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Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts

September 18, 2023

Monday, September 18, 2023 - ,, No comments

Looters imperil unknown people's past, 37 years ago and still today.

"Looters imperil unknown people's past."  That was the title of an article written by Barbara Crossette, the Bangkok bureau chief of The New York Times on September 9th 1986.  Her report described the destruction to archeological sites caused by grave diggers operating in the densely forested mountains of western Thailand.  There, subsistence looters had been systematically plundering a wide variety of antiquities, hauling away various grave goods, including high-quality ceramics, some found at  hilltop ring-ditch burial sites that belonged to a then-unknown group of people that defied cataloguing.

Crossette told the New York Time's readership that the area's inhabitants, probably ethnic minorities, like the Karen and other minority groups, shared their remote terrain with smugglers, poachers and opium growers.  She also wrote that looters working the region sold the antiquities they found to foreign dealers who spirited them out of the country, selling the pieces onward to private collectors, including those in Japan. 

See Reference at the
end of this article
Like so many other plundered cultural sites in at-risk and remote locations, circular earthworks in and around Tak Maesot were scarred by extensively pitting. Sketched out on maps, some of the impacted burial sites had the appearance of buttons sewed onto the hillside.

But the damage done by plunderers didn't just strip away treasures.  In addition to the grave goods they stole, looters took with them many of the geological and cultural clues that could have lead us to better understand who left these graves here in the first place.  

What remained in their wake, was only a series of useless pits, scattered with broken and discarded ceramic fragments and the outline of the the graves themselves.  Archaeologists who later explored the sites have since documented that the inhabitants of the past had a vibrant trade in ceramics,  identifying pieces coming from Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese and Chinese production centres.

Unfortunately, so little remained after the thefts, that researchers still remained puzzled as to who the peoples were, who cremated their dead, placing their ashes in urns and interring them in the mountains, accompanied with valuable objects.   All that was known was that this population were likely not Burmese or Chinese, nor Khmer or Thai.  Perhaps even a transitional culture which eventually died out or merged with others from the area.

At the heart of the plunder in this area of Thailand were some 100 burial sites dating from the 12th or 13th century, up through the 16th century CE, scattered along a 60-mile swath of western Thailand between Umphang, on the Myanmar, (then-Burma) border south of Mae Sot, and north to Chiang Mai which contained the inexplicable mixture of Chinese, Thai, Burmese and Vietnamese ceramics, as well as other pottery never documented previously. 

Barbara Crossette, speaking with John Shaw MBE, an expert on Southeast Asian ceramics who lived in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, quoted British-born collector and Honorary Consul to Chiang Ma, John Shaw, who described the area of the new finds as ''beyond the writ of the law' who stated ''It would take the whole Thai Army to protect those hills.'' 

Illegal digging at Som Poi Burial Site, 1984.

Shaw's family website, which highlights artefacts from the region in his collection as well as photographs of local looters, mentions that by September 1984 thousands of ceramic wares believed to have been plundered from this area of Thailand, which then appeared in the antique shops of Bangkok, Sukothai and Chiang Mai.   Shaw recorded Chinese, Lan Na, Sawankalok, Mon and even Vietnamese ceramic objects as the type of material which flowed out of the region.  In an interview with Ray Hern, Shaw mentioned that many pristine examples of superb quality, went directly from the diggers into private hands, only to then be dispersed, largely undocumented, onward. 

This despite Thai antiquities legislation passed in 1961 and a government decree passed in July 1972 making it illegal to buy, sell or export bronze age Ban Chiang pottery.

In February 1985 Shaw states that another batch of freshly looted ceramics surged into the antique market, this time coming from the Mae Tun - Om Goi area further north, showing that as long as there was a demand, there would be regional people to supply the market. 

But why bring a pattern of looting and subsequent fossicking in Thailand that happened 37 years ago?

Earlier this September, Thailand's Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) reported on a collaborative investigation with the country's Department of Fine Arts, which apprehended three individuals involved in present-day illegal excavation and trade of antiquities. The suspects were identified after having advertised their plunder on Facebook.  In a multi-province operation, authorities eventually seized 11 metal detectors, excavation equipment, and nearly 970 items believed to be ancient artefacts during searches conducted this month at nine seperate sites, including, again, one of which was in Chiang Mai.  


Like almost 4 decades ago, authorities have seen a spate of robbery at archeological sites across Northern Thailand, from Sukhothai to Lampang, and from Chiang Rai to Chiang Mai, this time also sold digitally. 

And while these recovered examples of ancient jewellery, coins, and tiny ornaments suitable for someone's mantelpiece may seem relatively harmless when compared to some of the higher profile Thai sculptures being returned from various museums, the cumulative process to seek, loot, and put these materials on the market for consumers is significantly more destructive towards our knowledge of the past than what individuals, and collectors, often perceive.

The times, they are (not) a-changin. 

