"We had no idea it was a library"

The CNN story on the burning of the library in Egypt contains a telling vignette:

At least one demonstrator was unaware that the structure was a library containing historical documents.
"We had no idea it was a library. We love our country. Why were the military thugs on the rooftop of the building in the first place, throwing debris and rocks at us? They destroyed it, not us, and now they will use it to turn public opinion against us and label us thugs," said Ahmed Ali, a student and activist involved in the clashes.

"Since when are buildings or manuscripts more important than the lives of humans?" he added.

The demonstrator's comments hold several lessons one hopes will be learned by heritage protection advocates:

1. There is no guarantee that protestors, patriotic as they are, will know that the buildings they are fighting over are cultural institutions. Organizations that want to avert the disaster that befell the library need to make sure that their buildings are prominently labelled, and heritage protection advocacy groups should be handing out leaflets marking buildings as offlimits.

2. The 1954 Hague Convention requires the marking of cultural buildings in war zones with Blue Shields, but that provision would probably not apply to the kind of conflict occurring in Cairo or elsewhere between citizens and government forces rather than between militaries. The law of war has not caught up with the realities of war today, which involves irregular conflicts much more often than traditional war did. The International Committee of the Blue Shield, which might have taken proactive measures as suggested in #1 above, is hamstrung by its need to operate on a government to government basis, so it either needs to persuade the UN to broaden its mandate or other international and non-governmental organizations need to step in to make sure combatants are informed about the risks they are taking with cultural heritage when they confront each other near or on the grounds of cultural institutions.

3. The Egyptian military should be held accountable for a war crime if its soldiers attacked the demonstrators from the roof of the building, assuming that the 1954 Hague Convention applies. But if the soldiers were attacked first, the Convention (at least so far as I, a non-lawyer, understand it) would be moot. And if the soldiers were trying to drive the protestors away from the building to keep it from burning, they would be acting heroically not illegally.

4. Buildings or manuscripts are not more important than human beings, which is why the 1954 Hague Convention recognizes that military necessity can allow buildings to be destroyed if there is no way to avoid doing so in the midst of a fight. But this is all the more reason why, since both sides in this conflict recognize that manuscripts are important, steps should have been taken by both sides in advance to ensure that there was no need to choose between protecting lives and protecting culture.

After Iraq National Archives, after Baghdad Museum, after Cairo Museum, Why Was Egypt's Library Not Secured?

The burning of the Egyptian Scientific Institute in the midst of the chaos in Cairo is a cultural disaster on a par with the worst acts of destruction of heritage in recent years, arguably worse than the losses to the Iraq Museum (since stolen artifacts can still be recovered, whereas the burned original manuscripts are gone forever). Whether the fire was started by a Molotov cocktail or, as some have asserted, was set by the soldiers inside the building, is not yet clear, and may never become clear. What is clear, however, is that the burning of this library reflects yet another abject failure of heritage policy to protect heritage when it is most at risk.

It is not as if this eventuality was unpredictable. After the Cairo Museum was robbed in the midst of similar chaos last January, the Egyptian government, and the military leaders who run the country, should have been able to work with international heritage protection agencies and organizations such as UNESCO, the Blue Shield,and others -- including the many, many Egyptian citizens who care deeply about their heritage (and showed it by joining hands to cordon off the Cairo Museum in January) -- to put in place contingency plans to keep cultural institutions secure during periods of unrest. Last but not least, the US government, which subsidizes Egypt's military to the tune of billions, ought to have demanded the Egyptians secure their cultural institutions and sites as a condition of aid. But of course, since we have no carabinieri-like forces ourselves to do this sort of thing, and little interest ourselves in securing cultural sites apart from major tourist attractions such as the Baghdad Museum or Babylon, chances are that no one from the Pentagon was even thinking about the problem, even after the looting of the Cairo Museum.

That was in January. Did the fate of the Cairo Museum provide a wakeup call that site security needed to be an urgent policy priority? It was not until mid-October, after months of bureaucratic chaos, that the government announced it had set up a committee to develop security plans, so the answer is most likely no. Nor did any citizens' groups evolve out of the noble ad hoc handholding at the museum.

The result? If this CNN report is accurate, the military did not set up a perimeter around the building. Instead, a small number of soldiers stood on the building's roof and goaded the protestors:

The library was a scene of intense confrontation Saturday.

A dozen men dressed in military uniform were positioned on the library roof and threw cement blocks and rocks on the protesters and sprayed them with water hoses to push them away from the building.

But protesters hurled back rocks as well as Molotov cocktails. Then a massive explosion erupted, apparently originating from inside the building, and black smoke billowed.

Firefighters were busy putting out another fire in a nearby building.

Protesters were bleeding from rocks thrown at them.

What is to be done going forward, beyond the important immediate task of salvaging the remnants of the library?

First, the courage, energy, and passion that Egyptian citizens have shown in responding to the disasters at the museum and now at the library needs to be channeled into civic organizations that can be mobilized proactively next time around.

Second, UNESCO needs to either shift resources from conservation and development or supplement them with additional funding focused on securing cultural sites during periods of political unrest.

Third, the United States needs to exercise some leadership and influence, where it has leverage or ties with militaries in countries undergoing transitions or crises, to induce them to do the right thing.

Fourth, NGOs and foundations that support cultural heritage conservation need to begin thinking about how they can work directly with nascent heritage site protection NGOs in-country.

US Customs Introduces Online System for Alerting Authorities to Illegal Importation

If I were an antiquities dealer this would make me a lot more worried than ever before about importing dodgy artifacts. Hat tip to Paul Barford.

Calling All Coin Collectors: Please Explain Again Why the FIndspots of Coins Don't Matter Much

http://news.yahoo.com/old-coins-force-think-jerusalems-western-wall-121242557.html

Profile of State Department's Archaeologist in Afghanistan

Excellent profile of Laura Tedesco, who as the State Department's archaeologist in Afghanistan is doing even more dangerous duty than her colleagues in Iraq, the only other country, as the article notes, where the State Department has posted an archaeologist. It takes great courage and commitment to put one's body on the line as archaeologists in both countries have done, and they deserve our gratitude for that.

As a matter of policy, it is interesting to compare the approach taken in the two countries. In Iraq, the focus has been on redeveloping Babylon and restoring the Iraq Museum as heritage tourism destinations, with little attention paid to the massive destruction of other sites by looting or encroachment. In Afghanistan, in contrast, the focus has been on one extraordinary recently deiscovered archaeological site, at Mes Aynak, that is certain to be destroyed, even though it could in theory have become a major tourist attraction if it did not sit atop mineable natural resources worth far more than tourism could ever generate. Tedesco is coy about how much is being spent on salvaging what can be saved from Mes Aynak, but admits it runs into the millions. It is worth asking how much might have been saved from being destroyed by antiquities looters in Iraq if the policymakers at the State Department and in the Pentagon had recognized that there was an equivalent need to protect Iraq's threatened archaeological heritage, and not just to exploit the part of it that would generate tourist revenues.

The American Academy in Rome meeting -- What Brian Rose Could Be Telling Museums They Ought to Do

I was unhappy not to be able to attend the recent American Academy conference, due to a previous speaking engagement. As this article about the meeting makes clear, it was a very timely meeting, and the organizers, Brian Rose and Laurie Rush, deserve kudoes for pulling it together.

The article provides only a very partial account of what went on, and one hopes that the organizers will be posting at least some of the papers and presentations for those of us who could not make it to Rome to get a fuller picture of what was said. The article was written for Cleveland.com and so takes a rather parochial view of the issues based on the Cleveland Museum's insistence that it will continue to buy antiquities. That elicits from Brian Rose the suggestion that "Rather than collect, museums ought to forge agreements with source countries to share cultural riches...."

Of course, most museums are now already already doing that or moving in that direction. The problem is that despite this shift in museum policy, site looting continues to plague countries rich in antiquities. In Turkey, for instance, as Rose tells the interviewer,

thieves use road building equipment at night to smash open stone chambers in ancient burial mounds and to remove treasures buried for centuries. Turkey simply can’t prevent the activity, he said.

