The Chasing Aphrodite blog ('Introducing WikiLoot: Your Chance to Fight the Illicit Antiquities Trade', March 12, 2012) announces an exciting new project they’ve been thinking about for some time. They are calling it WikiLoot. The idea behind WikiLoot is simple:
1. Create an open source web platform, or wiki, for the publication and analysis of a unique archive of primary source records and photographs documenting the illicit trade in looted antiquities.
2. Use social media and other tools to engage a broad network of contributors — experts, journalists, researchers, dilettantes and curious citizens — to collaborate in the analysis of that material.
Well, first of all I must say that I am for any and every initiative which gets "everyone" involved in questioning the current state of antiquities collecting and in particular the antiquities trade. This is exactly what archaeological outreach should be doing, but is not. It is good to see some real investigative journalists after doing some real investigative journalism (unlike their British counterparts who queue up outside the BM for their crib sheets to write yet another trite fluffy-bunny-treasure story) and then doing something about what they found out. I do have a number of misgivings though.
The authors of the idea seem to be planning to use "the vast amount of documentation seized by European investigators over the past two decades during investigations of the illicit trade in Classical antiquities smuggled (primarily) out of Greece and Italy. These business records, journals, correspondence and photographs seized from looters and middlemen during those investigations comprise a unique record of the black market". Jason Felch announces: "During six years of reporting on the topic, I obtained much of this archive, including images of thousands of looted antiquities that have yet to be located". The problem is that they surmise that "much of that documentation remains tangled in legal cases that are likely to end inconclusively, like that of former Getty antiquities curator Marion True and dealer Robert Hecht". Here we have the problem of the disregard of the American sponsors for those Others who - they are sure - are going to mess everything up unless the transatlantic "Truth-Justice-and-The-American-Way"-brigade step in and sort things out for them.
The proposals shows the authors' actual aim (and possibly the identity of the "everyone") in fact to be rather narrow:
"WikiLoot will identify looted antiquities in American museums by crowd-sourcing the analysis of a unique archive seized from black market dealers".They plan therefore to pre-emptively "make these records and photographs publicly available on the web and will enlist collaborators around the world to tag and analyze them". So a sort of global crowd-sourced Christos Tsirogiannis-David Gill clones.
The authors claim they are considering the "concerns about the effect this release of information will have on existing collections and the still-thriving market for antiquities with unclear ownership histories". I am not clear what they have in mind, but certainly if Mr Felch thinks that any more objects will be "surfacing" after their pictures are published in a catalogue of "black market antiquities", he must think the sellers of these things are pretty stupid. Mr Felch also ignores the whole question of the effect of releasing this information on ongoing investigations. This is the same series of issues that I had with Dorothy King's original idea, that releasing certain material will adversely affect prosecutions of further dodgy dealers and sellers with dodgy stuff on their hands.
Update 14th March 2012: Dugup Dealers' paid lobbyist Peter Tompa asks whether this is nothing more than a "High (sic) Tech Witch Hunt". One might suspect that his concern is the number of his clients' mates who run the risk of being "caught with" (as he puts it) "their pants down" as a result of this closer public scrutiny. But of course EVERY one of his clients and their mates will loudly protest that they care "a lot" about looting, and would want to know if anything in their stock was of illicit origins and take appropriate action immediately. It seems their glib assurances might soon be put to the test in a very public manner.
