The American Schools of Oriental Research have received over $2.1 million in grants from the US State Department and National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities, presumably to study ISIS and looting and cultural destruction in Syria and Iraq.
Meanwhile, credible estimates of the amount ISIS is making from illicit antiquities sales range from several hundred thousand to several million dollars.
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A Web Log Championing the Longstanding Interests of Collectors in the Preservation, Study, Display and Enjoyment of Cultural Artifacts Against an "Archaeology Over All" Perspective
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
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About Me
- Cultural Property Observer
- Washington, DC, United States
- Peter Tompa has collected ancient coins for almost 50 years. He has written and lectured about cultural property issues for a decade. He is a contributor to a chapter on numismatics in K. Fitz Gibbon ed., "Who Owns the Past?" (Rutgers 2005). He has lobbied members of the U.S. Congress and the Executive Branch in an effort to ensure that the small businesses of the numismatic trade receive fair treatment from federal regulators. He currently serves as a board member of the Cultural Policy Research Institute and the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild. He also has been a co-chair of the American Bar Association's Art & Cultural Heritage Law Committee. His advocacy has received notice in the media, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Art Newspaper and the Voice of America. He hopes his views as a collector and lawyer will provide a counterpoint to the "archaeology over all" perspective found in most blogs about cultural property issues. This Web page is a public resource for general information and opinion about cultural property issues, and is not intended to be a source for legal advice. Opinions expressed here are the author's own.
1 comment:
Hello Peter:
The UK's Daily Telegraph carried a piece on page 14 of it 3rd March edition, headlined:-
'Isil making £14m a month playing currency markets with looted bank cash.'
Written by Colin Freeman, the DT's Chief Foreign Correspondent, went on to report that:-
"Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant's (Isil) white collar crime is now a major source of income, along with oil smuggling and extortion from people living in Isil-controlled areas."
Oddly, Freeman makes no mention of the alleged vast sums of money Isil makes from selling looted antiquities that some on archaeology's anti-collecting cadre would have us all believe is Isil's financial mainstay.
Even an old cynic like me can't really believe archaeology's anti-collecting lobbyists would stoop to gilding the lily? Would they? Surely not, accuracy is their watchword.
Best regards
John Howland
UK
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