What is to be done, then? Given that the reporter has been asking him about museums, one might have hoped that the answer would be, the museum world (and the dealers and collectors who are part of it) needs to do more to help Turkey et. al. But instead, Rose merely suggests -- or at least the reporter only reports him suggesting -- that "source countries should train soldiers to preserve cultural sites during wars and revolutions and instill pride over patrimony by educating children about national heritage." Those are both excellent ideas, but neither is particularly well suited to address the kind of looting that goes on in Turkey and other countries at peace. What is needed to stop peacetime looting is not soldiers but antiquities police and site guards. Education campaigns are sure to do some good, but the economic incentives for looting are not going to be trumped by pride in one's national cultural patrimony (Turks are already very proud of their national heritage, as are most Americans for that matter, yet looting of archaeological sites still goes on there and here).

In any case, neither training for soldiers, nor education campaigns for children, nor antiquities police and site guards, can be provided in these countries without additional financial resources. Preventing looting costs money. The article on the meeting misses this key point -- an especially odd oversight, since the reporter moves immediately from quoting Rose lamenting how hard it is for Turkey to prevent looting to naming "another serious challenge" that an Italian archaeologist working in Turkey, Roberto Nardi, has identified: "that of raising the money needed to preserve antiquities."

Rose should be saying the same thing. And he should be saying it to those who have the money: the museums, collectors, and dealers, whose money right now is destroying rather than preserving antiquities, by driving the looting of sites. What Rose could have told the interviewer was: "Museums should be doing more than sharing cultural riches, they ought to forge agreements with wealthy collectors and dealers to get the US government to tax antiquities purchases to raise money for anti-looting efforts in source countries." Why the former head of the AIA, who has done so much both institutionally and personally to raise awareness of the problem of antiquities looting, does not have a more forward-leaning position on what museums should be doing puzzles me.

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.

Another Collector Calls for Registering Antiquities -- and Taxing Them (just not here, though!)

Peter Aldrich refloats a proposal made some time ago for a series of steps he thinks would help curb antiquities looting.

The solution is unrealistic, and unnecessarily so. No country where looting is going on now is going to change its laws to make it even easier than it is now for foreigners to deplete the countries unexcavated sites. But with a little tweaking, parts of the plan would do a lot of good. So instead of asking the world to do what it clearly is not ready to, why not just get together now with other antiquities collectors and dealers here in the US and show the world what good could be done for them? Legislators could be told that collectors, museums, dealers and auction houses all want a registry established here that antiquities would have to pass through to be saleable (a fee would be charged to have their antiquities vetted to cover the cost of that, and to cover the costs of policing the industry to ensure compliance as well). Legislators would also be told that collectors, dealers, museums, and auction houses all want to see a tax on all antiquities purchases here –including purchases made overseas of items brought into the US -- but only if tax revenues are put into an anti-looting Superfund that would support more site guards and other anti-looting measures there in poor countries where looting is worst.

Yes, the US would be putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage in the short run for unprovenanced antiquities, but that would be more than compensated by the goodwill the collecting community would garner from countries of origin — goodwill that could be built on in lots of ways impossible now, given the animosity caused by perceived indifference towards the harm that the demand for antiquities is doing.

Egypt's archaeological sites and museums will be getting a security upgrade

This sounds like a very good development, not just because better-armed guards, if they are properly trained, will have more deterrent effect, but also because the security plans will "be updated periodically to meet new or unexpected challenges." One hopes that Egypt will settle down and fulfill its promise of establishing a stable democratically-run government, but gaming out the possible scenarios for political breakdown and creating agreed-upon contingency plans now is very prudent. It may be touchy to raise the question of whether the Tourism and Antiquities Police might once again melt away, as they did during the January uprising, but that sort of possibility has to be put on the table, just in case, so that if security does need to be turned over there are clear directions as to how the SCA can fill the security gap at least temporarily.

Libya's Sites Get the Once Over

The plucky team of Joris Kila and Karl von Habsburg, guided by Libyan archaeologist and assisted from Europe by Dr. Thomas Schuler, were able to make their way into Libya to produce the first on-the-ground assessment of that country's extraordinary cultural heritage, and have now issued this report. The news is mostly good, which is heartening, and the Blue Shield and the International Military Cultural Resources Work Group are to be commended for once again being first in, as they were in Egypt. UNESCO has now sent a mission as well. Among the most interesting findings in the Blue Shield/IMCuRWG report is that in the case of the Leptis Magna site, the museum staff, operating without a contingency plan, nonetheless took a series of steps that kept the site and its museum's pieces safe, despite efforts by Gaddafi militia on several occasions to take over the site. Shepherds were invited to bring their sheep onto the site, something not normally permitted; the shepherds helped the staff monitor the vast site and prevented mines and booby traps from being laid. The staff also was able to persuade armed members of the Qaddafi militia to rehabilitate themselves by patrolling the site's perimeter. In addition, according to this CNN report, but not mentioned in the Blue Shield report, the site director also distributed a thoroughly documented inventory to friends in the capital an hour's drive away, so even if the town were destroyed during the war its history would not be lost. Directors of archaeological sites everywhere should take notice of these smart moves, and especially of this last one. The dire consequences of not having a thorough inventory -- including photo documentation -- are being felt by the one museum in Libya that has sustained major losses from looting, the Benghazi Museum, which has been robbed of more than 7,000 rare and valuable coins dating back to Alexander the Great, as well as other artifacts. Strangely, the Blue Shield/IMCuRWG report makes no mention of this theft. So, not a fullscale assessment mission but valuable both in helping convey to Libyans that the world cares supports their laudable efforts to protect their heritage, and in waving the flag for a more robust cultural heritage protection effort on the part of NATO. As the report notes, despite the deep involvement of NATO in the war to liberate Libya, it does not appear that NATO's concern for protecting Libya's heritage has gone beyond the important but very limited accomplishment of creating a no-strike list of sites to be avoided in bombing campaigns. That is what is required under the 1954 Hague Convention. The report argues that NATO has a further obligation:

Military contacts and training about protection of cultural property are indispensable, this is for instance mandatory under IHL (Hague Convention) and is still not put into practice in many countries.

I do not share that reading of what the Hague Convention requires, but I am not a legal scholar so I am ready to stand corrected. In any case, whether Hague requires it, policymakers would be well-advised to do this as a matter of sound policy. Securing cultural sites from post-conflict looting is in the interests of mankind, since the archaeological past is our shared human past; but it is also in the interests of warfighters to win hearts and minds by showing that a nation's heritage is respected. The Libyans are going to need all the help they can get going forward to ensure that the new Libya, with its freedoms, and with the inevitable lure of profits to be made by mining and smuggling its antiquities to be sold to super-rich collectors abroad, does not see the emergence of industralized looting by mafia-like groups, as is the norm in countries where state power is weak.

If Busybodies Can Help Prevent Illegal Garbage Dumping, Why Not also Pay Them to Identify Looters of Antiquities?

The Times today has a story about an interesting law enforcement technique in Korea that might be a cost-effective way to improve policing of archaeological sites, especially if the fines are greater than the reward.: http://nyti.ms/o2icnK

Archeological Organizations Step Up, Urge Concrete Steps to Help Protect Libyan Archaeological Sites

Finally, a coordinated, thought-through call from archaeological organizations for specified steps to be taken to protect archaeological sites in a post-conflict transitional situation. I would have suggested a few additional steps that would focus more resources directly on site guarding -- i.e., not just US-AID funding, but also real-time remote site monitoring assistance from NATO, which has the capacity to keep an eye in the sky on what is happening out in the desert. But that aside, this is a huge improvement on any comparable statements in the aftermath of other revolutions or wars.

Excellent overview of what the Egyptologists saw and did during the 2010 Revolution

Kate Phizackerley and Andrea Byrnes of the Egyptological blog have posted a very informative and clearheaded summary of how the Egyptological and cultural heritage communities responded to the challenge posed by the revolution in Egypt. Well worth reading.

