News

Dr Donna Yates will be participating in this event hosted by the UNESCO Chair on Business Integrity and Crime Prevention in the Art and Antiquities Market to be held at the Palazzo Visconti in Milan on 30 September 2024. Donna will speak in the session "Codes of Conduct, Codes of Ethics and other Soft-Law tools in Cultural Heritage Area". More...

Dr Donna Yates will be participating in The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum's

The Limassol-based Eratosthenes Centre of Excellence (ECoE) received a full mark score of 15/15 for REVITALISER project, securing a budget of €1,500,00. The REVITALISER project, titled “Preventive Protection of Archaeological Sites in the EMMENA Region,” is positioned to lead the fight against illegal excavations and protect cultural heritage using remote sensing, AI, and space-born technologies, it has garnered recognition for...

Dr Donna Yates will give a keynote speech on 30 January 2024 at event titled "Dialogue with the art market"  organised by the European Commission. The event is taking place during BRAFA Art Fair. The European Commission is organising this event to strengthen the collaboration between actors in the art market, EU institutions and governments to protect cultural heritage and...

Diāna Bērziņa was part on an expert panel focusing on monitoring compliance with art market regulations at a conference “la vente illégale sur le marché de l’art” organised by Anthemis which took place on 24 October.

On 2 November Dr Donna Yates gave a presentation titled “Crime in Collections: Patterns, Priorities, and Hidden Knowledge” at a conference “The Market for Latin American Antiquities” organised by co-organized by the Centro Latinoamericano-Suizo de la Universidad de San Gallen, the Museum der Kulturen Basel and Musée d’ethnographie Neuchâtel. The conference brought together comparative provenance research that examines the role...

Dr Donna Yates will give a talk at

Dr Donna Yates will give a keynote at the German

Dr Emiline Smith appeared on PODS by PEI podcast

Article “How a Stolen Nepali Statue Found Its Way Home” written by Dr Emiline Smith has been published on Hyperallergic.  “A long-lost Vajradhara sculpture that resurfaced in a Hong Kong collection highlights scholars’ responsibility to mediate between communities and the art market,” writes Smith. Read the full article here: https://hyperallergic.com/821240/how-stolen-nepali-statue-found-its-way-home/

The NWO-funded PRICELESS project is seeking two researchers to complete fully-funded PhDs at Maastricht University in the Netherlands The first PhD is in the field of criminology and will focus on value manipulation in markets for ultra high-value watches. It will be supervised by Trafficking Culture’s Donna Yates and Professor Rachel Pownall. The call for applicants is available here: https://www.academictransfer.com/en/329986/phd-candidate-financial-crime-and-the-valuation-of-unique-goods-priceless/ The second...

Diāna Bērziņa will present her current research on affective atmosphere in art fairs at ’White-collar and organisational crime: New ideas, directions, and perspectives’ workshop, taking place in Manchester on 6-7 July. The workshop is organised by The Manchester Organisational Non-compliance Initiative (MONI) and will focus on discussing new ideas, perspectives and directions in the study of white-collar and organisational or corporate...

Dr Donna Yates will be one of the panellists at the webinar on money laundering and terrorist financing in the art and antiquities market organised by the FATF. The webinar will take place on 5 July and will be conducted in English, in Zoom format.  To register and view more information about the event, visit https://www.fatf-gafi.org/en/topics/methods-and-trends/Webinar-ml-tf-art-antiquities.html

Dr Donna Yates will give a keynote address titled “T. Rex is Fierce, T. Rex is Charismatic, T. Rex is Litigious: Desire and Disruptive Objects in Affective Lawscapes” at Law and Popular Culture V Roundtable at Faculty of Law, Maastricht University. The event will take place in-person on 23 June at the Faculty of Law building. The Roundtable wants to...

Professor Shawn Graham and his team worked alongside Dr Donna Yates to design a machine-learning model that helps researchers to uncover previously unknown possible connections by using known, established facts about the illegal antiquities trade. Read all about their work here: https://carleton.ca/fass/story/connecting-the-digital-dots/

Dr Donna Yates will participate in Round Table 'Science Diplomacy: As a tool for tackling cultural property illicit trafficking', May 25 and 26, 2023. The event aims to foster greater understanding about the links and possibilities of interaction between Science Diplomacy and scientific research, in relation to the illicit trafficking of cultural goods, by providing a variety of perspectives. Live...

Dr Donna Yates is speaking at a regional conference on use of AML/CFT in Investigation of Art & Antiquities Criminality in Mexico. Conference is taking place from 9–11 May, 2023 in Mexico City, Mexico. The Conference aims to strengthen the capacity of the public and private sectors to share information, exchange best practices, identify problems and create solutions to this...

