 60 cm down, the article insists on telling us), by archaeologists Peter Breunig and Nicole Rupp of the Goethe-University Frankfurt during the 2010 field season at Kushe, a small village about 150 kilometres north of the capital Abuja. The Nok culture flourished in the region of modern Nigeria from about 1000 BC to AD 500 ("when it mysteriously died out").

The Nok terracottas are a mystery. No one knows for sure what they were used for. They may represent dead members of the Nok community and could have been a votive offering at a shrine. Alternatively, the figurines may have been grave goods. Africa has seen a resurgence of archaeological activity to investigate Nok culture. Part of this has to do with interest in Iron Age societies in Africa, which is surging as anthropologists consider how technologies - especially those based on iron - spread. The Nok are considered to be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, people to smelt iron on the African continent. However, the research is under threat. Over the past half-century countless Nok terracotta specimens have been looted from hundreds of sites in central Nigeria. The booty has found its way onto the international art and antiquities market, ending up in the hands of private art collectors.

Of course from an archaeological point of view of less importance than the fact that the objects are disappearing into private collections is the fact that so they can "surface" onto the market, the sites which hold them are riddled with holes dug blindly by looters hoping to find saleable items. Any area of the site producing them will be the focus of renewed digging hoping to find others in the vicinity. The potential for the destruction of any and all archaeological context is clear.

Once out of the ground, and country, the potential for these loose artefacts to tell us anything much of use for the real research questions the modern discipline would like to pose of Nok sites (about social structure, economic regimes etc.) simply cannot be addressed by an "art-history" approach to the decontextualised collectable geegaws on the "art" market. Indeed the possibility of even that being contaminated by skilful forgeries made to look old is very high indeed in the case of Nok "art" in particular. There is no possibility of there being a "Good Collector" of such items.

Source: Curtis Abraham, "Look into the eyes of a rare ancient African sculpture", New Scientist (Short, sharp science), 6 January 2012.

Photo: Archaeological artefact, not Knocked-off "art" on a dodgy market (Image: Nicole Rupp/Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Goethe-University Frankfurt).

The "Ancient Art" Market and the Trashing of Archaeological Sites

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This Google earth shot of a chunk of central Mali is a bit fuzzy, but the best available at the moment. It shows pits dug by looters at the site of Mounya, 30 kilometers west of Djenné. Mounya is one of the most heavily looted sites in Mali. It is estimated that as much as three-quarters of the surface of the site has been plundered for artefacts sold on the illicit antiquities market (Maria Kouroupas, 'Illicit Trade in Cultural Objects', Getty Newsletter 13.1 Spring 1998)

Here is part of this area from ground level (photo from Kouroupas article) and the scale of the digging can be seen:

The items sought for sale include terracotta figurines of so-called 'Djenné type' dating from the 11th/12th centuries to the 18th century (the majority are from the 13th to 15th centuries AD). They occur in sites along the central Niger valley, especially in mound sites in the inner delta. Here's the description from a list of 'Artifact Categories Subject to U.S. Import Restriction, Mali Designated List Sections IA1- IA2, Human and Animal Figures': "Anthropomorphic figures, often incised, impressed and with added motifs, such as scarification marks and serpentine patterns on their bodies, often depicting horsemen or individuals sitting, squatting, kneeling, embracing, or in a position of repose, arms elongated the length of the body or crossed over the chest, with the head tipped".

Examples of such figurines of unknown origin can currently be seen on the websites of a number of dealers. Where did they come from?
Pierre Bergé & Associés, Paris, Geneva, Liege and Brussels.
David Norden African Antiques, Antwerp, Belgium.
Galerie Bruno Mignot (Arts Prmitifs), La Wantzenau, France,
Frank Bottaro, BC Galleries, Melbourne, Australia.(see Damien Huffer on this "gallery" here too)
Christie's Paris (2007).
Bakarat Gallery, Beverley Hills/London/ Abu Dhabi
Hamill Gallery Boston, USA (Bura terracottas)
And so on...

All of the above are simply listed with a generic and very general 'country of origin' provenance and no mention whatsoever of any export papers, and rarely any kind of collecting history. Some are accompanied by thermoluminescence test results, and obviously collectors are more interested in "authenticity" than legal origins. The problem is that since the 1980s, the no-questions-asked market has become infested with fakes, often sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and ended up in some museum collections (Michael Brent,'Faking African Art', Archaeology Magazine - Volume 54 Number 1, January/February 2001). This could not happen if dealers were made to account for the full collecting history of an item and verify its legitimate origins. It would be nice to think that many of the items noted above could be fakes instead of looted artefacts.

