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Trafficking Archaeology - Episode 42
124 Plays6 years ago
On this episode of the Women in Archaeology Podcast we are joined by Dr. Donna Yates to discuss trafficking of archaeological materials. We talk about whose looting, whose brokering, whose buying, and what you can do to help stop looting and trafficking.
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Transcript
Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hi everyone and welcome to the Women in Archaeology podcast, a podcast about for and by women in the fields.
Who is Dr. Donna Yates?
00:00:12
Speaker
On this episode, we are joined by Dr. Donna Yates to talk about the trafficking of archaeological materials
00:00:26
Speaker
Before we jump into the meat and bones of the episode, Donna, do you want to just tell us a little bit about yourself, where you are, what your research interests are?
00:00:36
Speaker
Sure. As you said, my name is Donnie Yates. I am a lecturer at the University of Glasgow. And my title is Lecture in Antiquities Trafficking and Art Crime, mostly because they let me choose my own title. Oh, nice. So I picked something as cool as possible. All of my degrees are in archaeology. I have a PhD in archaeology. But for the past six years, I've been in a criminology department. So I'm at the Scottish Center for Crime and Justice Research.
00:01:06
Speaker
And the reason I'm there is because I try to combine archaeological style research, heritage research with methods and theories and frames of analysis from sociology and criminology.
The Impact of Looting on Archaeology
00:01:24
Speaker
My specialty in archaeology was Central and South American archaeology, but at this point I kind of bounce all over the place doing all sorts of things. But the main focus is this idea of the looting of the past and the commodification of the past and the trafficking of archaeological remains between various points. Isn't it? Yeah, that's perfect. That's fascinating. What drew you to that topic in the first place?
00:01:51
Speaker
Well, the shortest version of the story is that I thought I was just going to do regular archaeology, if there's a such thing as that. And when I was an undergraduate, I did my field school in Belize and then rolled straight into an archaeological project in rural jungle Guatemala.
00:02:12
Speaker
And when I got to the sites, absolutely amazing site, a huge Maya site, massive temples in the jungle, it would have had some really high population. I've seen numbers like 25 to 50,000 people. Some people say more. But every single pyramid, every single building, every single structure at the site had been basically bisected by looting. It was like Swiss cheese.
00:02:38
Speaker
And anything we found there was left over that the looters missed. And even while we were there, there was some question whether we would encounter looters. And while we were excavating, some of the local workers that I was working with told me that a particular archaeological site was being looted as we spoke, but to not really tell anybody because the people involved had killed people in the past.
00:03:07
Speaker
All of that turned out to be absolutely true. The site that they were leading was Ken Quinn. Somebody had been killed. A large ball court marker had been moved to the police border. And back again, it was originally recovered by secret police. All of this was going on at the same time. I was hearing whispers of it through the jungle. And by the time I got back to Boston, where I was studying at the time, I thought,
00:03:32
Speaker
I can't really just go on with ignoring this and kind of geared the rest of my life towards studying this and trying to prevent it. That sounds terrifying. I'm just going to run out there. Just another day in the jungle. Wow. And kind of going from there, were you...
00:03:53
Speaker
being not only just being drawn to this topic where there are areas specifically that you found the most interesting to kind of start focusing your studies in traffic and that kind of stuff.
00:04:04
Speaker
Yeah, I was really quite lucky because I was studying at Boston University at the time as an undergraduate. And there were a number of people there who are really the big names in the early and still now the study of and the prevention of the Lutean Trachium Antiquities. So I was studying under Clement C. Coggins, who in the late 60s wrote
00:04:27
Speaker
basically one article that changed everybody's view on the looting and trafficking of cultural objects. She inspired some of the early legislation that the U.S. had. Ricka Leah, who has done a significant amount of work in this area, and quite a few others. Lord Colin Renfrew came through my university and gave a talk.
00:04:50
Speaker
And I was also volunteering with the Archaeological Institute of America, who at the time was preparing information for the US State Department regarding bilateral treaties to prevent trafficking with various countries. So I had a lot of exposure to things and I got
00:05:09
Speaker
very much interested in both a little bit about policy and how policy can affect people, but a lot about how looting and trafficking affects people on the ground. So people who live near archaeological sites, who are connected to them, and who maybe make their income from them through things that aren't like looting.
00:05:31
Speaker
and really how this plays into an idea of global inequality. So I kind of got obsessed with that idea of the rich taking advantage of the poor to have pretty things.
00:05:42
Speaker
That sounds absolutely fascinating. And I don't know if you've found this true in general, that it seems like it's a largely underrepresented topic of study in terms of like, you know, we hear all the big, big name or big topics in archaeology and seems like trafficking and whatnot doesn't seem as big, like as much in the news as it should be.
How Widespread is Trafficking in Archaeology?
00:06:05
Speaker
Yeah, as much as covered. Is that true for the most part? Or I'm just not reading enough.
00:06:12
Speaker
I think you're right. I think it's getting a bit bigger. I think that for a long time, this has sort of been on the periphery of archaeological research in the sense that it was an issue that almost all archaeologists have had to deal with, to some degree or another, either directly on their own site being looted,
00:06:35
Speaker
or dealing with archaeological remains in foreign collections that have no provenance and trying to square that with whatever research is being done. So it's something that we've all had to deal with. But as a form of academic inquiry on its own, that's really been kind of coming to an effect in the past 10, 15 years or so with very certain people. So Neil Brody at the
00:07:01
Speaker
Illicit Antiquities Research Center, which unfortunately no longer exists at Cambridge, and other people kind of brought this more into the mainstream of archaeological inquiry. But on the other hand, I'm employed by a criminology department. I'm not even in an archaeology department, so in a way,
00:07:20
Speaker
It's not like archaeology is paying my bills or anything like that. I think it's coming more into undergraduate educations and I think it's something that young archaeologists are taught about, but it isn't necessarily a research area that archaeology is investing heavily in. That might be changing. It also seems like there's a changing public perception of
00:07:49
Speaker
archaeological looting. There was an article that came out maybe a month ago about the woman that they were nicking. Oh, that looting. Who was like- Oh, yes. Right? Do you want to just touch on that for a minute? I mean, obviously, looting is bad using your diplomatic license to loot. Yeah. Isn't that a joke? Don't do it.
