2019/08/15 by Simon Mackenzie, Neil Brodie, Donna Yates +1 · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Medicine · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Policy Transfer and Learning #Science, Research, and Medicine #Economic, financial, and policy analysis
paper · doi:10.4324/9781315532219-8
openalex publication_date 2019/08/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/25
International antiquities protection policy aims to protect cultural heritage sites at source, and to provide mechanisms for the return of trafficked antiquities to their dispossessed owners, often source states. Protection and recovery—and in particular the ‘recovery’ element—stems from the development from the mid twentieth century onwards of attempts by various decolonised countries to reclaim as part of their sovereign identity and cultural self-determination the great volumes of antiquities that had been removed to collections in the west. This chapter proposes some main reasons for this failure. First, the emphasis of policy initiatives on cultural site protection at the source is unrealistic. Second, the reactive nature of policy initiatives means that they come too late to prevent either the establishment of regional looting and trafficking networks, or the massive damage such networks cause to cultural heritage sites. Third, the targeting of policy initiatives at single countries follows developments in media coverage.