The looting of antiquities has a history as old as the antiquities themselves, but political instability and rising prices have seen a surge in thefts in recent years.Until now, efforts have focused on stopping the trade, but now archaeologists are borrowing ideas from the wildlife conservation movement in an attempt to get to the root of the problem. Charlie Furniss reports

With an estimated 30,000 religious and historic monuments stretching back thousands of years, Sri Lanka has one of the world’s richest records of cultural heritage. Most glorious among these is the ancient Sinhalese city of Anuradhapura, the island’s capital from the fourth century BC to the 11th century AD. Among its palaces, monasteries, stupas and statues were some of the greatest buildings of the ancient world. Even today, its Jetavanaramaya dagoba, built in the third century AD, remains the world’s tallest brick building.

Having prospered for almost 1,500 years, the city was abandoned in 1017 when it was overrun by Chola forces from South India. It was subsequently hidden away in dense jungle for hundreds of years, until renovations and excavations began during the 19th century. Now, however, Anuradhapura is under attack once more. A recent survey by archaeologists from the universities of Durham and Kelaniya has recorded an outbreak of looting around the city.

Ancient Buddhist material has become fashionable on the international antiquities market, it seems, and the value of such items has gone through the roof. All over Sri Lanka, ancient religious monuments are under threat. And not even the country’s most treasured historic site is being spared. From the Ark of the Covenant to the Elgin Marbles, the theft of antiquities is one of history’s oldest controversies. During the past 50 years, however, the level of looting and illegal excavations of archaeological sites has increased sharply. Demand in the West from museums and private collectors has seen prices soar, even more so since such items have become fashionable in interior design.

For those in search of a quick buck, digging up an old tomb or hacking the head off a statue is an easy way to a small fortune, particularly now that mechanical bulldozers, diggers, chainsaws and dynamite have replaced the shovel and the pickaxe in many parts of the world. The trade in antiquities has become so lucrative that there is now a well-organised network of smugglers and dealers who traffic this material around the world, often alongside drugs, arms and people.

Recently, the campaign against the illegal trade in antiquities has won a number of significant battles. In Italy, one of the world’s best known dealers has been convicted of trafficking in stolen archaeological material, while in the USA, one of the world’s most prominent art museums has been forced to return two of its most prized artefacts. All over the world, emboldened governments are expected to launch claims against what they perceive to be the theft of their countries’ national heritage. Yet, despite such developments, at source, the scale of looting continues to grow. Indeed, the situation is now so desperate that there are fears that we may soon lose forever the opportunity to learn about some of the world’s most important cultures and civilisations.

There may still be hope, however. In a few isolated cases, archaeologists have been able to signifi cantly reduce levels of looting by adopting a strategy inspired by wildlife conservation. Indeed, so successful has this been that several prominent archaeologists are now calling for their fellow professionals to re-evaluate the concept of conservation and for institutions such as the World Bank and the EU to recognise that the theft is not only destroying cultural heritage but threatening the future economic security of many of the world’s poorest nations.

Condemned to obscurity

Few cultures have escaped the plunder. Although there is little accurate information, it’s clear that a taste for exotic material in the West has caused looting to spread since the Second World War from its traditional bases in Egypt, Greece, Italy and Turkey to Africa, Asia and South America. The ongoing looting has led to increasingly fractious debate among governments, museums, archaeologists and antiquities dealers. To many of the governments concerned, the loss of archaeological material represents a blow to their national identity – particularly for those still coming to terms with what that means.

At a time when Peruvian president Alan García has made indigenous heritage a central theme of his administration, his government has demanded that Yale University return all of the artefacts taken from Machu Picchu by the famous US explorer Hiram Bingham after he discovered the Inca city in 1912. And Egypt – flexing its muscles in the international arena – is threatening legal action against the St Louis Art Museum in Missouri over the funerary mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer, a noblewoman in the court of Rameses II.