Antiquity tied to Jesus? Maybe, but we will never know for sure, thanks to the looters and those who buy from them

Here we go again. An ancient ossuary is determined to be genuine, but is the inscription genuine as well? And even if it is, where exactly is the burial site, who else was buried there, etc. etc.?

The researchers aren't able to trace where the ossuary was discovered, since it had made the rounds in the illegal antiquities trade, but they believe it came from a burial site in the Valley of Elah, southwest of Jerusalem, the legendary location of the battle between David and Goliath. Beit Imri was probably located on the slopes of Mount Hebron, they said.

Maybe yes, maybe no. If I were a devout Christian, I would be very upset. As someone who cares about the truth in our past, a truth that is continually being falsified and obliterated by those who collect antiquities, I am upset myself.

After the Iraq Museum Was Looted, Senior Bush Administration Officials Told It Still Needed to Be Secured. Three Days Later It Was.

As cables from the Iraq war continue to ooze out onto the internet, more details are gradually emerging to fill in the small gaps that still exist in the picture of the Bush administration's ineptitude and indifference. From the particular angle of interest to readers of this blog -- the failure to secure the Iraq Museum and archaeological sites -- this cable reconfirms what we already knew: that even after the news of the looting at the museum reached authorities, the museum remained unsecured for days. What we still do not completely understand, all these years later, is who dropped the ball during that interim period, when Donny George and a few other museum employees armed with nothing more than metal pipes were fending off further attacks on the museum.

In the cable, Amb. John Limbert, a former Iran hostage who had been tapped to deal with Iraq's cultural ministry after the expected cakewalk, writes on April 13. The museum had been looted between April 10 and April 12, when Donny George and other Iraqis returned and drove out the looters. Limbert writes from Kuwait, weeks after the invasion began, having been denied, along with most other post-war reconstruction officials, the chance to go into Iraq along with the military.

In addition to the important call to issue offers of amnesty for return of stolen items and to define looted antiquities as stolen property, Limbert urged that

Coalition authorities should provide security for
remaining objects and for other high-value cultural
sites.

Limbert might have been more forceful had he written instead that "coalition authorities should provide security for remaining objects AT THE MUSEUM" but his point is clear: the museum itself needs to be secured.

Who received this message?

EPT FOR NEA LAROCCO PM BLOOMFIELD AND INL SIMONS
IRAQ TASK FORCE FOR PM ACTION TEAM
DOD FOR WOLFOWITZ
DOJ FOR SWARTZ AND ODAG/EONS JAMES MCATARMNEY
DEPARTMENT PASS NSC FOR SUZANNE MCCORMICK

That would be, then:
a) from the State Department: James Larocco, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East, 2001-2004; Lincoln Bloomfield, Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs from 2001-2005; and (probably) Paul E. Simons, then acting assistant secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs. Simons was one of three State Department officials to write a memo in February 2003 warning that there were major gaps in the military's postwar planning. Suzanne McCormick's status at that point is unclear, but she later became Director of the Office of Intelligence Operations at the NSC.
b) from the Justice Department: Bruce Swartz, Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division in charge of international issues, with duties that include interacting with foreign governments on counterterrorism and criminal justice issues. Like McAtarmney, another lawyer, they are probably on the list to push the legal angles.

Policy players all, but not as far up the policy food chain as Paul Wolfowitz, who needs no introduction. He could, one assumes, have picked up the phone and ordered the museum to be secured immediately. But he probably had his hands full with other matters at this point, and it was to be another three days before a tank crew finally arrived at the museum on April 16, 2003.

Libyan Rebels Mobilize Special Brigade to Protect Museum and Sites

I somehow missed this nugget in a Guardian article on Tuesday: "The opposition National Transitional Council (NTC) said on Tuesday that guards from a specially trained Tripoli brigade, made up of fighters from the capital, were being stationed at the national museum as well as other key cultural sites." That is really interesting news, and very heartening, especially since it is the Libyans themselves taking responsibility for the dangerous but important task of securing their own cultural patrimony.

Thanks to Cori Wegener and the excellent U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield for the find.

Did NATO Plans to Help Libyans Topple Ghaddafi Include Inducements to Protect Libyan Archaeological Sites?

This UNESCO statement warning authorities in and neighboring countries to guard against looting of their archaeological sites raises some important questions. With Libya now more or less liberated from Ghaddafi's tyranny, what will happen to the extraordinarily rich archaeological sites there now, with the country in what may be a protracted period of instability? I am ashamed to say that I do not know enough about Libyan politics to be able to say whether archaeological police were part of a hated governmental ministry (as was the case in Egypt and Iraq), but in any case the sites are almost certain to be left less well-protected than they should be. Are there any short- and middle-range steps that could be taken at this point, beyond issuing statements, to help the Libyan people protect their own (and the world's) archaeological heritage from the market-driven looting of antiquities that spikes during such periods?

NATO has certainly thought about this problem (as in this excellent conference held a few years ago in Tallinn), but it is pretty unlikely this thinking has been translated into the very politically constrained operational planning structure under which NATO must be operating in Libya. Let's be clear: No U.S. or British or Italian tanks are going to be rolling to the gates of Leptis Magna. This is not Iraq. But one could imagine a number of other stopgap measures that might be taken, if the planning had been done over the past month or so. These possibilities include:
a) helping the ministry of culture to organize and enlist Libyans, preferably locals for each major site, into site-protection groups who could camp out in large numbers on the sites and act as a deterrent.
b) helping the ministry of culture work with the antiquities police units directly
c) providing real-time aerial and/or satellite monitoring information
d) placing import bans on antiquities from Libya
e) with the permission of Libyan authorities, bring the carabinieri over to help the antiquities police cope with the heightened threat
f) providing Libyan archaeological police and site guards with material support in the form of walkie-talkies, remote monitoring devices, helicopters, etc.

Readers of this blog may have other ideas to add.

These suggestions are about what NATO and the community of nations could and should be thinking of doing. But -- and it is a big but -- there is no reason why many of these suggestions could be pursued by cultural heritage NGOs, if they were a little less focused solely on sustainable tourism and more attentive to the threats that looting poses, even to World Heritage sites. I would add that it would be wonderful if a wealthy collector or major foundation recognized this as a problem they could help solve, but I am not holding my breath on that one.

ICE on a roll

This story is interesting on several counts, including the news that the smuggler was apparently moving artifacts not just from the Dominican Republic but also from Mexico. Equally interesting and heartening is the news that ICE is working well with INTERPOL and other countries to interdict illicit imports. (On the other hand, checking a shipment marked as containing artifacts is not exactly rocket science, and leads one to wonder why the importer did not try to hide the artifacts somehow.)

Antiquities Dealers, Asked for Help from FBI in Identifying Law-Breaking Dealers, Respond with Laughs

A sobering account here of a meeting between FBI agents and the Antique Tribal Art Dealers Association. The attitude of dealers in Native American antiquities, at least, appears to be to laugh at the law as it stands. When asked to help law enforcement identify major players in the illicit trade, the response of dealers is jeers. That is hardly likely to endear the FBI to these folks. If I were in the FBI I would leave that meeting steamed and ready to do some more investigating. If I were a responsible dealer I would be looking for some way to deal with the problem of looting that prompts law enforcement to go after dealers in the first place. Legalizing looting of Native American sites is not going to happen. The licit trade needs to develop structures to make it as difficult as possible for illicit pieces to enter the market. As I have suggested on many occasions, the best policy here would be one whereby the licit trade agreed to a tax and reporting system on sales over a threshold price, with proceeds directed at beefing up the number of Park Service police to prevent the looting in the first place.

