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Khirbet Beit Bassa is located about three kilometers southeast of Bethlehem city on a hilltop that in every direction overlooks other archaeological sites. The results of surveys and archaeological excavations conducted at the site indicate that it was inhabited during the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic periods, and for a time in the Ottoman period. The architectural remains that have been discovered during various archaeological activities at the site include a subterranean rock-cut tomb, ground graves, a wine press, residential structures, cisterns, and a khan. Over recent decades, many parts of the site have been exposed to destruction and vandalism resulting mainly from the looting of antiquities by local groups, by urban development such as the construction of new roads and houses, and through agricultural activities in which tractors were used for plowing. This study focuses on presenting the results of archaeological excavations that the author conducted at the site, mainly in 2009 and 2010.

Operatives of the Islamic State reportedly destroyed six Palmyrene funerary busts and statue fragments in Manbij, Syria, on July 2, 2015. This article considers the ethical implications of publishing photographs of antiquities that have been destroyed, arguing that in such dramatic cases as destruction, it is justified to publish readings. Photographs of these antiquities are then analyzed, their physical and iconographic characteristics described, and readings for three of the inscriptions suggested. Finally, the loss of data caused by the items' destruction is measured against the loss of data occasioned by looting.

There is widespread belief that civil conflict in poorly governed countries is triggered by surging international demand for their natural resources. We study the consequences of US legislation grounded in this belief, the “conflict minerals” section of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. Targeting the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, it cuts funding to warlords by discouraging manufacturers from sourcing tin, tungsten, and tantalum from the region. Building from Mancur Olson’s stationary bandit metaphor, we describe some channels through which the legislation could backfire, inciting violence. Using georeferenced data, we find the legislation increased looting of civilians and shifted militia battles toward unregulated gold-mining territories. These findings are a cautionary tale about the possible unintended consequences of imposing boycotts, trade embargoes, and resource certification schemes on war-torn regions.

The title of Brad Duncan and Martin Gibbs's 2015 book, Please God Send Me a Wreck, rapidly conveys the contradiction between wrecks as crises and wrecks as boons— savior and salvor, altruism and opportunity. This third volume in the Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology (ACUA) and Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) series When the Land Meets the Sea represents the work of the state maritime archaeologist (New South Wales Heritage Branch) and a professor of Australian archaeology (University of New England), respectively. This Springer-published set covers archaeological work on single, or a collection of related, sites that encompass both underwater and terrestrial investigations. The recent addition, in the genre of anthropologically oriented archaeological essays, adopts the nineteenth- and twentieth-century communities of Queenscliffe, in the southern Australian state of Victoria, as a case study. It casts the community as the central protagonist in a landscape where shipping mishaps take center stage. Pilot, lighthouse, hydrographic, lifeboat, and customs services act as the key players, orchestrating responses to shipping mishaps encompassing stranding, wrecking, rescue, salvage, looting, caching, beachcombing, and souveniring.

Most efforts to evaluate the impact of the war in Syria on the country's cultural heritage have struggled with the highly politicized nature of reporting and the total absence of evidence from many...

Southern Iraq suffered an onslaught of looting of archaeological sites following the first Gulf War and especially in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion. This paper uses recent high resolut...

While many news reports exist about archaeological site looting in Egypt following its January 2011 Revolution, no one had yet examined the issue of how looting patterns changed over time across th...

Humanitarian assistance is intended to ameliorate the human costs of war by providing relief to vulnerable populations. Yet the introduction of aid resources into conflict zones may influence subsequent violence patterns and expose intended recipients to new risks. Here we investigate the potential negative externalities associated with humanitarian aid. We argue that aid can create incentives for armed actors to intentionally target civilians for violence. Aid encourages rebel violence by providing opportunities for looting and presenting challenges to rebel authority. It potentially encourages state violence where it augments rebel capabilities or provides rebels a resource base. We evaluate both arguments using spatially disaggregated data on aid and conflict violence for a sample of nearly two dozen post–Cold War African countries. The results of multiple statistical analyses provide strong support for the argument that humanitarian aid is associated with increased rebel violence but less support for ...

