Trafficking Culture

New Directions in Researching the Global Market in Illicit Antiquities

Simon Mackenzie, Neil Brodie, Donna Yates, Christos Tsirogiannis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315532196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

Trafficking Culture outlines current research and thinking on the illicit market in antiquities. It moves along the global trafficking chain from 'source' to 'market', identifying the main roles and routines involved. Using original research, the authors explore the dynamics of this 'grey' market, where legal and illegal goods are mixed and conflated. It compares and contrasts this illicit trade with other 'transnational criminal markets', such as the illegal trades in wildlife and diamonds.

The analytical frames of organized crime and white-collar crime, drawn from criminology, provide a fresh perspective on a problem that has tended to be seen as archaeological, rather than criminological. Bringing insights from both disciplines together, this book represents a productive discourse between experts in these two fields, working together for several years to produce the evidence base that is reported here.

Innovative forms of regulation are the most productive way to explore crime control in this field, and this book provides a series of propositions about practical crime reduction measures for the future. It will be invaluable to academics working in the fields of archaeology, criminology, art history, museum studies, and heritage. The book will also be a vital resource for professionals in the field of cultural property protection and preservation.

1

THE STRUCTURE OF THE GLOBAL MARKET IN ILLICIT ANTIQUITIES

Actors, drivers, mechanisms

The social construction of the illicit antiquities trade has grown around the basic concepts of supply and demand. Demand for antiquities, mostly but not exclusively, comes from more economically and politically secure states, inspiring a supply of antiquities to be sourced from less secure states, in violation of the law in one or both locations. Buyers of antiquities, then, are willing to pay a price that is high enough for looters and sellers of antiquities to risk a violation of the law. This fair but simplistic construction masks an intricate network of social, political, and economic mechanisms that maintain the antiquities market (including its illicit component) in its current form; govern how various actors negotiate their involvement in the trade; and, underlie the specific decisions made in heritage policy formulation at all levels.

In this chapter we will consider the illicit trade in antiquities as a form of transnational crime, moving the locus of crime from a single incidence of theft at an archaeological site, to the entire trafficking network up to, and including, the final point of sale. During its movement, the antiquity itself undergoes a complex series of negotiations and transformations. As the object changes hands, it experiences a degree of ‘cleansing’ and ‘conversion’. Starting as an archaeological artefact, it then becomes loot, then contraband, then a commodity, then finally a collectible object of artistic or historical interest. The structure of the path through which the antiquity moves is designed to facilitate this transformation with each node in the trafficking chain, from the initial looter to the final buyer, contributing to the eventual acceptance of the illicit piece as socially acceptable within a museum, auction house, or private collection.

That a looted and illegal antiquity can, through this process, become a legal commodity based on the transnational nature of the crime is a nearly unique feature of the illicit antiquities trade. Most other illicit commodities remain illegal through the course of their smuggling and are almost always illegal at their point of final sale. The processes of smuggling arms, narcotics, ivory, endangered animal pelts, or people does not remove the illegality of the commodity being smuggled, nor do these smuggling chains lead to a nominally open and elite public market, which claims deceptionless sale. To labour the point, perhaps more than is necessary: the Metropolitan Museum of Art is not in a position to spend $1 million on 50 kilos of trafficked cocaine, to put it on public display, to then defend the purchase in the newspaper as a ‘public good’, and only turn the cocaine over to the authorities 30 years later without anyone facing punishment. It has done so for an illicit ancient Greek vase—the Euphronios Krater, described in the appendix of case studies at the end of this book.

To understand how this is possible for antiquities, one must understand construction and maintenance of market drivers at the demand end of the antiquities trafficking chain, as well as the social pressures and restrictions at the supply or source end of the chain. From this we can develop a framework for the middle space that connects the two through the consideration of antiquities trafficking as transnational crime.

