(3 of 4)
Together with the U.S. Customs Service, Josephson's agency has helped stem the smuggling of archaeological loot from one region: Latin America. Plunderers of pre-Columbian sites used to have a field day rifling covertly excavated Mayan, Olmec and Incan ruins and shipping the artifacts north to a voracious U.S. market. In 1970 the UNESCO convention on cultural property established an international framework to curb pillage and the illicit trade in artifacts. Among the rich countries that are the biggest markets for stolen works, however, only the U.S. and Canada signed the treaty. Britain, France, & Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Scandinavia and Japan remain holdouts today.
"Our major concern," Josephson explains, "is that looting destroys the site where artifacts are found, thus wiping away a page of history forever." Turkey fears that an encyclopedia of history will be wiped out. Since the Neolithic Age, the Anatolian peninsula has been a crossroads of conquerors and civilizations. By official count, it is home to 20,000 monuments, 10,000 tombs, 5,000 mounds that may conceal buried settlements and 3,000 ancient cities belonging to 36 various pre-Turkish cultures. It is a virtual supermarket for antiquities -- and looters take their fill.
"Nowhere in the world can you find such a quantity and variety of ancient art," says Ozgen Acar, a Turkish investigative journalist. In the "open-air museum" that is his homeland, he says, farmers go into hock to buy metal detectors, while Sotheby's and Christie's catalogs "sell better than Korans." One Turkish case, tied up in litigation since 1986, involves the country's claim on the Lydian Hoard, a famous collection of 250 gold and silver wares. New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which bought the pieces, does not acknowledge that they came from Turkey.
Source countries themselves bear some blame. Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Greece, Italy and other nations claim state ownership of all artifacts underground, but cannot afford what they promise to pay for any finds. Says Josephson: "An Egyptian farmer will not report an archaeological find for fear his fields will be confiscated. So he either throws the object away or sells it to a cousin in Cairo." Though a peasant who finds an artifact makes a small fraction of its retail value -- one contraband Cambodian Buddha head on sale in Hong Kong recently carried a $37,000 price tag -- it is better than nothing.
Unidroit, a Rome-based intergovernmental organization, is drafting codes that would harmonize many countries' cultural-property laws and make the UNESCO treaty more acceptable. Interpol and other enforcement agencies are hoping that computer files -- once the many different police computers can talk to one another -- will help further.
Yet the attitude of purchasers to whom the illicit trade panders is not something laws can change. When taxed with blame, art connoisseurs and dealers grow philosophical: they insist that they are rescuing pieces from an uncertain fate, that they are better equipped to maintain and protect much % artwork and that in general, cultural property ought not to recognize frontiers. Lowenthal herself admits, "A heritage is also a splendid ambassador of the country's culture to the rest of the world."