I’m teaching a fourth year seminar next year dealing with issues surrounding the illicit antiquities trade. This seminar will be in conjunction with a larger project spearheaded by the investigative reporter and author Jason Felch, of Chasing Aphrodite. I’m quite excited about this; as an undergraduate, I once had the opportunity to work on a term project that looked at the antiquities market. That was twenty years ago; I’ve never really had the opportunity to scratch that itch since. So, when I was asked to suggest a seminar topic, I jumped at the chance to plumb the depths of my own ignorance together with my students. What better way to teach than to be learning right along with your students?

As ever, I turned to twitter, to see what folks there had to say.

putting together a reading list to get next year’s students introduced to the world of looting and crimes against cultural heritage.

— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) March 12, 2014

re that last tweet, I meant to add: open to suggestions!

— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) March 12, 2014

Many folks chimed in with suggestions, including:

@electricarchaeo Lucas & Spielberg (1981) is still required reading http://t.co/PcSdLIFvJY @DrDonnaYates — James Doeser (@jamesdoeser) March 13, 2014

I’m keeping all of these in a zotero library for eventual sharing with my students (wider world too), but for now, this is the kind of stuff that’s come in:

Legal & Academic Frameworks

Renfrew, Colin. Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership: The Ethical Crisis in Archaeology. Duckworth, 2000.

Lazrus, Paula K. And A. Barker (eds). All the King’s Horses: Essays on the Impact of Looting and the Illicit Antiquities Trade on Our Knowledge of the Past. SAA 2012.

Marlowe, Elizabeth. Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art. Debates in Archaeology. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. http://catalogue.library.carleton.ca/record=b3486847~S9

Hoffman, Barbara T., ed. Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy, and Practice. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. http://catalogue.library.carleton.ca:80/record=b2293643~S9

Green, Penny, and S. R. M. Mackenzie, eds. Criminology and Archaeology: Studies in Looted Antiquities. Oñati International Series in Law and Society. Oxford ; Portland, Or: Hart Publishing, 2009. http://catalogue.library.carleton.ca:80/record=b2609135~S9

RealTime Delphi Study on the Future of Cultural Heritage Research http://www.jpi-culturalheritage.eu/wp-content/uploads/JPI-Cultural-Heritage-RealTime-Delphi-Report-final-version-to-be-published.pdf

Campbell, Peter B. ‘The Illicit Antiquities Trade as a Transnational Criminal Network: Characterizing and Anticipating Trafficking of Cultural Heritage’. International Journal of Cultural Property 20, no. 02 (2013): 113–153. doi:10.1017/S0940739113000015.

World War II

Nicholas, Lynn H. The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1994. http://catalogue.library.carleton.ca/record=b1456118~S9

Edsel, Robert M, and Bret Witter. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. New York: Center Street / Hachette Book Group, 2010.

Edsel, Robert M. Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis. 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. http://catalogue.library.carleton.ca/record=b3445170~S9

Current State

Felch, Jason, and Ralph Frammolino. Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

Watson, Peter, and Cecilia Todeschini. The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities from Italy’s Tomb Raiders to the World’s Greatest Museums. PublicAffairs, 2007.

Waxman, Sharon. Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World. Macmillan, 2010. http://catalogue.library.carleton.ca/record=b2928026~S9

‘Trafficking Culture’. Accessed 12 March 2014. http://traffickingculture.org/.

and an entire special issue of Internet Archaeology: Issue 33 – Portable Antiquities: archaeology, collecting, metal detecting, Edited by Stuart Campbell and Suzie Thomas http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue33/index.html

And from Donna Yates, the exciting news that she and her collaborators at Trafficking Culture are going to write a textbook on the subject:

I meant lecturers: I am trying to figure out who would use a looting/illicit antiquities textbook by Neil Brodie, Simon Mackenzie and myself

— Donna Yates (@DrDonnaYates) March 13, 2014

Assessment

In terms of assessment, I want to avoid long research essays based on secondary sources. Instead, I’d rather have the students build something, analyze something, visualize something… so this will be a heavily digital humanities inflected course. I want my students at the coalface. My little looted heritage social media observatory, https://heritage.crowdmap.com/ will be pulled out of the mothballs and will become an active part of the course. We’ll be mining eBay, looking at the auction sites, exploring museum archives… probably. Stay tuned!

If you have suggestions for things the students should be reading/looking at/exploring, please do drop me a line or leave a comment.