In 1860, the 18th‐century European-style pavilions, along with the rest of the Yuanming Yuan imperial palace in Beijing, China, were burned down during an invasion of the palace by Anglo‐French troops. Thereafter, with further looting and physical aggression, the former Qing dynasty architectural marvel continually deteriorated into complete ruin. By the turn of the 20th century, the only remaining visual reference of its original state was a set of 20 engravings that showed selected building facades. No plans, sections, or other architectural data were available. The situation changed dramatically in the 1930s. Within a few years, researchers of different backgrounds—Chinese, American, and French—began publishing their research on the European‐style pavilions and displaying materials that had never appeared before the public. This article examines the sudden emergence of those visual archives and reveals some of their interestingly intertwined stories. Furthermore, by discussing ways in which the...

document fifty-five new sites in the area, many of them quite large. The sites date from Early Dynastic through Islamic times. An ancient bed of the Euphrates can be seen quite clearly in this area and represents the eastern extension of the river bed that once flowed beside Eridu. Many of the thirdand second millennium BCE sites that we identified were located along this ancient branch of the Euphrates, extending our knowledge of Mesopotamian settlement closer to the Perisan Gulf. We might have expected that these sites, given their remote location, would have escaped the looting that affected so much of the south. However, the draining of the marshes removed the water that had once protected them and here too we found evidence of the work of the looters, although not to the same extent as in the desert. These looting holes revealed the importance of these sites, including one hole that uncovered part of the facade of another temple, like that at Zabalam, decorated with half columns with spiral and date-palm trunk motifs.

The term "Keros Hoard" was introduced in the literature by Getz-Gentle (formerly Getz-Preziosi) in 1983. This term describes an extensive group of Early Cycladic objects, mostly fragments of marble figurines, allegedly from Kavos, on the island of Keros, a site that had suffered intensive looting before the first rescue excavations in 1963. About half of the original group was in the Erlenmeyer Collection in Basel. The rest, which Getz-Gentle had first seen in the hands of a dealer who was the original owner of the assemblage, had been dispersed to various museums and private collections. Fragmentary material from this "hoard" was first published in the catalogue of the exhibition on the art and culture of the Cyclades in the third millennium B.C.E. held in the Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe in 1976. The Keros Hoard has been the subject of debate in the past, and discussion has been renewed with the publication of my monograph on the assemblage. The controversy stems from the fact that it consists largely-or as a whole-of material of questionable provenance and authenticity. The suggested date of its looting has also been disputed. The contents of this hoard and the date of its looting are discussed here using evidence from the archives of the Badisches Landesmuseum and the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens.