00:08:16
Speaker
No, let me choose my words carefully so that I'm not sued for libel by anybody or defamation or anything. But ultimately, this is a story that's progressing right now because this was in the international media just the other day, like two days ago, because
00:08:37
Speaker
various countries have started to fuss about it, as well they should. But in an Australian paper coming out of Perth, a woman in her 90s was presenting her collection of antiquities, including objects from Egypt and other parts of West Asia, saying that
00:08:56
Speaker
This was stuff that she collected while her husband was a diplomat in the region. And she went into tombs and took this stuff. And things were just different back then. And this was before the law went into effect. And as it turns out, that's absolutely not true. That was entirely against the law, according to absolutely everybody at the time. So either she's mistaken, very much mistaken, which
00:09:23
Speaker
or she's insincere, but ultimately she's 95 years old and has unfortunately been propped up in a newspaper talking about these activities in a way that
00:09:39
Speaker
that sounded very self-congratulatory and quite a bit horrible. But the recent newspaper accounts, and I don't know anything much beyond the newspaper accounts, is that complaints have been made and investigations are being done. But if you're bragging about using diplomatic immunity to traffic and antiquities, you're probably asking for it.
00:10:05
Speaker
But oddly, that's an interesting thing. The use of diplomatic immunity to move antiquities is not a surprise. It's something that I've encountered in a lot of major cases. And it's something that I've recorded in a number of countries of people using power and influence in that way to move items because diplomatic pouches aren't checked. That's fascinating. I honestly considered something like that. And it seems like there are many different
00:10:35
Speaker
levels and kinds of looting. And I guess for the sake of our listeners, I think when we think a lot of people think looting, it's just like a lone person out there with a shovel going, wahaha, I'm going to take this. Would you mind kind of touching on like the different kinds of looting that take place and reasons behind it, maybe?
00:10:53
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, there's there's first of all, the question is, what do you mean by looting? But in a sense, there's a whole there's a whole range of activities that we might consider to be the looting of an archaeological site. And on one side, it can be simply doing something that we archaeologists consider to be unethical, but it's still totally legal.
00:11:15
Speaker
So, for example, the excavation of Native American remains on private property within the United States, which in most cases is fully legal but makes us feel a bit funny, to something that is fully illegal, something that breaks national or local law.
00:11:34
Speaker
So in, for example, in Guatemala, where I was working before, all archaeological objects are property of the country, that's property of the nation. So you can't loot any of them, even on private property, they're property of the nation. So if you've taken it out of the ground without authorization, you have broken the law.
00:11:53
Speaker
So there's that and everything in between. Some people would consider metal detectorists working in the UK or around Europe engaging in that particular hobby to be looters, whether they were legally doing so or illegally doing so. Other people wouldn't. Some would consider commercial salvage firms who
00:12:17
Speaker
salvage ancient and slightly more modern shipwrecks to be looters, whether they're legally doing it or not, and they kind of skirt the edge and sometimes do so illegally. There's quite a range of activity. But ultimately, if you're looking at on the ground archaeological looting, you can have people, you can have the single person digging something up alone as a hobby or as a way to make a little bit of extra money on the side of other activities.
00:12:46
Speaker
or you can have really quite organized looting gangs that hire or kind of force people into doing really quite terrible work. Wow. So a broad range. So range is from hobby to full on organized crime. Is that true for would you say like the different levels for most countries or do you see like one type more in one area and another in a different area?
00:13:12
Speaker
I think there's a broad range in most countries. This kind of hobbyist type looting, if you want to even call it looting, you tend to see that more in the US and Europe. The people out casually with a metal detector calling it a hobby.
00:13:33
Speaker
is really quite a Western idea of how to spend one's time for fun. This kind of taking of archaeological objects, not really for much in the way of profit or subsistence or anything like that.
00:13:50
Speaker
You see a lot of economic-related looting in lower-income countries, so the type of digging at archaeological sites that people would never do if they had better economic options.
00:14:07
Speaker
because they don't make a lot of money off of it. It's hard work, it's kind of terrible work, and it's dangerous work both from cave-ins perhaps, but also people at that level are more likely to get arrested for crimes related to trafficking than people higher up the trafficking chain. So the most risky and the most illegal types of looting we tend to see in lower-income situations
00:14:36
Speaker
Which makes sense because if you're trying to get money to put food on the table, the risk versus reward is there. Yeah, exactly. Hmm. And so I'm sure anywhere with substantial crises occurring, whether it's Syria to just areas with extreme economic poverty, you see kind of the ebb and flow of looting for the most part in a lot of sites. Yeah.
00:15:06
Speaker
There's a lot of research that does connect looting to economic decline, economic crash, just kind of terrible economic situations where you might see a base level of archaeological looting at any time in any location. This kind of big flare-up where you see almost a sudden gold rush, if you will.
00:15:30
Speaker
often is really tied to economic crash or conflict, but also the economic issues related to conflict. When people's livelihoods drop out, well, you do what you have to do.