Too Many Antiquities Seizures in Turkey For the Museum to Handle

According to this article, Turkey's antiquities police have been very busy, confiscating more than 68,000 artifacts from nearly 5,000 smugglers in the last year alone. That shows that: a) Turkey is devoting substantial resources to fighting the looting of antiquities from its territory; b) demand for unprovenanced classical-Greek-era antiquities remains virulent, despite the changes in policy by museums. This is not to downplay the value of museums adopting a clean-hands approach, but one thing should be clear: the private market, not the museum sector is the driver of antiquities looting, and that the private market is in dire need of regulation to control, reduce, and exploit the demand in ways that would serve to prevent further looting in the future.

Beyond that, the article notes that all this policing has created a problem in turn: the Archaeological Museum is facing increasing difficulty in dealing with the influx of looted materials, 25,000 and counting piling up. (Imagine how many would be piling up if there were a Portable Antiquities Scheme!)

Turkey's policy requires the museum’s management to care for seized artifacts, the article notes, "until the investigation is completed, at which time either the piece will be released, permanently added to the museum’s official collection, or sold to a collector via an auction." Presumably only in-country collectors would be allowed to buy, though I am not sure of this, nor of whether funds raised from the sales are devoted to help defray the museum's costs to some extent. Any readers have better knowledge of this to share?

One other issue the article leaves unaddressed is whether the seizures are being made on sites, at the border, or in-country. The extraordinarily high number of artifacts being seized may indicate that the Turkish approach is focusing scarce policing resources on confiscation rather than on site protection. Both are needed, but it is far more important, from an archaeological viewpoint, to keep sites from being looted than to keep looted artifacts from leaving the country -- especially if the policy is to eventually sell those looted artifacts to collectors.

Can the London Riots Help Us Understand How to Deter Antiquities Looting?

Ed Glaeser has a post (at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-12/how-riots-start-and-how-they-can-be-stopped-edward-glaeser.html - I cannot figure out how to put in links using the iPad I am working on right now) summarizing some of what historical research and statistical studies tell us about how riots start and end. There is, as always with this kind of research, a lot to treat with skepticism (i.e., Glaeser's claim that because riots were less common in the South than in northern cities in the 1960s, and more common in ciies that had more government spending, we can say that there is not much of a link between unrest and either inequality and poverty), and Glaeser's failure to attend to political concomitants (i.e., the perception on the part of poor people that society is unjust in myriad ways, including of course the rewarding of massively anti-social criminality on the part of the financial class, for whose destructive behavior the rest of us, and particularly the poor, are to be punished by austerity). But one of Glaeser's points is of interest to readers of this blog, who worry about how best to deter looting not by rioters but by tomb or cave painting robbers:

The lesson: Light penalties widely applied and serious penalties applied to a few can both deter unlawful behavior. This is a central conclusion of Gary Becker’s path-breaking economic analysis of crime and punishment. But in the case of riots, it is awfully hard to actually prove wrongdoing and extremely important to clear the streets. Arresting widely and temporarily can be far more effective.

The same conditions hold for antiquities looting and trafficking: it is very difficult to prove wrongdoing and extremely important to clear the sites of looters. So a policing strategy of more arrests and fewer major prosecutions might make sense for antiquities looting, at least where the looters are doing so opportunistically. For the professionals, whether looters or fences/middlemen/dealers or receivers of stolen goods/collectors, on the other hand, it might be insufficient deterrent to arrest widely and temporarily. There are not that many of them, innocent dealers and collectors might get swept up (which could of course also happen in riots), and unlike poor rioters, the dealers and collectors are powerful enough to go after the police chief or prosecutor who opted for such a strategy. For the pros, then, serious penalties applied to a few -- i.e., Fred Schultz -- is probably the better course. The best course, though, would be to harden the sites to make looting more difficult and dangerous for the would-be looter.

A few thoughts on today's Guardian article on "Stamping Out the Illicit Trade"

No doubt the Arab Spring is generating some opportunities for looting, but the examples given in this article are all of looting that occurred before this year, including the most recent one. It also is simply not the case that the market for antiquities from the Middle East is dominated by American and British buyers. There are millionaires all over the world interested in this material, including of course many in the Gulf States and Lebanon, where it is certain that much of what was looted from Iraqi sites in the 2003-2006 period is gracing living room mantels. Shutting down the international trade in Iraqi material helped somewhat but did not put an end to the looting there. So the policy solution cannot just be more stringent provenance rules, though that would be helpful. The power of the demand side needs to be tapped to provide the resources that are needed to better police the supply side. A good step in this direction would be to put a "pollution tax" on the sale of licit antiquities, with the proceeds going into the equivalent of a SuperFund that would pay for more and better security at sites, museums, and borders. That could be done domestically without the nearly impossible herding needed to get international conventions passed.

Getty Trust CEO James Cuno wraps up debut week

Getty Trust CEO James Cuno wraps up debut week

As expected, and as he has already stated, Jim Cuno intends to continue to have the Getty follow the rigorous do-not-acquire-anything-at-all-fishy acquisitions policy, which is of course good news. But this is the least the Getty, and Cuno, could do in terms of anti-looting policy, and one would hope -- though his mind does appear from the interview to be on acquisitions -- that he is also thinking about how he could use his position at the Getty to help persuade the collectors, dealers, and the museum community to not just say no to dodgy antiquities but to say yes to additional policy measures aimed at getting more monetary help where it is needed to police sites, borders, and the licit market.

The Long Tail of Cultural Policy, Cultural Diplomacy Division

A Pakistani version of Brubeck's "Take Five" here. The album is shooting up the charts in the UK, having gone viral. What is interesting, and moving, about this story is not just the music itself (I would have hoped for more drumming and some improv from the sitarist, and maybe a south Indian violinist solo as well, though perhaps the full version of the song, which I have not yet heard, goes further than the clip), but the spirit of "freedom, and live-and-let-live" that the millionaire Pakistani underwriter decribes, returning musicians to work after the repression that crushed them back in the 1980s.

This story also tells us several important things about cultural policy. First, that the longterm impact of cultural diplomacy can be very longterm: Brubeck, Ellington, et. al. visited Pakistan back in the 1950s as part of a State Department-run Cold War cultural diplomacy initiative. It is not completely clear how, or to what degree, that tour left seeds in Pakistani culture that emerged here, but that would be a story well worth pursuing.

The other interesting cultural policy feature of this story is what it says about the recording industry today. Marketing did not create the hit: building an Abbey Road-style recording studio in Pakistan made the hit possible, a hit that in turn helped strengthen so-called Western values associated with the music. So a cultural diplomacy initiative today might well draw lessons about how to encourage politically-progressive spirit in other countries by running programs that empower musicians and artists more generally to explore hybridized idioms of expression.

Collector as Looter (and not just by analogy!)

This story is over a year old but I just ran across it and thought it worth sharing, since it is rare that a wealthy collector even admits to buying looted artifacts, much less to having looted them himself, and from a World Heritage site to boot:

In an interview with German magazine Welt-online prominent Austrian-German media manager Helmut Thoma admitted the looting of a grave in Syrian UNESCO world heritage site of Palmyra 30 years ago.

Thoma tells how a dealer in Damaskus took him to a grave chamber in Palmyra and invited him to crawl inside. "It was dark and there were snakes..." Thoma says. But his inner Indiana Jones was stronger than his worries. After a small entrance there were several graves, decorated with frescoes. "I've chosen these ones here in my living room." Afterwards these antiques were smuggled through the customs at Frankfurt. Today this piece – probably the closing stone of a hypogaeum – is presented in Thoma’s living room among other objects. “Most more recently acquired pieces”, Thoma said, he had bought from art dealers.

German and Austrian archaeologists protest against this crime against international law and demand that the objects have to be brought back to Syria.