These items can also be seen on many museum websites, again with no details given of the precise manner in which they were collected and exported. Neither is there any indication on any of these websites that any questions were asked whether these objects, which started to surface on the market in the 1980s, should have been/not have been acquired by those museums.

As we are well aware, certain fractions of the dugup antiquity trade (especially in the US) questions whether looting is caused by the no-questions-asked market. In order to examine that issue, we might look at the holes in the photos above. What were they dug for? For fun? For exercise? To kill time? Fishing bait? In fact those holes represent a substantial physical effort in a very hot climate. I suggest those who claim that the existence of a highly absorbent international market is not the cause of the looting of sites might like to explain to the rest of us their version of the origin and purpose of those holes, why they have been dug where they have been dug.

Nigerian "Nationalism" in Action

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In Ekiti state in southwestern Nigeria, a task force has been set up to curb the activities of illegal forest operators (Toba Suleiman, 'Oni Raises Task Force to Check Illicit Forest Activities' This day Online, 5th June 2010). It has a mandate to impound and auction any vehicle caught with illegal logs or illegally produced planks, and to close down any sawmill found engaging in illegal activities. The governor, Mr. Segun Oni, said his administration would not fold its hands while some few people collude with non-locals to plunder the state�s forest resources.

He said his administration did not want a repeat of what happened in the 1970s and 1980s when a syndicate made of some foreigners and some greedy local people stole artefacts and antiquities across Ekiti land.

Oni, who described the forest reserves as the commonwealth of the local host communities and the state, called on the people to be vigilant and to volunteer useful information on the activities of the illegal forest operators to the security agents.

I am sure the dealers in portable antiquities are fuming among themselves. What a "nationalist" eh? Never mind, I am sure there are plenty of "internationalist" dealers out there still willing to buy the "liberated antiquities" and the "liberated wood" to sell to "cosmopolitan" collectors and carpenters over the seas. Obviously though they need first to fight any legislation that would get in the way of such free enterprise and "protect their freedom to collect".

The scramble for Africa’s treasures

From Nigeria Daily News Sun, 21 Mar 2010:

"The history of the African continent is littered with the exploits of plunderers. Slave traders - local and foreign - held sway for centuries, carting multitudes of Africans across the Atlantic, to plantations in the Americas and elsewhere. When the slave trade went out of fashion, the land grab followed. In Berlin in 1885, the colonial warriors carved Africa up into bits - represented on the map as brightly coloured slices - which they then proceeded to administer and exploit, until the wave of independence that arrived with the 1950s. Following that phase, the scramble has largely taken on an economic dimension, with Africa’s oil and minerals and farmlands up for grabs. Less overt, is another kind of plunder - involving the relocation of hundreds of valuable pieces of artwork - sculptures, pottery, from Africa to museums and private collections in the West. Take Benin’s bronze heads for example. In 1897, the British attacked and destroyed the Benin Kingdom. In the process they gained access to the Kingdom’s rich trove of extraordinary artwork, which they wasted no time looting. And the plunder has continued to the present day. Over the last few decades, hundreds of vigango (ancestral totems used to mark burial sites) have disappeared from Kenyan villages, ending up in museums and private collections in the United States. In 1994, the National Museum in Ile-Ife was broken into three times, with the vandals carting away some of the finest heads in the collection.

It is estimated that the global illicit trade in artifacts is currently worth billions of dollars. It would also not be farfetched to say that the West’s thriving exhibition circuit is propped up to a significant extent by artifacts illegally acquired from Africa. An exhibition, currently going on in London at the moment, is showing the finest of Ife’s terracotta and brass heads. At the moment, there are no plans to host the exhibition in Nigeria.

It would not be true, or fair, however, to lay the blame solely at the feet of Europe and America. The West would find it extremely difficult to gain possession of African artifacts, especially in contemporary times, without the collusion of Africans themselves, within and outside the government bureaucracy. Unscrupulous Western businessmen and art dealers may pay for Kenya’s vigango, but the actual stealing is done by unscrupulous Kenyan youth, who loot burial sites".