00:15:46
Speaker
Yeah. And in a sense, that makes it very hard to address. It's hard to say you and this Jean Valjean stealing bread to feed your family situation shouldn't be doing this. And in a way, I don't think that's the right approach to just say, don't do this, arrested for being in this terrible situation. And I know that there was a recent
00:16:14
Speaker
I believe it may have been Newsweek, but don't quote me on that. We'll definitely put the link in the show notes, where they were talking about some individuals in ISIS-controlled territory who were forcibly recruited into finding objects, helping to transport objects across borders.
00:16:40
Speaker
literally for fear of their lives, their families' lives. That's another causal factor, I guess. I can't speak much to what may or may not be going on in Syria and Iraq right now, but I can tell you that my research group, I should say my research group, the Trafficking Culture Research Consortium,
00:17:02
Speaker
So some of the information that two of my colleagues, Tess Davis and Simon McKenzie, collected in Cambodia relate to a situation like that that you described. So they, partially because Tess has spent so much time in Cambodia, she's basically been working there for the past 15 years talking about this issue with people.
00:17:28
Speaker
they ended up talking to a lot of people who were in situations where they were forced by the Khmer Rouge and other militants to loot distant jungle sites really on fear of death. And they had one informant that it's just absolutely soul crushing that
00:17:50
Speaker
He was a child soldier and that he was a child executioner. So as a child, he actually had to execute people. But he decided to get out of that line of work and get into the much better line of work of looting archaeological sites.
00:18:05
Speaker
So when you hear that, you go, hmm, you know, that was probably a good move if those were your two options. But really, in that situation, they were able to collect a lot of evidence that supported the idea that people really were forced into doing this.
00:18:23
Speaker
that they may have gotten paid a little bit, but ultimately, extremely terrifying and armed people were saying, well, come on village, it's time to loot this place. And they weren't about to say no. Who would? Yeah. God, that is a really heartbreaking story. Pretty depressing.
00:18:40
Speaker
Yeah, I know. I don't even really know where to go from there, and we already knew what to do to our break for the end of our first segment, so maybe we'll leave it there. So a painful, reflective... Commercial break, yeah.
00:19:06
Speaker
child soldiers getting out of the murdering business, going into the looting business.
00:19:13
Speaker
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00:19:36
Speaker
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Legal Frameworks Against Trafficking
00:19:52
Speaker
So far on today's episode, we have been discussing the trafficking of archaeological materials. In the last 20 minutes, we talked a bit about
00:20:02
Speaker
who was procuring these objects that were being trafficked and why. In the next 20 minutes, we're going to transition a little bit into what are some of the laws around the trafficking of archaeological materials and who
00:20:21
Speaker
is driving the demand for these. I know there are obviously international laws, national laws, state and local laws. Donna, if you want to touch on a couple of the big ones, I think there was a UNESCO law.
00:20:38
Speaker
So, in a way, the big international bit of policy that we have to work with is the 1970 UNESCO convention on the means of a really long name. Basically, it's called the 1970 UNESCO convention, and it focuses on preventing archaeological objects from being looted in the first place or leaving their countries of origin in the first place.
00:21:05
Speaker
and affecting the return of archaeological objects when they've left their country of origin. And interestingly enough, it's not just archaeological objects, it's all sorts of cultural materials and fossils. Fossils are actually named as a cultural material before archaeological objects are crazy stuff. I'm really obsessed with fossils trafficking right now.
00:21:27
Speaker
completely outside. Nothing to do with I've broken all the archeology rules and actually doing stuff with fossils these days. No, there's dinosaurs now. It's partially because in a lot of places, archeological law when it comes to smuggling and protection is exactly the same as fossil law. It's the same law. It's on the same line of law. So that's part of it.
00:21:56
Speaker
Back to the UNESCO Convention. So that came out in 1970, and it's had a lot of influence on how we approach this topic internationally. And in a way, the UNESCO Convention really depends on partnerships between countries. It depends on one country being able to say, this is my archaeological material, I want it back.
00:22:26
Speaker
And that, as we know, is really difficult within archaeology because ancient borders are nothing like modern borders. To go back to my Guatemala example, you can't tell if a Maya object came from Guatemala or Belize. There's no way to tell. So a situation where Belize needs to be able to definitively say that a looted archaeological object came from Belize to get it back.
00:22:52
Speaker
Really, it's a situation that doesn't work. It's not something that works very well. There are a lot of positives of the Inesco Convention, but in a way, it is a 1960s law that came out in 1970 that we're still applying today. I shouldn't even say it's a law. Sorry, it's a treaty, basically. There are again pluses and minuses, but it leaves out a lot of stuff.
00:23:21
Speaker
including pretty much the whole trafficking phase of antiquities trafficking. It deals with the initial theft and kind of protection there. It deals with getting stuff back. It doesn't even really consider this center bit at all. So there's the UNESCO Convention. There's the 1954 Hague Convention, which is meant to deal with antiquities in times of war. It also has pluses and minuses. One of the big minuses is that it doesn't really
00:23:48
Speaker
deal with modern warfare. What war is these days? Who are the combatants? This is from 1954. It really imagined a World War II situation, which we don't have anymore. And we have the the Unidua Convention. There's a lot of conventions, actually, which is meant to try to to make kind of civil public law, sorry, private law unified.
00:24:18
Speaker
which not very many countries have signed on to and really quite excitingly as of this spring we have a new convention it is the council of europe convention it's being called the nicosia convention and i think nine countries have signed it but that's a pretty good start for just a few months
00:24:38
Speaker
And this will be the first international antiquities trafficking convention that actually brings any sort of criminal law and criminal sanctions into an international agreement. So the UNESCO convention, all of these other conventions actually had kind of no teeth. There was no criminal aspect of it. So this brings in all sorts of criminal charges and various things.