Felch on KQED: The Conceptual Limits of Focusing on Museum Restitution

Jason Felch, co-author of Chasing Aphrodite, was interviewed last week on KQED, one more sign of the remarkable publishing success of that book. I admire the reporting Felch and his colleague did for the book. What I wanted to flag from the interview, though, is something that also lurks in the background of the book, and indeed lurks in the background of all the sturm und drang over the question of whether museums should participate in a market in which 95% of the items are likely to have been dug up by looters who in the process destroy our ability to ever find out crucial details about our past. At one point, after Felch notes that the Getty's acquisition budget was upwards of $100 million, several times that of the Met's, a listener emails to ask what is being done to stop private collectors. Felch notes that the art market is unregulated but points out that several collectors have in recent years had to return objects. This begs the bigger question, which is what the size of the high-end market as a whole is. The assumption on the part of those who have worked assiduously to force museums to clean up their act has been that this will put an end to the looting, presumably because museums are market makers. Certainly the Getty was a market leader, but that was only because Getty himself was so wealthy and fixated on Greco-Roman antiquities. The Met was unable to compete with Japanese buyers for van Gogh's sunflower back in the early 1980s (de Montebello said the price for that one painting alone was several times the Met's acquisition budget, and he could only watch in amazement), and we know that other pieces on the licit market have been purchased by private collectors (the "Artemis and the Stag" donated anonymously to the Met after purchase, and the Guennol Lioness last seen publicly after being sold to a private collector for $57 million, the highest price ever paid for a sculpture).

My point is that there are many, many millionaires in this world interested in purchasing antiquities, and their combined wealth almost surely dwarfs the resources of the major museums. If that is the case, then museums having clean hands will make some, but not much, difference to the looters and their middlemen. Felch claims, without much evidence, that the illicit trade in Greek and Italian antiquities has more or less dried up, supposedly as a result of the Marion True case. The statistics from the carabinieri do show some drop in the number of arrests for illicit digging and trafficking in the past few years, but that corresponds to an increase in funding for their efforts, and in any case the digging has by no means stopped altogether. In fact, as Ferri and others have noted, looters who have found Italy too hot these days have moved to Bulgaria where lax site protection means Greco-Roman antiquities can still be dug to feed the continued demand from collectors. The recent arrest in Greece of men who had a recently-found kouros in the back of their truck is another indicator of the obvious: so long as there are people willing to pay large sums of money, artifacts will continue to be dug.

In this regard, the case of Iraq is particularly interesting. Felch surprisingly goes out of his way to downplay the losses from the museum ("we now know not nearly as much was take as we had feared"), which misses the point that much more was taken than anyone expected before the war began, some 15,000 items, of which nearly half remain unaccounted for. As Felch notes, these objects have not surfaced in museums -- and only a very small number at auction houses or dealerships. The reason for that is obvious: these museum pieces are on a Red List, and there is a worldwide ban on Iraqi antiquities trading as well. But what Felch does not mention is that in spite of this ban, Iraqi archaeological sites were looted on a massive scale for several years following the invasion. No museum would touch such pieces. So either something like 100-200,000 artifacts were dug up by looters for middlemen who saw them as an investment to be warehoused and sold at some later date (hard to believe), or there are collectors, almost certainly in the Persian Gulf states, who were keeping those diggers busy.

The economic basics are clear: looting will continue until the antiquities market itself is regulated and taxed to pay to prevent the harm that even the purchase of a legal antiquity does. (As I have noted a number of times, the Guennol Lioness sale was perfectly legal, but it signaled how much a similar piece, illicitly excavated, might be worth.)

Another way to say all this is that fascinating as it is, the Getty story, and the restitution issue more generally, is a sideshow.

A Few Thoughts on the Egypt-Abu Dhabi-New York-Michigan-Virginia Smuggling Network

There is sure to be a lot more to come, but there are already plenty of interesting facts surfacing about the international antiquities smuggling network based on stories like this one from CNN. Among other things:

• the ring was truly international, not just in terms of the players involved, but more important, in terms of the objects they handled, which came not just out of Egypt but from Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan as well. That is alarming, as it shows that social networks amongst this sort of criminal are not naturally restrained by national or linguistic borders. That degree of cosmopolitan flexibility also jibes with reports that a smuggling network that had been operating out of Iraq turned to smuggling Tunisian antiquities under recently-deposed Tunisian president Ben Ali. Whether that network turns out to be the same as this one remains to be seen, but in any case the implication for law enforcement is clear: there is a clear need to develop stronger means of cooperation between police in different countries. To that end, former Italian prosecutor Paolo Ferri had already begun (most recently at the annual ARCA meeting in Amelia, Italy) to call for antiquities trafficking to be recognized as falling under the category of international criminal conspiracy, a change that would enable intergovernmental police coordination like that which is possible for drug, human trafficking, and other such mafia-run smuggling operations.
• The advent of metal detector usage by looters in Middle Eastern countries is alarming, but it is not clear to me what the impact of this new technology will be on archaeological sites. By making it easier for looters to find what they really want, it might even lead to less widespread destruction of context. (Much would depend on how precious metal objects are distributed around a site, which would differ of course by civilization, etc.) On the other hand, it might lead to many more sites completely unknown to archaeologists being pillaged. One might even envisage a Portable Antiquities Scheme down the road -- not that this would necessarily be an optimal outcome.
• It is not clear what the customs agent means when he says there has been an escalation in Iraq, but the context implies he is talking about more digging in the last six months. That is news to me if true, and I'd be interested to hear what the Mesopotamian archaeologists or heritage professionals who may be reading this blog have to say.
• Abu Dhabi is certain to take some steps to clean up its act, though what these might be I do not know, as I do not know what steps Switzerland took after the Medici case. Anyone out there know much about free ports?

International Smuggling Ring Operating within US Cracked

Lots of intriguing information in this story, though the outlines mesh with what we know is the modus operandi by which antiquities make their way from countries of origin (here, Egypt) to collectors in faraway exotic places (here, Virginia): move the pieces to a free port like Dubai, from there to Manhattan dealer, either directly from a Dubai dealer -- or a foreign (Jordanian) dealer operating out of the free port -- or run through some other dealership (in this case in Bloomfield, Michigan). The Manhattan dealer -- who thanks to Paul Barford we know operated in midtown, on Second Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets -- then fabricates a false provenance (part of an old family collection, in this case the dealer's own family!) which the collector accepts. What is quite interesting in this particular case is that the collector has also been indicted for allegedly knowing that the provenance story was fiction. How the authorities could prove this is a puzzler but even if it cannot be proven it really does put collectors on notice to be very very careful from hereon in if they want to avoid major legal bills at the very least.

World Heritage List Inscription for Syrian Villages: A PR Coup for a Murderous Regime

UNESCO's World Heritage Committee approves inscription of 40 ancient villages in northern Syria on the World Heritage List, along with a number of other sites. The villages are no doubt well worth visiting, but the timing is somewhat unfortunate, as it affords the tyrannical and repressive Syrian government the opportunity to present itself as enlightened and progressive:

Shakkour [Syria's Permanent Representative to UNESCO] said the decision affirms that Syria, which has more than 5000 ancient sites and the seventh of which to be listed on the World Heritage List, has been enjoying a civilized position that everyone must testify.

The registration of the village, Shakkour noted, is part of a "Syrian cultural vision project". How will such a vision be squared with the Syrian political nightmare project in which the Assad regime is now engaged?

Arts leaders speak up -- is Rahm listening?

Lots of good ideas here, and more should come out of the woodwork if the process of generating a cultural plan for Chicago is not hijacked, as is often the case, by those who have the deeper pockets or connections and who mistake their own interest in the arts as representing the general interest (or who simply ignore other interests than their own):

Arts leaders speak up -- is Rahm listening?

An Exchange with Hugh Eakin

Hugh Eakin has responded to my previous post with a comment that I thought deserved to be shared along with my response to it below.

