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

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

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

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

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

One further question then needs to be asked:

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

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

Two Cheers for Interdiction and Restitution!

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

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

Potentially Very Important News from Iraq about Archaeological Site Protection

I had begun reading this story, titled "Iraq Unveils Restoration Plan for Heritage Sites", prepared to be disappointed at another instance in which the focus was being placed on maintenance maintenance and tourist infrastructure rather than on protecting sites against looting. As usual, I thought, the World Heritage Site prize is skewing priorities.

But I was happy to find I was wrong: 

Another project aimed at protecting archaeological sites involves installing ground sensors around each site to detect and monitor movement and transmit it to specialised offices and security services via satellite, Saleh said.
"This project, which we hope to launch this year, is among the most important to help curtail random excavation by antiquities thieves at archaeological sites that do not have sufficient protection," he said.
"This in turn protects the human and cultural heritage of Iraq against theft and smuggling," he added.

The use of remote monitoring technology to enable antiquities police to detect looting is something that we've been calling for since at least 2007 (see the suggestions collated in Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War). To my knowledge it has not been done elsewhere. There are of course GIS mapping projects and tracking via satellite imagery, but neither of these involves ground sensors and imagery collection and analysis is much too slow to be of great help, whereas one assumes that the ground sensors will stream real-time information. We need to know to be sure, but this Iraqi initiative could be a gamechanger.

Markdowns, gluts, and technological innovation: features of illicit antiquities trading in Egypt today

Four important tidbits of information in this brief article:

First, "only stupid people get caught." Clearly this statement must be taken with a grain of salt, reflecting some bluster here on the part of the dealer (and in talking to the press at all the dealer is already showing some lack of discretion). On the other hand, that he feels he can get away with talking to the press -- and even allowing Al Arabiya to film his stock! -- shows how unafraid of getting caught dealers can be.

Second, the risk of getting caught and the consequent costs of selling clandestinely are carried by the seller: "The trader, who allowed Al Arabiya to film his stock of illegal artifacts on sale, said every smuggled artifact loses about 70 percent of its value" -- presumably compared to what it would be worth to the dealer if the artifact were licit. And yet even with this markdown the dealer still finds it worth selling.

Third, the illicit market continues to function, despite lower profitability, not just in normal times but in the special conditions of a glut caused by the breakdown of site security and consequent looting of Egyptian sites:  'An artifact like this one, which I sell now for $718 used to be worth $7186, and it wasn’t easy to find such a piece.'” Prices for illicit antiquities have dropped by 90% - and yet the dealer continues to deal. Presumably the illicit $7000 piece would have been worth $23000 if licit, so the collector now can buy for $700 a piece that might someday or even today if he/she can get away with selling it as licit be worth thirty times its purchase price. 

Fourth, the extraction of antiquities is becoming more efficient thanks (sic) to the adoption of advanced technology in the form of higher-quality metal detectors. Just to give some sense of how clear the industrial tie-in between antiquities looting in Egypt and this equipment, here's a screenshot of the site of the company selling the jeodetector:

Metal detecting is supposedly illegal in Egypt without a permit, by the way.

Archaeologist recognizes artifact stolen from museum, even though it is missing from the museum's list of stolen artifacts -- lessons to be learned

This story offers three key facts that hold important lessons for archaeologists, antiquities dealers and auction houses, and museum professionals concerned about stemming the looting of antiquities:

1. Buyers of looted antiquities often rely on archaeologists to ascertain authenticity and estimate the value of artifacts.
2. Archaeologists who recognize that a piece is looted can go to authorities and authorities may succeed in working collaboratively and internationally in recovering the looted piece.
3. The procedures for listing missing items stolen from a museum are either flawed or susceptible to manipulation. In this particular case it is not yet clear which. The torso might have been left off the list as a glitch, since the artifact apparently was broken into two pieces and one was left behind, it not being clear from this report if the artifact was broken by looters or had always been in the museum in two pieces. Or, as the referring of this case to the prosecutor implies, it is possible that the item was left off the list deliberately in the hope that no one would notice at least for long enough for the piece to be sold.

Point 3) obviously calls for some tightening up of the protocols and record-keeping to keep this kind of thing from happening.