00:25:06
Speaker
And I should say the Council of Europe conventions, they sound like they're just for Europe. They're actually for everybody. Anybody can sign on to a Council of Europe convention. So we might see some sort of international base standard for criminalization of crimes against cultural objects and cultural. Who would do the prosecuting for that? So if there are criminal sanctions, which court would it be?
00:25:31
Speaker
That's a good question. For this, what it would be is when a country signs on to this convention, they need to bring the provisions of the convention into their own local law. The courts would ultimately be within whatever country somebody's been stopped in or wherever charges are being levied, but this would give a base standard.
00:25:57
Speaker
kind of make certain things certainly illegal with certain types of penalties. And if you're dealing with kind of a cross-border case, since the charges are relatively uniform under the same convention, it makes extra traditions easier, it makes investigations easier, the types of evidence you collect a bit easier. At least that's the thought. But again, nine countries have signed on. We're going to see where that one goes.
00:26:23
Speaker
But ultimately, really, when it comes to preventing the trafficking of antiquities or prosecuting people for antiquities trafficking or illegally consuming antiquities and things like that, what really matters is local law. We talk a lot about these international conventions, but what really matters is what is the law in the country somebody's standing in.
00:26:48
Speaker
And that's ultimately what is going to decide if anything happens to anybody at all, if they get a slap on the wrist, if they get jail time. What has been the track record?
00:27:00
Speaker
It's a bold question. Looters often get caught and go to jail and get very severe sentences. A couple of countries still are theoretically offered the death penalty for looting.
00:27:19
Speaker
Yeah, Iran. China's not supposed to anymore, but they're still convicting people of it in a weird way that I don't know all the details of it. But China did have the death penalty for looting. A lawmaker in Egypt has argued to bring the death penalty for looting back recently. So there's some very severe things on that side. When it comes to the market side, well, not very much happens to people who are illegal, consuming illegal objects.
00:27:49
Speaker
even ones who are doing so quite knowingly. So they're really quite brazen cases of white-collar criminals, I would say, engaging in the high-end smuggling of antiquities and not really seeing much in the way of jail time or fines or anything to convince them to stop. And there's several
00:28:14
Speaker
well-known, high-end, certainly criminals, I can say that because they have convictions that get convicted and bounce right back again. They're kind of back to their old antics. Of just buying materials?
00:28:29
Speaker
Oh, selling it at a high level. Yeah. So it's the high level type of dealer, not kind of your low level intermediary, the kind of person who is bringing this stuff onto the market.
Challenges in Prosecution and Acquisition
00:28:42
Speaker
Actually, there's an interesting term that one of my colleagues coined, Simon McKinsey coined this. He calls these people Janus figures.
00:28:50
Speaker
because in a way they have two faces like the god Janus, one looking into the past, one looking into the future. So they look into the black market side of the antiquity smuggling chain. They absolutely know where these antiquities are coming from. They may be involved in the movement of these objects through various locations. They may have strong connections or direct connections to organize criminal groups that source these objects.
00:29:16
Speaker
But on the other end, they have connections into the elite world, the art world. They may be selling, they may be consigning objects directly to high end auction houses. They may have, in some cases, Madison Avenue storefronts.
00:29:35
Speaker
they have two faces. They have this dark underworld face. They have this elite face. And these Janus figures are really important in moving objects from the smuggling networks into these elite spaces, into world museums, into the hands of
00:29:55
Speaker
of private collectors, because these kind of elite buyers are not going to be hanging out on the Thai-Cambodia border, buying from former Khmer Rouge tribe soldiers, are they? They need somebody to launder it enough to make these seem like consumable objects. So these are really, really quite important characters. And some of those folks
00:30:19
Speaker
just kind of keep bouncing back. A couple of them have gone down rather hard, but they keep bouncing back. Some surprising ones that we thought were completely retired, for example, are in the news as of late being raided by Italy and you thought, well, your jail time clearly didn't translate into you stopping.
00:30:44
Speaker
But yeah, those are really important characters in this, I think. And identifying them, which is very difficult, is kind of key to breaking up smuggling networks. But they're sort of exactly the sorts of people that aren't covered by the international conventions because they're in this transit phase. They're transitioning these objects. They're changing them into something acceptable by society.
00:31:10
Speaker
The people who get caught having participated in these exchanges, not necessarily the brokers. I'm thinking particularly of Hobby Lobby. The buyers. It's from a couple years ago. They got fined with a number that I think a lot of people would think is large, but based on the net worth of the company, maybe not.
00:31:34
Speaker
Even more interestingly, that wasn't even a fine. So they weren't even a fine. I can't remember the exact terminology, but they agreed to fork over a certain amount of money in lieu of value of something something. So it wasn't even a fine.
00:31:53
Speaker
They didn't even have that. But yeah, this is the interesting thing about being in criminology for the past six years or so. I've learned quite a lot. But one thing that's really quite interesting coming out of criminology is that white collar actors and these people who are in elite positions, these important, powerful people,
00:32:15
Speaker
And all aspects of committing crimes are very unlikely to go down for it. They're the absolute hardest people to convict of crimes, even when the crimes are very clear and obvious and on the books for so many reasons. They're very sophisticated. They know what they're doing. They have really great lawyers because they can afford them.
00:32:40
Speaker
They are able to avoid criminal labels just by default, by their status in society. They're able to internally and externally justify their actions in certain ways that people believe. They're often, to use a term that's applied to these sorts of things, they're often too big to fail or too important to fail.
