A 2018 workshop on the White Mountain Apache Tribe lands in Arizona examined ways to enhance investigations into cultural property crime (CPC) through applications of rapidly evolving methods from archaeological science. CPC (also looting, graverobbing) refers to unauthorized damage, removal, or trafficking in materials possessing blends of communal, aesthetic, and scientific values. The Fort Apache workshop integrated four generally partitioned domains of CPC expertise: (1) theories of perpetrators’ motivations and methods; (2) recommended practice in sustaining public and community opposition to CPC; (3) tactics and strategies for documenting, investigating, and prosecuting CPC; and (4) forensic sedimentology—uses of biophysical sciences to link sediments from implicated persons and objects to crime scenes. Forensic sedimentology served as the touchstone for dialogues among experts in criminology, archaeological sciences, law enforcement, and heritage stewardship. Field visits to CPC crime scenes and workshop deliberations identified pathways toward integrating CPC theory and practice with forensic sedimentology’s potent battery of analytic methods.

How do archaeologists, governments, law enforcement, and a local non-governmental organization react to a hole in the ground—a hole that is the direct result of archaeological site looting? Whatever the response, the aim is the same: the protection of Jordanian cultural heritage through a curtailing of archaeological looting. New to the standard suite of responses are unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs). A comprehensive approach to the landscape, which includes UAV flyovers, ground truthing, oral interviews, collaborative efforts with the Jordanian Department of Antiquities and local cultural heritage organizations, is essential to safeguarding and documenting what remains of a series of Early Bronze Age sites (3600–2000 bc) along the Dead Sea Plain in Jordan. This is an examination of the (w)hole picture—individual and institutional responses to looters’ holes—diverse reactions with the common goal of preserving and protecting Jordanian cultural heritage.

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.

In the global struggle to protect not-yet-excavated archaeological sites from looting, despite legal strictures, the playing field remains badly tilted against the site guards, customs officials, antiquities police, and prosecutors who lack the financial resources to enforce existing laws. To supplement and give teeth to the strict, but ineffectual, legal regime now in place, economic theory points to a policy solution: a “pollution tax” on antiquities purchased by residents of “market” countries, designed to internalize the social costs of looting so that the industry either takes measures to clean itself up or pays the government to prevent or mitigate the harm the industry causes. Tailored to fall more heavily on antiquities with weaker provenance or extremely high prices, and channeled into an antiquities-protection “superfund” (as was done to clean up toxic chemical sites) or via existing governmental agencies, a Pigovian tax on antiquities could provide a sustainable funding stream for more robust monitoring and enforcement efforts against the illicit market as well as for better site security. Archaeologists and dealers may find the idea of this kind of tax repugnant, but such feelings may be overcome through sustained discussion and negotiation explaining the benefits to both sides of a more licit regulated market.