Eakin writes:

Many thanks for your comments, but I wonder if you have read my piece. You mention none of the main substantive points I make, including factual revelations about the Getty and other institutions (drawing on pages of documents and extensive conversations with the carabinieri and other Italian officials over many years) that, by any stretch of the imagination, cannot qualify as a “defense” of museums. Regarding the deplorable looting of Iraq I suggest you read [“The Devastation of Iraq’s Past,”] (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/aug/14/the-devastation-of-iraqs-past/) an extended discussion of the satellite and eyewitness evidence of large-scale, organized plunder immediately before and after the 2003 invasion. (It appeared, by the way, in The New York Review of Books.) I know of few other discussions of this scope short of your own book. As for the two factual observations I make that seem to trouble you, you do not dispute their accuracy: you acknowledge that “evidence and argument” are not provided in the book for the point in question, and you agree that “archeologists have gained little” by restitution. This is precisely what I meant: viewers of the Nostoi exhibition may derive pleasure from viewing beautiful objects just as viewers in California or New York did, but that will not bring back the works’ archaeological context. Any other reading of those statements would be a fanciful departure from the facts. In view of your own laudable efforts to bring together archaeologists and collecting museums, I’m surprised that you seem now to favor puzzling generalizations about “museums and their apologists” over reporting that may complicate the assumed positions of both sides. 
Hugh

 My response:

Dear Hugh,

Just for the record, I want to say that there is no better reporter on these issues than you, and that, as is true of all your pieces, your article on the Getty does contain a lot of valuable information, information that adds to our understanding of what the Getty's mishandling of the True case cost it. You are also right to note, as I do not, that in your piece you present valuable new and substantive evidence about the bad behavior of museums more generally. Had I been writing a full description of your article I would have made that clear. I have enormous respect for you and your work.

But my post wasn't aiming to rehearse the facts presented in your review, nor was I trying to suggest that you were in any way inaccurate about the facts you did present.  Rather, I was taking issue with the rhetorical framing of your factual observations within what you call in the article an "interpretation". As any interpretation must, yours departs from the facts towards a claim about what the facts mean.  So, when you note that the authors provide "neither evidence nor argument" proving that far more knowledge is destroyed by looting than is preserved by the museum-collected artifact, you do so for a reason: you want to show that, as you say in the immediately preceding sentence, the book is wrongly "cynical" about "the notion that art museums might have some legitimate reason for collecting art from the ancient past." I do not think it is "fanciful" to conclude that you believe museums do have a legitimate reason for collecting art from the ancient past, legitimate because even if some knowledge may have been destroyed in the process, there is always going to be more to learn, and because art can bring the world alive regardless of what we know or don't know. As you put it in your final sentences:

Even now, scholars are trying to determine the identity of the cult statue after which the authors name their book (several think it is not Aphrodite); and archaeologists continue to seek the place where it was found. In the meantime, Italy can enjoy the same exquisite artworks of unknown origin that had previously graced American display cases: a victory less for archaeology, perhaps, than for the approach endorsed by collecting museums of showing beautiful objects that, even without knowledge of their discovery, may bring alive the ancient world to the modern public.

That's a very soothing interpretation, much more so than one that would have ended with something like "But that enjoyment will do nothing to bring back the works' irrecoverable archaeological context, or to ensure that what we think of as the living ancient world is more than just a fantasy", or simply with the truncated phrase "a victory less for archaeology, perhaps, than for the approach endorsed by collecting museums of showing beautiful objects." I wish I could be as sanguine as you are that it is just a matter of time before scholars determine the identity of the cult statue and determine where it was found, but there is a good possibility we may never get answers to those questions, or to a host of others related to untold thousands of artifacts whose findspots and identities would help us understand the meaning of this particular cult statue.

In any case, my point in quoting you here is simply to explain why I took you to be defending, at least indirectly, the deeper philosophical position that Keats is laying out in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in support of the priority of a museal aesthetics as "all ye need to know": beauty teases us out of thought, and a vision that seems to "bring alive the ancient world" can substitute for the missing truth about the world.

Keats did not confront the possibility we have to confront: that beauty might not just substitute for but kill truth, that the passion for the beautiful might be slaked at the expense of knowledge. (The Romantics were worried about murdering to dissect, not murdering to admire.) The public, as well as collectors and museums, all share the passion for the beautiful; we all also share – or should share – a passion for, or at least an equal respect for, the true. We should not settle for the situation we are still in now, even with museums adopting a clean-hands policy, in which archaeological sites continue to be destroyed for the sake of the beautiful. Museums, collectors, and governments ought to recognize that they do not need to settle for the beautiful alone, as is the case with restituted artifacts. Policies can be devised that would focus not on restitution alone but on paying for more guards. The Getty, for instance, could have been told it had to set up a fund for site protection -- or perhaps pay for permanent guards at Aidone, something Malcolm Bell could have used back in the 1970s! -- rather than simply give back the hot pots to Italy; more generally, sales of beautiful antiquities could be taxed and the proceeds used to help pay for guards and the like. But we can't even have that conversation if we don't care if we don't know.

What Went Wrong With "What Went Wrong at the Getty" by Hugh Eakin | The New York Review of Books

What Went Wrong at the Getty by Hugh Eakin | The New York Review of Books

Hugh Eakin reviews the already-much-reviewed expose of the inner workings of the Getty, in a piece that, like most other discussions of antiquities looting in the New York Review of Books, bends over backward to defend art museums against charges that the museums, in the words of the authors of Chasing Aphrodite, "have fueled the destruction of far more knowledge than they have preserved." As Eakin points out, that claim is not backed up in the book by either evidence or argument. Eakin's implication is that this is poppycock.

But just because evidence and argument are not provided does not mean there is none. True, it is difficult to imagine how one could specify precisely how much knowledge has been destroyed by looters ransacking archaeological sites, since by definition this would be knowledge that will have to remain forever an unknown unknown (to paraphrase the poet of unknowingness, Don Rumsfeld); what the metrics would be for measuring how much knowledge has been preserved by museums would be difficult enough, though conceivable at least. But we do know, for example, that the area looted in Iraq alone since 2003 is several times the size of all the archaeological sites dug there licitly from 1923 to 2003; all that knowledge is gone forever. And we also know that the Mesopotamian areas most devastated correspond to categories of antiquities that are most in demand by high-end collectors who either donate to or serve on the boards of major museums.  The book's claim may be hyperbolic, but the link between museum acquisitions and the lobotomizing of our collective memory by antiquities looters is impossible to deny.

The extent to which Eakin prefers not to acknowledge what antiquities looting means becomes clear when he points out that the return of looted artifacts from the Getty to Italian museums is "a victory less for archaeology, perhaps, than for the approach endorsed by collecting museums of showing beautiful objects". He is correct that archaeologists have gained little: restitution followed by agreements to loan objects does nothing much to stop looting (Egypt and other nations ought to be demanding not just objects back but more financial help to pay for site guards etc.). But Eakin is wrong to think that the approach of showing beautiful objects, "even without knowledge of their discovery, may bring alive the ancient world to the modern public".

That's the same aesthetic attitude that, as Meyer Shapiro famously showed, enabled Heidegger, looking at van Gogh's beautiful painting of a pair of the painter's old shoes, to misinterpret these as the shoes of a German peasant woman -- a far from innocent move in the Germany of the 1930s, and even less innocent when one learns that Heidegger originally delivered this speech bringing the world of the peasant woman to light before an audience of Nazi women. Shapiro's lesson was that while a work of art may seem to bring to life a world to a viewer who is ignorant of and indifferent to knowledge, what it may in fact be doing is serving as a screen on which the viewer projects his or her fantasies on the world.  Luckily van Gogh's letters were not destroyed, so Shapiro was able to do the art historian's work to show what world van Gogh's painting really brings alive. We have much more difficulty with objects that might bring the ancient world to life, since so much has already been lost: there are no letters extant from the sculptor of the Getty "Aphrodite". The equivalent to van Gogh's letters would be whatever information archaeologists might have learned by properly excavating that statue and others.

Beauty is not truth. And we need truth, not just beauty. Museums and their apologists should recognize this.

