But we know that solving yesterday’s problems won’t help.

Last month (so July 2024) I was invited to the University of Salento to speak at their ISUFI Summer School. I wasn’t quite sure what the other presenters were doing so I prepared two presentations. One was “fun”, showing the results of interdisciplinary and tech assisted research. The other was a set of quite grumpy but serious comments concerning “gaps” regarding queries into the illicit trade in antiquities. On the day of, I did the “fun” which is rather predictable. I’m going to go with fun whenever I can. However, I believe in my grumpy comments so I want to put them somewhere. Here they are. If you want to grump at me about the comments, email me.

Gaps in Understanding the Illicit Trafficking of Antiquities: Solutions need a Problem

I’ve now been working in this field for 20 years. My first bit of policy focused research happened in late 2005, working for the Archaeological Institute of America in support of the extension of the US/Italy cultural property import restrictions memorandum of understanding which eventually happened in January 2006. Coincidentally, my job at that time was to document the auction history of looted ancient pottery from Puglia so it’s quite nice to be here, recalling that!

There are certainly many colleagues who have been in this field longer than I have, but my 20 years (during which time I’ve been based on four different countries and three continents, during which time of work in and on every continent except Antarctica) gives me, I think a depth of memory, if not also a depth of knowledge.

• I remember what has been said and done already.
• I can see what has changed.
• I can see successful interventions and innovations
• But I can also see the unproductive loops that we seem to be trapped in

History repeats itself.

The topic today is technology solutions to the antiquities trafficking problem, but I feel we must take a step back from this to take a step forward. And to risk sounding grumpy and jaded from my 20 years of experience, I want to highlight a disturbing issue, the widest of gaps, that I believe is at the heart of our continued inability to truly deal with the problem at hand:

We don’t know what the problem is.

In policy circles, in funding calls and responses, in the rhetoric of NGOs and IGOs, and in some academic literature the issue of antiquities trafficking and related crime exist in a time warp. What is described as current features of this market were actually things that were becoming outdated when I started 20 years ago. Antiquities related crime now is not like it was in the 80s and 90s, and we have little baseline information about contemporary manifestations of this crime. Equally the market has changed drastically and fundamentally. Demand is different, as is supply, and we have very little good information about any of this. Deep, careful, sociological, problem defining research is not being funded. It isn’t sexy enough. Worse, such research is risky because it may show the problem really isn’t what some important entities need it to be.

A common complaint over the past 20 years is a lack of data sharing about antiquities trafficking, and short-term projects and initiatives (several of which I’ve been involved with) have been funded not to empirically gather new data, but to try to squeeze hypothetical pre-existing data from various sources. The problem is that hypothetical data doesn’t exist because collecting real data isn’t funded. There’s no data to share, as experts and law enforcement tell each of these projects in turn. All of these projects conclude with a bullet point about the need for more data (or, again, more data sharing) despite not having collected any real new data themselves. This leaves the situation unchanged and sets up the next project to search for the same non-existent data and then conclude the same thing.

Years go by. This repeats again and again.

In this information vacuum we are at the mercy of what Norman Mailer called factoids: false facts that feel like they should be true but that only exist via repetition. There is no evidence for them. Many discourses on the topic antiquities crime are dominated or predicated on factoids.

Indeed, there is no (good, research-supported) evidence for the following statements:

• that the illicit trading antiquities is worth any amount annually: millions, billions, or whatever;
• that illicit trade in antiquities is the third largest or third most valuable illicit market/trade;
• that looting and trafficking of antiquities is increasing;
• that demand for these items is increasing;

and so on.

I challenge anyone who believes any of these statements to be valid to show me research that supports them. I do not believe it exists. It would be interesting to me to be proved wrong.

I suppose it’s possible one or more of these statements is true. I don’t think they are, but my point is we don’t actually know much about the contemporary crime related to antiquities so we can’t say if things are true or not.

So where does that leave us regarding solutions? Well, we can’t possibly find a solution to an undefined problem. Trying to solve the antiquities trafficking problem of 20 years ago, or the antiquities trafficking problem as defined by unsupported factoids, is a waste of time and money. Solutions offered to outdated (or imagined) problems will not protect our cultural heritage or reduce crime. Meanwhile the as yet undocumented, unknown reality of this crime continues unchallenged. Technology towards detecting and preventing crime should be a response. It should not be a starting point. We should not be developing technology in search of a problem. Rather we should let our problems dictate the technology we need. But to do this we must know what our problem is.

Personally, in my opinion, I don’t think that contemporary crime related to antiquities is what many people, even people here, think it is. I don’t think looting or trafficking are the primary vectors for criminality in this market anymore. I honestly think financial manipulation of various kinds is the big contemporary issue regarding art, antiquities, and cultural heritage objects. Yet I need to do the primary empirical research to see if I’m right. I could be wrong! Who knows? No one knows. But I’m not confident anyone will fund unsexy, slow, meticulous, problem defining research on the topic of antiquities. Funders want to fund solutions.

And on that note, to end, and I say again that when it comes to antiquities looting, trafficking, and crime, we don’t know what our problem is. There is no solution to an unknown problem.