Against Despair Over the Looting in Egypt

I am hearing a lot of despair being expressed, on facebook and elsewhere, about our inability to do anything to stop the destruction of cultural heritage in Egypt as elsewhere -- even from people as otherwise optimistic as the great folks engaged with the Sustainable Preservation Initiative. After all, if one cannot protect human lives, how could one protect sites and museums? And if all that international organizations like UNESCO can do is to issue one more statement deploring what is happening, what else can we do?

We can do a lot more actually, and SPI helps point the way, though of course SPI-like initiatives in these countries in chaos are impossible. The key point of SPI, though, is the taking-responsibility by non-governmental groups, and that has to happen here as well -- in spades, since the government has abandoned or lost the ability to fulfill its responsibilities.

So with that as the principle here are a few things that could be done:

• Non-Egyptians could help by finding ways to donate to Egyptians like Monica Hanna, Save El Hibbeh and other facebook groups, etc. who are mobiizing Egyptian citizens to take direct action where possible; 
• We could raise money to pay for remote site monitoring to at least make sure the world is aware of what is going on; 
• We could push much harder for a worlwide emergency ban like the one UN Resolution 1483 imposed on Iraqi materials; 
• We could help foster longterm growth of both SPI-like and citizen-led emergency site protection groups in countries where breakdown, revolution, or invasion seems possible (UNESCO is doing something like this but working with governments not with NGOs incountry);
• We could explore ways to tap into the military-to-military friendships that one supposes must exist given the decades of joint exercises, to see if there might be some way to appeal individually to officers there who are in the right position to move some forces onto sites. 

These are action items, and I am sure there are others beyond this (please chime in anyone). But they take energy, as well as financial resources, neither of which exist in anything like the amounts needed for the overall task of investing in sustainable site protection. What we need, above all, is a stable and substantial revenue stream that can feed and incentivize such efforts. SPI generates sustainable revenue streams but only at the local level and only so long as the government takes care of law and order more generally. Is there another market in things archaeological that is not the tourist market, a market that is not affected negatively by unrest or revolution as the tourist market is, a market that is legally protected and therefore could generate sustainable revenue streams, say via a tax or user-fee on purchases with proceeds funneled to support efforts like those above? Why yes! Guess what market that is.

If You Believe That Antiquities Looting is Driven by Rich Americans or Europeans, Think Again

Amongst many of my comrades who like me are trying to find ways to more effectively address the problem of looting of antiquities from archaeological sites, it is an article of faith that if we can reduce the demand for antiquities by collectors and museums in the US and Europe then looting will be reduced concomitantly. Hence the self-congratulations when museums in the US finally adjusted their acquisitions policies, for instance. 

But as I have argued, this is a naive view based on the mistaken assumption that the global market is dominated by Western collectors. The reality is that there are plenty of collectors from other parts of the globe whose demand is more than adequate to fuel looting.

But don't take my word for that. Here's what a Greek detective has to say:

Mr Tsoukalis believes the most popular buyers are Russians, Chinese and Latin Americans.
"In the last few years with the crisis, people who have reached their limits have become more easily tempted," he says.Continue reading the main story

"They are more likely to either sell antiquities in their possession or search for them in abandoned excavation sites, in order to sell what they find to dealers who take them abroad.
"We've tracked down ancient Greek antiquities as far away as Colombia - in the hands of drug dealers".

Does this mean that we should ignore what the collectors in the US and Europe are doing? Absolutely not. But it does mean that prohibitionism or just-say-noism is not going to do much of anything to stop looting, and that we need to think harder about other strategies that might do more. 

Spoiler alert: that doesn't include talking the Russians, Chinese and Latin Americans into just saying no -- but it might involve figuring out ways -- maybe through tourism revenues, maybe through a US tax on sales of antiquities to American collectors -- to fund better site protection and more people like Mr Tsoukalis. 