The rest is here.

Vignettes: Vigango in the gallery and in context (SAFE). Heads-up from Museum Security Network.

Suspicion of Arson at Ugandan Heritage Site Fuels Deadly Clashes

Riots erupted at venerated burial grounds in Uganda on Wednesday after a suspicious fire on Tuesday engulfed the Tombs of the Buganda Kings at Kasubi. The violence is a symptom of continuing troubles between the Ugandan government and members of the Buganda traditional kingdom who want more local power. The tombs were built in 1882 and later converted into a royal burial ground for the Buganda kingdom and are now a World Heritage site. In the fire the main tomb, made of wood, thatch, reed and wattle, burnt to the ground. Supporters of the kabaka, the Buganda king, blamed arson as the cause of the disaster, and Kingdom officials called for a week of mourning.

By Wednesday evening, hundreds of members of the Buganda community were streaming toward the remains of the tomb, camping out by their remains. Protests erupted when Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, visited the scene of the fire and protesters tried to prevent him from approaching the tombs. Witnesses said that police officers shot and killed three protesters.

Jeffrey Gettleman and Josh Kron Suspicion of Arson at Royal Tombs Fuels Deadly Clashes in Uganda, New York Times March 17, 2010.

Video here

The site can be 'visited' virtually here .

This situation is another example of the embedding of cultural property (in this case a place, a powerful place, a place of memory) in identity which universalist collectors' lobbyists simplify under their "Nationalist" label. The situation with 'identity' and 'heritage' is of course far more complicated than the Cunos of this world would like their readers to think.

Briton arrested in Tunis

The newspaper Assabah reports that a British citizen (so far unnamed) was arrested at Tunis airport while he was about to leave the country under a false identity. He has been charged with being part of a ring of illicit dealers of archaeological finds. This is the latest in a series of 22 arrests of foreigners and Tunisians resulting from a complex investigation which has been going on since December. This has led to the dismantling of a major network of dealers of illicitly made archaeological finds (statues and pottery in particular) which were being smuggled to Europe and the USA.

Of course after the smuggled objects arrived in Europe and the USA they must have magically turned into white geese and flew away into the sunset, as every single dealer that sells no-questions-asked artefacts is adamant that every single dealer that sells no-questions-asked artefacts in Europe or the USA sells only material coming from old collections.

Curbing the Killing by Keystrokes: EBay ivory ban

For the past few days, conservation blogs and news have been full of stories that from the beginning of 2009, eBay will ban all sales of items made of elephant ivory - Yielding to Conservationists, eBay Will Ban Ivory Sales. Lobbyists had been campaigning for the closure of the loopholes that de facto had existed in the existing regulation of the ivory trade, and unregulated internet sales were one of the biggest.

This is a victory for the conservation lobbyists who have been pointing out that it is the inability of buyers (and here US ones figured largely) to curb their acquisitiveness and ask where the raw material was coming from which has been directly responsible for the continued poaching of elephants in the wild, even in places where they are supposed to be protected. Good profits are still involved because despite existing bans there is still an unquestioning market for ivory, as a result elephants are being gunned down even in wildlife reserves, despite the presence there of armed rangers and other measures taken to protect them. I wrote on this depressing situation earlier and reflected on its relationship to the antiquities trade.

This is an interesting parallel to the antiquities market in several ways. First of all the current situation is a foil to the arguments of portable antiquity collectors that "it is not they who are responsible for looting", but the archaeologists who “do not guard sites against the looters”, or the laws "are ineffective". It is clear that in the case of ivory, the market and therefore the incentive for poaching exist because there are people willing to buy ivory goods no-questions-asked. Here internet-aided sales have a large influence. Conservation groups detail how much ivory they found being traded in the US alone through sites like eBay. They labeled it “Killing by Keystrokes” which is an interesting parallel to Elias’ “Collectors are the real Looters” epigram referring to portable antiquities.

It is the same with document-less antiquities. There in an incentive for people to go out with spades and metal detectors to dig up little scraps of the past from a local archaeological site while there are acquisitive people who are willing to buy them.

