Following Nepal’s 2015 earthquake, there was speculation that sacred art would be looted from the ruins of severely damaged temples due to a breakdown in formal security. Although pillage did not immediately occur, the months following the earthquake have seen the theft of sacred heritage items. As Nepali sacred art remains under threat of theft, we explore the processes by which government intervention can be destructive of the community dynamic that maintains local crime prevention on an informal and unofficial level. Based on fieldwork conducted in Nepal shortly before and after the earthquake, we ask: can situational crime prevention measures, when imposed in a top-down fashion upon communities by state actors, be corrosive of collective efficacy and, therefore, ultimately self-defeating in crime prevention terms? The case of post-quake Nepal seems to suggest that the answer to this question is, in some circumstances, yes.

The antiquities trade is the subject of contentious debate. The anti-trade position stems from a long unquestioned stance within academia that private ownership of antiquities inherently results in archaeological site destruction and the loss of valuable data. However, there is little data to support this notion. It also ignores the enormous contributions to our shared knowledge of the past that have been made through art collecting and museum acquisitions. The narrative that the destruction of ancient sites is directly tied to Western demand for ancient art is overly simplistic. Despite the ongoing destruction in the Middle East and North African region, virtually no artifacts from there have entered the Western trade in recent years. Opportunistic treasure hunting by desperate locals and intentional destruction of ancient objects for religious reasons cannot be curtailed by increased legislation in Western nations. Fetishizing mundane ubiquitous antiquities as sacrosanct objects of great national importance that must be retained within modern borders in a globalized world and demanding criminalization of the legitimate international art trade are counterproductive. In many archaeologically rich countries, antiquities are regarded as items to sell to foreigners at best or sacrilegious objects to be destroyed at worst. The free trade in cultural objects is itself an institution that needs to be protected. An open legitimate trade in antiquities is now more than ever necessary to ensure the preservation and dissemination of worldwide cultural property.

The 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (CSICH) was not intended to have legal repercussions in international trade. Nevertheless, intangible cultural heritage (ICH) may interact with trade regulation under various scenarios. The CSICH “Representative List” inscribes numerous ICH elements with real and potential international commercial aspects and consequent trade law implications. These emergent trade law–ICH regime dynamics require not only some critical reflection (for example, is safeguarding of ICH ultimately dependent on commodification or, at least in some cases, significantly prone to commercial capture?) but also doctrinal legal analysis. This article undertakes a survey of many plausible ICH–trade interactions (generally excluding intellectual property issues), providing an analytical framework with reference to a series of case sketches of selected CSICH inscriptions such as kimjang, beer culture in Belgium, and yoga. These and other cases may indeed raise issues under world trade law, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the General Agreement on Trade in Services, the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, the Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, and subsidies regulation. Trade law may have underestimated the significance of ICH as a growing field. At the same time, ICH law may be developing without thinking through how it is impacted by commercial interests and international trade law.

The most recent opinion in the so-called Kennewick Man or Ancient One (as many American Indians choose to call the skeleton) case by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit unfortunately resurrects some very old and contentious issues in America. Indians mostly view the opinion as one more echo of the same old story of Native American property issues raised in the courts, but they also understand that some implications may be broader. The most direct impact of the opinion is that the Umatilla people will not be allowed to return the Ancient One to the earth, but others could be portents of a larger resurgence of anti-Indian sentiment and scientific colonialism in America. Specifically, though not directly stated as such, the court's opinion supports a notion that archaeological materials are a public heritage, no matter their culture of origin. In addition, by affirming the plaintiffs' position, the court essentially declared archaeologists and associated scientists to be the primary stewards of that heritage, much to the chagrin of many American Indian people. Along the way, the court reinforced the idea that scientifically generated evidence has greater validity than oral tradition in court, outright denying oral tradition's validity and undercutting a major intention of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Worse still, the court reflects—and by its decision supports—an idea that there may be a “white” or European history for the Americas that predates the arrival of Indians. The most damaging and long-term impact is that the decision reinforces fundamentally erroneous definitions and stereotypes about Indians as tribes, which has plagued Indian-white relations for generations.