Donna Yates was featured in the New York Times article “For U.S. Museums With Looted Art, the Indiana Jones Era Is Over”. Full article can be read here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/arts/museums-looted-art-repatriation.html

New book titled Art Crime in Context edited by Naomi Oosterman and Donna Yates is out now! "This book brings together empirical and theoretical case-study research on art and heritage crime. Drawn from a diverse group of researchers and professionals, the work presented explores contemporary conceptualisations of art crime within broader contexts. In this volume, we see ‘art’ in its...

Dr Donna Yates was participate in public lecture series "RES(T)ITUIEREN: Provenienz, Sammlung, Verantwortung" (RES(T)ITUTE: provenance, collection, responsibility)  by kgi. Dr Yates will give a lecture titled "Provenance Beyond Objects: New directions and other criminal flows in the global illicit antiquities trade" on 2nd of November. Lecture series will take place: from November 2nd, 2022 to February 8th, 2023 on Wednesdays,...

Diāna Bērziņa will speak at 28th EAA Annual Meeting in Budapest, Hungary, 31 August – 3 September 2022. Bērziņa will participate in session #237 Protecting the Past Is the Key to the Future: Rights of Archaeological Heritage Stakeholders and Social Justice taking place on 2 September, 2022. Full programme and more details are available here: https://www.e-a-a.org/EAA2022/Programme.aspx?WebsiteKey=13a70299-9cf2-4cc8-98c2-2862c5c6a8dd&hkey=01dc47f6-68bd-4d87-bcdf-183a7eb484d2&Program=3#Program

Dr Donna Yates will teach at Summer School: Contested Heritage and the Role of Provenance Research, taking place from 29 Aug to 1 Sep 2022 at the Leiden University Campus, the Netherlands. The summer school will focus on contested cultural objects and the role of provenance research.The programme is curated by Dr. Evelien Campfens (Leiden University) and Dr. Naomi Oosterman...

Dr Donna Yates will speak at Foro Rumbo a Mondiacult 2022 conference taking place from 8 to 10 August 2022. Dr Yates will participate in session titled "Tráfico Ilícito: búsqueda de una nueva ética mundial". For more details on the talks and speakers, have a look at the attached programme.

Dr Donna Yates will give an in-person talk "Illicit Antiquities: A Global Criminal Market" at Shaikh Ebrahim bin Mohammed Al Khalifa Center for Culture & Research, Kingdom of Bahrain  on 30th of May, 2022. For more details, please visit: https://shaikhebrahimcenter.org/en/event/illicit-antiquities-a-global-criminal-market/#

Dr Emiline Smith was interviewed on NewsFirst Sri Lanka. Dr Smith talked about looting, illegal export, and protection of Sri Lanka’s cultural heritage. The full interview is available on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9AMrBXxpd4 

Article “The Ongoing Looting of Sri Lanka’s Cultural Heritage” written by Dr Emiline Smith has been published on Hyperallergic. “Artifacts stolen from the Kotawehera Rajamaha temple in Sri Lanka are the latest victims of longstanding looting and trafficking,” writes Smith.  Read the full article here: https://hyperallergic.com/716524/the-ongoing-looting-of-sri-lankas-cultural-heritage/

Dr Donna Yates wrote a piece titled "Violence as a Value Enhancer in the Art Market" for the Social Science Research Council's "Where Heritage Meets Violence" series. In this piece, Dr Yates look at the market for Pacific cultural heritage: The sale of heritage from the Pacific is entangled with colonial narratives that sensationalize cultures of the region—especially through narratives...

Neil Brodie and Donna Yates gave a keynote presentation titled “Money Laundering and Antiquities” at UNESCO/EU Workshop on the Role of the Financial Sector in the Fight against Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property, which took place online on 27 January 2022. The workshop brought together leading experts and professionals in the field. Lecturers, researchers, representatives of the European Central Bank,...

Dr Donna Yates made an appearance on "What Are Museums For" podcast by Fitzwilliam Museum, Colnaghi Foundation and Athena Art Foundation. Dr Yates appeared on episode 4 titled "Restitution". Fitzwilliam Museum Director Luke Syson and Athena Art Foundation Director Nicola Jennings talk with Professor Nicholas Thomas and Dr Donna Yates about institutional and community authority in the context of historical...

Neil Brodie and Donna Yates will give a keynote presentation titled "Money Laundering and Antiquities" at UNESCO/EU Workshop on the Role of the Financial Sector in the Fight against Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property, which will take place online on 27 January 2022. The workshop will bring together leading experts and professionals in the field. Lecturers, researchers, representatives of the...

