Cairo and Washington signed an MoU last month to impose tighter restrictions on the illicit importation of Egyptian antiquities. Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs repatriated on Monday five late pharaonic-era artefacts which had been smuggled to, and recently recovered in the US, General Supervisor of the Antiquities Repatriation Department Shabaan Abdel-Gawad told Ahram Online. Minister…
A Roman marble fragment currently on sale at the Royal-Athena Galleries, owned by Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, New York, has a more than doubtful history. The fragment of this sarcophagus, which presents a battle between Greeks and Trojans, is depicted in four Polaroid images (see below) and is referred to in three handwritten notes, in the…
The Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Baden-Württemberg just published a leaflet with guidelines on how to deal with metal detectorists or people carrying out illegal excavations. It includes the definitions of Raubgräber (someone excavating without permission) and Sondengänger (metal detectorists), and the current legal background in Baden-Württemberg. It is in any case suggested to call the police…
This Monday, November 7, our committee member Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis, senior archaeologist at the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, University of Cambridge, identified an Etruscan terracotta antefix (lot 14) in the forthcoming Bonhams auction in London, on November 30th, 2016, as deriving from the Medici archive (see images on the right). But the collecting history given by…
A recent article from the German TV-Channel ‘Das Erste’ by Andreas Wolter (in German) discusses the unsecure provenance of a Poseidon statuette recently sold at Gorny & Mosch in Munich (though the auction house is not mentioned by name). The auction house names as provenance only ‘Ex collection A.T., Munich, since 1985’. But the statue…
Our committee is now also officially contributing to the ICOM International Observatory on Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods! But why? Every day, somewhere in the world, an object is either stolen or looted in order to be illegally sold on the market. Illicit trafficking in works of art and cultural property has become a serious…
The current volume VII of the journal Archeomafie is now online. It is the first journal of its kind in Italy and you can find different topic related articles in Italian. The journal (ISSN 2036-4539) is published by the Osservatorio Internazionale Archeomafie in coperation with Liberarcheologia and the Centro Studi Criminologici di Viterbo. You find…
The webpage archaeologyinbulgaria.com gives a very good overview on recent cases of illegal excavations, trafficking of cultural objects, and different strategies against it. If you want to be updated, just subscribe to their blog via email. Reading that roughly 500,000 people in Bulgaria are dealing with treasure hunting and thus destroying the country’s archaeological, historical,…
The illegal diggers come at night with shovels and sacks, hunting through the places where they know the professionals have been. They’re looking for the tonnes of ancient artefacts that lie hidden in Bulgaria’s soil. In the past two decades, Bulgarian law enforcement agencies say this plunder has turned into a €30m-a-year industry for local…
When the French historian, archaeologist, and researcher Morgan Belzic, of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris embarked on a PhD thesis on the somewhat esoteric subject of Cyrenaican Funerary Sculptures, little did he know he would end up becoming a detective. However Belzic’s studies have led him to follow a murky trail of transnational artefact…
EAA-Community on the Illicit Trade in Cultural Material 