We can expect a book with revelations of this kind to prompt a strong reaction from the powerful in the acquiring museums, with talk of world heritage and cosmopolitan culture. They may particularly grumble in feeling that U.S. museums are now being targeted by the more prosperous countries of origin seeking to recover what was taken (while poorer countries of origin such as Albania may not have the resources to pursue this route effectively). There are at least two reasons why they might be targeted—if indeed they are. One is admirable: U.S. laws and their enforcement by U.S. courts are such that wrongdoing can be revealed, proven, and reversed in a way that may be hard in other jurisdictions. One is not admirable: the common close nexus in the United States of museums holding charitable privileges with energetic private collectors who are also patrons and benefactors, the two interests working together with the celebratory curators, attributors, and identifiers—a kind of partnership that has long seemed so productive in taking ambitious U.S. museums forward—may come to be seen as having a darker side that makes it a mixed, even a cursed blessing. We live in a world of sovereign nation-states; if a sovereign nation-state resolves that its patrimony should not cross its frontiers, then cosmopolitans in other lands should respect that sovereign decision rather than imagine they have some cultured right of access to the stuff. Decades, often many decades, ago nearly all the countries where classical antiquities are to be found passed protective legislation to ensure they were no longer legally exported. Accordingly, it would be expected, the free market in other lands for classical objects should by now be nearly completely restricted to “recycling” objects from the old collections that had left their lands of origin before the bar came down. That has not happened: the great U.S. museums, old and new, notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, have continued to acquire and present classical objects new to the world, such as the Getty’s great and perfect kouros and the Metropolitan’s Euphronios krater, as astonishing and splendid as those masterpieces such as the Venus de Milo in the Louvre, which came out in the previous era.1 So, what has been going on? There have been occasional glimpses all is not well: a wonderful Egyptian sculpture is given a knock as it is transported from the London to the New York premises of one of the world’s great auction houses, and its ancient “stone” disintegrates into a modern mess of wood shavings and plaster; one or another great museum, under lawyers’ pressure from Italy or Greece or Turkey, reluctantly returns some masterpiece while avoiding any admission of criminality or guilt. Italian full-time professional tomb robbers publish their memoirs, prompting again the question, “What happens to their loot once they have sold it?” Thomas Hoving, ever the mischievous and charismatic one-time director of the Metropolitan Museum, has often made it clear he enjoyed its world of careering games; he called its Euphronios krater the “hot pot” not only because it was the most expensive Greek vase in history.2 It happens that a number of criminal investigations and subsequent trials have recently revealed and documented the workings of this hidden world. Behind the neatly trimmed cuts in a chic butchers’ shop window, in which all evidence of blood that might upset the squeamish has been drained, is the stinking and knifing violence of the slaughterhouse floor; behind the elegance of these wonderful new finds is a dirty and wicked world of theft and criminality. This excellent book reveals that world; it is vivid, lively, eye-opening, often very comic—and deeply, deeply dispiriting. In its 21 breathless chapters, the reader is given a range of scenarios that even John Grisham would struggle to fit within a single thriller: heists in museums, nighttime looting in Tuscan olive groves, police raids in the Geneva Freeport, mysterious deaths in the cellar, phone taps, hidden laboratories, religious cults in Japan. Sleaze and hypocrisy ooze from the characters who flit through these shadowy worlds—from the flashy antiquities galleries in Switzerland to the flattering salons where the world’s “great museums” entertain their generous patrons and benefactors. Our own experience of life in its many aspects inclines us generally to prefer cock-up theories of history; sequences of events in large part arise from chance, confusion, chaos, coincidence. But Watson and Todeschini rightly call their book the Medici conspiracy because the world in which Gia

As Baghdad was falling to coalition forces in April 2003, the international media reported that the Iraq Museum had been ransacked and more than 170,000 of the finest antiquities from the very cradle of civilization had been stolen while U.S. forces stood idle. The list of missing objects read like a "who's who" of Near Eastern archaeology, and the world reacted with shock and outrage. In response, the United States dispatched to the museum a highly specialized multiagency task force that had been conducting counterterrorism operations in southern Iraq at the time of the looting. Their mission was to determine what had happened at the museum and to recover whatever antiquities they could. Among several startling discoveries were that the museum compound had been turned into a military fighting position and that the initial reports that over 170,000 priceless antiquities had been stolen were wrong. Although final inventories will take years to complete, the best current estimate is that approximately 14,000-15,000 pieces were initially stolen. The investigation determined that there had been not one but three thefts at the museum by three distinct groups: professionals who stole several dozen of the most prized treasures, random looters who stole more than 3,000 excavation-site pieces, and insiders who stole almost 11,000 cylinder seals and pieces of jewelry. The investigation also determined that the international black market in Iraqi antiquities continues to flourish. Working closely with Iraqis and using a complex methodology that includes community outreach, international cooperation, raids, seizures, and amnesty, the task force and others around the world have recovered more than 5,000 of the missing antiquities. This is a comprehensive account of those thefts and recoveries, as well as an attempt to correct some of the inaccuracies and misunderstandings that have been commonly reported in the media.

This is a summary report of three surveys conducted in Iraq by scholars from the University of Vienna between 1999 and 2001. The author participated in all three surveys. Since 1991, there have been reports of significantdamage to Iraq's cultural property. This damage has generally been considered the result of military action that occurred in the course of the 1991 Gulf War, looting in its aftermath, and neglect during the period of sanctions. But there was very little reliable information available to confirm or refute these allegations, and contacts with Iraqi scholars were limited between 1991 and 1999. The major task of these surveys was to fill the gap in information and to document the state of preservation of some of the most important archaeological sites and museums in the country. This report is divided into five sections: introduction, general remarks on the situation and state of information prior to 1999/2000, general description of the damage sustained by the cultural property of Iraq due to military actions during the second Gulf War and post-war looting, description of damage sustained by the cultural property of Iraq due to neglect and natural deterioration in the period of sanctions, and some concluding comments.

