Cuno: partage is the solution to antiquities at risk

As one might have expected, James Cuno uses the disasters unfolding now in Iraq to beat the drum once again for restoring the old system of partage. He is right, of course, to say that we should be thankful that even though ISIS destroyed the Assyrian statues in the Mosul Museum and at Nineveh some statues remain safe in museums inaccessible to ISIS' sledgehammers. And surely he is also correct to argue that the most prudent policy for protecting cultural heritage from disasters is to distribute them around the world rather than concentrating them in one place.

The problem with partage as a solution is (at least) three-fold:
a) it ignores other ways in which antiquities might be -- and indeed are being -- dispersed, ways that would not be permanent (i.e., temporary transfers to safer countries as precautionary measures, as Iran is now offering to do, or long-term exchanges), and that would be much more palatable to countries that wish to retain ownership of cultural property they deem part of their cultural patrimony.

b) it does nothing to protect the razing of archaeological sites and the smashing of non-portable antiquities.

c) it does nothing to stop the looting of portable antiquities from museums or the market-driven digging-up of archaeological sites by looters. 

b) and c) would be less troubling if we were not now in the middle of a terrible crisis in which major sites are reportedly being looted and bulldozed. Failing to address those issues and fixating instead on a change in policy that even if enacted now would have zero impact on either b) or c) is insensitive.

It is fine to call for partage as one among several possible long-term solutions based on the principle of dispersion-for-safety's-sake. But what Cuno should also be doing is offering or at least calling for solutions to the immediate problems of stopping the razing of sites and the looting of both sites and museums, and putting some of the Getty's considerable resources into getting the job done.
 

A caveat about reports of site razings

We still have no imagery of the bulldozing of Nimrud, or Hatra, or Dur Sharrukin, as reported by Iraqi heritage officials, and hence no confirmation of how extensive the damage is (or even whether that damage has actually occurred). Reputable media outlets from CNN to the New York Times to NPR have spread the stories, and the documented iconoclasm at the Mosul Museum and Nineveh certainly lends them credibility. But without optical proof, we can't be certain.  

Should these sites turn out to be more or less intact after all, the error will no doubt be seized upon by the same looting deniers who declared no harm had been done at the Iraq Museum in 2003 because first reports mistakenly said the museum had been completely looted and it later turned out that "only" 15,000 artifacts were stolen, and who later pointed to the absence of looting on 8 sites as proof that there was no looting to speak of at the thousands of other sites in Iraq.

We should know the truth soon enough, once the site monitoring groups at Penn and the AAAS get done looking at the latest satellite imagery. But the very fact that we don't know what the facts are, and that we have to wait days to get them, is more important than whatever the facts turn out to be. For it is a sign that the US military is not taking seriously the need to prevent ISIS from getting to major sites. Doing so would have meant setting up a realtime monitoring regime covering not just the sites but the roads leading to the sites, so that bulldozers and trucks heading out to a site would be spotted, targeted and destroyed on the way to, not from, the sites. No such realtime monitoring system exists, it seems. That's a big problem. The Penn Cultural Heritage Center and AAAS projects are crucial for tracking the long-term effect of clandestine digging and must continue to be supported, but they were not designed for the quick turnaround needed to deal with this particular challenge. That's the military's job.

So if it does turn out that Hatra and Dur Sharrukin are not yet victims of bulldozing or dynamiting, we should thank God for our good luck, consider this a second wake-up call after the televised ISIS iconoclasm at Nineveh, and redouble our effort to force the military to step up with an operational plan -- realtime monitoring plus operational capacity to neutralize the bulldozers before and not after they get to the site -- before what happened at Nineveh is repeated.

Kaylan's review of the new Metropolitan Museum show

Melik Kaylan reviews the awesome new show at the Metropolitan Museum. As he makes clear, it is well worth seeing. One sentence in the review, however, gives us pause: "That their civilization was centered for a while in what is now Mosul, Iraq, gives us pause. Many such objects would now be endangered—originating, as they do, from the famed palace of Nimrud and its environs."  A sense of irony is called for here about what endangers museum-worthy artifacts in Mesopotamia. Reports, including one just this week at UNESCO, indicate that while mosques, shrines, and religious manuscripts are endangered by ISIS' iconoclasm, antiquities are not for the most part being destroyed. Instead, they are being dug up or pillaged and sold (with tax paid to ISIS). And where do they go? "According to Baghdad Museum director Qais Rashid, 'Assyrian tablets were stolen and suddenly found in European cities.'” 