The experience of the indigenous communities regarding access and benefit sharing under the national regimes based on provisions of Convention on Biological Diversity and Bonn Guidelines has not been satisfactory. The communities expect that noncommercial values should be respected and misappropriation should be prevented. Some academics and civil society groups have suggested that traditional knowledge commons and biocultural protocols will be useful in ensuring that while noncommercial values are respected, access and benefit sharing takes place on conditions that are acceptable to the communities. This proposal is examined in this context in the larger context of access and benefit sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity and implementing prior informed consent principles in access and benefit sharing. This article examines knowledge commons, provides examples from constructed commons in different sectors and situates traditional knowledge commons in the context of debates on commons and public domain. The major shortcomings of traditional commons and bicultural protocol are pointed out, and it is suggested that these are significant initiatives that can be combined with the Nagoya Protocol to fulfill the expectations of indigenous communities.

The debate leading up to the ban on hunting with dogs in England and Wales in 2005 focused on the practical aspects such as the possible economic and social affect and issues of animal welfare. The relationship between hunting and the landscape was not prioritized, nor was it acknowledged that hunting contributed to regional and social identities. This article explores the relationship between hunting and landscape in the “shires” of the East Midlands, where modern hunting developed as part of the radical landscape changes experienced from the late eighteenth century. It examines why hunting is not recognized within national initiatives to map historic landscape character and suggests that the lacunae is the result of established academic agendas, which focus on long-term processes of change, to facilitate the creation of a common European landscape heritage. As a result distinctive regional identities and landscape character are ignored and the modern landscape is depoliticized.

This article analyzes the dichotomy between the practices of the art market and of court judges when it comes to the authentication of works of art. While judges very much rely on experts acting in the art market, they may not necessarily pursue the same examination methods and conclusions, which can have serious repercussions on the art object and for its owner. The dichotomy unavoidably leads to the questions of what the correct assessment is and whether court judges should be conducting such examinations.

Taking account of the difficulties judges and legislators face in attempting to interfere with established art market practices, it is suggested that courts are not an adequate forum to resolve authenticity disputes. Instead, scholars and art market actors should adopt improved authentication standards and, in the event of a dispute, refer to alternative means of dispute resolution.

The return of cultural objects lost as a result of colonial rule is a controversial issue. A common response is: “it was legal at the time” and, therefore, not a legal issue. But is that so? This article argues that it is not a lack of legal norms that explains this belated discussion but, rather, the asymmetrical application of norms. Moreover, a human rights law approach, focusing on the heritage aspect of cultural objects for people today—instead of a sole focus on property title—offers useful tools to structure this field. To illustrate these points, a case concerning an African ancestral sculpture today known as the “Bangwa Queen” will be assessed on its merits under international law. The Bangwa Queen is of spiritual importance to the Bangwa, a people indigenous to the western part of Cameroon. She was taken as part of a collection of so-called lefem figures by German colonizers in 1899 and is currently part of a French museum collection.

Meeting in the historic city of Québec (Canada), from 29 September to 4 October 2008, at the invitation of ICOMOS Canada, on the occasion of the 16th General Assembly of ICOMOS and the celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of the founding of Québec, the participants adopt the following Declaration of principles and recommendations to preserve the spirit of place through the safeguarding of tangible and intangible heritage, which is regarded as an innovative and efficient manner of ensuring sustainable and social development throughout the world.

Cicero's speeches and essays—especially the Verrines—were widely read in France and England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when they were used in public debates about the fate of art in wartime. The early development of the concept of “cultural property” owed much to careful readings and citations of Cicero's views. The main charge brought against Verres in 70 B.C. was extortion during his term as governor of Sicily, but in the course of his prosecution Cicero depicts Verres as a rapacious collector of art who even took cult statues from temples for his private collection. This portrait of a “collector” who felt entitled to anything he could get and who abused his official authority to acquire works of art was recalled and used in debates about “collecting” many centuries later. This paper examines how Ciceronian views contributed to the development of the concept of art as cultural property.