In the commercialization of America, abundant consumable upland natural resources were wantonly squandered in pursuit of power and wealth, while along the shore, habitats were routinely destroyed by dredging of waterways and filling of wetlands and shoreline areas. The process of exploitation began along the Atlantic seaboard and continued in interior sections of the country as the nation extended its technology and commercial fervor westward. Unabated misuse of the environment and wastefulness of economies caused Carl Sauer to note in 1938 that western c,hl-ilrp had yet to learn the difference between "yield and loot." Sixty years latez pertinent lessons remain as "looting" of coastal habitats, upland forests, and fisheries now happens worldwide, with losses occurring at an accelerating pace in developing nations.' The development of New Bedford in southeastern Massachusetts (see Figure 1) offers an opportunity to study effects of commercialization on the ecological health of an estuary during the economic growth and decline of an adjacent city. New Bedford began as a farming settlement and then sequentially became involved in maritime industries, factory production, and light manufacturing, much in the way an emerging Third World country might develop today. The community enjoyed great prosperity and recognition, first as the world's leading whaling port, later as a producer of fine quality cotton textiles, and more recently, as a major commercial fishing port. Unfortunately, the city has gained notoriety in being identified as "one of the most extensive cases of environmental contamination by polychlorinated biphenyls." Construction of shoreline facilities in support of economic goals and expansion to accommodate the increased population and economic growth were significant events in New Bedford's development. In addition, the adjacent estuary was used as a receptacle for domestic and industrial wastes during the course of this development, and now the New Bedford Harbor is one of the most polluted in the nation. Devaluation of local, small-scale natural resources in favor of larger commercial opportunities available worldwide, was also a part of the expansion, as evidenced by destruction of an alewife fishery on the Acushnet River, once important to the eighteenth-century community.2

In The Republic Socrates distinguishes between the conflicts that arise among Greeks and those that arise between Greeks and barbarians: enslaving the conquered, looting corpses, and burning houses are prohibited in conflicts with Greeks but permitted in warfare against barbarians.' We are appalled. Our morality allows no such distinction among persons. Our moral rules seem to be universal and impartial with respect to race or nationality. Let us use the term 'moral universalism' to refer to the characteristic of morality that it extends moral concern or moral protection impartially to all living human persons. Our moral culture is universalist in the sense that at least some of our norms are understood as applying impartially to all persons irrespective of nationality. Yet we have many particular commitments: to particular friends and family, perhaps to a school, neighborhood, ethnic group, or country, and often to a profession, religion, or sense of purpose of our own lives. Much recent discussion in moral philosophy has been devoted to the question of whether the particular commitments that make us who we are can be reconciled with the universalist moral philosophies that have dominated the academy for the past two hundred years. This article concerns the problems raised by one sort of particular commitment, the commitment to social norms governing conduct in groups that are narrower in scope than all of humanity: the norms governing the social life of a particular family, the shared norms of a religious or ethnic community, or the dominant social and legal norms of a nation. Each set of such norms constitutes a social morality.