00:33:04
Speaker
and are often too important to take down. So it's really easy to convict some poor person in a lower income country that's very physically looting an archaeological site. It's very difficult to convict a very elite person who has a lot of lawyers and a lot of money and the ability to creatively exploit loopholes and various things in the law.
00:33:34
Speaker
It's a very unbalanced and uneven situation. So in the case of Hobby Lobby, well, you have an extremely wealthy person who has decided exactly what he wants to do, which is to buy a large amount of antiquities for his vision of a museum.
00:33:55
Speaker
And he did it. He chose to do it despite receiving expert advice from one of the top people in the field saying, no, this is entirely illegal. What are you thinking? Did it anyway. And the punishment was really quite light. Well, that museum has now opened a little over a week ago, although by the time this is,
00:34:25
Speaker
Episode is released, it will be considerably more than a week. Which museum? This is the Museum of the Bible. Oh, correct. Yes. There's a lot of questions about that museum right now, and we'll just have to see how that one goes. But ultimately, any museum, and I'll say this here for the record, anybody who's starting a museum now,
00:34:52
Speaker
from objects they haven't had for 100 or 200 years, there's no way that you can make a museum of totally legal antiquities. It's entirely impossible. There isn't a source for that. So if you have somebody floating in saying, here's my new museum, your only option is to have loot and fakes. And those are the accusations that are being levied against the Museum of the Bible.
00:35:20
Speaker
And really, whatever the intentions are, there's no way to make that museum these days. It's just impossible. So for any museum that is trying to acquire new materials, is it completely on the onus of the curators to ensure that they're buying something that is
00:35:38
Speaker
legally being sold by like an auction house or does the water get a little bit muddy to there when it comes to like purchasing items through a gallery and auction house etc.
00:35:51
Speaker
Well, in a sense, this is where it comes down to local law. It does depend on local law. So I would say, ethically speaking, and most museum associations agree with me, it absolutely does come down to the curators and the museums to do their due diligence.
00:36:11
Speaker
This is an absolute ethical obligation for provenance research to be done on anything that's being considered. And especially public museums that are using public funds to fund this stuff should be held to really quite a high standard. The Museum of the Bible, of course, is not a public museum. But in some countries, there exists an idea of a good faith buyer.
00:36:40
Speaker
So, in a number of countries, if you buy something in good faith, where you can show that you did an acceptable amount of due diligence research, though how it is an acceptable amount nobody knows, you won't be necessarily held accountable for the purchase of an illicit antiquity or an illicit anything.
00:37:04
Speaker
So if somebody wants it back, they may actually have to pay you for the return of it. The United States doesn't have a concept of a good faith buyer, I should say. So if you're in the United States, you may never be able to get good title to alluded antiquity, even if you never have to give it back.
00:37:21
Speaker
but other countries do. So this is where it gets a little bit murky and strange. And I think a lot of buyers, including museums, expect the dealers that they're buying from to perform a high level of due diligence.
The Reality of Small-Scale Trafficking
00:37:35
Speaker
But these days, anybody who's buying an antiquity that doesn't perform really quite good provenance checks on what they're buying, they're basically asking for it, I think. You can't really trust somebody who's trying to sell you something.
00:37:50
Speaker
So what would you say are the objects that are most likely to
00:38:02
Speaker
be trafficked? Or what's the easiest thing to not have a provenance for? Well, that's actually really easy because it's small objects. It's really tiny things. It's coins. It's so many coins. It is tiny figurines. It's metal things that you can find with a metal detector all over the place. It's things that fit in your pocket.
00:38:26
Speaker
It's these small low-value items that you and I could go out and buy today because they cost maybe $100 or less. It's these accessible pieces. We make a huge deal over gigantic gold pieces and really impressive, unique, one-of-a-kind finds. And those are the type of objects that we push for return for, where countries sue each other for because they're worthwhile.
00:38:54
Speaker
my colleagues and I would say that the bulk of looted and trafficked antiquities are these really low value items that come out by the cart load. And as archaeologists, as we all know, that the hole that was created to pull out this valuable gold piece is the same as the hole that was created to pull out this kind of crappy cylinder seal. It causes just as much archaeological destruction
00:39:23
Speaker
perhaps even more to loot a few coins as it does to loot something far more valuable. It's the same loss of context, yet there's a lot less focus on these items.
00:39:38
Speaker
simply because their value is so low. When it comes to police investigations as the items have been trafficked into another country, the value of these items might fall below the amount that the police will investigate. That happens a lot of times. The police might say, we don't actually do routine investigations for anything worth less than, what, $250?
00:40:02
Speaker
A couple coins only worth 100 cost the same archaeological destruction. It's below the investigation threshold. So really, the type of stuff is the kind of junky stuff that we could all buy. It's a lot less exciting than massive amounts of gold floating out. But archaeologically speaking, this is where we see all these kind of lunar landscapes and completely gutted sites in Syria and Iraq. It's these small items that are coming out of those.
00:40:32
Speaker
Yeah, and I know I saw there was estimates for what the value of what had come out of Syria and Iraq and some people are putting it as high as like 100 million in profits worth of stuff has come out of there. I don't know.
00:40:53
Speaker
If you feel like that's too high or too low. We almost had during the heart of the looting and reporting on the looting in Iraq and Syria from 2012 to 2014, 2015, there was almost like we had a running joke on how high the estimates could go.
00:41:17
Speaker
I would, we would email back and forth very once for an academia or kind of other related groups that work on living antiquities. At one point, somebody reported that it was worth $6 billion that ISIS was getting, $6 billion. And at that point, you know, the emails that flew around were like, oh, fine, I'm converting at this point. I'm going over to the living side. If you think it's $6 billion from living archaeological sites, then obviously a joke.
