Tim Harford: Ending the black market in stolen antiquities
[Tim Harford is a columnist for the Financial Times. His latest book is The Undercover Economist.]
I am writing this column in one of my favorite London haunts—the Great Court of the British Museum. I've just been to see one of the museum's most famous and controversial exhibits, the Parthenon Sculptures—also known as the Elgin Marbles <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles>; . These carvings were removed from the Acropolis in Athens more than 200 years ago by the Earl of Elgin. But while there's a predictably long-running argument over where the carvings rightfully belong, the trade in antiquities is very much alive today.
This trade is almost inevitable. In a poor country, such as Mali or Cambodia, foreigners are likely to be willing to pay more for artifacts than the locals would. The logic of the market would pull the choicest objects into foreign collections and foreign museums. Many see this as undesirable, and so most countries maintain some form of ban on trading antiquities.
But such bans have some unpleasant side effects. They replace the logic of the market with the logic of the black market, which means that smugglers would try to conceal the locations of new archaeological sites, to erase or forge the historical record surrounding objects, and to excavate and ship objects without the care that could be lavished on an operation that was legal. Beyond these purely archaeological considerations, illegal objects are less likely to end up in the top museums and may be relegated to purely private collections, which is in itself a shame. It's enough to make an archaeologist weep—and an economist, too....
Read entire article at Slate Explainer
I am writing this column in one of my favorite London haunts—the Great Court of the British Museum. I've just been to see one of the museum's most famous and controversial exhibits, the Parthenon Sculptures—also known as the Elgin Marbles <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles>; . These carvings were removed from the Acropolis in Athens more than 200 years ago by the Earl of Elgin. But while there's a predictably long-running argument over where the carvings rightfully belong, the trade in antiquities is very much alive today.
This trade is almost inevitable. In a poor country, such as Mali or Cambodia, foreigners are likely to be willing to pay more for artifacts than the locals would. The logic of the market would pull the choicest objects into foreign collections and foreign museums. Many see this as undesirable, and so most countries maintain some form of ban on trading antiquities.
But such bans have some unpleasant side effects. They replace the logic of the market with the logic of the black market, which means that smugglers would try to conceal the locations of new archaeological sites, to erase or forge the historical record surrounding objects, and to excavate and ship objects without the care that could be lavished on an operation that was legal. Beyond these purely archaeological considerations, illegal objects are less likely to end up in the top museums and may be relegated to purely private collections, which is in itself a shame. It's enough to make an archaeologist weep—and an economist, too....