News

Donna Yates will be presenting two public seminars this week.

On Thursday 2 October, Neil Brodie will be at UNESCO in Paris attending the 19th session of the Intergovernmental Committee For Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation, where he will be presenting a paper entitled ‘Internet Sales of Cultural Objects’.

Trafficking Culture’s Affiliate Researcher Tess Davis is organizing the Second Annual Cultural Heritage Seminar of the Federal Bar Association that will take place in New Orleans on 2nd October, 2014 (from 9:00 a.m. to 4:40 p.m.). The theme of the seminar will be: ‘Spoils of War: Plunder and Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the Pacific Theater of World War II’. The event will...

Trafficking Culture’s PhD student Jessica Dietzler will participate in the 42nd Annual Conference of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, organised in Liverpool from 3rd – 6th September, 2014. The theme of the conference will be: ‘Resisting the Demonisation of ‘the Other’: State, Nationalism and Social Control in a Time of...

Results of research by several members of the Trafficking Culture Project have been picked up in several news outlets recently: Cổ vật ở Campuchia bị đánh cắp bởi tội phạm liên quan với quân đội  (30 June 2014) Sur la trace des pilleurs d’Angkor (Le Monde, 1 July 2014) Glasgow University uncovers relic looting networks (The Scotsman 1 July 2014) Losing Maya Heritage to...

Project affiliate Tess Davis will be giving a talk entitled “Looted Cambodian Antiquities: The Case of the Duryodhana Statue and Sotheby’s” on 7 August 2014 at the American Chamber of Commerce in Phenom Penh. Please email admin@amchamcambodia.net to RSVP.

Donna Yates will be in Belize until 29 July conducting preliminary research on the looting and trafficking of Maya antiquities. We hope this will be the start of a fruitful partnership with Belize on this topic. Today she leaves Belmopan for the San Ignacio area and plans to spend much of next week in the northern part of the country near Orange Walk Town and along the Mexican border. You can...

At the end of June, Simon Mackenzie attended the annual conference held by ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, in Amelia, Italy, to receive the 2014 Eleanor and Anthony Vallombroso Award for Excellence in Art Crime Scholarship. In accepting the award, Simon thanked the rest of the Trafficking Culture team for their invaluable work towards making the project a success. The...

In a post for the 2014 Day of Archaeology titled “Lost cities and looted tombs: Studying artifact smuggling in Belize” Donna discusses conducting fieldwork on antiquities trafficking in Central America. According to their website, “The Day of Archaeology project aims to provide a window into the daily lives of archaeologists from all over the world.  The project asks people...

Neil Brodie will be in Paris on 3 and 4 July at a meeting hosted by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) to discuss its major new initiative International Observatory on Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods (http://obs-traffic.museum/) aimed at monitoring the traffic and promoting appropriate normative standards.

The  Association for Research into Crimes against Art based in Amelia, Italy is hosting its 6th annual interdisciplinary Art Crime conference on 28 and 29 June 2014. The full programme is here. Christos Tsirogiannis will be chairing Panel 2, which is entitled ‘The Many Faces of the Illegal Heritage Trade’.

Simon Mackenzie and Tess Davis‘ latest article is available, free to access for a limited period, via the British Journal of Criminology website. Temple Looting in Cambodia: Anatomy of a Statue Trafficking Network Abstract: Qualitative empirical studies of the illicit antiquities trade have tended to focus either on the supply end, through interviews with looters, or on the demand...

We are excited to have been profiled in the article: New Evidence Ties Illegal Antiquities Trade to Terrorism, Violent Crime Trafficking culture would like to thank reporter Heather Pringle for her hard work on this piece.

The University of Kent is hosting a conference entitled: ‘New Approaches to Heritage Ethics: Interdisciplinary conversations on Heritage, Crime, Conflicts and Rights’ on 23 and 24 of June. The full programme is attached. Christos Tsirogiannis will present a paper titled ‘Looted, smuggled and stolen antiquities identified in auction houses: what have we learned in the last eight...

Professor Simon Mackenzie and Tess Davis, an Affiliate Researcher in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Glasgow featured in a video on Boston University website. The video presents Tess’s account of her career in researching illicit traffic of antiquities from Cambodia. http://www.bu.edu/today/2014/returning-duryodhana/

Tess Davis, an Affiliate Researcher in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Glasgow, has been featured in several media outlets for her expertise in illicit antiquities from SE Asia, her views on what should be done to protect Egypt’s cultural heritage and the latest developments in US legislation surrounding cultural property: Theft of Buddha relics...

Welcome to Dr Christos Tsirogiannis who has joined the Trafficking Culture project as Research Assistant on May 26th.

The Art-Law Centre at the University of Geneva is hosting the first ‘All Art and Cultural Heritage Law Conference’

Simon Mackenzie, Neil Brodie, Donna Yates, project affiliate Tess Davis and friend/project veteran Suzie Thomas are presenting at a symposium on Saturday afternoon entitled Trafficking in Cultural Objects. Chaired by Donna Yates, the symposium also features papers by Patty Gerstenblith as well as Richard Leventhal, Brian Daniels and Sasha Renninger.

Donna spoke on Good Morning Scotland this morning about the global illicit trade in antiquities.