Points 1) and 2) suggest that archaeologists, the trade, and museums could have a much more potent impact on the illicit trade if they took more seriously their connection to it and developed stronger policies to make the most of that connection. Here are a few changes that might have some bite:
a) archaeological associations and perhaps academic departments should establish clear guidelines as to what archaeologists ought to do when approached with pieces recognized as stolen -- or even suspected of possibly being stolen:
      1. agree to do the authenticating and valuation only if they first are able to find out who has approached them (name and contact info at least);
      2. while authenticating, photograph the artifact and documentation; and
      3. immediately go to authorities with that information, without alerting the artifact's possessor and scaring him/her off. The objective should be to make it possible for authorities to both recover the artifact and to apprehend the suspect.

b) Archaeologists who authenticated and estimated value on repeated occasions without taking these steps should be subject to professional sanctions (i.e., blackballed from hiring and publishing).

c) Auction houses and legitimate antiquities dealers do not have the same capacity to impose professional sanctions on those who do not do the right thing, but they should adopt the same rules about what to do about questionable pieces.

Now They Are Looting INSIDE the Pyramids Too!

If this news report is to be believed, Egypt cannot even protect the inside of its most famous pyramids from being looted. This is the most alarming news possible about the deplorable state of site protection since the start of the Revolution and the attack on the Cairo Museum. Those who profess to care about the world's culture -- directors of major museums whose boards include some of the world's wealthiest collectors -- should be asking themselves at this point, "What could we do to help Egypt protect its -- and our -- heritage from our less responsible fellow collectors?"

How Can Antiquities Police Function If the Police in General Are Deligitimated?

Hopes that the military takeover of Egypt's government, whatever its other implications, would at least mean the return of police to Egypt's beleaguered archaeological sites, have not panned out. This sobering report in the New York Times explains why: the military, rather than doing the  dirty work of suppressing protest, has delegated that task to the police.  The result?

Another officer, Maj. Haitham Abbas, complained that the entire force had been tarnished by the response to the unrest, giving the example of a colleague who works in a unit that guards tourists:
“They told his son at school: ‘Your father is a murderer. He kills people in the streets,’ ” the officer said. “He probably never even pulled his gun out.”

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

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

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

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

Could Egypt use $350,000 per year for site protection?

The indispensable David Gill offers an updated chart of antiquities sales at Sotheby's with a breakdown for Egyptian artifacts. Gill's focus is on the downward trend suggesting Sotheby's is being more careful about provenance. But just as important is what this chart tells us about the revenue stream generated by antiquities sales -- a revenue stream that I would suggest could and should be tapped to provide a sustainable source of financing for anti-looting efforts.

Imagine a 5% tax on the roughly $7 million of revenues from Egyptian antiquities sold at Sotheby's annually, yielding $350K. Take out 20% or so for overhead, roughing out the net at $300K. Now imagine that $300K being injected back into Egypt to support vetted site protection improvement proposals, and/or used to tighten the policing of the international antiquities trade, or poured into research to develop new technologies designed to greatly improve the capacities of police, customs officers, and others trying to control the illicit trade.

Of course, one would not want to tax only the Egyptian sales but all antiquities sold, and not just at Sotheby's. Sotheby's $20 million per annum sales alone would raise $1 million. 

Kaylan profiles IICAH

Nice profile of the Iraqi Institute for the Conservation of Antiquities and Heritage by Melik Kaylan. I'm especially happy to see him report without challenge that,  "according to Ms. Price, 400,000 to 600,000 objects were looted in Iraq from 12,000 sites." Given Kaylan's earlier denialist position ("So Much for Looted Sites"), this marks a step forward. Maybe the next step could be to focus on efforts not just to conserve shrines and monuments (good and noble work, to be sure), but to secure and protect archaeological sites, since according to other reports, looting continues on Iraq's archaeological sites albeit not at the catastrophic levels of the 2003-2006 period.

Cornell returning 10,000 tablets to Iraq -- with no penalty for the donor, of course

According to this report in the Art Newspaper, Rosen, who bought looted Iraqi antiquities and then donated them to Cornell, was a co-owner of a gallery with Robert Hecht, who was the key middleman buying looted Italian antiquities and then sold them to the Met. Those were the days.

Also notable that Rosen got an $800K tax benefit for donating. Will the IRS demand that money (plus penalties)? That would send a signal to collectors that if they want to buy dodgy antiquities they should not expect to be rewarded for doing so, at least.

Zahi Hawass says everything is hunky dory now, looting over!

