New Imagery of Archaeological Site Looting in Syria

The US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs has released some updated satellite Imagery of Archaeological Site Looting in Syria, focussing on three sites in the Euphrates and Khabur valleys in Deir ez-Zor Governate, the area where insurgents have been highly active.

The first site is Dura Europos, Abu Kamal, Deir ez-Zor Governorate, where since the first photograph (June 2012) and before the beginning of April this year, the entire area of the city has apparently been dug over pretty systematically, penetrating deep into many individual rooms of whole ranges of buildings. The latest Google Earth photo of this site dates to 8th April 2011 and when I looked at the looting as seen on Google Earth a few months ago, showed no recent looting. In the latest photos, the shadows are sharp, the sun is low, and the extent of the damage is shocking. It is a superb photo (is this a satellite shot or a vertical survey shot from a plane?). This hole digging was not done for fun or to pass the time, somebody has been getting something from those holes, and that something has been got for a purpose. They've found a way of making this hole-digging in the hot sun worthwhile.

At Mari, Abu Kamal, Deir ez-Zor Governorate, the latest photos available through Google Earth are also from 8th April 2011. The BECA have shown photos of 7th September 2012 and 25th March 2014. The looters' pits are visible in several areas in the second photo. Several of them cut through excavation spoil heaps as though the diggers knew that there was something underneath, and in other cases totally blank areas have been chosen - why? While the pitting is nowhere near as severe as at Dura, this is still disturbing. Again none of this new digging was visible on Google Earth.

The third site chosen by the BECA is Tell Sheikh Hamad ( Dur-Katlimmu / Magdala),  where the Google earth photos show nothing (the only photo up there at the moment is a low resolution shot of April 2011). There is digging in three areas between March 2011 and March 2014. There is digging near the recent cemetery on the tell (which seems not to have expanded in the meantime), in spoil-heap covered areas to the southwest (do the spoilheaps perhaps shield diggers from view?) as well as in the old excavation trenches (ditto) to the northeast. There are also new pits on the 'lower town' on the north side of the tell (away from the modern houses) not marked by the BECA.  

What is coming out of these holes, where is it going, and who profits from it all? Whatever the answer we are all the losers here, it is the global archaeological record that is being trashed in front of our eyes, and this raises the question of what we are going to do about it.

US Collectors and their empty-headed, black-hearted, money-grabbing lobbyists, missing the point as usual, say "nothing, better smuggled than lost".   


Vignette: social change in action, destructive imposition of one group's ideals over another's

What's with the "Barford"?

Poland and its rich
archaeological tradition

Having bought Brindle's book, I am now ploughing through it. It is, as expected, very pro-PAS in tone and in the posing of the questions. I was puzzled by a reference right at the beginning (page 19) to a text by "Barford et al. 2000'. Then I remembered that Philippa Walton (2011, 55) had not only referred to the same piece of work (in a volume on surface survey) but with reference to the same comment about surface data reflecting a mirror image of below-plough preservation. Both of them had (apparently) read the text however without drawing the main conclusion that it should prompt - about the method by which British archaeologists go about creating a HER, compared to the more organized way it has been done elsewhere.  Neither of them cite any of the several other texts I have written on the sampling bias of the PAS database which both of them were using for their work (Walton citing a "Casey pers. comm." instead, and Brindle - to my eyes - in effect skipping a detailed discussion of this fundamental issue). It is interesting to speculate why two writers with a PAS background independently (?) hit upon the same obscure text in the Polish literature, and take from it the same (equally obscure) point, and both ignore the rest. Habent sua fata libelli.

 

Today on eBay

Today (Sunday evening) on eBay.uk, as I have just counted, there are  429 lots being sold by UK dealers of Roman coins, of these 71 lots are bulk listings of uncleaned coins, each over ten coins - which would bring the number of coins on sale today as over a thousand. Some listed as "Roman" are not, they are fakes or misdescribed coins (many of them from India - export of such items is currently prohibited by Indian law). Some are clearly bulk lots from the Balkans being passed off as local finds (export of these too is prohibited without export licences by all countries in the region - have the sellers got any?). There are a couple of suspicious looking gold coins which may be from my region of the world laundered as being British finds (at least one of them, if its not a modern fake looks to be a Barbarian imitation)...  Not all of the coins on offer today will sell this week or month, but it's a fair bet that by the end of the year most of them (the real ones) will have gone to personal collections scattered across the world. I mention this because the (2011) study of Philippa Walton which I am reading today she proudly announces is based on an assemblage of 57,993 coins gathered over a decade, so probably about as many UK-metal-detected coins as pass through the hands of online UK dealers in less than a year - very few of which are recorded anywhere at all.