Source

Context, context, context

At source there are two types of antiquities: those that are known and those that are unknown. Known antiquities, such as those that either have been previously excavated by archaeologists or those that have never been ‘lost’ (e.g. ancient items in an active temple) are comparatively easy to consider within normal conceptions of ownership and protection. They are documentable, possibly securable, and their recovery following a theft is facilitated by the fact that they have clear owners to claim them. Their theft, importantly, represents a loss of property, but may not involve a loss of context, a concept that will be discussed below. For the most part, our consideration of antiquities in this volume will focus on previously unknown antiquities: artefacts discovered at their point of looting that cannot have been recorded, cannot have been secured, and whose origins are obscured by the acts of looting, trafficking and illicit sale. We also refer frequently to antiquities in a grey zone between these two poles of ‘known’ and ‘unknown’, for example in relation to pieces of temple statuary violently removed from architectural remains, which may have been recorded by archaeologists at some point and which have rested unsecured in the context of the surrounding structures, perhaps in a remote location such as a jungle or desert. Although technically ‘known’ there may be precious little in the way of official documentation of these objects, and when they are stolen this is to the detriment of the overall heritage structures they relate to.

When thinking about the sources of previously unknown antiquities, it is important to understand the basics of archaeological context before moving into a larger discussion of source communities and source states. These objects were made at some point in the past by humans who eventually stopped using them. They may have buried the artefact in a grave, tossed it in a rubbish heap, sunk it accidentally with a ship, or it may have dropped out of their bag as they staggered home drunk. They may simply have deserted a decorated monument or a building. There are myriad reasons why an antiquity may have been abandoned. Following this abandonment, this deposition, a series of post-depositional processes affect the antiquity. Other objects are deposited around it both on purpose and by coincidence. Floors are built over it. Rivers flood, covering it with alluvium. Later people dig near it, burying other things. Ultimately, all of these activities—these natural and human interventions—leave traces which tell the story of the antiquity in space and time. The mosaic of all of these traces is the antiquity’s archaeological context. It is from reading the relational information embedded in this context, not simply through studying individual objects, that archaeologists assemble what we know about our past. Once an antiquity is removed without record from its place of deposition, that context is irretrievably lost. Field archaeology, then, is the process of recording that context for study before it is destroyed. The removal of previously-unknown antiquities from their place of deposition (which usually can be summed up as ‘the ground’) without employing proper archaeological methods represents a grave loss to our knowledge of humanity. Because knowledge of the human past is considered to be valuable not only to science but to the construction and maintenance of modern identity, there is a drive to protect archaeological sites from destructive incursion: from natural forces such as erosion, from human building and development, and from looting to feed the market for antiquities.

Looting itself is a difficult term to define. In some situations, we may consider any antiquity’s extraction at an archaeological site, performed without use of proper archaeological methods of excavation and recording, to be looting. However, for our purposes it may be best to consider the looting of an archaeological site to feature both a lack of archaeological rigour and the violation of a policy or law, usually with the expectation of financial gain. Indeed, most countries place restrictions on the excavation of archaeological remains, reserving the practice for accredited professionals who seek permits, and limiting the transferability of antiquities after their removal from the ground, although the nature of these restrictions vary from country to country. Looting, then, is excavation outside of these established norms, almost always with artefact extraction as the primary goal of the activity. Following this extraction, the looter may keep the antiquity for themselves, or may sell it onwards. The moment that the antiquity is removed from the ground, the sanctity of the site has been violated, and thus even if the object is later recovered, archaeologists are unable to reconstruct its context. Furthermore, the context of antiquities not removed during the looting incident may also have been damaged or destroyed. The looting of an archaeological site is always destructive.

Poverty, insecurity and vulnerability

To try to understand why someone might choose to destroy an archaeological site by looting it, we must consider the market, and indeed this is something we will do at quite some length in this book. Destination market actors are not only culturally elite, they are moneyed, and antiquities are rare. If demand for antiquities is created by an elite need to outwardly display cultured status, supply of antiquities is created by an ability to pay for this luxury. Demand on the antiquities market clearly causes antiquities supply. The illegal or illicit excavation of archaeological objects is difficult and dangerous: backbreaking labour coupled with the risk of injury or death. Added to this physical risk is legal risk: looters face the possibility of arrest, fines, jail time, and even execution. It is from destination market funding that looters at source find their motivation.