Good news from Zahi Hawass, if true (but that's an "if" that is bigger than the Pyramids): 

"For a period there was looting everywhere and illegal excavations. So from Sunday I have agreed to travel all over the world on behalf of the Ministry of Tourism to tell people that the sites are now completely secured. Egypt is safe for everyone and we need tourists to come back."

Illicit Antiquities Markets, Chinese Style

Commission a fake antiquity that if authentic would be illegal to trade or sell, get it appraised by experts who work for a national museum, and use it as collateral for a $100 million loan to buy real estate. Of course, if it did sell at auction, the buyer would never actually pay. Sounds a bit like our own financial markets here!

http://m.npr.org/news/front/141125011

In one case that was recently exposed, businessman Xie Genrong commissioned a fake ancient jade burial suit made out of pieces of jade stitched together with gold thread. He got five top expert appraisers to vouch for the authenticity of the suit and value it at $375 million. Using that as collateral, a bank gave Xie a $100 million loan for a real estate project.
This saga casts doubt on the role of the appraisers, who work for such august institutions as Beijing's Palace Museum. Of the five, one has since died, and the other four have blamed him, saying they had to carry out the appraisal of the suit without touching it, while it was in a glass case.
But Zhang Ning, a porcelain appraiser who does not specialize in archaeological objects, says such a valuation should never have been given for a jade burial suit: "For a start, it was violating the law. If it had been unearthed in a dig, there's a law that says archaeological objects can't be traded or sold. So the experts should have never given it that estimate. It's likely the experts knew it was fake."
The businessman, Xie Genrong, is now serving a jail term.
Many are now arguing for reform of China's auction law. One major issue is that Chinese auction houses are not responsible for the authenticity of the goods they sell, as long as they issue a disclaimer. But the problem is that the fakery is endemic. In all too many cases, the art is fake, the bids are rigged, the experts are crooked, and the bills are never settled. It's difficult to know what is real, aside from the corruption.

a quick thought on responses to the Art Loss Register article

On her widely read PhDiva blog, Dorothy King has posted an anecdote that explains the annoyance she and many others feel about the Art Loss Register. There are a number of problems with the ALR, but the complaint she makes, and that I have heard others voice as well, is that "The police don't charge people to help with crimes," while the Art Loss Register does.

I can understand that frustration. But it might be worth thinking a bit more about the notion that the police don't charge people to help with crimes. Technically that is true, but only technically: the police don't charge individuals to look into their crimes. But instead, we all are charged -- in the form of taxes to pay for the salaries etc. that are required to enable the police to exist and be able to fight crime, art crime included. Unfortunately, our politicians have not seen fit to adequately fund the police to pay for the kind of information-gathering that they could otherwise do instead of the ALR, much less to adequately fund the police to pay for the officers' time to investigate.


The solution has to be some better funding mechanism than the privatized one the ALR represents. One answer, which I have been beating drums for for several years now, would be to impose a "user-fee" tax on sales of antiquities above a certain threshold price, with the proceeds dedicated to improved policing of the market. That would include a registry -- not just of stolen antiquities, presumably, but of all antiquities (above a certain threshold) bought and sold -- which would dramatically improve the ability of police to investigate chains of provenance. But it would also one hopes include things like hiring more police and more guards, or doing something as clearly cost-effective as paying for bullets for site guards in Egypt, where as noted in an earlier blog posting the guards at a major site ran out of bullets and were driven off by a gang that is now looting the site.

"Custodians have run out of bullets"

This post is from Sept. 3 on the "Egypt's Heritage Task Force" facebook page:

Saqqara Looting Update: tonight gangs of armed thugs attacked the pyramid of Merenre, Djedkare Isesi and the southern shawaf area. Custodians have run out of bullets and gangs are currently left to dig on the site.

But of course, we all know that arming site guards doesn't stop looting. Don't we?

A Window on Antiquities Smuggling from Syria

A very interesting piece profiling a low-level smuggler. A few remarks about what it shows:

1. cellphone technology is integrated into the illicit trade, making it easy for anyone to share photos
2. countries bordering on nations like Syria or Egypt should be pressured to seize any antiquities crossing their borders, and to restrict their own antiquities dealers from traveling within 50 miles of the border (or take other measures to try to disrupt the network in those countries). Turkey in particular needs to be chastised for turning a blind eye.
3. Antiquities smuggling is often not done independently of the smuggling of other illicit goods, including, importantly, weapons. Matthew Bogdanos, here's another piece of evidence for you.
4.  Many smalltime smugglers have no idea of the value of the items they are smuggling.