But museums, dealers and collectors argue that the location of antiquities is less important than the owner’s ability to look after them properly and to display them for as wide an audience as possible. “Many national governments simply don’t have the resources to look after their antiquities properly or to study or display them adequately,” says former restorer Jonathan Tokeley. “So important material is often condemned to obscurity and decay.” Private collectors, on the other hand, ensure that antiquities are restored properly and can be studied and viewed by all who share their enthusiasm. “Historically, wealthy individuals with a passion for antiquities have often collected material in close collaboration with museums, often with the intention of eventually selling or donating it on to an institution.” In a speech to the US National Press Club in Washington DC in April last year, Philippe de Montebello, director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, argued that the best place for antiquities is a Western institution such as the Met, the Louvre or the British Museum. Objects that can only be studied in the country or locality of origin, in direct proximity to similar material, he explained, yield a “narrowly circumscribed” understanding of their history.  “The universal museum, on the other hand, is the cultural family tree where all people can find their roots, where these may be studied according to their key interconnections in close proximity to other cultures.”

While the debate about curatorship continues, archaeologists have pointed out that there is a much bigger issue at stake: looting is destroying the information with which we piece together history. “When an antiquity is ripped out of the ground clandestinely, the situation in which it’s found isn’t recorded,” says Jane C Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America. “So we have no idea what was found together with it, how it was found, what it was part of – whether it was in a house, a temple, a palace, an administrative building. All of these things tell us how it was used and what it meant to the people who owned it or traded it and so on. Looting means all that information is lost.” Not only are the looters destroying evidence about the origins of individual items, she continues, in some cases they are preventing any further meaningful excavation of the sites. “There is an enormous amount of ruin that takes place in the interest of fi nding one or two objects that may have some commercial value. If you look at some of the sites in Iraq and Afghanistan that have been extensively looted, they look like moonscapes. The looters have gone in with heavy equipment and simply dug holes all over the landscape. So there’s no hope of going back and trying to retrieve the stratigraphy and the context and so forth.”

According to Lord Colin Renfrew, former Disney professor of archaeology and director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University, losing such information is a disaster. “These sites provide us with the only opportunity to understand the early part of human history, and the prehistoric past especially.” In Mali, he points out, the remains of the ancient Djenné civilisation have been so extensively wrecked that the possibility of understanding the history of this culture has most likely been lost forever. The same is true of the sites in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of which have never been examined in any depth by archaeologists.
“These sites are a diminishing resource and their destruction is a catastrophe not only for the countries concerned, but for all humankind.”

Cleaning up the trade

To date, most attempts to stop the looting have focused on cleaning up the trade in antiquities. And in recent years, they’ve gained much ground. In June 2005, a court in Rome convicted Italian dealer Giacomo Medici of trafficking antiquities. The result of a ten-year investigation, it was one of the most high-profi le cases of its kind. Medici, one of the biggest suppliers to leading international dealers since the 1960s, was sentenced to ten years in jail and ordered to pay a fi ne of ten million euros. (At the time of writing, Medici was appealing the decision.) The Italian authorities have subsequently begun trying Marion True, former curator of antiquities at the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for criminal association and receipt of stolen property. Also charged is Robert E Hecht, Jr, a New York- and Paris-based dealer who has sold antiquities to the Getty and Metropolitan museums, among others.

These trials are part of an attempt by the Italian authorities to expose a network of dealers in New York, London and Switzerland and collectors and museums in the USA that it believes has conspired to unearth antiquities illegally and smuggle them abroad. The Ministry
of Culture has launched an aggressive campaign to retrieve hundreds of artefacts from US museums. It has already negotiated the return of the infamous Euphronius krater and the so called Morgantina treasure, a rare set of Hellenistic silver, from the Metropolitan Museum in February last year. It has also laid claim to at least 42 items held by the Getty, and others held by the Princeton Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The Italian campaign follows an exposé in 1997 by British journalist Peter Watson of the role of Sotheby’s in the illegal antiquities trade that led to the auction house closing its antiquities department in London. Watson subsequently contributed to a report published by the Illegal Antiquities Research Centre at Cambridge University that identifi ed the UK, the USA, France and Germany as the main destinations for antiquities.

The British government has since passed legislation that made it illegal to deal in antiquities whose provenance couldn’t be proven after 2003. And the US authorities have made bilateral agreements with several source countries. Many museums have introduced stringent codes of practice governing acquisitions that comply with international standards, the exception being a handful of US institutions that have maintained relatively aggressive acquisition policies.

Despite such attempts to reform the trade in antiquities, there has been little impact on looting around the world. This is partly because, in practice, it’s very diffi cult to prove guilt in court. So dealers continue to sell, and collectors and certain museums continue to buy, material of unknown provenance – material that archaeologists know has been looted because details of its excavation have never been published.

