Temple Looting in Cambodia: Anatomy of a Statue Trafficking Network

Abstract

Qualitative empirical studies of the illicit antiquities trade have tended to focus either on the supply end, through interviews with looters, or on the demand end, through interviews with dealers, museums and collectors. Trafficking of artefacts across borders from source to market has until now been something of an evidential black hole. Here, we present the first empirical study of a statue trafficking network, using oral history interviews conducted during ethnographic criminology fieldwork in Cambodia and Thailand. The data begin to answer many of the pressing but unresolved questions in academic studies of this particular criminal market, such as whether organized crime is involved in antiquities looting and trafficking (yes), whether the traffic in looted artefacts overlaps with the insertion of fakes into the market (yes) and how many stages there are between looting at source and the placing of objects for public sale in internationally respected venues (surprisingly few).

Disentangling Strategic and Opportunistic Looting: The Relationship between Antiquities Looting and Armed Conflict in Egypt

“…Prior evidence of any relationship between antiquities looting and armed conflict has been journalistic or based on case studies tracing the path of looted objects to the market (e.g., Baker and Anjar 2012;Mackenzie and Davis 2014). Quantitative methods like multiple time series complement these qualitative methods in two ways.…”

The cultural capitalists: Notes on the ongoing reconfiguration of trafficking culture in Asia

“…Think, for example, of the low-cost outsourcing of production lines for consumer products, which shifts occupational hazards to low-income communities around the world while increasing profits at the retail market end of the supply chain ( Klein, 2000 ). Comparably, in antiquities trafficking chains, looters in the lower-income countries are exposed to significant occupational risk for scant reward, the value of their illicit labour being appropriated by international traffickers and then most significantly by antiquities dealers and collectors at the top of the market supply chain ( Brodie, 1998 ; Kersel, 2011 ; Mackenzie and Davis, 2014 ; Yates, 2015 ). This market structure involves the layering of cultural power onto capitalist economic power and it is in this way that we refer to those who acquire forms of cultural capital in this way as ‘cultural capitalists’: a term that deconstructs the symbolic work of a crass translation of economic capital into status-through-culture.…”

Looking Forward by Studying the Past in East and Southeast Asian Archaeology: The Next 50 Years

“…We must work actively with Asia-based colleagues to protect and promote heritage -and, by extension the archaeological record --if we want research material for the future. Looting for collectors is one major factor in the destruction of heritage Glover 2015;Mackenzie and Davis 2014), and training the next generation of heritage managers and sponsoring incountry educational events is critical. So is encouraging our respective western government agencies operating in the host countries to support these initiatives and collaborating with our respective western governments to stop trafficking in illicit antiquities through inter-governmental agreements, direct collaboration with law enforcement, and through work with national and international archaeological and museums/heritage organizations to publicize problems and pursue initiatives.…”