The Impact of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Antiquities Trade: Not Much Now, Not Much Likely Later

Souren Melikian offers a rosy-tinted view of the impact the 1970 UNESCO Convention is having on the antiquities trade. There is no doubt that the visible market is being impacted to some extent, though Melikian's evidence is purely anecdotal, and as Nord Wennerstrom points out, a glance at the auction catalogues shows that there are still a great number of unprovenanced pieces going up on the block. Mackenzie and Brodie's crew is likely to weigh in soon with authoritative statistics making clear that we have a long way to go before the auction houses have clean hands.

But even if we were to reach a point at which auction houses sold only adequately provenanced antiquities, it is far from clear that this would have all that much effect on looting, because:

a) a lot of the trade in antiquities is done privately, so that it seems very likely that as the trade cleans up its public image the more dodgy pieces will simply not be brought to auction or advertised but will continue to be bought and sold in the back rooms (as, for instance, Dr Arnold Peter Weiss attempted to do recently at the national coin convention with coins he thought were stolen);
b) Melikian's claim that "dealers are paying attention" is so weak that even Melikian offers no evidence beyond the fact that Jerome Eisenberg returned illicitly excavated antiquities (not so surprisingly, Melikian omits to add that Eisenberg only returned the pieces after being pointedly requested to do so by Italian authorities);
c) not all collectors plan to sell what they collect or to give it to a museum, at least not during their lifetimes, and such collectors are therefore unlikely to give a damn whether or not the auction house or museum is unwilling to handle the pieces they love; 
d) there are many deep-pocketed collectors in other countries where there is little concern about the Convention, and as the number of millionaires in non-Western countries skyrockets they will almost certainly take up any slack created by the reduction in demand for unprovenanced antiquities by Western collectors; 
e) as ethical collectors increasingly are willing to pay a premium for kosher antiquities, the higher prices commanded for high-end antiquities with pristine provenance will provide powerful signals to looters that similar pieces will almost certainly be worth digging up even if not quite as much as the kosher pieces (if one figurine is worth $57 million on the licit market, surely a similar illicit one will be worth at least hundreds of thousands).

The point I am trying to make is two-fold: the licit market is far, far from being sealed off from the illicit one, and even if it   could be the illicit market would continue to exist. That does not mean we should give up on the 1970 UNESCO Convention and say, "provenance be damned." It means that we need to go beyond just establishing a strictly licit market to begin thinking about how the power of that market could be used to pay for the policing needed not just to keep it licit but to crush the black market and secure archaeological sites around the world.

Batten Down the Hatches!

A Greek museum containing major antiquities is looted: "Two armed robbers broke into an Olympia Museum and made off with between 60 to 70 bronze and clay pottery objects. They tied up and gagged the female security guard before using hammers to smash display cases and grab the loot."

What can we learn from this? The key lesson is that the mere fact that artifacts are in a museum and recorded is not going to deter criminals who believe they are worth a lot of money on the black market. The criminals may be too stupid to know that fencing these hot objects may be difficult because a recorded artifact on the Art Loss Register or the like is almost certain to eventually be spotted if they come onto the auction house market or get donated to a museum. Or the criminals may be smart enough to have already set up a deal with a middleman or with a collector. Either way,the point is clear: antiquities cannot be protected only by a registry, if an illicit market exists.

Brookings Fellow on Libyan Heritage Policy Overlooks the Biggest Threat Ahead: Antiquities Looting

William Y. Brown, a nonresident Brookings Institution Senior Fellow who is former Science Advisor to the U.S. Interior Secretary and President of the Bishop Museum, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and Woods Hole Research Center,weighs in with a number of policy suggestions for how to make the best use of Libya's heritage in the post-Ghaddafi era. Among other ideas, Brown urges Libya to follow the example set by developed nations and

earmark funding for museums and land preservation efforts with fees on income or activities. For example, the Land and Water Conservation Fund in the United States was established for acquisition of important public lands and is funded by companies engaged in offshore oil and gas activity. Libya might consider such a heritage fee levied on its own oil and gas production.

