Belize: Anti-Looting posters!
On a more positive note Belize, the country that stole my heart and hasn’t given it back, has a new anti-looting campaign going on to pair with the recent signing of a Belize-US cultural property MOU!...
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Heading to Belize for preliminary fieldwork and a call for info
I’m heading to Belize to look into antiquities trafficking. Who who should I speak with? During the month of July I will be in Boston and then Belize conducting (very, very) preliminary fieldwork into...
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Lost cities and looted tombs: Studying artifact smuggling in Belize
On last year’s day of archaeology I was 3700 feet above sea level, studying the looting of Andean churches. This year I am in the Central American jungle conducting fieldwork on artifact smuggling in...
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What we’ve lost: the two stories of the ancient Maya Buenavista vase
In this post I will present two stories about one Maya vase: what we would have thought if the vase was looted and what we know because it was excavated archaeologically. When an artefact is looted its...
View Article“It’s sad because something beautiful was destroyed”: Bus stop story
A story from day one of fieldwork in Belize. I heard this one while waiting for a bus on the Western Highway. I let two busses pass talking to this guy. Paraphrased, names/locations removed, etc. of...
View Article“They will be looking for it!”: Little boy’s story
A story from day 2 in the field. After chatting to some kids about how fast ice melts and the proper way to not be eaten by bears or wolves, a little boy told me this story. He couldn’t have been more...
View Article“This is my livelihood”: cave story from the Maya Mountains
This story comes from a Belizean hostel shareholder who works and lives in central Belize along the Hummingbird Highway surrounded by the cave-filled Maya mountains. I took a Swedish visitor up to a...
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Dance of the Maize God: a beautiful film about the pillaging of the Maya past
Out of the looters trench and on to the computer in less than an hour: a film review from Belize. Halfway through last year I began to move a little bit away from the Andes and started to focus in on...
View ArticleFailures and consequences of antiquities trafficking policy: rethinking...
A taster abstract for one of the journal papers I have “in submission”. Archaeological sites are looted, cultural objects are trafficked, and buyers purchase stolen artefacts. For decades we have known...
View ArticlePreventing Protection: On-the-ground barriers to effective cultural property...
My presentation for the European Association of Archaeologists, Sep 2015. The paper that this presentation represents will be in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Cultural Property.
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