00:41:47
Speaker
But yeah, when it comes to doing any sort of estimate of any illicit market, I would take it with the biggest, gigantic grain of salt possible. Because how do you get that information? How do you get that information? How do you get those numbers? We can't say that for the illicit trade in drugs. We can't say that for the illicit trade in arms. We can't say that for the illicit trade in people.
00:42:16
Speaker
how can we suddenly say it for antiquities? There's been interesting research done that provides really kind of small scale estimates for certain classes of antiquities with a lot of caveats, but for the idea that anybody's making X amount of money off of this is, I think,
00:42:41
Speaker
misleading at best and probably at worst when we're up to $6 billion, absolutely crazy insane. I'll tell you, nobody's making $6 billion off of the international antiquities trade.
00:43:01
Speaker
This stuff isn't that high value. What we're losing is this archaeological information. We're losing this context. We're losing our shared cultural heritage. But just because that's happening doesn't mean that there's a gigantic price tag on it.
00:43:19
Speaker
It doesn't even have to be a big price tag for these people. The people are looting at the slower level. And if you're living on a dollar or two a day, adding another dollar or two in really makes
The Loss of Archaeological Context
00:43:32
Speaker
a difference. Right. Back to the depressing looting. I think that's actually a good kind of sentiment to end on, or to end this session, the section on, is that kind of regardless of the value of the object,
00:43:49
Speaker
the archaeological context that's lost is invaluable. It is, yeah. Yep. There's no price tag that can be put on it, and there's no way to recover it. For sure. So we will end on there. And when we come back, we will talk a little bit about reporting looted goods, how you can recognize them, some resources for the public to hopefully
00:44:15
Speaker
help stop looting. Fingers crossed.
00:44:24
Speaker
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00:46:04
Speaker
Hi and welcome back to the Women in Archaeology podcast. On this episode we have been discussing the trafficking of archaeological materials with Dr. Donna Yates from the University of Glasgow. In the last two sections we've talked about who's doing the actual looting, what some of the laws around trafficking of archaeological materials are, and how difficult it can be to apprehend
00:46:32
Speaker
the people who are purchasing these materials, the people who are brokering the transaction of these materials. But moving on in this section, we're going to talk a little bit about what you can do if you suspect that there are looted materials.
00:46:53
Speaker
in your vicinity who you should talk to, what you can do to raise awareness. So I know we talked about this a little bit earlier, Donna, but not on the recording. One of my big questions was, who do you report this to if you suspect looting or the illegally obtained artifacts have been purchased? Because you have all of these conventions
00:47:20
Speaker
So, is there a reporting body, or is it just locals? I know you answered this from me earlier, but for our listeners? Yeah, well, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, pretty much the only
00:47:35
Speaker
people that you can report the looting of an archaeological site to or give information about possible traffic antiquities that you've seen to is local authorities. So we're talking about local police, local customs, if that's the right type of people, the local ministry of culture. There's not really any higher body to report anybody to.
00:48:03
Speaker
There's kind of an idea that maybe Interpol should do something, but even though Interpol does have a small unit of people devoted to dealing with issues related to antiquities trafficking, their role is organizational. What they do is they maintain a database and they connect different police forces to each other. They don't have any investigative powers at all.
00:48:28
Speaker
So really, the only people who can investigate, the absolute only people who can investigate are your local police or local police where you think the crime was committed. So that's positive because those are people who are relatively easy to reach. Negative because as we're dealing with a transnational type of crime, you get to kind of the end of various people's jurisdictions and there's not much you can do beyond that.
00:48:57
Speaker
So positives and negatives there. But ultimately, if you think something's weird or dodgy going on, it's time to call the local police. And so I can see how that's that'd be a great way for, you know, anybody to report something. But how do you how do you and your group, how do you guys track trafficking? Like, what's the process there? And then who do you do you guys report to the local authorities as well?
00:49:27
Speaker
Today is a very interesting question. Actually, no. When it comes to anybody or any antiquities trafficking that I'm researching directly, it has only been on very rare occasions that I've reported anyone to the authorities.
00:49:48
Speaker
The people that I interview, the people that I talk to are all covered by various types of agreements that I have with them not to reveal their identity, of course. Basically, barring a court order, I'm not going to reveal who they are. That's just good social science research there.
00:50:12
Speaker
If we see evidence of major crimes currently taking place, we may tell the authorities again without really revealing sources or anything like that. But for the most part, if it's part of our actual research, like in a lot of crime research, as long as nobody is directly being physically harmed, we tend to see there being more value in understanding the whole process and system than taking one person down, if that makes sense.
Research Methodologies and Ethics
00:50:40
Speaker
When it comes to tracking this and studying the trafficking section of Antiquities Trafficking, it really is not very more complicated than going to the places where you want to do this work and
00:50:56
Speaker
kind of walking around and talking to people, it is really quite a bit easier to talk to people who engage in low-level looting or have done so in the past than it is to talk to collectors and dealers and people in the market who have antiquities conventions.
00:51:15
Speaker
We tend to find that people who have engaged in looting are often really quite open about it once they are reassured that we're not turning them over to any authority for this, because in a way, there's very little I can do to hurt them.
00:51:34
Speaker
So, you also have this difference in sophistication level. Dealers and convicted white collar people in the market tend to not want to speak to you without their lawyer present.
00:51:50
Speaker
Not a lot happens, but really the kind of research we do, we do a lot of market analysis, so we look at what's on the market and do various analysis of that, but a lot of it's just really kind of qualitative, almost ethnographic fieldwork in certain locations. It's really kind of standard anthropological type stuff or sociological work.