The European collectors who are buying these artifacts illicit will over the long haul undoubtedly either sell them onto the international market or donate them to museums like the Met, for future exhibitions like this one. 

So Kaylan doesn't have it quite right. What is most endangered is not the small number of museum-worthy antiquities like those displayed at the Met. ISIS is implementing a regulated "licit" market in areas under its control, and permitting the international export of artifacts -- a kind of parodic realization of the market structure advocates from the collecting community drawing on John Merryman's work have called for. Those artifacts are safe. What is endangered, rather is the context of the sites out of which they will be snatched or chiseled, and the knowledge of the past that this context holds.

Protecting heritage in Mesopotamia Redux: Will the US military get it right this time?

It is telling, I think, that the news out of the Metropolitan Museum event focused almost completely on Secretary Kerry's comments and on what the monitoring shows is happening in Syria, and almost not at all on what might be done beyond vague calls for help. Now at least one blogger has indicated at least one more specific suggestion:

Bonnie Earnham (sic)  of the World Monuments Fund proposed an even more radical step: incorporating heritage protection training into American efforts to train Syrian rebels and Iraqi military personnel.

This is a very good idea in principle (and one that Bonnie Burnham may have proffered back in 2007-9 when she participated in the meetings that eventuated in the recommendations and articles, including one by her, in Antiquities under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War).  As I have argued repeatedly, heritage protection -- especially in times of armed conflict -- needs to go beyond the valuable but insufficient focus on monitoring and conservation to also encompass the kind of expertise needed to secure sites from looters. Archaeologists and conservators simply do not know how to train military personnel in how best to deploy guards at archaeological sites, with what kinds of weaponry and other technologies, etc.

In practice, however, it is far from clear that the American military has the kind of expertise in archaeological site security or antiquities policing to do much if any good. Military policing in general has never been a high priority of our military. On the other hand, it would take an incredibly tiny fraction of the American military budget to set up a heritage security unit better than any other military's. That's why in Antiquities under Siege we urged that the US do so. In the meanwhile, we also suggested, any military intervention by the US be planned with an eye to making use of the expertise of some of our allies in this area, notably Italy, Spain, and others.

Is anything like this in the works?

US Military in Iraq Used Remote Sensors Near Archaeological Sites -- Unfortunately, Not to Monitor the Sites

Levi Keach, a graduate student at University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Iraq war veteran, has an ineresting post on the ASOR blog linking to a presentation he gave at the ASOR meeting. Keach reports on the results of his Freedom of Information Act requests for information about anything the military might have been doing on or around some major archaeological sites. The response he got was expectedly frustrating -- at least they got back to him (I'm still waiting for a response to my 2008 request), and the findings, also not unexpectedly, show no evidence that the military did nothing much to protect sites.

There was, however, one puzzling set of slides included in the materials that the military eventually did provide Keach. Several slides show remote ground vibration sensors. These were available at least as early as 2006. That they are included in the materials Keach requested might lead one to conclude that the military used remote sensing to monitor possible looting activity. Unfortunately, as Keach notes, the equipment appears to have been associated with the site (and therefore sent to him) only because there also was apparently insurgent activity in the area, including the burial of IEDs that seems to have been detected by the equipment.

What can we conclude, albeit tentatively given the possibility that more information might eventually surface?

1. the military did have remote sensing equipment at its disposal
2. this equipment nonetheless was not deployed to protect archaeological sites, despite massive looting.

One further question then needs to be asked:

Were the civil-military affairs officers advising these commanders aware that these technologies were available? If so, did they ever advise commanders it would be a good idea to use them?

I am assuming the answer will be: "No, we were not aware -- but even if we had been aware that this equipment was available, it was not within our remit to hector commanders." Would that have been the attitude of the Monuments Men?

Two Cheers for Interdiction and Restitution!

A good post from Tess Davis following up on the Huffington Post piece she did with Mark Vlasic. I'd only add that while it is indeed laudable that the FBI et. al. are having some success nabbing individuals who are smuggling already looted artifacts, this doesn't really address the fundamental problem of how to prevent looting going forward, since the demand is global and effective interdiction difficult. Interdiction and restitution on a country-by-country basis, assisted by the always-understaffed INTERPOL, are necessary but not sufficient. And while it would be thrilling if the world could be persuaded to stand together and institute -- not to mention enforce -- a global ban on trade in antiquities, that is not going to happen. The real answer has to lie in providing more and better resources to those who are trying to guard and protect their own archaeological sites.

