Art Research: Art Crime/Theft

Cultural property and its stewardship have long been concerns of museums, archaeologists, art historians, and nations, but recently the legal and political consequences of collecting antiquities have also attracted broad media attention. This has been the result, in part, of several high-profile trials, as well as demands by various governments for the return of antiquities to their countries of origin. These circumstances call out for public discussion that moves beyond the rather clear-cut moral response to looting, to consider the implications of buying, selling, and exhibiting antiquities.

This volume from the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) Press examines the impact of looting and the use of artifacts of unknown provenance in the humanities and social sciences, ranging from the impact of amnesty laws for reporting stolen cultural property to the use of Google Earth to assess the scale of illicit excavations, and from the impact of poorly sourced artifacts on early Mycenaean and Minoan studies to the structure of the growing commercial trade in ancient coins.

First comprehensive study of Italy's "art police", an organisation devoted to protecting cultural artefacts. Renowned for their rigorous investigative approach, the dedicated officers of the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Property (Carabinieri TPC) have recovered thousands of objects and built legal cases resulting inhigh profile repatriations of cultural property.

In 1980, an antique print dealer was going broke from competition and lack of supply. Then he discovered all the high-quality antique prints he could ever want--for free--on the shelves of American university libraries. Torn from Their Bindings tells the story of Robert Kindred's brazen theft of irreplaceable antique illustrations and maps from academic libraries across the country--a crime spree that left the irredeemable wreck of countless rare books in its wake.