00:52:10
Speaker
no chasing criminals across borders and tackling them because we're not really in the business of investigating individual crimes to lead to convictions, though some of our work has gone into stuff like that.
00:52:28
Speaker
Our goal is to understand the phenomenon and try to affect better policy and better responses and better ways that we can regulate this market rather than taking one or two people down. That makes sense. So one interesting question
00:52:50
Speaker
that I've had. I recently attended a presentation on the accessioning of items, particularly items with poor provenance. In this case they were talking about museum collections that
00:53:06
Speaker
Some of it didn't have provenance and might never have had provenance. Some of it, they have collection numbers on them and the database is who knows where that has all of the corresponding information. And obviously, archaeological material without its context is less valuable. But when you're put into a situation as an institution where there are items that are offered to you, maybe free, maybe not,
00:53:33
Speaker
that you're not sure of the provenance of, but maybe the people who are getting rid of them say, well, we don't have money to maintain them. And if you don't take them, we're going to kind of deaccession by neglect or our collections are being closed down. And if we can't sell them or rehouse them, they're going to end up in a dumpster. Because unfortunately, that's something that does occasionally happen with museum collections. What is your take on kind of the ethics
00:54:02
Speaker
That's a rough ethical conundrum to be in. Luckily, I'm never placed in that situation. The unofficial advice I tend to give to people is that what's wrong with returning it to its country of origin? Why does it have to stay in a foreign museum?
00:54:28
Speaker
Why does it have to deaccession to the market? Why does it have to deaccession to another foreign museum? Why aren't you just packing it up in a box and posting it to the correct embassy?
00:54:40
Speaker
And if you get to that point and everybody just goes, Oh, well, cause we don't want to, I kind of question people's motives. You know what I mean? So if, if, if it's unprovinanced material, but you know, it likely came from Mexico or from, uh, Nigeria or anywhere else. Why, why aren't you just sending it back to Nigeria? Why can't it go to a museum there? Do you think that's just like a, of
00:55:07
Speaker
I don't know. Residual colonialist attitudes at play there? Probably. If I was to guess, yes, yes. It's often not certain people's visions of what kind of museum they like their stuff in because they still feel like this is their stuff. There's a lot of
00:55:33
Speaker
really bias in certain circles against museums in lower income countries, even though some of them are absolutely spectacular museums and most of the professionals who work at them are true professionals.
00:55:49
Speaker
So there's this thought that somehow these items aren't safe in their countries of origin. You hear a lot that, oh, they'll just get stolen again, which is really quite hilarious because the market that is creating the demand is saying that it'll get stolen again for the market.
00:56:09
Speaker
But ultimately, I think it's just this downplaying of the legitimacy of museums and cultural institutions in lower income countries, which is something that we should all be certainly fighting against.
00:56:24
Speaker
Next time that comes up, throw that one out there. Why aren't you just giving it back to the country that it came from and see what the response is? Everybody shifts their eyes and looks away. They're not really having the full conversation. If there's a reason not to give it back, the country doesn't want it.
00:56:43
Speaker
In a way, if it's been offered to the country of origin, it doesn't want it, fair game, anybody can have it at that point. So I think it hasn't been offered. Well, part of the conversation that I was part of was two collections facilities in the same city, and one of them was deaccessioning and was basically like, we don't want to bother to spend the money to send this anywhere else. You're in the same city. If you want it, you can have it.
00:57:08
Speaker
I see. So it's complete hand-washing. Right. The group that's deaccessioning will not be providing funds in the group that might be taking them on. Museums don't have a lot of funds, might not have the funds to pack everything up appropriately and ship it elsewhere, depending on the volume of the collection.
00:57:34
Speaker
Yeah. Especially if you're deaccessioning to wash your hands of paying anything else. That's another issue that comes up when looted cultural objects are returned. Who pays for the shipping when they're returned, even if they're returned by court order or because they've been seized and so on? Who pays for
00:57:58
Speaker
maintenance and conservation after potentially they were kept in poor conditions. Often it's the source country that's received this stuff in bad condition that needs to pay to clean it back up again, but hey, they got their stuff back. You can't see because it's a podcast, but I'm making a grimace right there.
00:58:21
Speaker
We expect a lot. We expect lower-income countries to really shoulder a lot of the financial burden of this international problem, be it paying for returns and paying for maintenance after returns, or be it just this kind of initial policing and security that they're supposed to be providing at archaeological sites, when really it is demand that's causing the supply. It's
00:58:49
Speaker
demand in countries like the US, the UK, Europe, China, places like this that have a lot of money that are convincing people to loot by the lucrative nature of it. If there wasn't a market for it, they wouldn't do it.
00:59:06
Speaker
No, why would you? Except for archaeologists, we're all a little bit mad, who would be out there in the hot sun or in the freezing cold digging for archaeological stuff? There's zero percent chance, right?
00:59:21
Speaker
I know when we're all out there digging everyone, so we're going, why are we doing this? Oh my gosh. So you said this is all something we should be fighting against, that we should be fighting to not have any more trafficking and whatnot. Just for the sake of our listeners, why should they care?
Why Does Trafficking Matter?
00:59:43
Speaker
Well, if your listeners are archaeologists, then they absolutely should care. This is something that absolutely damages our livelihood. This is something that undermines our entire profession. If there are no intact archaeological sites to excavate, really, what are we doing? If archaeological context has been destroyed, and all we have are the tattered, decontextualized remains of what was once an intact site,
01:00:12
Speaker
We're not really doing much in the way of archaeology anymore, are we? We're kind of piecing together fragments that by rights probably can't be pieced together. So absolutely all archaeologists should care about this. At a wider societal level, this is our shared and collected past. This is something that
01:00:35
Speaker
really in a profound way isn't owned by any one person. And the idea that a very small group of people get to own, control, and make all decisions about the remains of our shared heritage, I think for me personally is really quite disturbing. It's quite scary that somebody is able to take that away from us.