Dr Donna Yates will give a lecture titled “The antiquities trade: Defining a grey market?” at online summer school Cross Border Transfer of Cultural Objects: the Law, Challenges, and Practice.  The summer school will take place online from 23 – 26 August 2021. The programme is curated by Evelien Campfens (Leiden University) and Naomi Oosterman (Erasmus University Rotterdam). “The Centre...

Dr Donna Yates will participate in roundtable Session #376. “Expanding Horizons: Decolonisation, Contested Ownership of Archaeological Material, and the 1970 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property” at the 2021 annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists. The session will be held entirely online and will take place at 14:30 – 17:30 CEST, 8 September 2021. The content of the session:...

The European Research Council-funded “Trafficking Transformations” project is hosting an online conference “The Power of Things: Understanding relationships between objects and crime. The conference will take place on 6 May 2021. This conference takes an “object-focused” approach to understanding aspects of crime and crime prevention. The goal of this conference is to bring discussion of the roles, influences, and power...

Dr Donna Yates will be one of the key speakers at an introductory webinar “Criminal networks trafficking antiquities: can we disrupt the market ?” organised by EU AML/CFT Global Facility. This webinar is the first of a series of regional events where international experts and law enforcement agencies will discuss approaches to disrupting criminal networks involved in trafficking antiquities. The...

Stumbling Towards Repatriation: We need to make it clear to our museums that we do not want to walk around in galleries of stolen artworks by Erin L. Thompson and Emiline Smith has been published on Hyperallergic. Read the full article here: https://hyperallergic.com/628195/stumbling-towards-repatriation/

Dr Donna Yates will be speaking at virtual Study Forum (6 Feb) organised by Institute of Art & Law. This forum will provide an opportunity to hear about some of the fascinating issues and recent developments in the art and cultural heritage law field. Topics discussed will include: Art contracts, Copyright, Looting and art theft, Brexit/ EU-UK Trade Agreement, Cultural property. The...

Dr Donna Yates and Dr Pierre Losson are presenting at a conference “Global Provenance” organised by the University of Bern, the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève, the Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel and the Palais de Rumine. The conference will take place over multiple days, Dr Yates and Dr Losson will speaking on 2 February. Their talk is titled ““Demuseumification” and the return of...

Dr Donna Yates and Brieanah Gouveia of King Kamehameha V Judiciary History Center will be speaking at a 2-day international online conference (28 and 29 January) organised by Leiden University. Donna Yates and Brieanah Gouveia will be giving talk titled ‘Provenance narratives of colonial exploitation as value enhancers on the Oceanic art market’. This interdisciplinary conference aspires to bring together (post-)colonial historians, legal historians, curators, international lawyers, and...

Dr Donna Yates is one of the people teaching at a certificate course “Art Law and Its Security Dimensions” (28th to 30th January) organised by Directorate of Extension and Distance Learning, Rashtriya Raksha University. Rashtriya Raksha University is a pioneering national security and police university of India. This 3-day course will introduce students to advance problems in Art Law and the way...

Congratulations to Dr Emiline Smith who has been awarded a Scottish Funding Council GCRF grant for the project ‘Art, Feathers & Crime: New Approaches to Studying Natural and Cultural Heritage Trafficking in Indonesia’. Together with Dr Chloe Heys (Staffordshire University), Dr Tular Sudarmadi (Gadjah Mada University), Dr Adam Miller (Planet Indonesia) and Dr Panggah Ardiyansyah (Borobudur Conservation Office), this project combines zoological and...

Dr Donna Yates will be speaking at a 2-day international online conference (24 and 25 Nov) organised by National Heritage Board of Latvia. Dr Yates will be giving talk titled ‘Regulating the “Grey” Antiquities Market: what works, what doesn’t and a way forward’. The event will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Prohibition and Prevention of the...

Dr Donna Yates will be speaking at a three-day online conference (16 to 18 Nov) hosted by the Federal Foreign Office in cooperation with UNESCO, the European Union and the Council of Europe. Dr Yates will be part of an expert online panel speaking on Mechanisms in fighting the trafficking in cultural property on day 2 of the conference. The full programme of the...

Simon Mackenzie’s book Transnational Criminology: Trafficking and Global Criminal Markets has been published by Bristol University Press! The book is available here (including 20% discount) https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/transnational-criminology This pioneering study looks across key trafficking crimes to develop a social theory of transnational criminal markets. These include human trafficking, drug dealing, and black markets in wildlife, diamonds, guns and antiquities.The author offers...

Contribute to our Online Conference and Edited Volume

Dr Donna Yates and Dr Naomi Oosterman of Erasmus University Rotterdam are seeking contributions for an edited volume to be submitted for Springer’s “Studies in Art, Heritage, Law, and the Market” series.

