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The exact nature of the illicit antiquities trade from ground to market in Southeast Asia remains poorly known outside of Thailand and Cambodia, where most research has been focused. This paper helps to address this imbalance by documenting and contextualizing looting activities at the Bronze and Iron Age site of Vưườn Chuối, located within urban Hanoi. A brief excavation history is provided so as to place recent looting into archaeological context. The methods used to document the recent and on-going looting observed are then discussed, followed by the nature of the current threat to Vưườn Chuối and a summation of what little is known about the Vietnamese antiquities trade in general and its relationship to regional antiquities trafficking. Finally, we discuss the current regulatory landscape in terms of constitutional, ownership, penal and international law, difficulties with enforcement and prosecution, and what course of action is needed not only to protect Vưườn Chuối and similar sites in and around ...

Archaeology has been a persistent theme for video games, from the long-running Indiana Jones and Lara Croft franchises to more recent uses of archaeology in games like Destiny and World of Warcraft. In these games, archaeology is often portrayed as a search for treasure among lost worlds that leads to looting and the destruction of cultural heritage. In this article, we review the current state of archaeological video games, including mainstream and educational games. While this is not an exhaustive discussion, it provides an introduction and overview to the current landscape. We propose that an understanding of current popular archaeological video games is important to archaeologists for three reasons: (1) it is a source of potentially dangerous misconceptions about the discipline that must be addressed; (2) it can be a source of inspiration for funding and a means to recruit new students to the discipline; and (3) games can be leveraged as teaching moments in classrooms and public discussions. It is important that archaeologists recognize the ways the discipline is being portrayed in such public contexts, in order to maximize the potential benefit for archaeology and to prevent further misconceptions about the subject.

The destruction of cultural heritage is motivated by many factors, but most often in the developing world the motivation is extreme poverty. Local people living in areas rich in cultural heritage assets are often either mute bystanders to theft or active participants, encouraged by middlemen to excavate illicitly or chip ornamentation from temples. Heritage Watch, an international heritage preservation organization, launched an initiative at the Koh Ker temple complex in Cambodia that stressed the sustainable use of heritage and education for the benefit of preservation. The lessons learned during this project have been applied in the organization’s new initiative at Banteay Chhmar, Cambodia.

To ask how prioritizing the commodifiable aspects of heritage transforms the relationships that define it, this paper begins by tracing the historical development of mercantile perspectives on archaeological objects, sites, and landscapes in the central Andes. From colonial looting and the mining of treasure to the illustrated emphasis on testimonial value which gave rise to modern national archaeologies in the early twentieth century, contingent encounters define processes of mercantilization, including current drives to deploy archaeology to produce commodities for the tourism industry. After scrutinizing the roles of heritage legislation, local government, entrepreneurs, local communities, and archaeologists in this process, the differing intentions, mechanisms, and effects of commoditization are highlighted. The production of essentialized identities and the invisibilization of meaningful relations between people about things and places are exclusions emanating from the marriage of archaeology...

(2009). The rape of Mesopotamia: behind the looting of the Iraq Museum. Public Archaeology: Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 378-381.

The first part of this paper provides a concise overview of the ethnographies of 'looting', demonstrating the importance of this kind of archaeological ethnography in understanding the phenomenon; the paper also emphasizes the need to encompass reflexivity in terms of the impact and the sociopolitical dimensions of professional archaeology upon public perceptions and treatments of the material past. Such a reflexive archaeological ethnography of 'looting' is instrumental for two reasons: it allows for the recognition of the power imbalances in the production of the past; and, most importantly, it gives voice to unofficial, indigenous meanings of and engagements with material remains. In the second part of the paper, the author explores how her ethnography of 'looting' conducted in Kozani, Greece opened the way for reflecting on her relationship with the people she interacted with. In particular, she discusses her personal experience in wrestling with ethical dilemmas that emerged from the dual off...

The state of preservation of archaeological sites in Southern Morocco is discussed, with particular reference to rock art sites. While the archaeological community is aware of the scale of the damage (both natural and anthropic) to archaeological sites in the central Sahara, the deterioration of Moroccan cultural heritage is still largely unreported. In May 2002, a survey of some rock art sites in the pre-Saharan Morocco, in the Jebel Sarhro, revealed the gravity and extent of the destruction, caused mainly by looting, vandalism and re-utilisation of archaeological material. Many of the activities detrimental to the rock art can be understood if read into their socio-economic context. Pre-Saharan Morocco is poor and suffers from progressive desertification; the traffic in cultural objects represents one of the few available revenue sources. As a consequence, rock art and other cultural artefacts are systematically looted and sold to private art collectors and tourists. Apart from the scientific da...

The looting of the Iraq Museum has been widely proclaimed to be the worst cultural destruction since World War II; some have compared it to the decimation wrought by the Mongol invasion of Baghdad....

Following a highly publicised expedition in the 1950s, the Tassili-n-Ajjer mountains of the Central Sahara (Algeria) were presented to the world as ‘the greatest museum of prehistoric art in the whole world’. Many of the claims of the expedition's leader, Henri Lhote, were misleading. A number of the paintings were faked, and the copying process was fraught with errors. The ‘discovery’ can only be understood within the political and cultural context of the time, namely the Algerian Revolution, France's attempt to partition Algeria, and the prevailing views of the Abbe Breuil, the archadvocate of foreign influence in African rock art. The expedition's methods caused extensive damage to the rock art while the accompanying looting of cultural objects effectively sterilized the archaeological landscape. Any restitution process must necessarily include a full recognition of what was done and the inappropriateness of those values.