01:01:03
Speaker
And at another, a different level, we're dealing with, like I said, we're dealing with a major issue of global inequality. We have a white Western or these days really quite wealthy Eastern individuals who are essentially taking culture away from people with a significantly less power.
01:01:30
Speaker
And that has effects of eroding society. It destroys traditional ways of life, alternative ways of being and seeing the world. And that just absolutely isn't fair. This level of power imbalance doesn't make anybody safe or secure.
01:01:51
Speaker
So it is a major issue. We all know that heritage is a large part of a group and individual identity. And the loss of that heritage is a loss of major identity. And really, we can't stand for it. But the easiest side of it is to say we're archaeologists and that's our life. So watching people tear it apart, we really can't do it. We can't just kind of sit idly by, I don't think. Definitely not. This does bring us pretty close to the end of our
01:02:21
Speaker
One hour show. So, Donna or Emily, if you have any final thoughts, now would be the time to air them. Yeah. Well, one thing I'd like to say is that in our research, we have seen, we see a lot of promise in ideas of soft regulation, of changing hearts and minds, of not really focusing on
Changing Norms and Community Engagement
01:02:50
Speaker
big fines or convictions or jail time for people because it's likely that's not going to happen anyway. And there's a lot of evidence that for certain types of people that the threat of jail time doesn't even change their behavior. But when we're dealing with the collecting of illicit antiquities, the consumption side of the market, you really can get a lot of traction in trying to influence
01:03:17
Speaker
people's behavior, to change hearts and minds, to kind of add a more social stigma to the consumption of these antiquities. Because these are people who are often elite, they don't consider themselves to be criminals, they consider themselves to be upstanding.
01:03:37
Speaker
And what we need to do is move to a situation where it just becomes absolutely not acceptable to have a looted antiquity on your mantelpiece. So in a way, I tend to think of it like fur. It used to be that it was considered the most elite thing in the world to step out in the middle of Madison Avenue in a gigantic fur coat.
01:04:03
Speaker
These days, people still kind of do it, but there's a 50% chance somebody's going to throw red paint on you if you do it. And when you see somebody in a full fur coat, I don't know about you, I go, ooh. That's a bit strange. Don't really see that every day anymore. It's moved into a situation where in a lot of circles, just doing that has become ethically dubious. Your wealthy and moneyed friends judge you for it.
01:04:32
Speaker
So what I want to do is I want to create a situation where when there's some wealthy person's dinner party and they have all of their Iraqi antiquities displayed for all of their friends to see their friends go, oh my gosh, what are you doing? And are absolutely ashamed to see them.
01:04:49
Speaker
So I want that social pressure to be there. And I think that's where we have a lot of hope. And that's where I think anybody listening can have a lot of hope. This is where we absolutely just change the narrative. We talk about this issue to each other, to our friends. When we go to museums, we tell other people that this is an unproven on cent equity. It was totally stolen.
01:05:14
Speaker
We go on podcasts and talk about it. If we're teaching, we make sure our students, all of our students have heard of this issue. We just bring it up. We don't hide it behind our archaeology. We bring this to the forefront of archaeology. We don't hide it in museum displays. We bring it to the forefront and we keep it as a constant source of discussion. We talk to kids about it.
01:05:39
Speaker
And that's how I think that we can change the tone. And I think that I've seen a shift in the tone in even the past decade since I've been studying this issue. I think that more and more people are seeing the collecting of antiquities that have no history, that have come out of the ground illegally and been trafficked as just not really an acceptable thing to do anymore.
01:06:08
Speaker
So I think there's a lot of power in shame is what I'm saying. I think there's more power in social shame than in increased criminal penalties. And I think that's where we all can do all sorts of things to contribute to not necessarily naming, but definitely shame. Seriously, well said. Yeah, definitely.
01:06:28
Speaker
Very well said. Well there we go, that's what we're doing. We're all shaming but not naming.
01:06:38
Speaker
The other side, of course, is to think of ways to bring the public into archaeological spaces in a positive way, to think of ways for maybe the interested and wealthy moneyed elite to channel their money towards proper archaeology things, but also to just give people many ways to engage with the past
01:07:02
Speaker
that doesn't really involve consuming it, to take the little kid who wants to buy coins and arrowheads and find something that they can do that isn't necessarily consuming looted and illicit material. And that's community archaeology, that's positive public outreach, and that's kind of brainstorming on everybody's part, I think.
01:07:28
Speaker
Excellent points to and on. We are also out of time. So Donna, thank you so much for coming on. It's been really lovely having you on to discuss this. And we hope you come again. Yes, please do.
01:07:42
Speaker
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. As always, we'll have to think of something positive to talk about next time, because I think this is a depressing job it is. But we tend to be at least slightly bright and sunny sometimes. We try. For all of our listeners, if you have any further questions, you can always reach us at womeninarchaeology at gmail.com. And until next time, bye, ladies. Thanks so much.
01:08:17
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Women in Archaeology podcast on the Archaeology Podcast Network. Please like, share, rate, and subscribe to the show wherever you found it. If you have questions, leave them in the show notes page at www.arcpodnet.com slash WIA, or email them to womeninarchaeologypodcast at gmail.com. The music is retro-futured by Kevin MacLeod and his royalty-free music. To support the network and become a member, go to www.arcpodnet.com slash members.
01:08:33
Speaker
Thank you. Bye!
01:08:44
Speaker
This show is produced at the Reno Collective in Reno, Nevada.