culturalsecurity:
Closing in on the Archaeological Underworld
Switzerland has been cleaning up its free ports after a 1995 scandal on its home turf triggered a probe into looted antiquities. Globally,the fight to disrupt such criminal activity is stepping up with a Web experiment to share information.
Museums the world over still display archaeological treasures that sometimes are not legally theirs. While governments wrangle over their rightful ownership, looters continue to plunder sites to feed a prospering black-market. Now, or an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times is trying to set up “WikiLoot”,a way of crowd-sourcing information on looted antiquities via the Web. “We want to make it impossible to turn a blind eye,” Jason Felch told swissinfo.ch. Felch and Ralph Frammolino led a five-year investigation that culminated in 2011 with their publication of Chasing Aphrodite, and an account of the archaeological underworld that reads like a thriller. The discovery in 1995 that Genevas free port was a haven for an international network of looted antiquities linked to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles was the starting point of their investigation. Read more
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Wooo coverage on WikiLoot. As tricky as WikiLoot is proving to be,I still believe that with the true people and the true resources, it can be a noteworthy game changer in bringing these issues into wide daylight.
Source: tumblr.com