The history of archaeology has become a fertile avenue of inquiry in recent years, with its own developing genres of historiography and the inevitable, ever more specialized doctoral dissertations. Debbie Challis’s account of British archaeology in the Ottoman Empire surveys 40 years of classical exploration in what was then considered to be a hazardous place to travel. She describes some momentous discoveries, or what one might more aptly describe as acquisitions, made for the British Museum. Her archaeologists were adventurers and diplomats, occasionally scholars or people of independent means. Their excavations, often supported by Royal Navy warships, filled the museum’s galleries to overflowing, even in sheds hastily erected on the portico. Challis bases her research on the writings of the archaeologists themselves and also on archival sources. She embarks on a journey through long-forgotten expeditions and obscure travel accounts that sometimes enjoyed remarkable popularity in their day. She points out that the motives of the writers ranged from self-promotion and a desire to cash in on the burgeoning literary market for adventure travel to highminded scholarship. But, above all, this a story of antiquities collecting often masquerading as archaeology, paid for by private individuals, occasionally with nominal financial support from the British Museum. These seemingly one-sided partnerships often included official support in material terms— the entire crews of warships, naval photographers, and local consuls. The four decades spanned by this book were a devout age when popular interest in classical archaeology was as its height, partly because of its biblical associations. Fortunately, these grand acquisitions and others led to classical archaeology becoming a serious academic discipline. After an introductory overview, Challis leads us chronologically through 40 years of excavation and what can charitably be described as looting legalized by firmans (permits) from Istanbul that technically legalized the export of antiquities large and small. The British Museum official– turned–diplomat Charles Fellows looms large in three chapters, thanks to his four trips to Lycia between 1838 and 1843. His favorite site was Xanthus, where he admired tombs, sculptures, and inscriptions, especially those from the Harpy Tomb and the Nereid Monument. He carried off his finds in warships. Chapter 2 is devoted to a valuable analysis of the debates over displays at the British Museum, triggered in part by the Lycian discoveries and Austen Henry Layard’s Assyrian finds from Nimrud and Nineveh. The Great Chain of Art, with its strong Hellenistic associations, figured prominently in the museum’s displays. The appointment of British Museum staffer Charles Newton as vice consul at Lesbos in 1852 strengthened the close associations between archaeology and diplomacy. A strong believer in the superiority of European civilization, Newton cut a broad swathe with excavations at Bodrum, where he had the services of 150 men, a military surveyor, and a photographer. He focused on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, removed large quantities of sculpture from the site, also imposing lions from the walls of St. Peter’s Castle. He was one of the first excavators to use photography in the field. Newton also traced the Sacred Way at the Sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma and, in a remarkable feat of engineering, removed the Lion of Cnidus, which now adorns the main staircase of the British Museum. Challis reproduces a print from his Halicarnassus book showing Newton posing by his trophy. She aptly compares it to an image of African big-game hunters showing off their trophies. Chapter 4 describes the long history of excavations at Carthage, mainly in the hands of an American, Nathan Davis, such an Anglophile that he displayed a Union Jack over his excavations. Davis was no excavator but a man with a passion for ancient Carthage. His dealings with the local people were much more adept than those of his contemporaries, partly because he lived permanently in Tunisia. Reviewers were critical of his books, but it must be said that they are more entertaining than those of his fellow archaeologists—using the word in the loosest possible sense. In 1860–1861, an expedition under Robert Murdoch Smith and Lieutenant Edward Porcher investigated Cyrene and took up residence in a tomb in the ancient city’s necropolis. They mapped the entire city and excavated the Temple of Apollo, sending 148 pieces of sculpture to London on a warship. Later excavations yielded more antiquities. The logistics of transporting the packing cases over rough terrain would have defeated anyone except a military detachment with the facilities of a man-ofwar and its expert seamen at hand. The longest dig of all was at Ephesus, under an expansive period at the British Museum, led by Newton of Halicarnassus fame. He encouraged a private individual, John Turtle Wood, to investigate the ruins of Ephesus. Wood was a railroad engineer and started work at the ruins in 1863 while still working on the railway. He worked there for a decade under difficult conditions at a time when Heinrich Schliemann was tearing