In the case of ivory, EBay faced with the criticisms of a whole bunch of animal rights and nature conservation groups has decided to do its bit to protect the elephant (and also of course its corporate image). Good for them, one can only applaud this decision and hope it will do its bit to curb the disgusting killing to give a few selfish individuals the hedonistic but perverted pleasure of owning a piece of dismembered elephant in the form of some kitschy gee-gaw. What I would like to know however is where are the archaeological and heritage lobby groups insisting they take the same sort of measures to protect the world's archaeological heritage from being similarly dismembered?

Kwame Opoku challenges Universal Collection arguments

In a wickedly elegant and well argued essay, tireless campaigner Dr Kwame Opoku raises a number of extremely pertinent points about the accusations thrown out by the Universal Collection advocates who oppose the repatriation of cultural property taken under dubious circumstances from other countries. In particular he cites the recent provocative book Who Owns Antiquity?: Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage by James Cuno, the publication of which has emboldened a few wannabe clones in the collecting world to join their voices to the clamour against “retentionist nationalism” and the policies lying behind the 1970 UNESCO convention.
The “universal collectors” see the nationalism in their own culture as benign while in foreign source countries it is dangerous, needing to be eradicated. The concept of nation-State:

gives countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon a certain amount of control over their own resources and cultural artefacts. These opponents of nationalism turn out almost invariably to be persons who would like to see the world governed by the forces in place. They would like to have a free-for-all situation where the stronger get what they want and the weaker ones can go to hell with their complaints.

Opoku notes that none of those playing the “Universalism” card offers:

any evidence that nationalism has any deleterious effect on restitution or on culture except that it prevents the large museums from continuing their old practice of taking objects from wherever they want. It also appears that they resort to accusations of nationalism only when there is a discussion on restitution of stolen or looted cultural objects that are in the so-called “universal museums” in the western world. We are still awaiting their explanation why nationalism in the case of claimants is somehow less respectable but not in the case of the western retentionists who are hanging onto stolen or looted property […] Cuno and his supporters should bring evidence why “retentionist nationalists” in some countries - Egypt, China, Turkey, Greece, Italy and Nigeria - are to be suspected in their motives for demanding restitution but “retentionist nationalists” in USA, Great Britain, Germany and France are not to be questioned in their motives for holding on to looted or stolen cultural artefacts.

He concludes that

With the hope of having contributed to clearing away this diversionary accusation of nationalism, the retentionists of the western museums should now offer more solid arguments, if they have any, for holding on to stolen or looted cultural objects from other countries. They should not present us arguments that do not help in understanding or solving the issue of restitution of stolen or looted cultural objects that are in the European and American museums. Their untenable contentions obscure the issues rather than enlighten us on the asymmetric nature of power in the colonial and imperialist system that made such illegal and unjustified robberies possible. The unresolved problems arising from colonialism will not simply disappear and the earlier serious efforts are made to reach acceptable solutions, the better for all of us

The whole article is well worth reading in its entirity, and it will be interesting to see whether the Universal Collectors reply with anything more than embarrassed silence...

A Collector's eye

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The stolen eye from a monumental statue in Amenhotep III’s funerary complex at Kom El Hetan which is being returned to Egypt now appears to have been formerly incorporated in the Norbert Schimmel Collection some of which, including this eye were sold at Sotheby's in New York on 16 December 1992, Lot. 87. The catalogue entry at that time, significantly, mentioned that this eye came from “a Colossal Quarzite Statue of King Amenhotep III”.

Monumental quartzite statues of this ruler however are not scattered in large numbers up and down the length and breadth of the Nile valley; known examples are relatively few and far between. In fact it seems that most of them come from the funerary temple at Kom El Hetan and the adjacent funerary complex of Merenptah excavated by Petrie in the 1890s, and one turning up buried in the courtyard of Amenhotep III colonnade of the Luxor temple in 1989.

Surely a collector being offered one of these things might be expected to ask where it had come from and some documentation showing how the seller had legitimately come into possession of such a find? Moreover if it had come on the market legitimately, surely this hefty fragment of regal visage would have been traceable in the literature? This is not after all a Second Cache shabti that can be slipped in a Nile cruiser’s cabin luggage. Would the fact that it is not give rise to a suspicion that there are problems with its provenience? So why would a collector not have this in mind?

