UNESCO's response to the Syrian crisis: more handwringing where new ideas are needed

In response to the latest footage showing, again, shelling of World Heritage sites in Syria, the head of UNESCO has issued yet another in a series of futile calls for an end to such destruction. What is most depressing is not just that these appeals are almost certain to fall on deaf ears, but that Ms. Bokova is missing the opportunity to call for changes that need to be made in the international instruments she cites -- changes that are desperately needed if there is to be any hope of reducing site destruction going forward -- whether such destruction is due to military action, as in the case of Syria, or to the actions of antiquities looters who operate with impunity in these conditions.

Take the 1954 Hague Convention, which was designed to discourage States Parties from firing at sites or pillaging them. As the article notes, "In an earlier statement, Ms. Bokova had said that 'destroying the inheritance of the past, which is the legacy for future generations, serves no purpose except that of deepening hatred and despair and it further weakens the foundations for cohesion of Syrian society.'" It is true that one effect of of destroying World Heritage sites is to deepen social divides, and in the case of the Taliban that was certainly the purpose. But as a matter of fact, the Hague Convention itself recognizes that there might well be a good reason for shelling a World Heritage site -- if the enemy has moved onto the site, the Convention says, anything goes. Whoever moves onto a site first is culpable in that case.

For the Hague Convention to do any good in the Syrian context, then, Ms Bokova would need to go beyond vague appeals to warring parties to cool it, and instead urge that the international community to do what it would take to hold accountable whoever moves their forces first onto a site. Why does she not call strenuously for an international monitoring system capable of putting eyes in the skies over World Heritage sites in conflict zones, so that those who move first onto the sites can be identified and then indicted and prosecuted?

The other international instrument cited by Ms. Bokova, the World Heritage Convention, is similarly hamstrung when it comes to dealing with Syria-style threats. The Convention itself has always been overblown about the protection it provides to the sites listed -- looting may have been one of the threats mentioned but from the beginning the more important threat was defined as that caused by development or by neglect. And the aim of the list was to incentivize governmental investment in conservation and planned tourist development.

What happens, then, when war breaks out? Tourism is non-existent. That makes the threat of de-listing -- the only stick that the Convention provides -- relatively unimportant, in the short run, which is the only run that matters when a state is at war.

Is there any change that could be made to the Convention's listing procedures to give it some relevance in situations like Syria? Yes. For starters, to get or stay on the list, UNESCO could require countries to submit a disaster preparedness plan for approval. A more robust change would require countries to contribute a percentage of tourist-generated tax revenues to an international disaster-response fund, a kind of insurance policy.

These are, admittedly, not necessarily easy changes to effectuate. But that is all the more reason for the head of UNESCO to be forcefully advocating for them, or for some other innovations. The problem is too dire to settle for the usual "I am shocked" pronouncements.

UNESCO on Syria: A Year Late and Millions of Dollars Short

UNESCO has placed six Syrian sites to the endangered World heritage list. Better a year late than never I guess, but what is really sad is how little this is likely to mean anyway. The decision is "meant to rally support for the safeguarding of the sites". How much rallying will ensue is highly questionable, especially absent any specification as to how such safeguarding might be achieved. A French proposal calling for a special fund to protect Syria's World Heritage property was approved, but there is no indication in this article at least that contributions would be anything other than voluntary, and similar funds set up after the Iraq Museum was pillaged received almost nothing.

What this shows is just how weak an instrument the World Heritage List is for doing what it claims it does: protect world heritage sites. Had it been better conceived, or if it were to be amended to recognize the need to safeguard sites from looting and shelling, not just from encroachment or degradation from too many tourists, it would have included at least two additional provisions:
a) a requirement that in order to be considered for accession to the list, countries would have to present disaster response plans that included the prospect of civil breakdown as one threat --plans that would involve mobilizing citizens from all walks of life and political persuasions to step in if/when the police disappear;
b) a requirement that all State Parties to the Convention contribute annually to the UNESCO fund a percentage of the tax revenues generated by tourist visits to their sites.

Until the economic power of heritage -- whether embodied by tourist dollars or by the astronomical sums paid by collectors for antiquities -- is harnessed and used to prevent looting and destruction, there will be no real help for Syria or anywhere else where barbarism reigns.

Egypt: Not Just a "Source Nation" for Antiquities!

We usually think of Egypt as the victim of Western collectors vacuuming out its antiquities. But as this story makes clear, the Middle East has its own cosmopolitan collectors willing to traffic looted antiquities from the Americas.

Juan Cole visits the Iraq Museum

Juan Cole, one of the most astute commentators on Middle East issues, has posted some photos from the Iraq Museum. These are indeed breathtaking artifacts, and it is good to see them well-displayed, in galleries that the State Department together with others helped restore. But while Cole notes that "The damage to the museum and its collection is yet another black mark against the Bush administration and, sorry, the United States of America, which by its illegal and brutal invasion and occupation diminished our store of knowledge about a crucial period of world history", he seems unaware that the museum he is visiting in its present form reflects in part the way in which the US chose to respond to the looting of Iraq's archaeological heritage. While the US plowed financial resources into training curators, fixing the museum (which, according to news reports, still is only half-open), and developing Babylon as a World Heritage tourist destination, it all but ignored the looting of thousands of archaeological sites over years during the occupation. Iraq's antiquities police were disbanded and very little done to fill that security gap, or even to acknowledge the extent of the problem. Estimates of the number of artifacts taken from those sites dwarf the number lost in the looting of the museum -- and of course, artifacts dug up by tomb robbers lose forever the context we need in order to fully understand what they can tell us about our past. Now we read that the Iraqi government is planning to build a brand new museum. 