There is, in fact, some reason to worry about the otherwise happy-making emphasis on high-profile seizures and restitution.  Catching a few dealers here and giving stuff back might well be a policy substitute rather than a complement to developing policies that would actually protect the sites themselves.  And there's good reason to believe that our government might prefer seizure and restitution to site protection support. That's because, as Davis and Vlasic note, restitution, with its high-profile newsworthiness, is a handy tool for mending diplomatic fences, much sexier than, say, giving some remote sensing devices to the Cambodian antiquities police. Just as in Iraq, where Babylon was restored while thousands of sites were left unprotected, so more generally, splashy seizures may just mystify and obscure negligence about the real and more intractable issue, which is how to keep the looters from reducing sites to rubble in the first place.

Army Field Manual passage protecting cultural property under revision -- Not to Worry

At the recent colloquium at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum one of the panelists asserted something very disturbing: that the sentence added in 2009 (if memory serves) to the military's invasion planning "bible" (the Army Field Manual), requiring the US military to include in any invasion plans orders to secure cultural monuments, buildings, and sites, was being stripped from the new edition. That would be terrible news, since getting that sentence added was -- along with the ratification of the 1954 Hague Convention -- one of the key policy recommendations made by policy experts and stakeholders who studied what went wrong in Iraq, and one of the few concrete changes made by the military based on lessons learned.

I am happy to report that reliable sources tell me that there is nothing to worry about. While it is true that the draft left blank the portion dealing with cultural property protection, that is because the language is being strengthened and the revisers of the manual are deciding how to coordinate its placement in one chapter or the other.

But this episode demonstrates why it would be better to embed such a requirement in law rather than trust that the policy will remain in effect. On the other hand, as I pointed out in The Rape of Mesopotamia, the law in which heritage protection advocates invested their hopes, the 1954 Hague Convention, was already being observed by the US military as a matter of customary international law, even though it had not been ratified as it would be eventually -- but nothing in the Hague Convention requires militaries to secure archaeological sites from civilian looters. (The looting that the convention addresses is looting by militaries, not civilians -- of a piece with the convention's focus on restraining the destructive actions of militaries.) If we want to be more assured that American invasion plans will always include provisions for securing sites and museums from looters, we would need to be pushing for additional legislation. I myself do not think that is the best use of our energies right now. 

Neil Brodie Stirs the Pot

My friend Neil Brodie has responded to my previous post in a comment that, with his permission, I am pulling up here to give it equal visibility:

Knew you wouldn’t like it!!

I suppose I should clarify what I am and am not saying.

First, site protection in Iraq. I said “effort and resources”, and I believe that the effort of some very hard-working archaeologists, museum curators, police, military personnel and politicians, both Iraqi and Coalition, was not fully reflected in the realized material provision of site protection. Similarly, now, I see effort and resources being devoted – I might say diverted – to the question of site protection in Syria. I have long suspected, though nothing more, that UNSCR 1483 did more to protect sites in Iraq than anything on the ground. In other words, a demand-focused measure did more than site protection. The failure there is that UNSCR 1483 was targeted only at Iraq. I hear talk now about the desirability of a similar resolution aimed at Syria. I’m not sure how that would help the situation in Egypt, for example, and I’m not sure what learning I’ve missed in that regard. We need “trade regulation at the international level”. At a guess, there are millions of sites in the world, thousands of collectors and hundreds of dealers. At that very simple level, it seems to me to be a matter of practical common sense where regulatory effort should be expended.

Second, Saddam and Mubarek. I wouldn’t characterize site protection under Mubarek as a success, I would call it a failure. What protection is it offering to archaeological sites in Egypt now? None. Mubarek’s policy did nothing to protect sites in the next country along, nor did it do anything to protect sites in the next regime along. A demand-focused strategy might have achieved a more sustainable solution.

Third, I agree that the localized integration of sites into cultural and economic practices is something to be supported. No argument there.

Fourth, I agree that we need “linkage”, though to me it implies forefronting the trade, not the actual looting. It also highlights the need for more good quality research, a point on which I am pleased to see we both agree.

I believe the problems of looting caused by the antiquities trade are ultimately caused by those who do the buying in the so-called demand or destination countries, and it is there that the solution lies. Calls for site protection sound to me very much like the trade and its beneficiaries trying to shirk responsibility for the damage caused while at the same time relocating guilt and inhibiting the development of more effective demand-focused policies. They add insult to injury.