Generally speaking, antiquities ‘source countries’ tend to be comparatively lower income than antiquities market countries, and many of the most famous seats of ancient culture are among the states with the lowest levels of infrastructure and development. Even within wealthier ‘source countries’, major archaeological sites, at least those that are most often exploited, tend to be concentrated in economically poorer regions. There is no set reason why this should be the case, although the history of post-conquest and post-industrial power dynamics and population concentrations could certainly be considered. Suffice to say, the modern remains of the ancient Maya are in modern Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador; the modern remains of the Inka are in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador; the modern remains of the Khmer are in Cambodia and Thailand; the modern remains of the ancient Egyptians are in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia; the modern remains of the Nok are in Nigeria. Looters, then, are residents of these countries who experience the acute pressures of economic vulnerability and insecurity and their decision to loot may be in response to these pressures.

During the 1990s and into the 2000s, a body of research focused on the idea of ‘subsistence diggers’ as people who looted archaeological sites due to the extreme limitations of other economic options (Staley 1993; Matsuda 1998, 2005; Hollowell 2006). This concept has been much discussed and much challenged within archaeological circles, but with notable exceptions the consensus is that many looters can be classified as being in or near poverty. While it may be difficult to substantiate the idea of large numbers of people living off the proceeds of looting alone for any length of time, we find it helpful to move away from the idea of ‘subsistence digging’ to a concept of nested and related ‘subsistence economies’ in which looting antiquities might form part of a larger survival strategy including licit, illicit, and illegal activities (see Chapter 2). Take for example, the extensive ethnography of looting in Guatemala’s Petén region conducted in the late 1990s by Sofia Paredes Maurey (Paredes Maury 1999). By joining a group of chicleros, men who seasonally harvest the gum of the chicle tree in northern Guatemala, she was able to document how they supplemented their meagre incomes with the looting of Maya sites that they chanced upon during their deep jungle work. The same chicleros might also illegally take birds or xate palm for the market. They might harvest chicle illegally. They might work in some minor support capacity for the drug and people smuggling cartels that move through the region. They loot opportunistically to get by.

There is also evidence that people turn to looting when times get tough and, perhaps, see archaeological sites as a source of income during extreme economic lows. In other words, they turn to looting when all other options fail. This has been observed in research into the spread of looting in Egypt gleaned from analysis of satellite data (Parcak et al. 2016). This research linked the start of an observable increase in looting, not to social unrest in 2011, but to economic recession in 2008, although unrest exacerbated an already precarious situation. This linkage of looting to extremes of economic instability has been observed in Iraq post-2003, and in other conflict locations (Brodie 2015c). While looting of archaeological sites has been linked to armed conflict, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that looting antiquities is observable as a by-product of the economic disruption associated with conflict as felt by the most economically vulnerable.

White-collar looters

It should be acknowledged that not all looters are economically disadvantaged or are engaging in the source end of the antiquities trade for survival. There are several contexts where the typical looter can be considered as an economically advantaged or white-collar actor. These individuals tend to resist the designation ‘looter’, but if we continue to employ the definition of a looter as someone who removes artefacts from their original context in violation of local policy and archaeological norms, they must be considered.

The most often-cited example of these white-collar looters are illegal metal detectorists: hobbyists who use these devices to locate metal artefacts at archaeological sites in violation of local law, primarily but not exclusively in Europe. As metal detecting requires expensive equipment and significant free time, detectorists are usually middle aged, middle class individuals (Thomas 2012). They are also usually white and male. In some countries, the use of metal detectors and the extraction of antiquities is legal, within limits: restrictions are placed on where detecting can take place, what permissions are required, what types of objects can be extracted, and who ultimately owns the antiquities found. Detecting outside these regulations, called nighthawking in the UK, is illegal and is as destructive as any other form of archaeological looting. Similar demographically to metal detectorists are hobbyist ‘pot hunters’ in the American southwest. They engage in a long tradition, often running through generations of families, of searching for Native American pottery and other artefacts, often on tribal, federal, or otherwise protected land in violation of the law (Goddard 2011). Both illegal metal detectorists and pot hunters may sell the antiquities that they find, or they may keep them as part of their own private collections. These individuals have little in common with casual looters operating in the subsistence economies of economically disadvantaged countries.