The beauty of these galleries should not distract us from asking whether what we are seeing is a Potemkin Village.

Governing without a state: The stakes for archaeological heritage

The withering-away of the state in Egypt has meant the emergence of do-it-yourself civic action, as this NY Times story makes clear, with consequences both exhilarating and frightening. Reclaiming public space on behalf of a community can mean real progress when the state was hoarding resources that the public left to its own devices could have better employed. But the dark side of this is the cannibalizing of nonrenewable or potentially renewable resources by short-term community interests (or worse, by private interests as when gangs rule). Encroachment on empty land that had been hoarded by the government is one thing; encroachment and artifact-farming on land that the government had declared offlimits in order to protect the nation's and the world's heritage is another.

In this moment, the fate of Egypt's cultural heritage depends on whether, left to their own devices, Egyptians will be able to form civil society groups that can advocate for protecting archaeological sites, demanding action by the state, and where necessary taking direct action themselves to do so.  We saw that spirit on display in the spontaneous joining of hands to cordon off the Cairo Museum when looters attacked it, and we are now seeing the emergence of citizens' groups, with participation not just by archaeologists but by locals, focusing on this. That is a highly promising development. It would be wonderful if such efforts could be supported by NGOs and individuals overseas (not to mention governments). 

Welcome, America, to the world collectors have made, in which no cultural patrimony is safe from looting, not even that of white Southerners

http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/crime-courts/2013-04-26/grave-looting-part-new-black-market-artifacts

On the UN's New Campaign to Educate Tourists Not to Buy Dodgy Antiquities

The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) announces a new campaign to "encourage tourists to make informed decisions and help reduce demand for trafficking in persons, cultural artefacts, wildlife, fauna and flora such as ivory products, as well as counterfeit goods, and illicit drugs." “Well-informed tourists can make a real difference in turning the tide,” the Secretary-General said.

Two things about this. First, it is really important that cultural artifacts are now recognized as illicit goods that need attention at the level given to human trafficking and drugs, or at least the destruction of wildlife. Attention is now being paid, not just by UNESCO but by the UN's higher echelons. That is good.

Second, an information campaign to inform tourists that buying unprovenanced antiquities is not a terrible idea, especially since UN agencies haven't either the money or the authority to use other more potent governmental means. I am not convinced that in and of itself it will do very much to stop looting. Information as a tool of government action tends to work best when the harm being done is to oneself by an activity that giives pleasure only to oneself (i.e., anti-smoking campaigns) and when any reasonable being would agree that knowing what they know it would be irrational to continue to do that harm. But we know that wealthy collectors are well aware of the harm done by the looting that their purchases of unprovenanced antiquities incentivizes, and that has not stopped them from continuing to collect. The harm they are doing is not to themselves, and the pleasure derived is not solely their own but also that of the others with whom they will share the beauty of the artifact.  And so long as just a few wealthy collectors are willing to pay thousands or hundreds of thousands for the rare artifact, looters will be incentivized to dig, even if the tourists stop buying.

On the other hand, if -- a very big if -- tourists begin to tell antiquities dealers they will not buy any artifact that is not declared kosher by a UN-approved-and-overseen registry system, the dealers in-country may begin to suffer enough that they would pressure their governments to establish such a system. That might be a helpful step, if it made it easier to prosecute sellers and buyers of unregistered antiquities, or at least to pursue restitution claims abroad. Registries raise some difficult problems of their own: how would the costs for administering a registration system be covered? who would decide? would unprovenanced antiquities brought forward by a date certain be grandfathered in? how would the kind of corruption of the registry that Morag Kersel has documented occurring in Israel be prevented? And would the UN have the will to remove its seal of approval in the event that a registry system was corrupted (the record on World Heritage site listing -- only two ever de-listed, despite massive evidence that there are terrible problems on many other sites -- does not encourage optimism about this)?

None of these problems is insuperable, and it is worth a try to get to a registry system via tourist demand. Of course, the UN's campaign mentions nothing about a registry, so they may not even be imagining such a possibility. And it seems a long way round. I agree with the UN World Tourism Organization head that the infrastructure of tourism [from accommodation establishments to transportation networks] could be used in the fight against trafficking, but a much more simple way to do so would be to tack on an "archaeological site security" tax on tourists entering the country from abroad (or at the hotels or at the sites) to pay for site guards and antiquities police not just at the World Heritage sites but around the country wherever looting is a problem. 

