As described above, since the nineteenth century, most countries have placed their archaeological heritage under some kind of legislative definition and control. International laws designed to inhibit the illegal movement of antiquities have been developing in parallel. At first, this international effort was responding to the plunder and destruction of art and other cultural objects during wartime, and in 1954 it culminated in the Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and its First Protocol. A Second Protocol was added in 1999. By September 2006, the Hague Convention had been signed and ratified by 116 countries, though only 42 had acceded to the Second Protocol.
The problems posed to archaeological heritage by the illicit trade in peacetime were also causing concern and in 1970 UNESCO adopted the Convention on the Means of Preventing and Prohibiting the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. This convention makes provision for intergovernmental action to control the trade, and by September 2006 it had been signed and ratified by 110 countries. Articles 7b(ii) and 9 of the UNESCO Convention were implemented in the United States as the 1983 Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act (CCPIA or CPIA). Under this act, the United States can reach agreement with a second country to place import restrictions on specific categories of cultural material which are thought to be in danger of pillage. In September 2006, the United States had bilateral agreements with 12 countries.
The 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen and Illegally Exported Cultural Objects rectified some of the perceived shortcomings of the 1970 UNESCO Convention. In 2001, in response to the increasing exploitation of deepwater shipwrecks, UNESCO adopted the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, which offers protection to submerged landscapes as well as to shipwrecks and other sunken objects.
Unfortunately, these national and international laws have seemed powerless to prevent the continuing expansion of the trade in illicit antiquities, and the associated archaeological destruction has grown worse (which is not to say that it would not have grown worse still without legislation). There are two reasons for this apparent failure of legislative regulation. One reason is poor subscription to the relevant international conventions. So although the United States set a good example when it ratified the 1970 UNESCO Convention in 1983, it was nearly 20 years before other major market countries followed suit. The United Kingdom and Japan did not become parties until 2002, and Switzerland until 2003. By 2006, neither the United States nor the United Kingdom had ratified the Hague Convention or its Protocols (although the United Kingdom had announced its intention to do so), and neither country was intending to accede to the 1995 Unidroit Convention nor to the 2001 UNESCO Convention on underwater heritage.
The second and perhaps most important reason for the failure of regulation is that the relevant national and international laws are poorly enforced. International attention focuses on the illegal trades in drugs, arms, and, recently, people. At the national level, health, education, and security are usually more pressing priorities than heritage preservation, particularly in the developing world where most archaeological looting takes place (see Historic Preservation Laws).
There is also disagreement about what should be the fundamental philosophy of protective legislation. Although there is a general consensus that the antiquities trade as presently constituted is inequitable and causing irreversible harm to the archaeological heritage, there is considerable dispute about how best to resolve the problem, whether by placing the trade under what might be characterized as ‘weak regulation’, or under ‘strong regulation’. Proponents of weak regulation, who term their perspective ‘cultural internationalism’, argue that, with the exception of a limited number of exceptional or otherwise significant pieces, most antiquities should be freely available for international trade. Free trade would increase the amount of material in circulation, thereby improving public access, and profits could be used to protect important archaeological sites. The strong regulation perspective is that a free market does not assure an equitable circulation of cultural objects, nor does it increase public access. Instead, it causes a flow of antiquities into a limited number of acquiring communities - internationalism is a serious misnomer. Free trade would not be sustainable, and any money generated would need to pay for oversight of the regulatory regime, none would ‘trickle down’ to site protection. In effect, the debate is about whether the conservation of archaeological heritage would be favored more by public (strong regulation) or by private (weak regulation) ownership. In the absence of any reliable comparative statistics of site damage in public and private jurisdictions, and with only a few quantitative studies of market composition, it is hard to decide.
World History