Iraq using satellites to monitor archaeological sites

The Tourism Authority, it is reported, has set up a special department to control and monitor areas using satellite imaging. That sounds promising. It is difficult to assess what this means, however, especially as the measure is being presented in the context of complaints about inadequate funding. Satellite monitoring, if it is to be done in a timely enough way to nip looting in the bud, is likely to be quite expensive, and the site monitoring systems being deployed in other countries in the region have turned out to entail image gathering once every six months or so, despite being hyped as anti-looting tools. So if the time series is short, Iraq's new satellite monitoring may well be a valuable way to extend the capabilities of the antiquities police, but we need to learn more. And the cost-benefit analysis needs to be done as well. Are these images going to be costing Iraq money to purchase, or is Google (or whoever the source is) donating them?

US-Iraq Joint Coordinating Committee for Cultural Cooperation -- Preserve, But Don't Bother to Protect

The US-Iraq Joint Coordinating Committee for Cultural Cooperation has released a fact sheet. Here's what they are up to in the area of cultural heritage:

The United States, Iraq, and premier American academic institutions, museums, and NGOs are collaborating to ensure sustainable preservation of Iraqi national sites, monuments, and collections of world importance. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has committed $550,000 to continue support for the educational programs of the Iraqi Institute for the Conservation of Antiquities and Heritage (IICAH) in Erbil through 2013. The Institute has also recently secured $650,000 in funding from private American foundations to continue its education and training programs. U.S.-supported infrastructure upgrades to the National Museum of Iraq are complete, and the U.S. is now assisting site management and preservation of the ancient site of Babylon through a $3.7 million grant to the World Monuments Fund. The United States supported a month-long residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Iraqi museum professionals in fall 2011 and will host Iraqi graduate students in the summer of 2012 as part of the Iraqi Museum Residencies Program.

All these are wonderful projects, and are, one might suggest, the least the US could do to help after having wrecked Iraq. But it is important to note that aside from the infrastructure upgrades to the Iraq Museum, which one presumes includes paying for the barbed wire and other security improvements, nothing on this list addresses the concern for protecting Iraq's cultural heritage from the threat of antiquities looting. The notion that tourism is going to ensure "sustainable preservation" for the entirety of a country's heritage -- not just for a Babylon or Pompeii -- is a dubious one even for countries in which tourists need not fear for their safety and in which there is not a plethora of difficult-to-reach, seemingly innocuous or even downright ugly (=untouristworthy) sites, including of course the totally untouristable undug sites, which are precisely those about which we should be most concerned. Those sites are going to remain tempting targets for looters, and to preserve them will require police, not educators or museum professionals. Yet not a cent appears to have been allocated toward antiquities policing assistance: no money for guards, no money for developing locally based citizens' groups to help Iraqi antiquities police monitor remote sites, no logistical support in the form of equipment, vehicles, walkie talkies, etc. It is understandable that the US and Iraqi governments both should wish to behave as if antiquities looting did not pose a problem going forward -- for the US this see-no-evil attitude is nothing new, since even when massive looting was occurring almost no attention was paid by coalition forces. Let us hope that security in general does not devolve and that the Iraqi government has the will to itself eventually more fully invest again in the kind of robust antiquities policing and site guard system it once had but which it has failed to rebuild completely since regaining its sovereignty.

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?

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.

1900 Security Police for Iraq's Archaeological Sites

Iraq announces a 1900-man security component to protect archaeological site and monuments. That's a big step forward from 106, but nowhere near the 5,000 that were supposed to be in place six months ago according to the 2008 plan to create this security force. As I have written about in Rape of Mesopotamia and on this blog, the 2008 plan itself was overdue about five years, a delay caused by the failure of the US to take responsibility for securing sites during its official occupation or to assist the Iraqis in standing up their own security force after the end of the official occupation. Let us hope that the Iraqis continue to build up this force to the levels needed to make Iraq once again one of the safest places for unexcavated antiquities in the Middle East.

Stunning footage of looting on Iraq's archaeological sites

Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carleton have posted the trailer for the long-awaited "Road to Nasiriyah", a documentary about the looting of Iraq's archaeological sites. It is based on footage shot in 2004 before Garen and his interpreter were kidnapped and held for ten days, a twist that inevitably shifts the dramatic focus of the film to some extent from the looting to the gripping personal story, a turn that is augmented by the film's attention to the equally gripping personal story of AbdulAmir Hamdani's struggle against the Iraqi mafia who control the looters ravaging Iraq's heritage. No other journalist had the temerity to do what Garen and Carleton did, and the footage they are finally releasing therefore offers a unique glimpse of the actualities of looting. It is not clear from the trailer whether the final cut will pull back from the on-the-ground view, invaluable as it is, to also include interviews with those whose policy choices left Iraq's sites vulnerable and Hamdani and others hamstrung, or with those collectors whose deep pockets and willingness to buy dodgy artifacts fuels the looting. Nonetheless, this film will be a must-see for anyone interested in understanding how and why many of Iraq's sites were destroyed. And it should put the quietus to those who have pooh-poohed reports of massive looting. 