Economics of Looting: The Costs of Production

A fascinating story about antiquities looting in Sri Lanka, which appears to be on the upswing, provides some useful information about what a shift from "subsistence" to "industrialized" looting involves:

We didn’t catch the wrongdoers. But we did find the laser gun and a generator. Inside the cave there was a pit 55-feet deep. We were informed that 50 people had been digging for three months, for payment of Rs 1,000 a day.”
Police are investigating the activities of several gangs. Many more are yet to be identified, let alone investigated. One network of hunters, recently busted, was implicated in three illegal excavations in Wellawaya, Haputale and Buttala.
A telephone number scribbled on a wall calendar in the home of a member, led to the discovery that the gang had agents islandwide. One of its main organisers was a security forces deserter from Ruwanwella, who was pretending to be the bodyguard of an influential minister’s wife. Another was a timekeeper from Wellawaya, who was residing in Buttala, as an employee of the Uva Provincial Council. He masqueraded as an officer of the Archaeological Dept.The husband of an Avissawella-based lawyer was involved in all three incidents. The chief financier was found to be the husband of a bank manager in Colombo. 

1,000 rupees is about $8. So for this dig alone, the labor cost is $36,000 (50 people digging for three months at $8). Add in the costs of a laser gun or generator, and it is clear that someone must be willing to pay quite a lot for the artifacts being stolen in order for this kind of operation to yield profits. 

The story offers one additional detail worth pondering: 

Before each excavation, a “kattadiya” (exorcist) performed ceremonies.

This gives us a peek into the psychology of the locals who have been enlisted to do the work of digging up artifacts that they know have something sacred about them. Too bad such superstition could not be harnessed to keep sites safe. (As I note in Rape of Mesopotamia, the first archaeologist to excavate in Iraq, Layard, wrote that his diggers steered clear of the stone figures they were uncovering because they feared there were spirits trapped in them, and this made it unnecessary to hire site guards.)

Are We Barking Up the Wrong Tree?

Anyone looking at blogs, front page news, and governmental announcements would come away with the strong impression that the best way to attack the illicit antiquities market is to clamp down on auction houses, licit dealers, donating collectors, and museums. But as this article about smuggling of Mexican artifacts into the US shows (and there are many analogous stories about antiquities smuggling from other countries), the supply chain need not run through auction houses, or illicit dealers, or museums:

Undercover agents intercepted some of the items by infiltrating the smuggling ring.
“We were able to set up some meetings and view these artifacts posing as buyers,” said Bill Fort, a Homeland Security Investigations agents who helped crack the case.
Fort, now retired, said the thieves offered to get more items for collectors.
“They would go out and dig something up, or go other co-conspirators and say, ‘Hey, we have an order for this type of artifact, do any of you all have it?’ or, 'Let’s go out to some of those sites that are protected areas in Mexico,’ and they would dig through those," Fort said.

You can not only get your illicit antiquity wholesale, cutting out the middleman, but you can get it to order. None of this will show up on the market or in the museum.

What does this tell us about where we ought to be focusing our efforts to prevent future digging of antiquities? The answer seems clear: we need to be figuring out how to increase the resources devoted to anti-looting and anti-smuggling policing operations, including but by no means limited to the sort of sting operation described in this article. 

To say this is not to suggest that auction houses, dealers, donating collectors, and museums should be simply left alone, or that restitution should not be demanded by countries when a looted artifact comes to light. But if what is really needed to stop looting going forward is more and better site monitoring, more and better guards for sites, more and better antiquities police going after smuggling networks, then what we demand from the licit antiquities market should be not just clean hands or givebacks, but help in generating funds for all these efforts. They should be asked what they are doing to help make sure their market really is licit, and why they aren't doing more. That more could be any number of things: using their authority and political heft to push our government to spend more on this problem both in Homeland Security and via State and Defense Department efforts to assist antiquities police in other countries; creating a foundation and endowing it (imagine what good the $200 million Shelby White gave to establish an institute for studying the ancient world would have done had she instead set up a foundation to support more and better antiquities policing); or lobbying the US government to tax the purchase of antiquities to generate funding that would go to pay for things like more undercover operations of the kind that this article shows can be successful.

Zahi Hawass's Most Important Accomplishment: High-Res King Tut

Way back in 2008, I was invited to a conference being held in Alexandria, Egypt, about cultural heritage policy. There was a lot of talk about economic development through tourism, and a lot of quieter complaining about the damage tourists were doing to overvisited sites, and about inadequate budgets to enable the Supreme Council for Antiquities to do all it needed to do to protect, secure, and conserve its massive portfolio of sites and to improve its mostly dilapidated museums. One thing no one was talking about at that meeting was the possibility of tapping the vast revenue potential represented by image rights (except for trademarking the Pyramids, a pretty silly idea). I had run a conference several years earlier on the policy challenges of videogames and had learned that even then 3-D image-capturing was already beginning to be done, with the pilot project I recall being a 360-degree camera sweeping around the interior of Saint Peter's in Rome. It was not hard to imagine a huge demand by videogame makers and film makers for computer-generated graphics built out of laser-captured imagery allowing one to go into King Tut's tomb (imagine Spielberg wanting to make another Indiana Jones film and knowing he could have the "real" interior of the Pyramid of Giza if he paid a licensing fee). I raised this idea at the meeting, to resounding silence.