The antiquities catalogues of major auction houses comprise an accessible long-term source of information about the auction market in antiquities and the market in antiquities more generally. The information contained in these catalogues has been used to investigate the nature and scale of the market and to assess the impact of legal and normative measures of market control. But, by way of two case studies, referencing Iraqi and Cambodian material sold at the New York branch of Sotheby’s, this article argues that, while auction catalogues do provide an invaluable source of information for investigating the antiquities market, it can be misleading. Changing material or monetary statistics might reflect commercial factors unrelated to market control. For more reliable research, long-term auction data should be contextualized with information available from other sources.

This article discusses some of the issues regarding the acquisition of art and the different philosophical views of some of the main protagonists regarding the reclaiming of art by nation-states, following American museums' acceptance of the 1970 UNESCO Convention, using examples from the Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The mediation of Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) claims by conservators is often an important component of the dialogue between museums and native communities. The philosophical and art-historical opinions regarding the value of copies and reproductions of works of art have oscillated from promulgation in the 1860s to outright rejection by the 1920s. In a modernist sense, points of view are once again open to reevaluation as host nations demand back more originals than ever before. Arguments against the claims of nationalist-retentionist countries and those advanced in favor of the claims of nation-states regarding the repatriation of their art are discussed. The problems created by looted art in association with the ever-increasing number of fakes is highlighted, with examples of the issues surrounding pre-Columbian art and some classical antiquities. The utility of copies in relation to the protective value of the authentic piece is discussed in the context of museum examples in which the concept of the utilization of copies for museum display has been accepted in certain cases as desirable.

In February 2013 Christos Tsirogiannis linked a fragmentary Athenian red-figured cup from the collection formed by Dietrich von Bothmer, former chairman of Greek and Roman Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, to a tondo in the Villa Giulia, Rome. The Rome fragment was attributed to the Euaion painter. Bothmer had acquired several fragments attributed to this same painter, and some had been donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as to the J. Paul Getty Museum. Other fragments from this hand were acquired by the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Princeton University Art Museum. In January 2012 it was announced that some fragments from the Bothmer collection would be returned to Italy, because they fitted vases that had already been repatriated from North American collections. The Euaion painter fragments are considered against the phenomenon of collecting and donating fractured pots.

In recent years, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)1 as well as several Al-Qaida affiliates have used the systematic and large-scale looting of antiquities as one of their income streams. Due to the large-scale and organized looting activities of these groups, in particular, in Iraq and the Syrian Arab Republic, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), following various reports and recommendations by the ISIL, Al-Qaida and Taliban Monitoring Team has adopted a range of measures, chiefly among them the landmark UNSC Resolution 2347 (2017) to counter this threat. These measures demand that both member states’ regulators as well as private sector stakeholders take specific action to ensure that the art and antiquity trading industry is capable of defending itself against the misuse of their services to finance terrorism. This article outlines the various challenges member states and private industry are facing in this regard and explains how the various new UNSC provisions, including the measures outlined in UNSC Resolution 2347 (2017), could be employed effectively to counter this threat.

Shortly after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Kanan Makiya, a long time Iraqi dissident and professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis University, uncovered a major trove of documents belonging to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and his security forces. The documents proved highly important in reflecting the inner workings of the Baath Party system in his final years in power. Soon after the discovery of the documents, the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), a private Washington, D.C.–based group founded by Makiya, took custody of the records, later depositing them with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University to provide a safe haven for them. The deal ignited immediate international controversy and charges of pillage from some Iraqi officials, archival organizations, scholars, and others who also demanded their immediate return to the Iraq National Library and Archive in Baghdad. On the surface, these charges of theft and plunder appear plausible enough, but on examination, a different and complicated narrative emerges in light of the conventions of war, U.S. law, and the Iraqi penal code, as well as the chain of events surrounding their taking and removal by nonstate actors in the Iraqi theatre of war and occupation.