Gathering Stones in the Desert for Collectors

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In another post here today, I discuss the effects on the archaeological record of a large expanse of the northwestern part of the African continent of the gathering up of archaeological material for sale to foreign collectors who are basically uninterested in where it came from and how it got into the big box of mixed goodies the seller in his own country offers to him at "reasonable prices". The archaeological issues have however analogies in those connected with other areas of collectorship. The same northwest African markets for example provide western markets with many fossils. It would seem though from the numbers of doctored and false specimens now appearing on the market that some of the previously more accessible sources are drying up. In other words, they have been collected away.

A more informative analogy however is with the surface collection of meteorites in the Sahara. A few years ago meteorites were relatively rare on the market and specimens fetched high prices. US collectors however were finding a number lying on the surface of arid regions in their own country (they stood out by colour, shape and texture from other stones and also were relatively stable in arid environments). Then some enterprising dealers realised that the deserts of other continents would be a good source of the commodity. So they began to make contact with dealers of geological specimens and persuade them to get desert wanderers to pick up the types of rocks they were interested in buying. Very soon this stuff started flowing onto the market in huge quantities. prices dropped, once a rare material, space rocks were now sellable for a few dollars a kilo. Now instead of being a highly-prized material accessible to only a few monied and well-connected collectors, they are now being collected by all and sundry and due to the glut, even used for making novelties (jewellery, watches, cut into novelty shapes). The availability of cheap material has allowed a substantial expansion of the market, new collectors are being enticed into the fold by various means which can only be good news for the dealers, its probably good news for the Bedouin (until the resource dries up) - but is it good news for the finite resource involved?

The situation is entirely analagous to the current state of the portable antiquities market, the expansion of which is encouraged by the ready availability of "minor" (sic) artefacts brought to light with metal detectors and with huge international oureach through internet auction and sales sites. In fact the similarities are so great that many of the arguments used by meteorite dealers and collectors to justify this personal collection of 'Rocks From Space' are exactly those used by dealers and collectors of 'Pieces of the Past'. There is no space to develop this here (which I hope to do elsewhere), but a few points need to be made about the material coming from somewhere in the Libyan and Algerian desert and surrounding areas currently being sold euphemistcally as "NWA" (Northwest Africa) material.

Meteorites are named by the place of discovery (where they fell). Stones from the fragmentation of the same meteoroid are grouped together under that name. An example is the Park Forest meteorite that fell on the outskirts of Chicago. This fragmented in the atmosphere and the pieces fell in a particular pattern (see Figure) which make up its "strewnfield". The study of the information of this pattern allows us to say something about the trajectory of the object and how it broke up (not without significance in studying the mechanisms of breakup on entry into the atmosphere of other objects from space, such as returning space vehicles and satellites). The pieces of a single meteorite can be studied together, the weight of recovered fragments determined and other such information obtained.

The situation with meteorites picked up "somewhere in the Sahara" and sold as part of a mixed bulk lot through a dealer in Marocco tell us nothing, other than a stone of a particular type fell some time in the somewhat large area known as "Northwest Africa", and now can be bought for a dollar a gramme from a Chicago dealer.

Collectors of these cut-price 'Rocks From Space' scoff at the idea that there is some form of technique and ETHICS that should be applied to collecting from strewnfields in the same way as many collectors of "Pieces of the Past" scoff at those who desire them to keep an account of provenance of the objects they covet. Meteorite collectors buying mixed lots of NWA material totally ignore the destruction of information for which their cupidity is directly responsible (just the same as those who deny that collecting of portable antiquities has any connection with the exploiting of archaeological sites as a source of collectables). Given such attitudes, the Bedouin collecting these rocks have no incentive to collect any information in the field on the strewnfield patterning of the material, since dealers know that private collectors will buy the loot regardless (they are not even overly interested that they cannot even learn which country or region the stuff fell in). Indeed, there are good commercial reasons for the finder keeping the actual findspot a secret. One of the most interesting and prolific of the NWA finds is the meteorite NWA 869, all that is known of it is that it was found (for most of it has now been collected away) at "Tindouf" on the Algerian-Maroccan border. Like the collectors of "Pieces-of-Other-People's-Past", meteorite collectors scoff at the existence of laws restricting the exploitation of a scientifically significant resource for commercial purposes. Likewise they scoff at the existence of "retentive" laws restricting the movement of certain resources across international borders and prefer not to think too deeply about who might be generating cash from this trade and to what aims. Collectors raising ethical questions like Richard & Roland Pelisson are ridiculed by the average meteorite collector, on the whole totally uninterested in anything like this which gets in the way of their free and easy (and cheap) access to material from which to build their own personal collection for entertainment and profit.