There is an argument for greater transparency and tougher laws, but Tokeley doubts that this would have any practical effect. “Tightening legislation in the West has reduced the amount of material that passes through the UK, the USA and other Western countries,” he explains. “But it has also caused the direction of trade to change. There are now increasing numbers of collectors in the Middle East and Japan buying Islamic and Buddhist material, and reports of a burgeoning market in China. Further draconian moves against the Western markets and museums won’t protect the sites from looting, but merely ensure the West never sees these antiquities and never has the chance to care for them.”

While millions of dollars, euros and pounds are spent on law enforcement in Europe and the USA, some archaeologists claim that, in many cases, the money would be better spent tackling the root of the problem.

Making ends meet

Albania’s cultural heritage has taken a battering since 1992, when the collapse of the Communist regime precipitated economic meltdown and a breakdown in law and order. Two of the country’s most valuable sites, Apollonia and Phoenicê, have been hit particularly hard, losing precious ancient Greek and Roman material from unexcavated cemeteries. But all over the country, archaeological remains have come under attack, and in each case, the story is the same: local communities have turned to excavating and selling ancient artefacts because they had no alternative.

In many ways, Albania’s experience is typical of what is happening all over the world. Although organised, well-equipped groups have carried out many of the excavations in Afghanistan and Iraq, in many other developing countries, poor farmers are digging up and selling antiquities on the black market just to make ends meet. Many argue that, for this very reason, the market should be liberalised, and that the excavation and sale of ancient artefacts should be legalised.

However, according to Neil Brodie, research director of the Illegal Antiquities Research Centre, even though the individuals concerned can make hundreds of dollars – often a small fortune – from selling a statue or vase, in the broader scheme of things, they are losing out. “When these people dig the stuff up and sell it,” he says, “they make money at the point of sale, but that is as far as it goes.” Once it comes to the UK or the USA, it will continue circulating for years, with each sale generating hundreds if not thousands of times more that the person who originally sold it ever gets. “None of that money ever finds its way back to the source country.”

As well as a purely archaeological imperative for protecting these sites, he continues, there is also an economic one, which is arguably more important. “These artefacts and the sites from which they come are vital resources for developing countries,” says Brodie. “If they are excavated carefully and kept in the source countries, they can be curated in such a way as to generate sustainable income through tourism.”

A British charity has placed this idea at the heart of the management plan of Butrint National Park in Albania. And the benefi ts are clear. While most of Albania’s sites continue to suffer from looting even today, the management authority at Butrint has avoided such a fate by encouraging its local population to take pride in the site and giving them a stake in its future. Butrint houses the remains of a settlement occupied during the Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Venetian periods. Its signifi cance as a repository of valuable archaeological material was recognised in 1992 when UNESCO inscribed it onto its World Heritage list.

Since 1994, the Butrint Foundation has developed the site for tourism, building a stateof-the-art museum and a network of walking trails through nearby woods and wetlands. Today, Butrint is one of Albania’s most-visited tourist attractions, drawing 70,000 visitors last year, when there were none seven years earlier.

The tourism boom around Butrint is a textbook example of its benefits to developing countries. The money the visitors have brought with them has transformed the local economy, with tour operators, restaurants and hotels all generating jobs for local people. The park itself, and its new museum, also offer opportunities. And archaeological excavations provide seasonal work for up to 50 people in a range of roles, such as security guards, labourers and pot washers.

The foundation has also developed a poverty alleviation initiative. “We have a training programme that teaches villagers how to make souvenirs – mosaics, jewellery and ceramics –based on images found among the remains,” says Danny Renton, the foundation’s director. “A community enterprise shop in the park now sells these crafts, and 95 per cent of its profits return to the community.”

Towards the end of last year, the foundation began a mobile education programme that will visit all of the schools in the area and teach students about the value of the site – in terms of both its heritage and the economy – using films, magazines, games and the like. “It’s all about encouraging community buy-in and explaining why the park needs to be protected,” says Renton.

Archaeologists from the universities of Durham and Tehran have adopted a similar approach in Iran. A study in 2004 found that 90 per cent of prehistoric sites around the town of Garchak had recently been looted. But when a construction company came across the remains of an 6,000-year-old potters’ settlement in the process of building a brickworks, the archaeologists held a series of meetings with local councillors and were able to convince them of the site’s value. The council has since bought the brickworks and is planning to turn the area into a park.