Little did I know that Zahi Hawass had already made a deal, back in 2002, for something like what I was suggesting. Only a decade later, the imagery is beginning to be made public. Here's a story about it. What's missing from the story is the economic boon the imagery represents. For that, one needs to go to the report by the company doing the work for the SCA. The key sentence is buried deep in the report, but is reassuring: "The copyright of the data will belong to the Supreme Council of Antiquities."

This might be the best thing that Zahi Hawass accomplished. It should pay dividends forever, and is a win-win-win: fragile tombs can be closed to save them from further degradation by overtouristing; licensing of image rights will bring in a substantial and permanently renewable revenue stream; and the ability of millions of people to see, in movies and videogames, the incredible beauty of Egyptian antiquity as never before shown to them will also act as a powerful advertising tool to spur future tourism.

Cellphones as Weapons Against Illicit (Antiquities) Networks: Google Ideas Has My Idea

Jason Felch, ahead of the pack as always, has posted on the Wikiloots facebook page links to an organization that looks as if it might actually be able to push forward the anti-looting agenda in a big way. Google Ideas, a self-described "think/do tank" spun off, it appears, by a few Google millionaires and run by a former State Department official, Jared Cohen, "convenes unorthodox stakeholders, commissions research, and seeds initiatives to explore the role that technology can play in tackling some of the toughest human challenges."

One of those challenge, as it happens, is illicit networks, about which the site says:

The persistence of illicit networks—including organized crime, narcotics, human trafficking, arms trafficking, terrorism, and cybercrime—affects every country and every demographic. While various illicit networks may differ from each other in terms of the goods they move and the objectives they pursue, their tactics are often remarkably similar.

Illicit networks strive for maximum secrecy and efficiency to evade law enforcement. Despite all of this, most efforts to investigate and intercept illicit networks have been siloed rather than holistic, depriving those who seek to combat them of opportunities to learn from one another. 

The increasing ubiquity of connection technologies will both empower those driving illicit networks as well as the citizens seeking to curb them. These networks have been around for centuries, but one thing has changed—the vast majority of people now have a mobile device, empowering citizens with the potential to disrupt the secrecy, discretion, and fear that allow illicit networks to persist. As illicit networks grow in scope and complexity, society’s strategy to reduce their negative impact must draw on the tremendous power of technology.

In brief: use social networks powered by cellphone technology to force into visibility looters, smugglers, dealers, and collectors of illicit antiquities. Since this is basically what I have been urging for the past several years on this blog, I am thrilled to find the basic concept is being thought about by people with the means to realize it.

My joy is tempered and made a bit bittersweet, however, by the knowledge that antiquities are not mentioned (at least not so far as I can discern, though I'd be happy to be shown otherwise) in the very minimal copy provided on the organization's site. This is all the more depressing because it turns out that Jared Cohen has direct experience of looted antiquities. He was the point person for the Google project to put the Iraq National Museum's artifacts online, a task that led him to visit Baghdad. Was he apprised then of the massive looting of archaeological sites by his State Department colleagues? I wrote at the time that the failure to get Google engaged in trying to help the Iraqis monitor their archaeological sites was a major missed opportunity. It would be terrible to miss the chance this time round as well. So if anyone reading this knows how to get hold of Jared Cohen, please pass along the heartfelt hope that he and Google Ideas will recognize that illicit antiquities networks would make an excellent candidate for a proof-of-concept.

Antiquities Looting: An American Phenonemon

It is salutary to be reminded that antiquities looting is not a function of ignorance on the part of uneducated people, nor of poverty. It occurs not just in those countries that collectors love to blame for the fact that their archaeological heritage is being pillaged for sale to those same collectors, but also right here where those collectors live.

Petroglyphs have been stolen from a sacred site in California. The looters were not acting on a whim:

The theft required extraordinary effort: Ladders, electric generators and power saws had to be driven into the remote and arid high desert site near Bishop. Thieves gouged holes in the rock and sheared off slabs that were up to 15 feet above ground and 2 feet high and wide.

All this effort, despite the fact that according to authorities, "the petroglyphs aren't worth a great deal on the illicit market, probably $500 to $1,500 each."

A few thousand dollars in value is more than enough to get a gang to organize a well-planned, lengthy operation.

What is to be done?

...desecration of the site, which Native Americans still use in spiritual ceremonies, has forced reservation officials and U.S. authorities to come together and ask a tough question: Can further vandalism be prevented?

"How do we manage fragile resources that have survived as much as 10,000 years but can be destroyed in an instant?" asked archaeologist David Whitley, who in 2000 wrote the nomination that succeeded in getting the site listed on the National Register of Historic Places. "Do we keep them secret in hopes that no one vandalizes them? Or, do we open them to the public so that visitors can serve as stewards of the resources?"

The easy answer is to police the site and others listed under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. But that's not possible given the condition of cash-strapped federal lands agencies, authorities said.

Forget about Greece -- the US is too poor (or to be accurate, too cheap) to afford to police its own heritage.

What then can be done? One answer is given in the article:

The site is one of dozens of such locations managed by the BLM office in Bishop. A small army of volunteers has stepped up surveillance of the area.

