York, and Tokyo, the cities where consumer demand is greatest. Artifacts pilfered from sites in Cambodia, Vietnam, and China are smuggled through Hong Kong to Australia, Western Europe, and the United States.
This slippery, largely unregulated world is considered a “gray” market because the legal market is largely supplied by an illegal one. Unlike smuggled drugs or weapons, an antiquity’s legal status may change as it crosses international borders—and once “legalized,” a looted antiquity can be sold openly by the likes of Sotheby’s and Christie’s to the likes of the Getty and the Met. While the United Nations has designed international protocols to discourage looting, every nation has its own priorities, cultural interests, and laws. What’s forbidden in one country is perfectly legal in another. It is illegal in the United States, for example, to sell bald and golden eagle feathers; and I spent a chunk of my career trying to stem this illegal trade. Yet whenever I visit Paris and wander through its finest antique shops along the Seine, I marvel at the American Indian treasures displayed openly for sale. I’ve seen full headdresses with eagle feathers selling for $30,000 or more.
The most visible criminals in the antiquity theft trade—the grave robbers doing the digging and the thieves swiping objects from religious shrines—fare poorly compared with the brokers at the other end of the smuggling chain. On average, looters earn only 1 or 2 percentof the ultimate sale price. The Sicilian men who illegally excavated a collection of Morgantina silver illegally sold it for $1,000; a collector subsequently bought it for $1 million, and resold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $2.7 million. Chinese grave robbers who came across a significant Song Dynasty sculpture sold it for $900; an American dealer later resold it for $125,000.
The world’s finest museums have not escaped this distasteful cycle. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles became ensnared in such a scandal after it purchased scores of looted antiquities from renowned Italian art dealer Giacomo Medici, including a statue of Aphrodite, purchased for $18 million in 1988. Senior curators at the Getty met with top officers from Italy’s Carabinieri and denied that they knew or should have known that the antiquities they’d purchased were looted. (Years after the backflap case, the Getty-Medici dispute would widen further and Italian officials would file criminal charges against an American curator and an art dealer.)
Illicit antiquity trading is said to be on the rise, and there’s little doubt the technology revolution that sparked the global economy made it easier to loot, smuggle, and sell antiquities. Looters employ global tracking devices, smugglers bribe low-paid customs officials, and sellers post items on eBay and clandestine chat rooms. If a piece is valuable enough, an antiquity can be smuggled out of a country on a passenger plane in a matter of hours, arriving in London, New York, or Tokyo less than twenty-four hours after it was unearthed by looters.
How big is the problem? It’s hard to say. Only a handful of countries collect reliable statistics on looting. The Greeks report 475 unauthorized digs in the past decade and say they’ve recovered 57,475 looted pieces, primarily in Peloponnese, Thessaly, and Macedonia. But Greece is an exception—the nation declared looting illegal as early as 1835, and its constitution specifically directs the government to protect cultural property. In most countries, looting is largely documented in unofficial ways, through anecdotes andextrapolation. Claims are made but unverified. Turkey says illegal looting is the fourth most lucrative (legal or illegal) job in the nation. Niger reports that 90 percent of its most significant archaeological sites have been stripped bare. A few criminologists have mingled these statistics and news accounts and drawn wild conclusions—for example, that
This slippery, largely unregulated world is considered a “gray” market because the legal market is largely supplied by an illegal one. Unlike smuggled drugs or weapons, an antiquity’s legal status may change as it crosses international borders—and once “legalized,” a looted antiquity can be sold openly by the likes of Sotheby’s and Christie’s to the likes of the Getty and the Met. While the United Nations has designed international protocols to discourage looting, every nation has its own priorities, cultural interests, and laws. What’s forbidden in one country is perfectly legal in another. It is illegal in the United States, for example, to sell bald and golden eagle feathers; and I spent a chunk of my career trying to stem this illegal trade. Yet whenever I visit Paris and wander through its finest antique shops along the Seine, I marvel at the American Indian treasures displayed openly for sale. I’ve seen full headdresses with eagle feathers selling for $30,000 or more.
The most visible criminals in the antiquity theft trade—the grave robbers doing the digging and the thieves swiping objects from religious shrines—fare poorly compared with the brokers at the other end of the smuggling chain. On average, looters earn only 1 or 2 percentof the ultimate sale price. The Sicilian men who illegally excavated a collection of Morgantina silver illegally sold it for $1,000; a collector subsequently bought it for $1 million, and resold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $2.7 million. Chinese grave robbers who came across a significant Song Dynasty sculpture sold it for $900; an American dealer later resold it for $125,000.
The world’s finest museums have not escaped this distasteful cycle. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles became ensnared in such a scandal after it purchased scores of looted antiquities from renowned Italian art dealer Giacomo Medici, including a statue of Aphrodite, purchased for $18 million in 1988. Senior curators at the Getty met with top officers from Italy’s Carabinieri and denied that they knew or should have known that the antiquities they’d purchased were looted. (Years after the backflap case, the Getty-Medici dispute would widen further and Italian officials would file criminal charges against an American curator and an art dealer.)
Illicit antiquity trading is said to be on the rise, and there’s little doubt the technology revolution that sparked the global economy made it easier to loot, smuggle, and sell antiquities. Looters employ global tracking devices, smugglers bribe low-paid customs officials, and sellers post items on eBay and clandestine chat rooms. If a piece is valuable enough, an antiquity can be smuggled out of a country on a passenger plane in a matter of hours, arriving in London, New York, or Tokyo less than twenty-four hours after it was unearthed by looters.
How big is the problem? It’s hard to say. Only a handful of countries collect reliable statistics on looting. The Greeks report 475 unauthorized digs in the past decade and say they’ve recovered 57,475 looted pieces, primarily in Peloponnese, Thessaly, and Macedonia. But Greece is an exception—the nation declared looting illegal as early as 1835, and its constitution specifically directs the government to protect cultural property. In most countries, looting is largely documented in unofficial ways, through anecdotes andextrapolation. Claims are made but unverified. Turkey says illegal looting is the fourth most lucrative (legal or illegal) job in the nation. Niger reports that 90 percent of its most significant archaeological sites have been stripped bare. A few criminologists have mingled these statistics and news accounts and drawn wild conclusions—for example, that
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