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 Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio recently sold nearly 70 antiquities from Egypt, Italy, and Cyprus for $1.2 million. New York auction house Christie’s said Thursday the total comes from live and online auctions this week. Egyptian officials earlier this week sought to stop the auction and wanted the items from Egypt returned there.…
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…
“Stolen Memory” is the investigation that led to the creation of the first journalistic platform that collects massive data on illicit trafficking of cultural artifacts from Latin American countries. It is a project of Peruvian digital investigative journalism site Ojo Público, which invited four important media in the region to participate in a transnational and…
An exchange of arms and art is shown by a new reportage of Domenico Quirico, and was published today in La Stampa (so far available only in Italian). D. Quirico describes the allegedly close connections between ISIS and the ‘ndrangheta in Calabria/Italy, and how the port of Gioia Taura acts as a hub for archaeological…
EAA-Community on the Illicit Trade in Cultural Material 