By Lynda Albertson



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References

Grave, Peter, The ring-ditch burials of Northwestern Thailand and the archaeology of resistance - Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, 3: 61-166, 1997.

Hearn, Ray,  Thai Ceramics, Lao Na and Sawankalok: An Interview with John Shaw, 2000/03.

The Shaw Collection. ‘Tak Hilltop Burial Sites Introduction’. Accessed 18 September 2023. http://www.shawcollection.com/item.php?cid=221.



August 7, 2020

Friday, August 07, 2020 - , No comments

A thanks to our readership on Twitter and Facebook

Five days ago, ARCA's art crime and cultural heritage protection blog began experiencing problems on the Facebook Platform posting to a few key heritage groups where our blog posts were sometimes being censored as spam.  While it took us a while to realize that this was not a technical glitch on the platform itself, by Thursday our blog's URL was totally banned, even from our own Facebook page despite us not having violated the site's Terms of Service.  

This total ban eliminated years of previous post links and information related to the issues surrounding art crimes that we have covered and published on the platform in an effort to increase awareness and build capacity on combatting art and heritage crime. 

Finding it difficult to find a way to engage directly with any sort of "help" department within the social media powerhouse's platform, we sent inquiries through about twenty different channels, each of which gave bot replies thanking us for our concerns but in no way indicating that our messages would be read by a human.   We also reached out to our readership asking our followers to help us get the lights turned back on by echoing our concerns with retweets and by contacting Facebook directly on our behalf.   Hoping that perhaps with external voices of support they would realize we were ok. 

This morning at 09:45 Italy time our access was restored.

In the end, we have no idea what changed Facebook's mind.  We have never received any communication from the social media platform as to why we were censored in the first place, nor did anyone contact us to tell us that our access had been restored but for now it seems we have been white-listed. 

We would like to thank everyone who helped our voice be heard and who banged the drums loud enough that we regained our posting capabilities on the platform. ARCA has been writing articles on art crime and cultural heritage protection for more than 10 years and while we still do not fully understand why we were suddenly censured on Facebook, it seems that everyone's notifications helped get the situation reversed relatively quickly. 

Without your group voice, ARCA's art crime blog would likely still be banned. 

March 3, 2020

Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and now TikTok being used to memorialize cultural heritage crimes

Screenshot of TikTok Video showing unauthorized excavation
In the past few years, and for better or worse, social media has completely rewritten the way the world communicates. As more and more humans, from all walks of life and socioeconomic backgrounds, stare mesmerised by the glowing screen of smartphones, the intersection between social media and art crimes grows unabated, and seemingly unstoppable by traditional law enforcement methods.   The monitoring of social media documented crimes, is most often focused on detecting drug crimes or human trafficking. Taking a bite out of heritage crime seems like a luxury.  Especially in police departments with few, if any, trained resources with experience in this new frontier. 

While mainstream social media networks have explicit rules on the kind of content they permit, criminal actors change profiles like most of us change our underwear.  Today's Igor becomes tomorrow's Ahmed, or better still, a sexy brunette named Elisabetta. This ability to morph into another avatar allows criminals to reach would-be "consumers" continents away simply with the tap of a finger and an endless supply of well-curated, high-definition pictures or tantalizing videos.

Facebook groups can and are being created where the privacy settings are such that only the group’s members are aware of the group's existence, and joining is monitored by gatekeeper administrators.  Entrances are granted by invitation or by screening, which sometimes makes monitoring them a game of whack-a-mole.

Open for business, those breaking the law are able to hide in plain sight, advertising their illegal wares directly via an ever-changing parade of profiles which post videos, photos and statuses onto social media feeds or via ‘stories’ , documenting the illicit objects they have available, sometimes with proof of life details.  Once a potential buyer is identified, the conversations quickly switch to DM, (direct messaging), or move off site altogether to encrypted chat applications.

Take a look at this February video downloaded from the app TikTok. 


To highlight the growing problem, and how these images can incentivise copycat crimes, the Turkish archaeology magazine Aktüel Arkeoloji Dergisi published this video, sent to them by one of their readers.  In the live broadcast, uploaded to the social media platform TikTok, a team of unauthorized scavengers can be seen excavating an entire sarcophagus with the help of heavy machinery.

What can social media sites do as a deterrence? 

In an effort to combat drug crimes and make sales videos harder to find, TikTok bans popular drug hashtags like #cocaine, #methamphetamine #heroin, but often misses the ever changing street slang terms associated with their use.   A quick search of more subtle hashtags like, #blues, #kickers, #40, #80, when strung together with other key words, lead you to posts advertising OxyContin and not blues musicians or football players.  Hashtags for treasure hunting, using words like lahit mezar which are language or dialect specific are even harder for sites to screen for.

TikTok is said to now be used in 150 countries and is labelled in the app store as being for those aged 12 and over.  The 16 second video above already had more than one million views before anyone could raise a red flag.

By:  Lynda Albertson