Archaeological looting

Archaeological looting is the illicit removal of artifacts from an archaeological site. Such looting is the major source of artifacts for the antiquities market. Looting typically involves either the illegal exportation of artifacts from their country of origin or the domestic distribution of looted goods.

Quotes

• The unsettled political conditions apparently encouraged clandestine diggings, and it seems that the ancient Bactrian region, centred in the Oxus valley which lies to the north of the Hindukush range, has been a good source of trade in illicit antiquities. In fact, the looted Bactrian graves, or rather, their antiquities surfacing in the western market, have been the major factor behind the postulate of an Oxus Civilization from the second half of the third millennium BC to about the middle of the second millennium BC.
  • Dilip K. Chakrabarti - Archaeology in the Third World, A History of Indian Archaeology Since 1947. (2003)

• The national museum in Kabul which was inaugurated in 1924 and the most important repository of the excavated material from Afghanistan, has been systematically looted. To put this looting in its proper perspective we have to consider some recent events of Afghan political history. The Soviet troops were in Kabul in 1979 to protect the pro-Communist government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. In late 1988 or early 1989 these troops went back to Russia, after fighting a losing war against the Afghan rebel groups or the Mujahideen who were liberally supported by Pakistan and the USA. The Islamic State of Afghanistan was established in April 1992, but there was no love lost among the rival factions of the Mujahideen. Kabul witnessed considerable fighting, and in the ensuing chaos the museum was looted, perhaps on several occasions. In an article (museum under siege’) in Archaeology in 1996 Nancy Dupree (1996), a well-known American scholar on Afghanistan, offered a list of the important looted material. This amounts to about 70 per cent of the museum’s material comprising most of its vast gold and silver coin collections, stone statuaries and ivories and also the famous Islamic metalwork of the Ghaznavid dynasty.
  • Dilip K. Chakrabarti - Archaeology in the Third World, A History of Indian Archaeology Since 1947. (2003)

• Dupree’s analysis clearly suggests that ‘the museum was not plundered by rampaging gangs of illiterate Mujahideen’.
  The looters in 1993 were discriminating in what they took and apparently had both the time and the knowledge to select the most attractive, saleable pieces. For example, they removed from wooden display mounts only the central figures (depicting voluptuous ladies standing in doorways) of the delicate Begram ivory carvings. It is also telling that although some 2000 books and journals remain in the library, volumes with illustrations of the museum's best pieces are missing.
  • —Nancy Dupree 1996 : 46 quoted in Dilip K. Chakrabarti - Archaeology in the Third World, A History of Indian Archaeology Since 1947. (2003) [1]

• While I have seen a few museum pieces for sale in Afghanistan, there are a number of artifacts on the market that have recently been dug up in Afghanistan. Mujaheedin commanders in all parts of the country are involved in this illicit activity, most notably in the east near the Hadda museum. An important Buddhist pilgrimage site in the second through seventh centuries, Hadda has been totally stripped of its exquisite clay sculptures in the Gandhara style, which combines Bactrian, Greco-Roman, and Indian elements. Looted artifacts from Faryab and Balkh provinces in the north allegedly include jewel- encrusted golden crowns and statues, orbs (locally described as ‘soccer balls’) studded with emeralds and all manner of exotic ephemera, as well as fluted marble columns similar to those found at Ai Khanoum in the northeastern province of Takhar. These are being carted away to embellish the houses of the newly powerful, according to witnesses.
  • Nancy Dupree, 1996, quoted in Dilip K. Chakrabarti - Archaeology in the Third World, A History of Indian Archaeology Since 1947. (2003) [2]

• You have to remember that the items that have been stolen from the Museum or have been plundered, are not owned by only one person and usually not only by Afghans. It is usually one or two Afghans with five or six Pakistani partners. And the underground stolen art business in Pakistan is just as well organised and it is just as dangerous as the drug business. In fact, I have heard some people say that as far as the end-result is concerned, it’s even more profitable than drugs.
  • Nancy Dupree 2000 quoted in Dilip K. Chakrabarti - Archaeology in the Third World, A History of Indian Archaeology Since 1947. (2003) [3]