More from Wikileaks on Looted Antiquities Recovered in Operations Against Insurgents

Below are a few more instances I've been able to cull from WarLogs describing antiquities being found together with weapons. To put these incidents in some perspective, it should be noted that there are 1020 documents in the WarLogs that mention smuggling (and many of these are duplicate reports, so the actual number of anti-smuggling operations is probably closer to 500); that is out of a total of almost 392,000 total reports posted to WarLogs.  

The total number of reports in which antiquities are reported found together with weapons, then, is very low, in the neighborhood of 1-2% (only 6 or so out of something like 500 smuggling incidents).  It is possible that antiquities might have been found but not reported because they were not considered important enough to mention, but there is no way to know this. 

It is also worth noting that the WarLogs do not contain all reports made during the war; missing are reports of smuggling of any kind before 1/1/2004. The major looting shown by Elizabeth Stone to have occurred in 2003 would therefore not register at all on WarLogs if those antiquities were being smuggled out before 2004. 

The incidents that we do have, while few in number, are enough to make clear that while most smugglers did not smuggle antiquities along with RPGs, rockets, body armor, and mortars, some did. 

 

In An Nasiriyah (south part) started a search op. In order to contrast the illegal detention of weapons and %%% carried out by MSU/Military Police joint with local police. The followings (in good conditions) have

2004-10-28 23:40:00

Expand acronyms:  Take care; definitions may be wrong.

In An Nasiriyah (south part) started a search op. In order to contrast the illegal detention of weapons and %%% carried out by MSU/Military Police joint with local police. The followings (in good conditions) have been impounded by local police: 3 2x automatic rifle; 3 4x %%%; 3 4x air rifles; 3 3x %%% 1x ak %%% rifles; 3 1x %%% rifle; 3 2x pattern rifles; 3 1x stern rifle; 3 1x gun; 3 5x hand grenades; 320x electric detonators; 3 10x gun magazine; 3 33x ak %%% magazines; 3 2x %%% rocket for rpg; 3Various calibre %%%. An IZ has also been arrested by local police for illegal detention of weapons and %%%. The INFO-OPS, which started yesterday, carried out by Task force MSU joint with provincial archaeological local guard in , , %%% and %%% (located north west of ( %%%)) ended this morning. The op. Aim was to oppose and repress the illegal trade of archaeological stolen finds in %%% province. As result of the op. several vases, statues and tools dated %%% bc. All finds were given to archaeological authority of %%%.

THREAT WARNING: POSS Attack ON (: %%% DEC %%%)

2005-12-28 00:22:00

Expand acronyms:  Take care; definitions may be wrong.

%%%. AS OF LATE %%%, AN UNIDENTIFIED GROUP REPORTEDLY WAS PLANNING AN ATTACKUSING EIGHT %%% ROCKETS ON THE %%% NEAR AN NASIRIYAH FOR . (%%% COMMENT: THE EXACT TIMING AND ATTACK PLAN DETAILS WERE NOT KNOWN.) THE EIGHT %%% ROCKETSWERE PURCHASED BY (()) (()) %%% STORED ON '%%% FARM. '%%% FARM WAS LOCATED IN %%% VILLAGE, NEAR THE . %%% ALLEGEDLY WAS AFFILIATED WITH %%%/ANTIQUITIES IN AN NASIRIYAH. (()) (%%%), A FORMER MILITARY OFFICER TRAINED IN ARTILLERY, %%% WOULD HANDLE LAUNCHING THE ROCKETS FROM %%% VILLAGE.



%%%. THE ALLEGED PLAN FURTHER SPECIFIED THAT WITHIN TWO TO THREE HOURS AFTER ATTACKING THE %%%, THE OFFICE OF THE MARTYR %%% (OMS) OFFICE IN AN NASIRIYAH WOULD BE ATTACKED BY THE SAME GROUP. THE GROUP REPORTEDLY HOPED TO MAKE ITAPPEAR THE %%% AT %%% HAD RETALIATED AGAINST THE OMS IN AN EFFORT TO GAIN %%%'A SYMPATHY FOR '%%% GROUP.