5-10% of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities Budget Goes to Site Security

Iraq Museum to devote special hall to recovered artifacts, honoring Donny George

It is moving to hear that the Baghdad Museum is going to honor the late Donny George by dedicating a conference hall in his name, and also interesting to hear that the museum continues to receive stolen items from Syria and that Syria and Jordan appear to have been on the smuggling trail (or perhaps it is just that the Jordanian and Syrian police have been more effective than, say, the Iranian or Gulf state police in tracking items down):

He said the museum received recently 32 more stolen items from Syria. More than 750 pieces have been handed to the Museum by the Syrian authorities so far. Jordan has sent back to Iraq 2,466 stolen pieces. More artifacts were recovered in the U.S., Holland, Sweden, Germany, Poland and Peru.

Harvard Egyptologist's Newsweek Essay on Protecting Egypt's Heritage Post-Revolution: What It Gets Wrong and Why the Facts Matter

Peter Der Manuelian, Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology at Harvard, is a brilliant archaeologist as well as a very nice fellow (I met him recently at a lecture I was giving for University of Chicago alumni at his stomping grounds). But the scholarly rigor that characterizes his academic research is sadly lacking in the opinion piece he published recently in Newsweek, Protecting Egypt's Heritage Post-Revolution - Newsweek. Here's how Der Manuelian describes what has happened this year:

In the space of a few short weeks, the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) broke away from the Ministry of Culture to become its own ministry; then Mubarak was toppled, the police disappeared, and some sites, including the famous Egyptian Museum in Cairo, were looted. Hawass stepped down to protest the looting; the SCA temporarily lost its independent ministry status; and the new prime minister, Essam Sharaf, could not choose a successor to fill the power vacuum. This created an unfortunate window of opportunity at some sites for armed criminals to overpower the unarmed guards and break into antiquities-storage magazines.

This timeline is both inaccurate and incomplete. The Museum was looted before Mubarak was toppled, not after, and looting of sites and storerooms also began before Mubarak stepped down -- began because the police disappeared, almost certainly on orders from Mubarak. Hawass did step down to protest the looting, but before the museum was attacked he seems to have done little or nothing to secure it, despite the pitched battle that took place in front of it just days before the break-in, and in the weeks following he repeatedly gave out information that was misleading in ways designed to downplay what had gone wrong at the museum as well as what was going wrong on sites and at storehouses. Speaking of the antiquites-storage magazines, Der Manuelian has the timeline wrong here as well. The window of opportunity Der Manuelian talks about did not open because Hawass' resignation created a power vacuum: storage magazines were being attacked before Hawass resigned as well as afterward. 

Why this slipshod approach to the facts? The answer is clear from the fulsome praise Der Manuelian heaps upon Hawass' performance at the helm of the SCA and from his contention that "few others could fill the post at this delicate time." I am not sure that I agree on that point, though I share Der Manuelian's view that Hawass has done great good work over the years for Egypt's cultural heritage and for archaeology in general (including, by the way, co-editing a volume in 2010 with Der Manuelian), and it is easy to see why foreign archaeologists might be not just wary of criticizing someone so powerful but truly and honestly in favor of keeping him in charge because he makes it easier to undertake digs there. 


But all the good Hawass has done cannot be a reason for sweeping under the rug the facts about his performance during the crisis. He must be held responsible for not having thought carefully enough or developed contingency plans in advance to deal with the eventuality of a breakdown in the normal policing functions of the state. The lessons of Iraq, where the toppling of the state left a security vacuum in which the museum and then Iraq's sites were massively plundered, were clear, but ignored. After the clashes began in Tahrir Square, he should have ordered the Cairo Museum completely locked down, and some of the 30,000-plus employees under Hawass' authority should have been dragooned, or at least asked to volunteer, to stand guard together at the museum, at sites and at storehouses, as was done with workers at the Baghdad Museum just before the 2003 invasion. 


One might add that foreign archaeologists and museums engaged in excavations in Egypt also should have been thinking before the fact about the need to secure sites and storehouses in the event of political unrest that was as predictable in general terms as an earthquake; Hawass' failure to have done so is of a piece with general disinterest on the part of both archaeologists and collecting institutions in the unsexy, unintellectual, and sometimes brutal task of securing sites, museums, and storehouses against looters.

Who Cares about Zahi's Clothing Line?

The New York Times, apparently. While there are real stories that need investigating -- i.e., how it could possibly be that a museum employee could just happen to be in a Cairo train station and notice a bag that turns out to contain pieces stolen from the museum, or why it is that the museum was not more fully locked down in the days before it was looted, or why the guards on Egypt's sites and at their storerooms were either not armed or inadequately armed to prevent gangs of looters from overrunning them -- the Times lazily trolls blogs for a tempest in a teapot regarding Hawass'  deal with a clothing line manufacturer. The lede of the story exhibits a very distressing blindness about what really matters:

Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s longtime chief antiquities official, has been criticized in recent months for many things: his closeness to former President Hosni Mubarak, some inconsistent reports on the safety of archaeological sites during the uprising and for his role in a dispute over an Egyptian museum bookstore, for which he now possibly faces jail time.

At the very least, "inconsistent reports on the safety of archaeological sites during the uprising" should read "his failure to secure the Egypt Museum and archaeological sites during and after the uprising". But one would have hoped that someone at the Times had a better sense of stories worth spending journalistic energy on.

A Matter of Priorities

Ahram reports that five days after meeting with the prime minister, Zahi Hawass has been officially reappointed, and more important, has held a half-hour meeting with the general who heads Egypt's armed forces 

to discuss security measures necessary to safeguard Egypt’s antiquities and efforts to be exerted to restore Egypt’s looted artefacts in collaboration with the world community and UNESCO.

Hawass told Ahram Online that the first order of the day is to repel the 500 encroachments on archaeological sites that have been found within the past two weeks, as well as the resumption of projects that were on halt due to the revolution.

The term "encroachments" normally does not refer to the storming of warehouses by armed gangs and to the digging of sites by armed looters, but to local squatters building cemeteries, houses, and farms on top of sites. The latter is a longstanding ongoing problem that Hawass has held conferences on in the past, and no doubt it is a problem that has worsened over the past two months. But to argue that it is "the first order of the day" at a time when sites and storerooms are under siege reflects a very odd sense of priorities. One would have thought that after all this time Hawass would have gone into  the meeting with the general with an action plan in hand to beef up site and storeroom security, and that he would have emerged announcing it was being put into effect. The lack of any such announcement is very disappointing.

More Information on How Underarmed Egypt's Site Guards Are

Another report of inadequately armed and inadequate numbers of Egyptian watchmen being driven off of archaeological sites by gangs armed with automatic weapons:

The watchmen complained that the small number of watchmen and their inadequate weapons facilitates made it difficult to protect such archeological sites.

Watchman Ruby Mohamed Abdel Salam said he worked with nine other watchmen to guard the 600 acre site in shifts. He said that he and his fellow watchmen were only armed with 9 mm pistols, which are no match for the automatic weapons used by the armed groups, especially considering the large area of land they are guarding. Abdel Salam also complained that their bullet supplies are running low.

If Zahi Hawass is really back in control of an organization 30,000 strong, backed by the interim government, how can it be that there aren't even enough bullets for the handguns, not to mention better weaponry and more guards?

We're Gonna Need More Guns, continued

Reports from Luxor Times and Al Ahram to the effect that ten armed masked men broke into a storehouse in Tel El daba', Facous, Sharkia governate, which was guarded by a policeman and three "Ghafir" guards working for the SCA; it is not completely clear from the reports if all four were armed but the Luxor Times describes the gang as having taken away "their weapons", so it appears that more than one was armed, though no information is provided as to whether these arms were handguns or automatic weapons. The gang apparently caught these four by surprise, or perhaps they were unwilling to engage in a firefight they would probably have lost, or perhaps they feared having their families targeted if they fought back (this was a common problem in Iraq where both site guards and looters often were locals who knew each other).

This is by no means the first time since the revolution that an armed gang has attacked a storeroom, but by now one would have hoped that the SCA and the Egyptian government would have responded by providing their own guards and police with the arms and additional security needed to fend off such attempts. But with the country still in transitional turmoil, and Zahi Hawass first in then out then in, that has proved difficult.