 Enlisting citizens to help keep an eye on sites has to be on the agenda for all future cultural heritage protection planning, whether here or in other countries. But, as I have argued repeatedly, the key to solving the problem has to be some new funding mechanism to beef up cash-strapped agencies' capacities to watch over sites and deter looters.

Want to secure a site? Use mines! Want to monitor it? Use kites!

Fascinating story on the fabled site at Carcemish, on the Turkey/Syria border. Its precarous position has  paradoxically meant it was protected by mines meant to deter aggression but happily also deterring looters. Now archaeologists are getting overhead shots by sending up kites. Now all we need are cameras that can upload those images automatically so kiteflying citizens can crowdsource site monitoring. 

Looting on Demand, Shipping Included!

ICE announces the return to Mexico of more than 4,000 antiquities. While it is not clear from the press release what the time frame is within which these pieces were seized, the dates indicated imply that the period is probably 2009 onward. Most interesting is the level of detail the ICE offers about how, why, and for whom such artifacts are being smuggled. Some were seized coming over the Mexican border, but others were discovered in cargo being shipped from Sweden to San Diego, or even from Chicago.

One detail sheds important light on the way in which archaeological looting in poorer "source" countries is driven by the demand side in wealthy "market" countries -- and not just spontaneously, but in some cases intentionally as an organized business:

HSI special agents seized 26 pieces of pottery greater than 1,500 years-old following an investigation in Kalispell, Mont., regarding a consignor who had paid members of the Tarahumara tribe to loot artifacts from burial caves in the Copper Canyon area of Chihuahua, Mexico, so he could consign them in a local art gallery.

Antiquities Auction Houses Must Now Reveal the Names of Sellers

I am not a lawyer, and look forward to hearing what Derek Fincham, Stephen Urice, Patti Gerstenblith, Rick St. Hilaire, and other legal scholars make of this new ruling. If it sticks it will make it far easier for researchers and police to track the chain of ownership for dodgy antiquities, which should be helpful.

Beyond creating transparency in at least one area of the market for antiquities, however, the ruling, one hopes, will give policymakers a reason to start thinking more carefully about how that market could and should be regulated in ways that do the most possible to prevent looting of archaeological sites (i.e., not just by keeping illicit pieces off the licit market via registration of antiquities -- something one assumes collectors and dealers might now support -- but harnessing the power of the licit market to help pay, via a dedicated tax, for the policing of the illicit market).

The Middle Eastern Geodatabase: A Monitoring System, But Can It Monitor Looters and Armies?

Timothy Whalen, Director of the Getty Conservation Institute, comments on my earlier post,

"This Is the Future of Archaeological Site Protection. Are Heritage Protection Advocates Listening?":

You call on the Getty to step in, but neglect to mention the important work the Getty and its partners are doing in the Middle East to help countries manage and monitor their cultural heritage.
The Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities, or MEGA, is a bilingual Arabic-English, Web-based national geographic information system created by the Getty Conservation Institute with its partner the World Monuments Fund to assist heritage officials in inventorying, monitoring, and managing the Middle East’s vast number of archaeological sites. We helped the Jordanian Department of Antiquities (DoA) customize it for Jordan, where it was called MEGA-J. The DoA deployed MEGA–Jordan nationwide in April 2011. (getty.edu/conservation/our_projects/field_projects/jordan/mega_overview.html)
The GCI and WMF also have adapted and made MEGA available for use by the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. Its implementation in Iraq has been delayed due to administrative changes in the country.
The MEGA system, which incorporates internationally accepted documentation standards, can be customized and is designed for adaptation and use by other countries. It uses open source software that does not impose licensing fees on financially strapped antiquities authorities.
Despite ongoing conflict in the region, we continue to work on projects in the area to aid heritage professionals in a variety of other ways as well.
As recently as July, a group of Syrian heritage professionals participated in training in Rome as part of MOSAIKON, a partnership of the GCI, the Getty Foundation, ICCROM, and the International Committee for the Conservation of Mosaics to conserve Roman mosaic pavements and manage archaeological sites in the Mediterranean region through strategic targeting of priorities and deployment of resources.
The first phase of MOSAIKON began in 2008. The partners will shortly be undertaking an evaluation to ensure that the strategy is meeting its objectives. The results of this evaluation will inform subsequent phases of work.

I have noted the MEGA system in earlier blogs as a very positive innovation, a helpful tool for longterm management and conservation of archaeological sites. But so far as I can tell (and I would be delighted to hear otherwise), the MEGA system is intended to help governments do a better job planning for development and to address longterm encroachment or ecological challenges, important problems but not the same as the problems of looting and war-related destruction. MEGA seems not so well designed to do what I am begging the Getty and other defenders of cultural heritage to develop the tools to make it possible to do: facilitate the realtime visual monitoring that could identify looting as it is happening and deter militaries from moving operations onto sites. 

Syrian rebels helping move museum's holdings to safety

Interesting story showing that the Syrian rebels are aware of the importance of protecting cultural heritage, and that they are also aware of the importance of showing themselves protecting cultural heritage. It would probably have been even more effective as propaganda had the report not also mentioned that the rebels are using the museum as a base themselves.