T _HE production of steel in India has captured the imagination of students of economic development ever since pioneer industrialist Jamshedji Nusserwanji Tata cleared the jungles in defiance of a British challenge to eat any steel that could be manufactured.2 Tata's enterprise is one of the finest chapters in Indian economic development. The fiftieth anniversary of the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) was celebrated in 1958 with the opening in Jamshedpur of a five-millionrupee Jubilee Park.3 Prime Minister Nehru was present, and a commemorative stamp was issued, a rare governmen. tal accolade to a private Indian enterprise. This was more than recognition of an ability to make steel; it was also a tribute to the Tata reputation as a progressive employer. Symbolic of this was the widely praised and publicized threeyear agreement signed in 1956 between the TISCO and the Tata Workers' Union (TWU), which pioneered in collective bargaining when most managements and unions seemed unable to settle outstanding issues by direct negotiation.4 However, the violent strike that occurred in May, 1958, revealed that all was not well in Jamshedpur, India's principal steel center. It began with a notice of a one-day token strike served by the Jamshedpur Mazdoor Union (JMU), the Communist-led rival of the TWU. Although the Bihar government declared this strike illegal and the TWU opposed it, a vast majority of the workers participated peacefully. However, the aftermath was critical. The company immediately charge-sheeted or suspended about fifty alleged ringleaders. In protest against this "victimization," from May 15 on, the JMU conducted an illegal stay-in strike. The steel plant was shut down completely on May 20, and the next day there was a one-day general strike. The ensuing week of violence saw police firings, mob destruction of property, looting, arson, prohibition of all meetings, scores of arrests, the imposition of 1 This article is based on research insights obtained, first, from an extensive field trip to India in 1954-55 as a member of the M.I.T. Industrial Relations Section Staff associated with the InterUniversity Study of the Labor Problem in Economic Development and, second, from personal observations over a fifteen-month period in Jamshedpur (where the Tata steel plant is located) between 1956 and 1958 as a member of the staff of the Xavier Labor Relations Institute. I have also benefited from the discussion of a draft in the Labor Workshop of the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago and from the keen substantive and editorial advice of Nancy Kenney Kannappan. The responsibility for the contents is, of course, mine.

The observer may perceive changes in the behavior of three types of groups. I suggest that these trends may indicate a change in broader social attitudes. i) The urban crowd still, as of yore, takes an interest in politics. It shields the assassin, threatens the politician or monarch, mans the barricades when revolt occurs, and, less dramatically, cheers, boos, and acts as a general sounding board in national party politics. But destruction, violence, and looting, which once followed in the wake of such political events, now begin with them, and very often appear to be more important to the rioters than the political protest itself. ii) National elections, in Anglo-Saxon countries, take place regularly or as often as required to find a government which has the confidence of parliament and/or the electorate. The considerable trouble and expense of elections was long thought worthwhile to assure a government that measured up to popular demands. But recently, perhaps with the advent of television, the politician who has protested "the people are not ready for yet another election" has been wrong: the people enjoy a good election. iii) Student protest. Student action has many dimensions and cannot be accurately distinguished from mere exuberance and rags. Nevertheless, in the past, there has been an earnest protest tradition among university students. Outside college they have taken an important part in elections, strikes, revolts, the underground, and open fighting. In university affairs they have attempted to get better premises and finances for their institutions. Trivially, they have struck over causes such as the coach or his training program, defended daring student newspapers against affronted elders, and started cooperative bookstores, restaurants, bus lines, and publishing houses to remedy deficiencies in their universities' arrangements. More profoundly, they have contested noble and difficult causes (not always on the right side); sometimes defending their professors and their

scattered in the doorway. Across the courtyard opposite the throne-room were a series of rooms (NTS 9-10) apparently used as scribal offices. Professor Mallowan has shown that it was in NTS 10 that George Smith found the upper part of a large copy of the Annals of Tiglath-pileser III (K 3751) on which he wrote the provenence "S. E. Nimroud." A fragment of the same king's annals (ND 400) was found some twenty yards away,2 and there is evidence that at the sack of the building in 614 B.c. the historical records at least were scattered in this area. It is noteworthy that in this same room a lexicographical text (ND 4311) listing Sumerian signs with their Old Babylonian equivalents-evidence of a local scribal school-was also found. This piece directly joins K 8520 (in the British Museum) and so underlines the likelihood that a number of texts of the "K" collection originally came from this building at Nimrud. It is probable that the court scribes used this wing of the palace, though the discovery of texts in the fill of Courtyard XVIII and as far as the outer reaches of the throne-room area might indicate that the scribes themselves worked also on the upper floor.3 The range of rooms across the southern courtyard (NT 10-11 and possibly 13-16) i.e. that opposite the temple of Nabu itself, produced a large number of tablets, though many being sun-dried, are in a poor condition, but again perhaps some had once been housed in an upper storey.4 "This pitiful remnant of a once great collection"'5 had obviously suffered from looting in antiquity, but sufficient remains to show that it represents the product of many hands including the fine stylus-work of skilled scribes copying texts for special library or temple use. Many works of reference, especially lexicographical vocab