They used to do it with their bare hands, sometimes using picks and spades. These days, people steal archaeological treasures using other tools.
Thieves of history break into tombs with explosives and cut the heads off wall statuettes with chainsaws.
The remote 12th century Cambodian temple of Bantay Chhmar, near the Thai border, was attacked at the end of 1998 with a pneumatic drill, says Christopher Pottier, an architect at the French School of the Far East who went there to investigate the damage.
In hidden corners of the developing world, but also in southern Italy and in Native American villages in the United States, clandestine excavations are done with bulldozers. In England, ”night hawks” scan the ground with metal detectors, a hobby that has become a national sport. None of these people have any qualms about attacking private property and protected cultural sites. In this way, the world’s most important collection of Celtic coins, the Snettisham Bowl Hoard, was stolen and 5 000 coins disappeared from a Roman site in Surrey.
The arrival of large quantities of coins on the market soon after such disappearances has enabled the extent of the loss to be measured. In another case, a person in Suffolk found Roman masks and bronze figures dug up on his land in the possession of two American collectors, Shelby White and Leon Levy, who had bought them from the Ariadne Gallery in New York. He had been able to trace them through photographs taken by the thieves and found by police.
Thieves and smugglers also operate with guns. Armed men attacked archaeologists in 1993 as they were working on the Angkor Wat ruins in Cambodia, but a special police unit since assigned to the site (with Unesco’s support and with technical help from France) has reduced thefts since then.
In Latin America, archaeologists run into guerrillas and drug smugglers, but in Cambodia the army is one of the main suspects. Colonel Chea Sophat, who commands the heritage police at Angkor, tells how in 1998 he arrested a group of soldiers making off with 15 tonnes of statues and bas reliefs hacked off the temple of Koh Ker.
Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, director of the McDonald Institute of Archaeology in Cambridge and head of a research centre into pillaging, is blunt about the situation. ”It hasn’t diminished, it’s increasing,” he says.
The institute sounded the alarm in a report commissioned by the British Museums Association and Icom UK. The right of entire peoples to their cultural identity is being abused with the complicity of several Western governments, it suggests.
Lord Renfrew says the biggest new danger comes from the art market. Even more than the civil wars that, for example, saw the museum in Kabul emptied of its contents in 1993, the desanctification of religious shrines and improved exploration techniques, the booming art market is the main cause of the spiralling thefts, he says. Old catalogues from Sothebys, the auctioneers, have even been found in remote areas of the Chinese countryside.
The institute’s report recommends a code of conduct for museums, some of which shamelessly handle looted items. When an archaeological item is illicitly removed from its surroundings, it dies in a sense – its history and that of those who made it is lost to us forever. And even the respect for art, in many cases, becomes questionable: witness the absurd situation in which one half of a statue of Hercules found in Turkey is exhibited there, while the other half resides in a museum in Boston as the property of the same pair, White and Levy, who refused to give back the Roman items stolen from the site in Suffolk.
– Unesco Sources
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, April 2001.