Interested in getting a PhD or Masters researching the illicit antiquities trade?

An opportunity from the Trafficking Culture folks:

Trafficking Culture aims to produce an evidence-based picture of the contemporary global trade in looted cultural objects. This research programme is based at the University of Glasgow and is funded by the European Research Council.We very much welcome communication from researchers and others interested in the topic. For general communication please get in touch with us using the form on the Contact page, or if you want to contact a particular member of the team you’ll find individual email addresses listed on our People pages.
The Trafficking Culture project is always interested in particular in hearing from potential students for our PhD and Research Masters programmes. There are a number of funding bodies that may provide support for students wishing to explore topics related to our project. If you are interested in studying with us, please forward a brief synopsis of your proposed research (not more than three pages) plus a CV to the Trafficking Culture post-graduate coordinator.

Heritage Tourism and Economic Development, 6,000 BC

Evidence that heritage tourism spurred economic development, even 8,000 years ago:

The settlers used the cave as a shelter, a cemetery and a sacred worship place. The population expanded outside of the cave and bloomed into an early urban center. The pottery and “ancient people’s garbage” the settlers left behind are the strongest evidence of a densely populated village, Parkinson said. A two-by-two meter unit revealed more than 30 pounds of pottery. The archaeologists unearthed materials and pottery styles from different regions, which indicate economic activity and a mingling of cultures.
“If you’re in an area where there is more trade more interaction, there’s more variety in not just in food, but in life and the people you meet,” Parkinson said. People may have gravitated toward Alepotrypa just for the sake of “wanting to live together.” But Parkinson said all life in Alepotrypa abruptly ended, around 5,000 years ago, when the cave’s population was most dense and dynamic. The cave entrance collapsed, possibly due to an earthquake. The cave’s occupants were buried alive.
“It’s sealed,” Parkinson said. “And it’s not opened again until the 1950s.”
After the collapse, settlers outside the cave fled the peninsula. Even today, the area surrounding the cave is scarcely populated.

Who Are the Looters? An Example from El Hibeh

Egyptologist Carol Redmount, who has led efforts to draw attention to looting at the site of El Hibeh in Egypt, reports on the facebook site "Save El Hibeh Egypt" that 

apparently two or three months ago several MSA inspectors went to visit El Hibeh and were threatened by Abu Kotia, the 'criminal" who has been overseeing the looting of Hibeh. He told them if they returned to Hibeh he would kill them. Then, about two weeks ago, Abu Kotia was shot (by whom I'm not sure) and wound up in the local hospital, where he died. I'm still trying to get further details. I very much hope that this means the looting at Hibeh has or will stop, but who knows at this point. If and when I get more details I will post them. I have heard rumors of items from Hibeh being for sale in Cairo and Luxor, but I haven't been able to confirm any of them. 

The lack of investigative journalistic coverage of this extremely scary story is almost as depressing as what the story itself tells us about who the looters are (hint: not just otherwise nice people driven to dig by poverty who could easily be convinced to go legal if only they were given a stake in sustainable tourism). As is the case in every other country where there is a lot of money to be made by digging and trafficking antiquities, mafiosi will bring violence to bear if and when needed to keep their business going. 

What that means is that securing sites from looters is not a task to be left to antiquities inspectors alone -- it requires real police with adequate authority and the training, weapons, transport, surveillance and communications gear to keep the bad guys away or arrest them. As I have said before on many occasions, however, most countries -- and especially Egypt given its drastic loss of tourism revenues during the past year -- do not have the resources to pay for better policing. The monies needed could, on the other hand, be generated by a "sin" or "pollution" style tax imposed on licit purchases of high-priced Egyptian antiquities in the US, Great, Britain, and other countries. 

Someday, I believe some such tax will be recognized by dealers, collectors, and museum directors as their best hope to transform relations between themselves and countries like Egypt that rightly see the illicit trade and the violence that accompanies it as the fault of those who collect -- even with a "clean hands" approach, since the enormous sums paid for licit pieces signal criminals that similar but unprovenanced objects must be worth enough to justify looting.

In the meantime, what can concerned Egyptians, Egyptologists, and heritage protection advocates do to help stop the bad guys? Investigative journalism is clearly too dangerous right now, or there would have been reporting done on what is clearly a highly colorful story. We need to do our own reporting, insofar as that is possible without putting lives in danger. Is there any way to empower Egyptians who live near the sites to anonymously crowdsource monitor (i.e., get Google or some other tech leader to design and then provide Egyptologists in Egypt with lots of cellphones designed to enable uploading of photos, phones that could be disseminated to local Egyptian citizens)?

The Provenance of the Jesus' Wife Papyrus Doesn't Pass the Smell Test

File this in under "antiquities: fishy provenance": The NY Times explains how it is that the fragment of papyrus containing the tantalizing references to Jesus' wife came to Harvard:

Dr. King first learned about what she calls “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” when she received an e-mail in 2010 from a private collector who asked her to translate it. Dr. King, 58, specializes in Coptic literature, and has written books on the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary of Magdala, Gnosticism and women in antiquity. 