Coming Soon to the Mantelpiece of a Millionaire Near You (or in Abu Dhabi, Lebanon, Tokyo, etc. etc.)

Stunning photos of some of the pieces looted recently from the Malawi Museum in Egypt:
http://storify.com/zeinobia/mallawi-museum-list-of-stolen-antiquities

UNESCO's actions in response to the looting in Egypt

Edouard Planche, program specialist in the Cultural Heritage Protection Treaties Section of UNESCO's Culture Sector,  has kindly agreed to allow me to repost the comment he made on Derek Fincham's Illicit Cultural Property blog, regarding actions that UNESCO is taking in Egypt:

Following the information given by the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities, UNESCO published immediately the data of the stolen objects on its website:http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/illicit-traffic-of-cultural-property/emergency-actions/egypt/warning-looting-of-the-malawi-national-museum/.
At national level, the UNESCO field office in Cairo continues to provide support to the museum staff and the Ministry of State for Antiquities to refine the list of looted objects and translate it into English. As of today, through the efforts of the Egyptian authorities, the police has already succeeded in recuperating 121 objects but 911 objects are still missing.
UNESCO is taking the initiative to circulate the most updated information concerning this looting and to inform its partners in order to ensure maximum vigilance on anticipated attempts to illegally export and sell the objects on the market.
UNESCO works closely with IGOs sucha as INTERPOL, the World Customs Organisation, ICCROM, UNIDROIT as well as with selected NGOs such as, for example, ICOMOS, ICOM, the International Committee of the Blue shield and private partners of the art market.

Against Despair Over the Looting in Egypt

I am hearing a lot of despair being expressed, on facebook and elsewhere, about our inability to do anything to stop the destruction of cultural heritage in Egypt as elsewhere -- even from people as otherwise optimistic as the great folks engaged with the Sustainable Preservation Initiative. After all, if one cannot protect human lives, how could one protect sites and museums? And if all that international organizations like UNESCO can do is to issue one more statement deploring what is happening, what else can we do?

We can do a lot more actually, and SPI helps point the way, though of course SPI-like initiatives in these countries in chaos are impossible. The key point of SPI, though, is the taking-responsibility by non-governmental groups, and that has to happen here as well -- in spades, since the government has abandoned or lost the ability to fulfill its responsibilities.

So with that as the principle here are a few things that could be done:

• Non-Egyptians could help by finding ways to donate to Egyptians like Monica Hanna, Save El Hibbeh and other facebook groups, etc. who are mobiizing Egyptian citizens to take direct action where possible; 
• We could raise money to pay for remote site monitoring to at least make sure the world is aware of what is going on; 
• We could push much harder for a worlwide emergency ban like the one UN Resolution 1483 imposed on Iraqi materials; 
• We could help foster longterm growth of both SPI-like and citizen-led emergency site protection groups in countries where breakdown, revolution, or invasion seems possible (UNESCO is doing something like this but working with governments not with NGOs incountry);
• We could explore ways to tap into the military-to-military friendships that one supposes must exist given the decades of joint exercises, to see if there might be some way to appeal individually to officers there who are in the right position to move some forces onto sites. 

These are action items, and I am sure there are others beyond this (please chime in anyone). But they take energy, as well as financial resources, neither of which exist in anything like the amounts needed for the overall task of investing in sustainable site protection. What we need, above all, is a stable and substantial revenue stream that can feed and incentivize such efforts. SPI generates sustainable revenue streams but only at the local level and only so long as the government takes care of law and order more generally. Is there another market in things archaeological that is not the tourist market, a market that is not affected negatively by unrest or revolution as the tourist market is, a market that is legally protected and therefore could generate sustainable revenue streams, say via a tax or user-fee on purchases with proceeds funneled to support efforts like those above? Why yes! Guess what market that is.

Drones For Site Protection: Necessary but not sufficient

Another story about archaeologists using drones, this time in Peru, to map archaeological sites. As the story notes,

Archaeologists say these small drones can help set boundaries to protect sites from squatters or miners.

A valuable, highly cost-effective tool for site protection as well as for discovery, then -- and, one should add, a tool that could and should also be deployed to protect sites not just from squatters and mining companies but from looters. In either case, however, the caveat is that the drones provide actionable intelligence but the police still need to exist and have the will and capacity to act on this intelligence. When Peruvian property developers bulldoze a pyramid, there is clearly also a need to strengthen deterrence.