RAID BY /%%% IA IN BAGHDAD(ZONE ): %%% DET, %%% INJ/DAMAGE

2005-06-03 11:14:00

Expand acronyms:  Take care; definitions may be wrong.

AT 1714D, /%%% IA CONDUCTED A RAID TO KILL OR DETAIN AIF %%%. RESULTS OF RAID: 5X DETAINEES, STOLEN %%% DEVICES, MONEY MAKING MACHINES, AND 31X ARTIFACTSRECOVERED. ARTIFACTS WERE STOLEN FROM THE BAGHDAD MUSEUM. NO Coalition ForcesINJ/DAM

(FRIENDLY ACTION) DETAIN Report - : %%% UE DET

2009-07-08 19:00:00

Expand acronyms:  Take care; definitions may be wrong.

***%%% NATION REPORT***
****CONFIRMED BY Coalition Forces*****
*****LATE REPORT*****
*EXCEPTIONAL INFORMATION*

MND-%%% EVENT (%%%)

UNIT: /%%% ABN

WHO: - %%%

WHAT: CACHE

WHEN: %%%

WHERE:

: %%%

CLOSEST ISF/SoI Check Point(%%%):
Check Point NUMBER:
UNIT:
GRID LOCATION:
DISTANCE AND DIRECTION:

TIMELINE:
: -%%% CONDUCTED A UNILATERAL %%% DRIVEN RAID TO CAPTURE -%%%. SUSPECT WAS DETAINED WITH 6X GUARDIAN DEVICES IN HIS HOME AND 2X ARTIFACTS. INFORMATION WASGATHERED THROUGH THE FLEXIBLE MAINTENANCE WORKER PROGRAM IN %%%. HHC/-%%% AND -- %%% REFINED THE INFORMATION FROM THE %%% AND PASSED TO HIGHER HQ FOR ABrigade LEVEL OPERATION. %%% RECEIVED PERMISSION TO ENTER %%% CITY FROM MAJOR GENERAL , %%% ISF PARTNERSHIP AND COORDINATION. THE SYSTEMS WERE IN Coalition ForcesHANDS BY %%%.


CACHE ROLL-UP:
%%% X ENEMY DETAINED
2X GUARDIAN SYSTEMS
2X ARTIFACTS
1X PISTOL
1X BODY ARMOR VEST

GUARDIAN TRANSMITTER SERIAL NUMBERS:

%%% BAND:
%%% BAND:
%%% BAND:
%%% BAND:
%%% BAND:
%%% BAND: %%%


Explosive Ordnance Disposal [bomb defuser] ASSESSMENT: %%%/A


S2 ASSESSMENT:
%%% AN Facility protection service GUARD AT BIAP WHO HAS PRIOR REPORTING OF BEING CORRUPT AND A MEMBER OF %%%. WE BELIEVE %%% GUARDIAN SYSTEMS FROM ANOTHER INDIVIDUAL WHO WAS GOING TO USE %%% THE DEVICES TO SOMEONE IN %%%. FURTHER TQ AND INTERROGATION OF %%% THE OTHER MEMBERS INVOLVED WITH THE THEFT OF THIS SENSITIVE EQUIPMENT.

SUMMARY:
%%% X CACHE
%%% X ARREST
%%% X INJ
%%% X DMG


//CLOSED// %%%

(FRIENDLY ACTION) RAID Report %%% AD DIN OPS/ : %%% UE DET

2008-07-03 15:00:00

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THE ISF RAIDED THE RESIDENTIAL COMPLEX IN %%% AREA, '%%% HOUSE WAS RAIDED AND THEY FOUND SOME ANTIQUES, THEY ALSO CAPTURED THE FOLLOWING :




%%%
AND THE ALSO SEIZED ONE MILLION ID AND .%%%

(FRIENDLY ACTION) CACHE FOUND/CLEARED Report KARBALA OPS/ : %%% INJ/DAM

2008-11-02 04:45:00

Expand acronyms:  Take care; definitions may be wrong.

THE SECURITY FROM THE ESTABLISHMENTS PROTECTION AND THE ANTIQUITIES PROTECTION FOUND AND CLEARED:
- 16X 60MM MORTAR ROUNDS
- 15X CONTAINERS OF %%%.5MM ROUNDS FOR MACHINE GUN
- 1X 122MM %%% ROUND
- 3X %%% PROPELLING CHARGES
- 1X 120MM MORTAR ROUND