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.

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?