As in Butrint, the reaction from the local community has been unreservedly positive. “Garchak is a somewhat drab industrial town that had, until recently, only been associated with child labour and a rather nasty serial killer,” says Robin Coningham, professor of archaeology at Durham University. “We’ve been able to show that natural clay deposits attracted people to set up kilns in the area during the fourth millennium BC. The local people are immensely proud to know that their town now has an association with the past and can be recognised for something more positive.” The site has attracted visits from the vice president, from schoolchildren from Tehran and from tourists from all over the country.

There are similar initiatives at Sipán in Peru and Catal Huyuk in Turkey. Harriet Crawford, chairman of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, believes that the potential for culturalheritage tourism is enormous. “In Iraq, once people can go back there, there is going to be an enormous upsurge in the tourist trade,” she says. “Not only from Europeans and Americans, but also from the Arab countries now that they are prosperous enough to generate a lot of tourists. The thousands of standing monuments and archaeological sites are a finite and non-renewable resource to these countries, at least as important as something like oil.”

The idea of placing a clear economic value on national heritage and of conserving it by working with local communities was first adopted by wildlife conservationists during the late 1980s. “Essentially, it’s the same thing,” says Richard Hodges, professor of archaeology at the University of East Anglia and scientific director of the Butrint Foundation. “Those who are looting antiquities are generally doing it for the same reasons that people poach elephants, tigers or rhinos. Instead of worrying about what’s happening to trophy art, we should be thinking about establishing, maintaining and sustaining the places where this material comes from as though they were wildlife parks. In that context, it’s important to keep the elements together –whether they be a population of elephants or a forest or a statue or a vase – because these are the things that give a place its spirit, its character and its value, not only to the locality or the region but to the world as a whole.”

While he believes that there is an important role for museums and art galleries in displaying works of art, infl ating their signifi cance confl icts with contemporary views on conservation.

“It’s a Western view developed during the 19th century that emphasises trophy art, museums and art galleries. We learned during the 20th century that game reserves and sites of outstanding natural beauty or of scientific importance are really to be treasured in a new global environment. These archaeological sites are no different.”

Coningham suggests that museums should now be looking to the example set by zoos. “Fifty years ago, zoos were only interested in collections,” he says. “Today, however, most are more geared towards conservation in the home country.” Some of the larger museums have enormous funds behind them, which, in the past, they have used to purchase antiquities, he points out. “Having reduced the number of acquisitions they now make, they could take a more proactive role in helping to develop in-country conservation of archaeological sites and antiquities based on community-development initiatives.”
 
Brodie is in no doubt that archaeologists can learn a lot about the management of cultural resources from conservationists. “Very few archaeologists work in this way because the discipline is still based around science,” he says. Addressing the root cause of looting will require a sea change in the way archaeology is taught. “At the moment, undergraduates learn how to dig a hole. But there is very little training on how to start up a poverty-reduction initiative or to develop cultural tourism.” He points out that such work requires huge amounts of money, but very few of the funding bodies that support archaeological research would consider fi nancing what amounts to development projects.

Nevertheless, according to Hodges, there is money available. “There are stupendous amounts of funding for development in countries such as Albania,” he says. “But at the moment, it goes to development organisations, architects and construction companies for building shopping malls and so on.” Hodges would like to see institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the EU doing more to support cultural heritage and cultural-heritage tourism.

“In many countries, cultural-heritage tourism is one of the biggest means of creating employment,” he says. Croatia, he points out,
which was recently ravaged by war, now generates almost 20 per cent of its gross domestic product from this sector. In Greece, the figure is higher. “But the administrators at the World Bank, the IMF and the EU have still not cottoned on to the significance of these archaeological remains. And that is reprehensible. The result is that all over the world, these most precious sites continue to be looted and the countries in question lose some of their most valuable resources.”

With the support of archaeologists and the financial institutions, says Hodges, a community-based approach could help “massively” to solve the problem of looting. “This whole issue has been seen around the wrong way. We need to look at all these places in a global sense and create a global structure that actually guides and advises on how to manage these places, working with all the stakeholders in such a way that through education and instruction, they are looked after in the same way as game parks. Hopefully, then, the world as a whole might take a different attitude to the problem because peoples’ lives and livelihoods would be at stake, rather than just a piece of trophy art.”