Given that oil and gas are where the money is,such a fee would make good sense, though it has to be pointed out that the economic logic taxing the users of land and water (the offshore oil and gas companies) to pay for conserving land and water does not translate to users of oil and gas resources paying for conserving heritage. The exploiters of heritage are those who would profit from heritage tourism, and those who profit from selling antiquities. Logic would dictate taxing both those markets,if it could be done. But the heritage tourism market is not yet developed, and while Brown is eager to see it developed because it has the potential to make a lot of money, he shows no interest in harnessing the economic power of that market to pay for heritage protection more generally. And the antiquities market, of course, is not located in Libya, so Libyans would have no way to tax it.

Speaking of the antiquities market: one of the striking features of Brown's argument is that it almost completely ignores the biggest threat to Libya's heritage going forward: market-driven looting of archaeological sites. Brown himself notes that the Benghazi and Apollonia Museums were looted during the uprising, but beyond calling vaguely for immediate action to provide physical security for movable objects and to recover items recently stolen, he sloughs off the issue: "Mostly, however, the problem is a lack of planning, funding and management that preceded and is unrelated to the Arab Spring."

That is very myopic. Libya did not suffer from large-scale looting of its archaeological heritage before the revolution, but it is likely to come under attack by looters in the months and years ahead. As we know from a multitude of examples, any country possessing large stocks of unexcavated sites holding antiquities for which collectors are eager to pay millions is going to be attractive looters. Where the policing power of the state is strong, looters will be deterred, but when authoritarian or totalitarian regimes fall or even weaken, black markets will flourish. As Donald Rumsfeld put it, shrugging his shoulders at the looting that erupted in the wake of the toppling of Saddam, "freedom is untidy". Public education campaigns -- may do something to keep at least some citizens from turning to looting, but there is no substitute for a robust policing capacity.

It would be helpful if development specialists at Brookings and elsewhere paid at least some policy attention to how best to plan, fund and manage the physical security of archaeological sites, rather than ignoring the problem.

Who Protects Antiquity? Panel Discussion Video Now Up Online

Thanks to CUNY's crack team, led by Michael Washburn, this panel on April 7, 2010 went off well, and the video is now available. A couple of things stand out for me reviewing the tape. First, James Cuno responds positively to my suggestion that a "polluters pay" tax on antiquities purchases could be instituted to generate funds that then would be funneled to site protection efforts of various kinds. I was expecting a peremptory dismissal. Also surprising was Cuno's acceptance of the need to retire the term "partage". Second, the comments by Philippe de Montebello (unidentified and invisible in the video, he is the first questioner) showed how touchy museum directors are at any imputation that they might still be accepting dodgy antiquities, even as gifts. I was not trying to suggest that at all, as I made clear. I was, of course, disappointed that Montebello sees no benefit to taxing the trade here based on his assessment that no one buys antiquities in the US or Britain anymore. He is no doubt right that there is a lot of money in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere around the world competing for artifacts. But he still needs to explain $57 million at auction in New York for that Mesopotamian figurine; the buyer might well be non-American, but the sale is made here, and those sorts of sales though rare will certainly recur. And antiquities dealers on Madison Avenue continue to ply their trade. The tossed-off "99% of the trade is now outside of the US and Europe" reminds me of the similarly unsupported claim Montebello and John Boardman used to make that 99% of what we know about the ancient past comes from studying the objects themselves, only 1% from the findspot context.

'Ancient' artifacts, cyber scams - Los Angeles Times

An interesting new article on Charles Stanish's argument that Ebay has reduced looting by making it more profitable for looters to switch to making fakes for gullible, uninformed buyers, and poisoning the legitimate market. Antiquities dealer Jerome Eisenberg disagrees, noting that his annual sales are in the tens of millions of dollars, including an Internet trade that has "increased exponentially" over the past few years. Eisenberg believes that news about forgeries -- and one might add, the Internet's spreading of the news that it is possible to buy antiquities -- only succeeds in making the market grow. 

