In the Channel 4 news item to which David Gill referred in his post 'Olympia theft: "it will be really difficult to get rid of them"..' this hope is expressed by Dr Christos Tsirongiannis. I am not so sure. Dr Tsirongiannis has recently had a lot of success identifying objects which were apparently on the illicit trade several decades ago when they "resurface", sometimes with a new provenance, in the most "unexpected" (?) of places. I wonder though whether in this case we will see more than a few of these objects again.
This depends how we see the thieves. Were they desperate uneducated Greek jobless folk who just happened to have a kalashnikov lying around the house (no European household should be without one) who 'had a go'? Or were they two members of an already established Balkan gang already involved in the illicit trade in antiquities with clandestine supply routes already open, who crossed the (green?) border into Greece, did the raid and are by now with the loot on their way home? Time will tell and the police advance their investigations, but at the moment I am more inclined to see them as the latter, the links between antiquities looting and smuggling and organized crime seem to be becoming increasingly clear. In the first case, there is a chance that we'll see the objects surface pretty quickly. In the second, dodgy dealers will take them and offer them to dodgy buyers and we'll never see them again.
Over a year ago some very distinctive objects disappeared from another museum. One would have thought "pssst, d'ya wanna buy this genuine statue of the boy-king Tutankhamun straight from his tomb?" would have landed somebody in jail by now, but no - the object has vanished. If we assume the object is on the market [which actually I think is not the case - but more of that when it is appropriate], that would tell us something about that market. The current state of the international antiquities market makes it possible for tonnes (literally) of small freshly-dug artefacts to be absorbed without any trouble at all and simply disappear. Moreover the system of distribution of these objects is developed in such a way to hinder tracing the movements of artefacts. This is what money-laundering is all about, and it is clear that freshly "surfaced" (from underground) artefacts are 'laundered' in the same way.
All those artefacts without any documentation "which are of legal origins (though you cannot prove or check this)" could be there precisely to shield the other artefacts on the market without documentation which are freshly "surfaced" because illegally obtained. That is clearly one way in which the antiquities trade would manage to top up the resources from buying up old collections with large amounts of freshly dug stuff illegally removed from one source country or another. This no-questions-asked trade is where the small percentage of smuggled items that is actually detected and seized by customs inspections are headed.
Larry Rothfield hits the nail on the head discussing the Olympia theft:
the mere fact that artifacts are in a museum and recorded is not going to deter criminals who believe they are worth a lot of money on the black market. The criminals may be too stupid to know that fencing these hot objects may be difficult because a recorded artifact on the Art Loss Register or the like is almost certain to eventually be spotted if they come onto the auction house market or get donated to a museum. Or the criminals may be smart enough to have already set up a deal with a middleman or with a collector. Either way,the point is clear: antiquities cannot be protected only by a registry, if an illicit market exists.I would go further. We cannot stop the illicit market without tackling the problem of the existence of a wholly no-questions-asked market that shields it from any scrutiny.
