The scourge of looting: trafficking antiquities, from temple to museum
About this video
An archaeologist explains how chisel and hacksaw marks on museum antiquities reveal how they were looted. Using Cambodia's temple of Koh Ker, once full of statues and now left with empty pedestals, she shows that looting happened mainly during the civil war, and warns that the trade continues today and funds insurgent and terrorist groups.
You'll be able to
- describe physical evidence that an antiquity was looted.
- explain how war and looting are connected, using Koh Ker as an example.
- explain why the illicit antiquities trade is not just a 'white collar crime'.
Key words
- Antiquities
- Objects from ancient times, such as statues and carvings.
- Looting
- Stealing objects from sites, often during war or disorder.
- Trafficking
- Illegally moving and selling goods across borders.
- Pedestal
- The base that a statue stands on.
- Khmer Rouge
- The communist group that fought in Cambodia's civil war and later ruled the country.
Transcript
My friends often accuse me of ruining visits to museums for them. They say that I ruined their visits to museums because if you look closely at the antiquities in museums, you often see things like chisel marks and hacksaw marks. Violent evidence of how those pieces got into a museum to begin with.
I came to Boston University specifically to study archaeology, and started learning about the looting of archaeological sites and trafficking of antiquities and what a huge global problem it is. I went to Cambodia as an undergraduate and saw are just how devastating this problem was on the ground. Cambodia's temples, some of them are over a thousand years old.
At some of the sites their word dozens freestanding statues. For example, the temple of Koh Ker in the Sotheby's case was described by an early explorer as a historical museum due to the abundant statuary there. When you go to Koh Ker today, there are no freestanding statues.
There are just empty pedestals, there are holes in the wall, there are fragments of pieces. These sites have been absolutely devastated, and that devastation was not something that took centuries. The evidence we have shows that the looting happened almost exclusively during the Cambodian Civil War against the Khmer Rouge. When conflict erupts in an archaeological rich country, suddenly the art market is flooded with antiquities from those countries.
And it's not just a historical problem either. The illicit antiquities trade is threatening sites around the world, but still going on now in Syria, and Egypt, and Libya, and Mali, and Tunisia, which is why I think the public should know that this is not just a white collar crime, that insurgent groups that terrorist groups are using the antiquities trade to fund their efforts. I do fear that by the time we, we get our act together on this it's going to be too late. Unless we stop the looting of archaeological sites, there really will be nothing left.
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