Clearly, more needs to be done to protect all storerooms (not to mention sites!). This particular storeroom contained artifacts excavated by Dutch and German archaeologists over the last thirty years; other storerooms that have been looted also have contained the fruits of foreign-led excavations (including one by the ultra-wealthy Metropolitan Museum). One wonders what steps, if any, those archaeological organizations and their governments might be taking now to beef up security at least for the artifacts that their archaeologists helped bring out of the ground. Obviously it would be difficult if not impossible for a foreign group to arm Egyptian guards, but surely there must be other steps that could be taken to help, including paying locals to set up a monitoring system to warn guards of impending attacks, providing remote sensing devices to detect intruders, hardening the sites themselves, etc. Does anyone out there know if any such plans are afoot?

What It Takes to Effectively Police Archaeological Sites

This report discusses the arrests of three men caught digging an archaeological site in Italy. The banal fact that even in relatively rich nations there are going to be looters, especially if the objects to be uncovered are potentially as valuable as the carnelian these tombaroli found, is of little interest. What is highly illuminating, though, is what this operation shows about how complex it is to do successful site policing. Guards on site are the least of it. The site inspectors for the region must undertake preventive patrols assisted by helicopters (in this case from the equivalent of the Coast Guard) and by the carabinieri. Pull out any one of these elements and the chances of stopping looters drops precipitously. In Egypt, of course, the SCA seems to have had little or no policing capacity of its own, and the Interior Ministry -- the equivalent of the carabinieri -- melted away once the revolution began.

UNESCO's Egyptian delegation: A New Role for UNESCO in Cultural Disasters?

The UNESCO delegation dispatched to Egypt at this particular point in the difficult transition to democracy has rubbed some archaeologists the wrong way, in large part since it comes at a very awkward time, given that the question of who is in charge of Egypt's antiquities is at the moment not clear. But more interesting from the viewpoint of a UNESCO-watcher perhaps is this tidbit from the story from Ahram Online:

El-Awadi told Ahram Online that Manhart offered to provide Egypt with technical experts, including on security measures. If funding is required due to the retreat of tourism, continued Manhart, in order to provide more security facilities, UNESCO could help find financial resources. 

almasryaloum.com has a slightly different take:

UNESCO will not offer crude financial help, but, according to Manhart, it can offer technical support, send security specialists, conduct a needs assessment, and define priorities.

What is interesting here is not just the dancing around the question of providing financial help (which is more or less to be expected, given UNESCO's generally ineffectual fundraising efforts for similar archaeological emergencies), but the double emphasis on sending security specialists and raising money specifically to provide  "more security facilities". So far as I know, that would be a new and extremely important role for UNESCO to assume. Let us hope "security specialists" doesn't mean site conservationists but experts on using guards, guns, barbed wire, walkie-talkies, and the like to lock down sites and museums.

Heavily Touristed Major Sites Do Not Translate Into Protection for Other Sites

120,000 tourists visit Gamarra annually, yet only 5 of the 250 sites in the region are protected.

Despite its status as a major site, Mirador is being devastated, with hundreds of archaeological sites being destroyed annually.

2 million tourists travel to or within Peru to see Machu Picchu, yet there are only three antiquities police officers in the Moche region of northern Peru where over a million people live.

The Global Heritage Fund calls upon Peru and other governments to divert visitors and revenues to local communities and lesser-visited sites. That is undoubtedly a good idea, but unlikely to be implemented. Even if it does get implemented, however, it is far from clear that local buy-in is sufficient in the absence of police. As we see in Egypt, even where the populace has a sense of the importance of archaeological heritage, there are always going to be criminals and hungry people who will have an incentive to loot. Governments need to spend more money for antiquities police.

The problem, of course, is that even countries as rich as the US don't spend the money they should to properly police their sites. For poorer countries the temptation to use tourist dollars for other more pressing social purposes is going to be even stronger. The solution is funding from overseas sources that is earmarked for building site policing capacity. What sources? The US State Department is unlikely to have any such funding available going forward (the Ambassador's Fund is under attack now by Republicans), so foundations, wealthy collectors, and museums are the only ones with the wherewithal.

Resistance to UNESCO Visit: Interference in Protecting Egypt's Heritage is "Antiquities Colonisation", Says Hawass

This is a painful article to read. One admires the patriotic spirit and sense of pride that leads Noureddin to assert that Egyptians "are totally able to protect our monuments" and that lead Hawass to reject offers by international organizations to help protect Egypt's heritage, and under normal circumstances these assertions and rejections would be warranted. But these aren't normal circumstances. Normally gangs of armed looters do not attack guarded sites or storehouses.

Public Archaeology Pays Dividends for Archaeologists

An interesting story about how non-archaeologists sensitized to the importance of digging things up properly have added to our scanty knowledge of America's prehistory.

RIP Donny George Youkhanna

Word from Abdulamir Hamdani that Donny George has died. A great-hearted and brave soul, who put his life on the line to try to protect the Iraq National Museum in its most desperate hour, he is one of my heroes, and someone who deserves to be remembered and honored by the world.

Something the AAMD and AIA Could Do to Help Egyptian Archaeologists

A report in Nature on the risks to Egypt's heritage notes that

some break-ins, particularly those at storage warehouses, do seem to be targeting antiquities to be smuggled out of the country for sale on the international black market. "Some of this material has huge market value," says Malek. The warehouses hold material from archaeological digs, for example fragments of loose wall reliefs from tombs. Much of it has never been properly described or published, meaning that it will be impossible ever to know for sure what has been lost.

This last sentence is key, and points to a major failing on the part not just of Egypt but of the international community of archaeologists, museum directors, and others devoted to preserving the ancient past. Instead of merely providing "professional support to.. identify and reclaim missing objects", as the AIA/AAMD joint statement urges its members to do, these organizations should also be focusing on protecting what has not yet been stolen but is at risk. One step that could and should be taken immediately is to organize a crash program to at least create an archive of photos, if not full descriptions and publication (though they are trained to be fastidious, archaeologists should not let the best should be the enemy of the good here), for the huge number of artifacts that are piled up in Egypt's storerooms, warehouses and museums. Such a program might prove to be a useful pilot leading to similar efforts in other countries.

If cost is an issue, here's a suggestion. Collectors and dealers have long complained about the archaeological community's failure to publish finds, though these complaints have seldom if ever been accompanied by offers to underwrite the costs. Perhaps it is time for Kaywin Feldman and Elizabeth Bartman to sit down with Shelby White and Arthur Houghton. 

We're Going to Need More Guns

This report from Zahi Hawass (via Derek Fincham) is extremely disturbing. Even "well guarded" storage depots, in which guards have been armed with handguns, are vulnerable to attacks by gangs of automatic-weapon-wielding looters. The depot raided in this case contained finds from both Egyptian and British and French teams.

This is the first indication I have seen that guards have been armed at all; as noted in my post yesterday, Hawass has complained that his security is not armed. So this may be a step forward. But if so, it is clearly still inadequate, in ways that should easily have been anticipated. The basic modus operandi of Egyptian looters -- large gangs armed with automatic weapons -- mirrors the tactics employed in Iraq out on archaeological sites in the 2003-2007 period, when the antiquities board was not permitted to rebuild its site police and the US military ignored the problem, as the Egyptian military seems unfortunately to be doing here. In many cases in Iraq, as now in Egypt, site guards were driven off, or if not, were threatened with harm to themselves and to their families (the looters tended to be locals who knew the guards).

Some sites were protected in Iraq, however, by tribal groups that had longstanding relations with university-based archaeologists who paid the tribes to provide site security. One has to wonder whether the British or French made any effort to enlist some of the Egyptian locals they must have ties with, to try to beef up security at the depot. One also has to wonder what other foreign archaeologists are doing right now to help Egyptians protect the digs they may have worked on and the fruits of that work.

Those would just be stopgap measures. In the absence of police, only the Egyptian military can provide the kind of force needed to deter looting on a wide scale by large groups of determined looters armed with automatic weapons.