Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World

From Publishers Weekly
As the destruction from the war in Iraq has demonstrated most recently, a country's antiquities are never safe from marauding looters and greedy collectors who trawl the black market. In a study that is part detective story and part history lesson, Atwood, an expert on the antiquities market who writes for ARTnews and Archaeology, focuses on one incident as a case study of the insidious effects of the illicit antiquities trade. In 1987, a group of grave robbers working at a burial mound near the village of Sipán in northern Peru uncovered a mausoleum of Moche rulers (the Moche were an innovative indigenous tribe) with a rich cache of gold and silver artifacts. Word soon spread to international buyers, who responded favorably, and prolonged looting began. By the time the Peruvian police intervened three weeks later, much damage had already been done. Walter Alva, a native Peruvian and the site's chief archeologist, uncovered many more undamaged tombs and worked tirelessly to preserve this ancient legacy, bravely confronting looters and endeavoring to establish laws to prevent museums form accepting stolen goods. The case raised international awareness of the illegal antiquities trade. Atwood's ability to bring a story dramatically to life and his keen interest in stemming the illegal antiquities trade makes this an important book for anyone interested in archeology, preservation or the potentially tangled provenance of works they love. B&w illus., one map. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Recently I visited a private collection housed in a villa in Miraflores, a quiet residential district of Lima, Peru. The tour was guided by Enrico Poli, the owner of the villa, which is packed with Cusco paintings, colonial silver and old furniture. But the museum's true gem is its pre-Columbian collection, which contains some golden objects from the Moche royal tombs in Sipán, discovered in 1987. (The Moche culture dominated the northern coast of Peru from the first to the sixth centuries A.D.; Moche arts, crafts and technology were extremely advanced for the ancient world.)The eccentric collector was free with graphic explanations of erotic Moche figurines, causing his audience of Peruvian and Ecuadorian matrons to blush, but he avoided any mention of the provenance of his unique possessions. Such caution was understandable. The majority of Peruvian archaeological artifacts in the private museums are purchased from grave looters -- so-called huaqueros, who have destroyed practically every archaeological site in Peru over the last decades.Roger Atwood's new book, Stealing History, tells the sad tale of the royal tombs at Sipán in great detail. In the best-case scenario, treasures discovered by gravediggers became prey to unscrupulous Peruvian collectors; in the worst, they were smuggled out of the country, to be sold at European and American antiquity markets. Atwood's account of the joint quest of the well-known Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva and a group of FBI agents to recover the looted treasures reads like a perfect detective story, replete with Mafia connections, diplomat-smugglers and police chases.By the end of the 1990s, the majority of Sipán objects smuggled out of the country had been returned to Peru, but the end of the story is more sad than happy. The author tries both to reconstruct the looting of one particular site and to put the tragedy of Sipán in a broader context of the history of crimes against the past, from the "purchase" of the Parthenon Marbles by Lord Elgin to the explosion of illegal archaeological excavations in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. But if grave robbers have always existed, some tendencies in archaeological looting are more recent. In 1923, the 22-year-old André Malraux (surprisingly not mentioned by Atwood) was caught using a handsaw, chisel and crowbar to take seven sculptures from the temple of Banteay Srei in Angkor in Cambodia. In 1951, in his book Voices of Silence, the French writer introduced his conception of an imaginary multicultural museum embracing everything from African masks and Mayan statues to the paintings of Raphael or Picasso. Malraux's dream was realized: What he called "the Western classical cataract" has been removed. However, the end of Eurocentrism has led not only to the revision of the concept of cultural history but also to the merciless destruction of the legacy of non-European cultures. The vision of all-inclusive art propagated by Malraux changed the face of museums. "Like French Impressionist paintings and a Calder on the lawn," Atwood notes with bitter irony, "Mayan stonework became one of those things that good art museums in America just had to have, and looters in the jungles of southern Mexico and Guatemala worked overtime to meet the demand."The real villains of Stealing History are not gravediggers -- who often have no other means of survival -- but dealers, collectors and museum officials. As Atwood makes clear, the consensus among