Vignette: Among the loot one can find on eBay. 

UK Detectorists and their Home Goal

Heritage Action today discusses the announcement that English Heritage is setting up a study of “the rates, reasons for and conservation implications of metal artefact decay in the ploughsoil“.

Metal detectorists will be hoping it will validate their claim that they are engaged in rescue archaeology (“saving artefacts before they rot”). I suspect they’ll be disappointed.[...] artefact corrosion is always in direct proportion to the strength of factors causing it so it’s bound to vary greatly from place to place. That being so, this new study may well finally show, definitively, that detecting, since it takes place not just where there’s an urgent conservation need but anywhere and everywhere permission can be gained, is not rescue archaeology.

Indeed in Tom Brindle's survey of motivations for detectorists' choice of site, which I am going through today, the degree to which it is being eroded by ploughing is nowhere in the responses to his survey of artefact hunters.

Vignette: add anions and stir

Baylor expert urges scrutiny of trade in looted coins

Baylor expert urges scrutiny of trade in looted coins 
Millions of ancient looted coins from archaeological excavations, including in Egypt, enter the black market annually, and a Baylor University researcher who has seen plundered sites compares the thefts to stealing “smoking guns” from crime scenes.

Looted Objects Smuggled from Mosul

Mosul in northern Iraq

Iraqi antiquities and historic monuments, including churches and monasteries, have already come under attack in the region of Mosul since the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIL) took control of the city on June 10.

“There have been attempts to smuggle a number of rare Iraqi manuscripts from a number of libraries in Mosul to Turkey, including a rare Qur’an which dates back to the Abbasid era,” the head of Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, Qais Hussein, told Asharq Al-Awsat. Hussein said that “relevant authorities in the Iraqi government will take charge of following up the fate of these smuggled manuscripts to ensure their return and the punishment of the parties involved in their smuggling.” [...] Meanwhile, UNESCO has also called on Iraqis and their government to join it in protecting Iraq’s “cultural heritage,” and to help fight the theft of antiquities and the illegal trade in artifacts.

It should be insisting the dealers and collectors do the same and at the same time conducting a far more effective and far-reaching public information campaign to bring opprobrium on all who irresponsibly and negligently buy and sell antiquities with no concerns about establishing their 'clean' provenance.

Source: Iraq authorities: Rare manuscripts smuggled out of Mosul' Asharq Al-Awsat, Sunday, 22 Jun, 2014.

More on Looted Antiquities and Political Violence

Derek Fincham a few days ago questioned the links made in a recent media article between antiquities looting and smuggling and political violence (specifically that which US commentators label "terrorism"). Sam Hardy ('Conflict Antiquities') answers him in a very lucid presentation of the arguments not to dismiss this problem so lightly: "The connection of looting and terrorism (or political violence) in cultural heritage advocacy" (21.6.14). This is followed by a refutation of the one-sided  irrelevant online snideness from another quarter:

According to antiquities collector and paid antiquities collecting lobbyist Peter Tompa, ‘the archaeological lobby is cynically exploiting the rise of the ISIS terrorist group in Iraq to try to justify a further clamp down on collectors’. Apparently, I am that lobby. And apparently a wish for antiquities
traders only to trade in demonstrably legal antiquities is a call for a clamp down.

(Sam Hardy, 'Is there significant evidence of paramilitary funding from the illicit antiquities trade? Yes', 21 June 2014). Hardy, who has obviously devoted some attention (and time) to cite his sources, marshals evidence which at the least sheds doubt on the trade-lobbyist's flat denials. Hardy basically demonstrates that "Cultural Property Observer" has no grasp at all on the facts of what he claims to be "observing". No news there, then. The lobbyist for the no-questions asked dugup antiquities market (and his insulting BFF metal detecting sidekicks) are losing it, and quite obviously have nothing of any importance to say on the wider issues raised by the antiquities trade. It seems that they have decided, along with Mr Sayles, that the only possible tactic they can manage is to play the victim and concentrate on deflecting attention by their time-wasting empty-headed sniping.

The dealers and lobbyists will refuse to discuss this, and no doubt be in lethargic denial for a long time yet. The point is that their protests of innocence do not make the issues go away, or stop the abuses. All they are achieving is encouraging inaction within the trade which exacerbates the problem, and prolongs human misery (not their own people of course just the brown-skinned people the international trade of which they form a part takes artefacts from). Meanwhile the world around them watches and learns, as portable antiquity collectors alienate themselves more and more. 

Vignette: armed, dangerous and initially supported by money from "somewhere".