The owner, who has a collection of Greek, Coptic and Arabic papyri, is not willing to be identified by name, nationality or location, because, Dr. King said, “He doesn’t want to be hounded by people who want to buy this.” 

When, where or how the fragment was discovered is unknown. The collector acquired it in a batch of papyri in 1997 from the previous owner, a German. It came with a handwritten note in German that names a professor of Egyptology in Berlin, now deceased, and cited him calling the fragment “the sole example” of a text in which Jesus claims a wife.

So a professor of Egyptology, now conveniently dead, told the previous owner, also now conveniently dead, this bombshell information, and the previous owner then did not announce the astounding fact to the world or try to donate the fragment to a museum or put it up on the market for millions, but instead sold the papyri privately to another owner who kept it for 13 years before asking the Harvard prof to translate it. As they say on Saturday Night Live, oh realllly?!

It would be interesting to know whether Dr. King raised any questions or an eyebrow when told this tale, but it would appear not, since she seems to be passing it on as if it were simply to be taken at face value. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

The owner could certainly answer some questions by authorities that might make it possible to retrace the trail the owner describes, and perhaps eventually lead to the discovery of other pieces of the fragment. On the other hand, we might well learn that the provenance provided is a cover story. But of course, none of these questions can be posed, since the owner is remaining anonymous becausehe doesn't want to be hounded, Dr King tells us, by buyers.

This Is the Future of Archaeological Site Protection. Are Heritage Protection Advocates Listening?

40 hours, a GPS tracker, a radio transmitter, and a used video camera. Cost: about $300. Results: the equivalent of an almost-realtime satellitelike monitor's view. This is exactly the kind of cheap, individually-launchable technology that could with a bit of tweaking allow heritage protection advocates to watch over remote sites where looters dig with impunity because antiquities police have inadequate intelligence about what is happening where, or where, as in Syria today, parties to armed conflict are themselves doing the looting to fund their fights and the international community has no way to assign blame because the visual proof is lacking. (Had such technology been available and deployed in Iraq, where for several years the only way to find out what was happening on the archaeological sites was to risk being kidnapped as Micah Garen and Susanne Osthoff both were, those of us who were hearing anecdotal reports of massive looting might have been able to confront US policymakers with embarrassing visual evidence and forced the US military to address the problem instead of sweeping it under the rug.)

The supporters of heritage protection -- UNESCO, ICOM, ICOMOS, ICCROM, archaeological organizations such as the AIA, SAA, and others, foundations, deep-pocketed museums like James Cuno's Getty and the Metropolitan, and wealthy collectors with consciences, the Smithsonian, etc. -- should be focusing now on this very doable technological advancement. Why not go to Google and ask them to sponsor a contest with a prize for the best invention in the field of remote site monitoring?

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

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

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

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

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

Protecting Cultural Heritage: The Burnham Plan

Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund, has weighed in on "Protecting Cultural Heritage: Lessons from the Syrian Conflict." Her words carry added weight because they are posted on the Huffington Post and thereby are reaching an audience magnitudes of order larger than any normally available to those of us who care about protecting cultural heritage in times of armed conflict. This is an all-too-rare opportunity not just to alert the public to the terrible damage being done in Syria (there have been a fair number of media reports already about the destruction), but to offer specific, pointed, and actionable policy proposals laying out things that could or should be done to minimize future damage, in Syria and other future conflicts.

Unfortunately, this is an opportunity missed. Though Burnham does offer three suggestions, they are vague and unrealistic proposals:

The international community must do more to address the issue of protecting cultural patrimony during conflicts. Plans should be in place before conflicts escalate. The more-than 100 countries that have ratified the Hague Convention should examine the possibilities of more strenuous enforcement. In the immediate aftermath of conflict, neutral bodies should sequester and protect cultural sites from further damage, as the U.S. Army's famous Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Unit did following World War II.

Let's take these one at a time.

"Plans should be in place before conflicts escalate."Agreed, but the passive voice leaves unclear just who should be making such contingency plans, and no indication is given of what such plans might or should include. That is all the more disappointing given that Burnham contributed a chapter to Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War, a volume which includes a number of planning recommendations by a range of experts. And since that book came out, we have learned more, from the experiences of Libya (where shepherds were permitted to graze their flocks on World Heritage sites in exchange for keeping guard there) and Cairo (where Egyptians formed a human chain to protect their museum), about how local citizens might be encouraged or enlisted in advance to be prepared to come to the aid of their cultural heritage when the going gets rough.

That sort of direct action, of course, involves risks, and in Syria today it would probably be too dangerous for it to make sense to ask locals to put their lives on the line at many sites. Even in Syria, however, some sites far from any fighting are now at risk of looting and could have been protected had heritage officials in Syria, and foreign archaeologists who are now shut out from the country, managed to develop local networks to be called upon.

"The more-than 100 countries that have ratified the Hague Convention should examine the possibilities of more strenuous enforcement." That would be nice, since the enforcement mechanisms now attached to the Convention are, to put it mildly, weak. But enforcing Hague would be of little help in cases such as Libya, where the loophole of "military necessity" would get the Assad the regime off the hook for most of the damage it is doing, and where the rebels do not constitute a state (much less a state party to the Convention). The 1954 Hague Convention was designed to deal with the actions of armies battling each other on battlefields, not with irregular civil warfare conducted in the midst of population centers.

