Neil Brodie: It is no surprise that the looting continues

On the SAFE website, Neil Brodie has a thought-provoking retrospective text: "It is no surprise that the looting continues". This contains a number of important points:

The response to archaeological looting seems reactive, working on a country-by-country basis, but this is not enough. Looting will never be controlled by on-the-ground site protection, which is much too expensive and usually a case of too little too late. Looting will only be curtailed by adequate policies of trade regulation at the international level, focusing on demand, not supply.  

He points out that much of the discussion of looting these days comes from the media, which of course informs public opinion, but such concerns tend to be transient (and again focussed on individual countries) and has little effect on policy.  

Policy makers look for hard empirical evidence and coherent reasoned arguments. Whether rightly or wrongly, they turn to academic and other professional experts. Yet there is only a small handful of archaeologists, museum curators, art historians, lawyers and criminologists who make it their business to investigate the antiquities trade, and despite the high-profile media reporting of the past ten years, the number and identities of the people involved haven’t changed much. The appropriate experts have failed to mobilise in numbers adequate for the job at hand. The inadequate response of the archaeological community has been particularly regrettable in this regard. Many archaeologists are quick to complain about looting but slow to engage in work of any kind that might help towards a solution. It is easier for them to point the finger at museums.

then of course you have the position that in at least one of the major market countries it is those very archaeologists who consider themselves to be the institutional "partners"  of the artefact hunters and collectors who are emptying the archaeological record of collectables. This renders any sensible public debate on these issues simply impossible. Should it not be the Portable Antiquities Scheme, a body set iup to deal with portable antiquity issues, that should be heading this public debate? And where is that debate? Certainly nowhere within PAS head office.  Brodie discusses the difficulties of academic work on the problem of the antiquities trade in a university environment. 

Another reason is that high quality information about the trade is not forthcoming. Several scholars have produced good ethnographic studies of looters or subsistence diggers at source, but there is nothing comparable for demand — no ethnographic reporting of rich and powerful collectors in their native habitats of Beverly Hills or wherever. Presumably these collectors and their confederates are lawyered-up and easily able to deflect academic enquiry in a way that the people who actually do the digging aren’t.

This means that there is little objectivity in research that "exhibits a clear and understandable self-interested desire to avoid unproductive legal quagmires". Another problem is the withholding of information. To illustrate this, he perspicaciously discusses the issues surrounding and potential implications of the lack of transparency in the recent announcement of the US returning in circumstances that are less than clear of some 10 000 stolen artefacts to Iraq. 

While information about the acquisition and exchange of illicitly-traded artifacts is suppressed or witheld it inhibits productive research into the trade and ultimately the formulation of novel and progressive policy aimed at constraining demand. Without such research, the fall-back position is for globally-ineffective local interventions, ameliorating symptoms but not tackling the cause. It is no surprise that the looting continues.

Now, of course the problem is that the people who are withholding this information from us are the very same administrations that we need to institute changes in the regulation of the market. One thing Brodie does not really cover in this text is what incentives there are, or could be, for the governments to do anything at all to change this situation. In the United Kingdom for example to do something to regulate the antiquities market. In the United States to scrap the country-by-country (MOU) approach for one more globally-focused. What would make these governments decide to do something which was more than a cosmetic feint pretending to combat the no-questions-asked antiquities trade and self-serving exploitive collectors?