Eisenberg, of course, may simply be trying to reassure his clientele, and we do not know whether his sales revenues have increased, even if his internet trade has increased. But the fact that this reputable dealer is able to increase his sales on the internet tells us something that Stanish -- and even Steve Levitt -- do not adequately address. The basic economics of "lemons" teaches that warrantied used cars fetch a higher price than unwarrantied ones, and it would be odd if this were not also true of authenticated antiquities. The Guennol Lioness suggests the price for authenticated antiquities may be going way up. (There's an interesting economic question buried here, which is about the difference between a good that is not as good as it appears, i.e., a lemon, and a good that is no good at all if it is not as it appears, i.e., a fake.)

If that is the case, what does it mean for looting? One thing it might mean is that collectors -- even eBay ones -- will learn to distrust unauthenticated antiquities, and that might lead to declines in sales of both fakes and looted artifacts, assuming some archaeological body of experts could be created to vet artifacts. And since the costs of authentication will raise the price dealers need to charge, some buyers will be driven out of the market.

But if some buyers are driven out, many more will have been enticed in by the news stories and by eBay's seductive ease of perusal. Some among these new buyers will surely become cognoscenti, and bring additional money into the system. The more scrupulous will demand authentication from a recognized body, or put their trust in reputable dealers; there are sure, however, to be some less scrupulous who will be willing to pay a lot for artifacts that have been looted, if the middleman can show that the piece has come from the ground. That, after all, was what Giacomo Medici was doing with his Polaroids of dirt-encrusted vases. The Internet has made that technology quaint: a looter nowadays can snap and send a cellphone photo direct from site to buyer. Looting might well continue under these circumstances, not decline.

'Ancient' artifacts, cyber scams - Los Angeles Times

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Site Looting Down Dramatically in Italy

Italy has demonstrated that it is possible to dramatically reduce the looting of archaeological sites, according to a new story in Scotland's Sunday Herald. What lies behind this success? Here's the money quote:

A three-pronged strategy from the government has made life increasingly difficult for Italy's would-be Indiana Joneses. Increased monitoring of archaeological sites means they are more likely to be caught; tougher penalties are in the parliamentary pipeline; and aggressive prosecution of museum curators and middlemen who trade in illegally excavated antiquities is drying up the market for their goods.
Last year, the carabinieri art squad discovered just 37 illegal digs, a tiny figure compared with the 1000 or so regularly found in the 1990s.

Assuming that the astonishing decline is not due to the carabinieri having cut back radically on site monitoring, the message here is clear: if the appropriate policies are put in place and -- crucially -- backed by adequate policing and enforcement resources, looting can be stopped. Dealers and collectors who suggest that the only feasible solution is to legalize the illicit market are wrong, as are archaeologists who put great stock in raising cultural awareness.

Of the three causes mentioned, it seems least likely that tougher penalties alone are responsible, since the decline has preceded the passage of stronger laws (though it may well be that even before the new laws have been passed, looters are being deterred by media attention). Nor is it likely that the high-profile prosecution of a small number of curators and middlemen -- really, only the Medici network -- could have done the trick by itself. While the Getty's buying spree surely poured oil on the fire, the demand for antiquities is primarily driven not by American museums but by the continued avidity of wealthy collectors worldwide; and the takedown of the Medici network must have left others intact.

That leaves increased monitoring of archaeological sites. The article provides no figures or additional information about how monitoring has improved, but whatever the specific measures -- better technology, additional personnel, information-sharing, etc -- they must have cost something. Those who are interested in assisting other countries where looting is out of control should focus on targeting their assistance on measures to improve the capacity for site monitoring. It is a lot less sexy than restoring a world heritage site or sponsoring archaeological digs, but much more cost-effective in preserving the past.

Loot versus Looting

The always astute Hugh Eakin concludes his review of Sharon Waxman's newly released Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, by noting that restitution is a sideshow that distracts from the real and pressing issue, which is the looting of archaeological sites:

The larger problem is Waxman's portrayal of the antiquities crisis as mainly a "tug of war" over coveted museum pieces. In fact, the more important battle concerns unprotected archaeological sites, and it is far less a matter of repatriating objects than of figuring out how to stop latter-day looters from destroying our collective past. That vital challenge remains unsolved.

