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

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

Libya's Sites Get the Once Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who received this message?

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

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

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

Libyan Rebels Mobilize Special Brigade to Protect Museum and Sites

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

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

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

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

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

Readers of this blog may have other ideas to add.

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

ICE on a roll

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

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

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

Too Many Antiquities Seizures in Turkey For the Museum to Handle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getty Trust CEO James Cuno wraps up debut week

Getty Trust CEO James Cuno wraps up debut week

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

The Long Tail of Cultural Policy, Cultural Diplomacy Division

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

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

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

Collector as Looter (and not just by analogy!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International Smuggling Ring Operating within US Cracked

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