I have tried (not always successfully) to avoid editorializing in my interviews with Robert Conforti and Giuseppe Proietti (“Italy’s Top Antiquities Cops Fight Back”), two Italian officials responsible for protecting Italy’s cultural heritage from looting and theft. Just the facts, ma’am. But a few comments do seem justified.
Some things we can all agree upon. Among them: The problem is complex, not easily solvable. Second, most of the officials dealing with the problem are agreeable at least to considering a variety of solutions.
Perhaps the first item on the agenda should be to define “the problem.” It has, it turns out, many parts. The looting of Early Bronze tombs at Bab ed-Dhra in Jordan is not the same as looting Apulian vases in southern Italy. The first has started only recently and is done by peasants who find mostly undecorated low-end pots. The tombaroli in southern Italy, on the other hand, have been robbing graves for generations, they are organized and armed (the Mafia may even be involved), and the pots they find are beautifully painted.
In both there are local aspects to the problem (the ability and will of the governments to control it, the social needs of the peasants who do the looting, the outlets for the product) and international aspects (laws, treaties, international trade, smuggling).
Then there is the intersection of site looting and museum theft. The latter may be a greater problem than the former. In Italy, it seems that the authorities are concentrating on museum thefts rather than on site looting. Have security experts been enlisted to try to develop better museum security systems? Could such security systems be developed for otherwise unguarded archaeological sites as well as museums?
How can we enlist antiquities dealers and responsible collectors in the effort to confront the problem? How can market forces be used to supplement law in the fight against looting?
All this suggests that we should at least be talking about the problem. For some time, we have been urging a professional conference on the subject, where a variety of scholars and others—archaeologists, government officials, economists, security experts, directors of antiquities departments, antiquities dealers, collectors, looters (if we can get them), even lawyers (they are easy to get) and a variety of other professionals—would present papers dealing with different aspects of the problem. The papers would then be published in a volume that would at least be the beginning of a discussion.
We have asked the Archaeological Institute of America to jointly sponsor such a conference. But the proposal has been dismissed out of hand, without even being considered. Perhaps there is another professional organization or foundation out there that would pick up the cudgels.
It seems to us that the first step in solving the problem is to talk about it. Simply telling people not to buy antiquities and vilifying collectors (to say nothing of publications like this one, which accepts ads from antiquities dealers) is not facing the problem. It is, in effect, avoiding it.
I have tried (not always successfully) to avoid editorializing in my interviews with Robert Conforti and Giuseppe Proietti (“Italy’s Top Antiquities Cops Fight Back”), two Italian officials responsible for protecting Italy’s cultural heritage from looting and theft. Just the facts, ma’am. But a few comments do seem justified. Some things we can all agree upon. Among them: The problem is complex, not easily solvable. Second, most of the officials dealing with the problem are agreeable at least to considering a variety of solutions. Perhaps the first item on the agenda should be to define “the problem.” It has, it […]
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