All of us who care about our collective past ought to be focusing now on generating and promoting realistic policy and legal measures that will reduce looting of sites in the most cost-effective way. I have suggested a few such solutions (impose a modest tax on antiquities sales with revenues dedicated to funding site protection in the countries or regions of origin; jawbone wealthy collectors to fund a non-profit foundation to develop low-cost anti-looting technologies and shunt assistance to those countries facing the most pressing difficulties; persuade countries, with the US leading the way, to contribute to the UNESCO fund dealing with the problem). Others have suggested market-based mechanisms that would incentivize site protection; public-spirited initiatives to spur cities, universities, or even facebook members to adopt particular archaeological sites; and, of course, cultural-sensitivity campaigns designed to tamp down on the demand side of the antiquities market by demonizing collecting as akin to buying baby seal fur.

With a new president -- from the University of Chicago, my home institution -- about to take office, there is a real opportunity to move forward. What we need now is a robust discussion where all these options and others are put on the table, critiqued, and refined.

What Should an OPEC-style Antiquities Cartel Demand From Market Nations?

Derek Fincham has an interesting recent post here reflecting on the prospect that countries of origin for antiquities are likely to band together OPEC-style to negotiate as a bloc, rather than continuing the individual dealmaking that has so far been the case. Fincham assumes, perhaps rightly, however, that even as a bloc antiquities-rich nations are unlikely to play hardball in demanding restitution and/or more stringent import rules because of the need to maintain good relations and thereby encourage increased tourism that can provide revenues needed to bolster site protection.

Reliance on tourism, he points out,

carries with it the distasteful tradeoffs, such as the commodification of heritage, and the wear-and-tear which millions of visitors will always cause. Hopefully nations of origin will be able to move beyond the dramatic repatriations, which are a necessary step, and continue to work to preserve the sites themselves.

But it is difficult to see how countries of origin will be able to do more to preserve the sites themselves absent some concerted effort to demand that any deal involving repatriation and loan agreements also involve some mechanism for generating revenues for site protection from within the market states, not from tourism dollars. The most appropriate source for such revenues is the antiquities market. Imposing a tax on all sales of antiquities would require lawmaking, of course, and countries of origin may feel it would be easier to make a deal with individual museums and collectors than to pressure them to call on Congress to tax the antiquities market. Dealers are almost certain to oppose any such measure, as well. But a cartel is far more powerful than any individual country, and with the stick and carrot of repatriation and loans in hand countries of origin have at least a chance to succeed. Surely it is worth a try.

3 Modest Suggestions for Improving Archaeological Site Protection

Derek Fincham suggests that if we want to protect antiquities currently at risk, "we need a cooperative coordinated approach which rests on a transparent market and loan procedure which works in conjunction with law enforcement and customs officials of many nations." This is exactly right, but needs a bit of flesh put on its bones. Here are three steps that need to be taken for this coordinated approach to work:

1. Transparency must be established in a way that satisfies the archaeological community that the provenance of antiquities is clear. That means creating a legally-binding mechanism for reviewing and approving antiquities for sale (presumably a board that would be run by archaeologists). It also means requiring all sales that take place to be registered so that it is known who is buying and selling, and at what price.

2. Sales of approved antiquities could then be not simply tracked, but taxed, in the model of sin taxes or user fees, with proceeds dedicated to a) paying for the provenance-review board, and b) funding programs (probably run out of the State Department's Cultural Heritage Center) that assist anti-looting and anti-smuggling efforts in those countries from which the artifacts originated. A tax of 5% on the Mesopotamian figurine recently sold for $57 million would have yielded a sum greater than the total 2003 budget of the Iraq State Board of Antiquities. Doubling their budget would dramatically improve their capacity to tamp down on site looting.

3. Both the provenance-review committee and the bureaucracy for administering anti-looting and anti-smuggling programs can be paid for from the tax proceeds. Ideally, there would be a governmental agency that would allocate tax proceeds to both these efforts, but the U.S. has no such agency. An oversight board should be created for this purpose.