I want to commend the organizers of the Chacmool Conference panel. All too often attempts to discuss the broader social and cultural dimensions of genetic studies of ancient human migrations devolve into simplistic celebrations or condemnations. It is heartening to find here an example of a conference session that managed to avoid these dangerous poles, and to grapple instead with the hard task of discerning the issues raised and not raised by genomic studies of human migrations and history. I would like to devote my commentary to exploring what might be learned from the discussions at Chacmool.

William St. Clair's article in 8 International Journal of Cultural Property 391-521 (1999) raised questions about the cleaning of the Parthenon marbles in London in the 1930s and about Elgin's so-called bribery of Turkish officials. The latter is here dismissed as normal practice. An account is given of the building and purpose of the Parthenon, its history to the end of the eighteenth century, then of the marbles taken to London and of those left in Athens. The cleaning is judged to have been no more than the comparable treatment of marbles in other museums, though vigorous in places, the intention being to make them intelligible to the visiting public, but resulting in no serious loss of detail or academic value. Finally, a personal viewpoint is given of the purposes for which ancient art is conserved, along with criteria for the optimum place of display for collections of cultural property of more than local importance in human history.

Recent controversies surrounding the Genographic Project, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and IBM, and its predecessors call attention to a need to better understand the broader ethical and practical implications of uses of ancient and contemporary human genetic information, which is today a form of cultural property. Although technological advances continue to facilitate the kinds of information available to researchers, concerns about appropriation and the potential misuse or commodification of human genetic material and the data extracted from it have been raised by a number of stakeholders. Misconceptions and apprehensions about the topic also abound. These issues were addressed in a forum, “Decoding Implications of the Genographic Project,” which we convened at the 39th Annual Chacmool Conference in 2006, “Decolonizing Archaeology.” The purpose of the panel was to explore and discuss some of the salient issues from a range of perspectives, in the hope of moving beyond a polarized debate to generate productive dialogue and delineate further questions about intellectual property, cultural identity, and research ethics. We later solicited seven commentaries on the transcript from a range of scholars, which are included here. Some of the issues addressed by the panelists and commentators include access to samples, permissions for research and analysis, ownership and dissemination of data, and potential consequences of archaeological or historical interpretation of results. The event was co-sponsored by the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage Project (IPinCH) and the World Archaeological Congress.

The preservation of cultural property is never a neutral activity; and the question of who is to possess, care for, and interpret artifacts is highly politically charged. This paper examines how preservation was used as a justification for the removal of pieces of immovable archaeological sites in the early twentieth century, and became a tool for building museum collections. This study focuses on a collection of 12 wall painting fragments from the site of Dunhuang, China, which were removed by art historian Langdon Warner in 1924 for the Fogg Art Museum. The removal process resulted in significant damage to some of the fragments as well as to the site itself, calling into question what is preserved: an intact ancient artifact or an ancient artifact scarred by and embedded with its modern collection history? Using the Harvard collection as an example, I explore the contradictions and legacies of early preservation ethics.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The Harvard University Art Museums generously supported this research through the Baird Fellowship and the Advanced-Level Training Program at the Straus Center for Conservation. I am particularly thankful to Thomas Lentz, Francesca Bewer, and Glenn Gates for their encouragement and advice throughout this study. I thank Abigail Smith, Martha Mahard, and Joanne Bloom Toplyn of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University for providing access to archival documents and photographs. I owe a great debt to the staff of the Straus Center for Conservation, particularly Henry Lie, Craigen Bowen, Kathleen Kennelly, Narayan Khandekar, Anthony Sigel, and former interns Ige Verslype and Scott Homolka. I am grateful to Robert Mowry, Melissa Moy, and Anne Rose Kitagawa of the HUAM Department of Asian Art. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviews of International Journal of Cultural Property, Francesca Bewer, Julie Hollowell, Robert Mowry, and Anand Pandian for their attentive and thoughtful readings of this article.