Research and innovation

Protecting cultural heritage

Issued: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:02:00 GMT

Each year, objects of cultural importance and significant value are looted and then smuggled around the world, often turning up in private collections and even museums in the West.

museum storage This project, led by Dr Simon Mackenzie and funded by the European Research Council, will gather and analyse data ranging from illegal excavation and pricing structures to the motives of traffickers. The aim is not only to develop new approaches to regulate the international trade of cultural goods but also to help policymakers better define laws to fight criminal activities.

Much of the problem with this trade, as with the traffic in wildlife or people, is hidden by a lack of a solid research base, Dr Simon Mackenzie explains: 'There's a definite dearth of evidence on some pretty fundamental aspects of this trade. Everybody knows that illicit trafficking in cultural heritage has been going on for a very long time. But it's a very private trade and because of that, it is difficult to record accurate statistics on the size of the problem globally.'

So where do the researchers start? At the beginning, says Dr Mackenzie. Adopting a method used by a colleague researching conflict diamonds, the team will take a multi-sited ethnographic approach; in other words they will conduct a series of observations and interviews at various points in a chosen global supply chain. 'The ideal for research in a criminal trafficking market is to follow an object all the way through the illicit trading chain from beginning to end. We have identified a known trade route: starting in Cambodia, crossing the border into Thailand, then on to Europe and finishing either in London or New York, the world's two centres for the antiquities trade; and we will identify key people, looters, local police, customs officials, dealers and collectors at each point, to interview for our research.'

Education plays a role in trying to combat the trade. Sometimes customs officials are unaware of the rarity of objects they come across. In one well-known case in New York, Egyptian artefacts were smuggled out of Egypt and into America by fooling customs officers into thinking they were simply tourist goods. There is also a role in educating individuals about the impact of the trade so that they don't buy looted antiquities any more.

'People are buying and selling cultural objects in the international market for millions of dollars and that money filters back down the chain of supply to the looters and small-time dealers in source countries. If we can stop that from happening, we will remove the incentive for stealing cultural objects and begin to unwind the criminal side of the market. So we are increasingly using an economic type of analysis in order to try to understand how to solve a criminal problem: which is not the way it's usually done by legal analysts. The normal approach has in the past been to target criminals with domestic or international criminal laws, but our research finds difficulties with the implementation of this standard criminal law approach in a global context, and as well as improving the reach of the criminal law we are now looking for a complementary market-based approach.'Prevention of the illicit global trade in antiquities is helped by a number of international declarations from organisations like UNESCO, but Dr Mackenzie thinks that more practical approaches are also required.

'The United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime is currently considering the application of their Convention against Transnational Organised Crime to this particular criminal market. This contains a number of practical measures about expeditious police and judicial cooperation across borders, and using money-laundering seizures. In that regard, for example, when somebody buys a looted antiquity we might argue that the purchase price paid to the supplier is the proceeds of crime and on that basis the police might be authorised to seize the money. This is a fast-evolving field of research where new ideas are constantly emerging, so we are hopeful that we can make a major contribution to the protection of the world's cultural heritage resources through this project.'

'People are buying and selling cultural objects in the international market for millions of dollars and that money filters back down the chain of supply to the looters and small-time dealers in source countries. If we can stop that from happening, we will remove the incentive for stealing cultural objects and begin to unwind the criminal side of the market.'

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