archaeologists contradicts the traditional argument that priceless objects can be better preserved in private collections and museum halls than in poor countries unable to take care of their patrimony. For archaeologists, artifacts unearthed by gravediggers become "mute," deprived of their historical value. Atwood exposes quite a few skeletons in the cupboards of respected American institutions, from the Metropolitan Museum in New York to the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe (which has some objects allegedly smuggled from Sipán.) Yet Atwood not only describes the disease, he tries to find a cure. He proposes a detailed program of international and domestic legislation to stop gravediggers, smugglers and their rich patrons. Atwood believes in the necessity of a worldwide moratorium on trade in undocumented antiques, legislation requiring museums to disclose the provenance of their acquisitions, and controls on the market in antiquities. The author understands the complexity of such a task; the difficulty of stopping archaeological looting in poor countries is greatly compounded by the need to convince collectors not to buy looted artifacts. For Atwood, such collectors are "mindless consumers of heritage, depriving everyone alive and everyone who ever will live of part of the collective memory that makes us human."We can hope that a program to prevent the transformation of South American archaeological sites into a moonscape will be adopted one day. In the meantime, smuggled artifacts fill New York galleries, are offered on eBay (of course, many of these are fakes) and may be seen in collections as diverse as the Poli Museum in faraway Lima and some respected museums in the United States.Reviewed by Konstantin Akinsha Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
Writing for magazines such as ARTnews, Atwood is an expert on the global traffic in stolen archaeological objects. His meticulous book tracks his investigation of one such object, a gold ornament cast by the Moche culture of pre-Columbian Peru. But in a prelude, Atwood recounts the night he accompanied, with their permission, Peruvian grave robbers at work. Although sympathetic to their destitution, Atwood is appalled at their obliteration of a site's archaeological value. Of course, the demand for these objects emanates from the acquisitive appetites of museums and wealthy collectors, who appear in the course of Atwood's account of the Moche "backflap." Plundered by grave robbers in 1987, it was smuggled into the U.S. by a corrupt Panamanian diplomat and seized in an FBI sting in 1997. Atwood's high-velocity, true-crime narrative immediately hooks readers while also informing them about the international antiquities business. A case study of the sordid trade, Atwood's stern admonition to the art world to reform, before archaeological knowledge becomes irretrievable forever, deserves a hearing. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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Art journalist Atwood outlines the systematic destruction of archaeological sites, concentrating on Peru. "Looting robs a country of its heritage, but, even worse, it destroys everyone's ability to know about the past," the author writes. "Looting obliterates the memory of the ancient world and turns its highest artistic creations into decorations, adornments on a shelf." This is the crux of the matter, for stolen pieces must, perforce, disappear from professional and public viewing, at least temporarily. Atwood is well aware of the motives that fuel the looting of sites, from pure economic desperation to the sheer greed of professional grave-robbers who sally forth with a laundry list in hand. But what he wants to elucidate here is how the process actually works, from the first dig of the shovel to the display of the objects in some chic private environment. No one can plead ignorance anymore, he asserts, for the modern trade in illegal antiquities has been reported in the popular press for decades. What is most galling is the number of people who are in cahoots, beginning with the robbers themselves, whatever their station or circumstance, right up to the collectors, be they individuals who squirrel away their purchases in vaults, or (and this will catch a few breaths) public institutions. "In the United States today," Atwood reminds us, "tax laws [allow] collectors to donate looted goods to museums in exchange for a deduction." Norton Simon can boast, "Hell, yes, it was smuggled. I spent between $15 million and $16 million over the last two years on Asian art, and most of it was smuggled." Forget about Lord Elgin for the moment; take a look at the provenance of that Peruvian textile atyour local museum. No, not every museum holding is an act of pillage, but Atwood, a participant/observer of the first water, will make you wonder. A disturbing tale of greed and cultural demolition, robust in the telling, scorching in its indictment. (16 halftones throughout, not seen)Agent: Gary Morris/David Black Literary Agency


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