The strewnfield figure is taken from the webpage based on the article: L. Martell "Meteorite Shower in Park Forest, Illinois".

Collectors promote illicit removal of archaeological material

There has been some disapproval in collecting circles of opinions supporting the epigram "collectors are the real looters" ([wrongly] attributed by them to Colin Renfrew). Indeed a whole discussion list has recently been set up by a dealer "to prove or disprove the Ren[f]rew Hypothesis (sic PMB) on Looting"... so far without too many collectors wanting to argue the point in detail.


This is not surprising. Most normal people need little convincing that the inception of the disasterous digging into archaeological sites in places like Nigeria dates from the period when dealers started to express an interest in buying the fragments of terracotta figurines (as objects of fashionable "tribal art") which such digging provides. In Jiroft in Iran, locals expressed little interest in quarrying the ancient site until dealers began appearing there eager to buy the bits of old stone and pottery and looting then began in earnest. Such cases may be multiplied. Though dealers and collectors try to explain individual cases away by specious arguments, the overall picture seems pretty clear to most of the rest of us.


On a collectors' forum yesterday there appeared the following announcement: "I can supply a large lot of neolithic arrowheads.
Original items! Good quality no complete broken or junk points!
I am selling this arrowheads for only $ 1 each + shipping costs.
Minimum to take is 100 pieces [...] Nico sahara-arrowheads."

The dealers' website is here and there are close up pictures of a box-full of the offered goods here and here. These are obviously the cherry-picked items from a larger assemblage of surface finds probably garnered from a wide region and cultural range - all mixed up in a box somewhere in a Dutch portable antiquity dealer's premises. Where have these items come from? How did they get to the Netherlands? It would seem from the way the dealer signs his message to English-speaking unprovenanced arrowhead collectors that he is saying that they have been picked up somewhere in and around the Sahara desert.


As we know the region now occupied by the Sahara desert has not always been as arid as today. In the past much of the area was savanna and even forested and supported a rich fauna. As such many ancient human communities exploited the area and left traces of their activities. The archaeological remains of the area have a rich story to tell of the history of mankind, and also the response of these communities to serious climatic change (perhaps not a message without meaning today). A number of archaeological expeditions in this region - both of national institutions as well as collaborative international scholarly expeditions - have gathered substantial bodies of evidence from surface survey and detailed investigation of some sites. This information cannot however be obtained if the sites have been looted. In other words if groups of people have gone over them and removed or otherwise disturbed the distribution and other patterns of the artefacts they contain without record.


This is what we have here. It seems most likely that the source of these items is Bedouin who go out into the desert and fill up their saddle-bags with the "stones" lying out in the sands. They go back to sites they know produce these items, they find new ones (unknown to science). They take whatever they can sell. They then take them to certain towns (sometimes crossing national borders) where there are dealers who have contacts with other dealers who form part of the chain to the western collectors' markets.


It seems pretty obvious to most normal people that the main impetus for searchers to go deep into the desert to look for these "stones" and haul them acrss the vast expanses of sands is because someone somewhere will pay them a little money for them. These middlemen can only do this because at the other end of the chain of distribution are those willing to buy unprovenanced gee-gaws for their collection without asking any questions about where they came from. It seems undeniable that the carefree collector of such items (which are being supplied along with beads and bangles, Palaeolithic handaxes, polished Neolitic axeheads and other "collectables") without even a thought to what happens to the archaeological site - the only source of our knowledge of a community part of a great human culture - when these items were grabbed up and transported to a distant souk in a bag of thousands of others.

I expect the collector will counter that the Bedouin's family and camels were fed with the money generated by this looting of archaeological sites and that probably they had no other source of income. Maybe. They may claim that the laws many of the countries concerned are "unreasonable and unjust" (prevent "private enterprise") and in any case "do not prevent looting" (that's rich coming from the collectors and dealers that finance the looting by ignoring their existence). This does not however change the fact that these laws DO exist, and that by ignoring them, dealers buying illicitly-obtained material which is in many cases seems to be illicitly exported from the source country, are financing illgal operations and putting money into the pockets of criminals.

Collectors of course, and still less dealers in portable antiquities, do not see it this way.