Another type of white-collar looter to consider are the individuals or companies that target historic and ancient shipwrecks. While the complications of the law of the sea related to salvage are beyond the scope of this volume, the illegal removal of items from protected underwater heritage sites has resulted in many lawsuits, for example Mercedes Shipwreck–Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. v. Unidentified Shipwrecked Vessel. While some of these relate to actions of individual divers, scuba diving itself is an elite activity that requires equipment and training, and the removal of wreck artefacts may be approached as a hobby, albeit an illegal one, by divers. On a larger scale are specialist salvage firms who operate at the edge of state and international regulation of underwater activity, and who target their actions at shipwrecks that are thought to have been carrying valuable cargo, for example Spanish Colonial vessels carrying gold and silver from the Americas. Because they are backed by investors who expect to share in proceeds from any finds, commercial salvage firms have historically had more money and better equipment than academic or national underwater archaeologists and have been denounced by the same as looters. Several prominent cases where salvage companies have been punished for illegal extraction of artefacts from wrecks support this formulation. Some undersea salvage firms have made agreements with the states who govern the waters they seek to explore, with an arranged split of the objects that result from the expedition going to the state and the company in whatever shares have been agreed (Alder and Polk 2002).

Source actors

At the source end of the antiquities trade there are three main types of actors: looters, local brokers, and facilitators. Looters, as discussed previously, are people who physically extract antiquities from their context within archaeological sites. While they may engage in other trafficking-related activities, they are the ones that perform the necessary task of locating antiquities and extracting them. In doing so, they take on a significant risk of being caught by guards or police, as many forms of earth movement are difficult to hide, and they may risk injury or death, usually from being buried alive during a hole collapse. Research indicates that in most instances they receive significantly less than the final sale value of the antiquities they extract, often less than 1per cent (Brodie 1998).

While still in the source country, looters may sell their antiquities on to local, regional, or national brokers. These are early stage intermediaries who serve to move the antiquities physically away from their site of looting, consolidating them for further sale. These brokers may ‘run’ in regions, passing through to collect antiquities that locals have collected for sale. Others might operate antiquities-related or other shop fronts in local markets and are known by locals as reliable buyers. Brokers may also coordinate the targeted looting of sites, such as was observed by Matsuda (1998) in Belize. Brokers also form a key link in the movement of antiquities abroad, at times organising transport of antiquities to borders and ports (Mackenzie and Davis 2014), planning the initial or complete route that the object will take to its final market, bribing or otherwise interacting with facilitators (discussed below), and preparing the potentially false documents that the antiquity requires for movement. At times there may be no distinction between looters and brokers and at times there may be no distinction between source-end brokers and the transit-phase brokers discussed below.

Finally, facilitators often play an instrumental role at the source-end of the antiquities market. Here we conceive of these facilitators as actors who neither extract nor physically move looted antiquities, but who, through their actions, allow looters and brokers to operate. This usually takes the form of corruption or negligence on the part of individuals in a place of public trust: archaeological site guards, police, civil servants, elected officials, customs agents, inspectors, regulators, or even at times archaeologists or museum staff. These individuals, by way of their privileged position, may look the other way while sites are looted; neglect to inspect certain homes or vehicles; issue spurious excavation or export permits; or otherwise knowingly allow source-end antiquities looting and transport to take place in violation of the law.

Transit

Between initial extraction from the ground and final sale, looted antiquities pass through a transit phase where they are moved through physical space away from the act of looting and towards an elite and often open market. During this process, the antiquity is transformed from contraband into a cultural commodity as it becomes further divorced from its original context. This transit phase has been the least studied and most poorly understood component of the illicit trade in antiquities (Mackenzie and Davis 2014; Tijhuis 2006). Here we offer an overview of the idea of a transit phase for antiquities, who participates in this phase, and what role it plays in transforming illicit antiquities to elite market commodities.

Key actors

Part of the difficulty that researchers and regulators face in...