What could dissuade or at least discourage both sides in Syria from fighting each other for control of militarily advantageous sites that also happen to be World Heritage sites? Changing the Convention to do away with the military necessity loophole will never happen. Short of that the only strategy that stands any chance of success would be one that calls upon specific states that are backing each side of the conflict to use their leverage to make clear to those they support that if evidence emerges that they were the first to move onto a protected site there will be a cost to be paid in terms of reduced military assistance (and vice versa). 

Of course, such evidence is very hard to come by and evaluate. What is needed, and what Burnham and other heritage advocates should be pushing hard for, is the development of new technologies capable of providing reliable and verifiable real-time monitoring of sites. This is an area where huge advances are easily imaginable -- for example, cellphone users in Syria could be enabled to upload images that would also automatically geocode information and that could then be collated to provide a crowd-sourced dossier. It would be great if the UN could take the lead on such a program, but the funding is lacking. If I were Burnham, I would get together a posse with other heritage protection advocates and make a pitch to Google and Getty for money for that sort of thing. 

"In the immediate aftermath of conflict, neutral bodies should sequester and protect cultural sites from further damage, as the U.S. Army's famous Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Unit did following World War II." This is one suggestion I endorse, though it would have little impact on the kinds of conflicts we are seeing now. Remember, the Monuments Men were part of a gigantic military operation that was pushing an occupier out and setting up its own occupation, not a neutral body, and they were able to protect sites from further military-related damage because they had the ear and support of military commanders. In principle, a UN-negotiated cease-fire might enable the carabinieri or other militarized cultural police to be dropped in, and developing a standing international force capable of joining in peacekeeping operations is an objective worth pursuing, especially because such a force might be able to do important work preventing looting by civilians (something else the 1954 Hague Convention did not anticipate becoming the major problem it is today). But this would have to be done very gingerly, since what counts as "neutral" to internationalists may appear very differently to nationalists, as we know from the fate of the carabinieri's heritage protection units, who were driven out of Iraq after a number of these brave souls were killed by insurgents.

Syrian Archaeological Looting: A Wake-Up Call for Archaeologists, Heritage Protection Advocates, and Collectors

One of the myriad terrible consequences of the 2003 Iraq invasion was to give rise to a mode of archaeological looting new to the Middle East -- neither ad hoc "substinence" dirtscratching by impoverished locals, nor a side-occupation for "tombaroli" whom tomb robbing was a cottage industry or family business, but an organized crime operation: highly organized, international in scope and multinational in reach, aimed at high-end artifacts (including those in museums and on well-known sites). We know that an Iraqi gang shifted its operations to Tunisia during the tumult there, and now there is a report by an Italian archaeologist who had been running a dig in Syria that a similar group seems to be operating there.

The Syrian government shut down all 80 foreign excavations, this report notes. Were the archaeologists prescient enough to have tried to develop ties to locals in previous years that might have proven helpful now as possible sources of site protection? Was such interaction even possible under the conditions of digging in Syria under the Assad regime? In any case, archaeologists working anywhere, but especially in brittle, fragile, or weak states should be thinking hard now about what if anything they could do to stop their own sites from being ruined in the chaos that accompanies armed conflicts.

And, as the fighting and looting goes on in and around Syria's heritage sites, with horrific results for the sites (leaving aside the human toll, which of course is infinitely more terrible), it may be time for heritage policy to start paying less attention to sustainable preservation through tourism, whether of the World Heritage kind championed by UNESCO and the Global Heritage Fund or the little-visited-site kind championed by the Sustainable Preservation Initiative, and more attention to the less happy but arguably more critical problem of how sites can be secured when there is no state to provide security.

The fact that even World Heritage sites are being shelled by the Syrian government, presumably because rebels are taking up positions in them, also points to the need of UNESCO and the international community of heritage advocacy groups to wake up to the reality that the international conventions designed to protect cultural heritage in times of armed conflict are not working well and need to be updated and strengthened. One way they might be improved, as I have argued elsewhere, would be new rules requiring countries to contribute to an international fund to support site protection efforts of all sorts, and to agree to regulate their antiquities markets (of course, a regulated market could also be taxed to generate the contributions to the international fund). Unfortunately, UNESCO itself is in no position to stir the policy pot, and heritage advocacy organizations have little clout. We may need to wait for a wealthy collector or cultural institution to provide the leadership needed to focus on this issue properly. In the meantime, the world of the ancient past is disintegrating day by day.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Fake Antiquities: A Weapon against Illicit Dealers, or a Tool for Them?

The notion that high-quality fakes might ruin the illicit antiquities market, floated by UCLA archaeologist Chip Stanish in an important article, has taken a couple of hits recently. First there was the arrest and conviction of Arnold Peter Weiss for hawking coins he believed were genuine but which turned out to be fakes. Now comes the Kapoor case and word that the dealer mixed up real antiquities amongst fakes in order to get them by Indian customs:

The paperwork would say they were all fakes. They used those to get them out of India,” a source is reported as saying.

 

Posted with Blogsy