Dr Donna Yates will be joining the V&A’s Vernon Rapley and Christie’s Dennis Ahern on a live expert online panel hosted by the Antiquities Coalition. The topic of discussion will be how the COVID-19 pandemic will effect security and crime at museums and cultural sites. The event will take place at 11am EDT on 17 June and all are invited to...

Dr Neil Brodie will be presenting an online lecture for the Oxford Archaeological Society. The lecture, entitled “Illicit culture contact? The case of the Hobby Lobby cuneiform tablets” will be held at 16:00 BST on 2 June. Those wishing to attend the lecture online are asked to RSVP at: https://www.oxfordarchaeologicalsociety.com/event-info/illicit-culture-contact-the-case-of-the-hobby-lobby-cuneiform-tablets

As part of the public conference ”Violated National Heritage: Theft, Traffic & Restitution”, Dr Christos Tsirogiannis will be speaking about recent restitutions of cultural property to Greece. “This conference is aimed not only at students but also art world and museum professionals, indeed at anyone interested to hear the latest information, much of which is unpublished, and to learn more about the...

Dr. Emiline Smith has been featured in an article in the Kathmandu Post about her work on antiquities trafficking in Nepal and Myanmar. The article is available here: https://kathmandupost.com/20/2020/03/04/everyone-i-ve-talked-to-here-has-a-story-about-art-theft (click here for archive link)

Drs Neil Brodie and Donna Yates will be speaking at a conference hosted by the Croatian Presidency of the Council of the European Union and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia. They will discuss the results of their recent European Commission-funded report focused on the illicit trafficking of antiquities in Europe. More details about the event are...

Join several members of Trafficking Culture on their new project, Trafficking Transformations, based at Maastricht University. This is a 3 year, full time position to assist in project research. More info here: http://www.anonymousswisscollector.com/2020/02/junior-researcher-wanted-trafficking-transformations-objects-as-agents-in-transnational-criminal-networks-project.html Application deadline: 22 March 2020 Contact Donna Yates with questions

Dr Yates has been appointed as an Associate Professor in Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Maastricht. Maastricht will serve as a base for her new European Research Council-funded research project, Trafficking Transformations. She can be reached at her new email address: d.yates@maastrichtuniversity.nl.

As part of her visit to the University of West Florida, Dr Donna Yates will be participating in the  UWF Downtown Lecture Series. Her talk is free and open to the public and will be held at the Museum of Commerce on Thursday, 21 November starting at 7pm (reception starts at 5:30). More details are available here: https://uwf.edu/cassh/community-outreach/experience-uwf-downtown-lecture-series/ Her talk: "Stolen...

Dr Smith will be presenting a paper entitled “In search of excitement and sensation: participating in the global illicit cultural property trade”. More information available here: https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/asc/asc19/index.php?program_focus=view_paper&selected_paper_id=1546503&cmd=online_program_direct_link&sub_action=online_program In search of excitement and sensation: participating in the global illicit cultural property trade The trade in art and antiquities, so-called cultural property, is a global, multibillion-dollar illicit trade, and often categorized as a...

Dr Brodie will be presenting the results of the recently-completed EU Study on trafficking of cultural goods in Europe. More details are available here: https://www.coe.int/en/web/culture-and-heritage/act-for-heritage- The event is being organised by the Commissioner for Volunteerism and Non-Governmental Organisations of the Republic of Cyprus, in co-operation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cyprus, the Council of Europe and the European Union....

On Thursday 17 October Dr Yates will be in Brussels presenting recommendations for regulating the market for antiquities beyond import and export controls. More information about the Commission expert group on the return of cultural objects under Directive 2014/60/EU can be found here: https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regexpert/index.cfm?do=groupDetail.groupDetail&groupID=3204

The Trafficking Culture book has been published by Routledge! The product of years of our research, we are looking forward to feedback and discussion about it. More details are available here: /publications/trafficking-culture-book/ …including a limited time discount code for 20% off the list price. Trafficking Culture outlines current research and thinking on the illicit market in antiquities. It moves along...

As part of an Erasmus+ Mobility Grant, Dr Emiline Smith will be teaching at Hong Kong University from 27 September until 11 October. She will also be giving two public lectures: “Chasing the Unicorn”: The Seduction of Trading lllicit Antiquities (4PM, 2 October, Hong Kong University) and Illicit Trade in the Global City: The Roots and Routes of the Illicit...

Congratulations to Dr Emiline Smith who has been awarded a grant for the project “Global synchronization and the illicit antiquities trade: understanding community crime prevention in post-earthquake Nepal and Myanmar” from the Scottish Funding Council’s Global Challenges Research Fund scheme. Together with Phacharaphorn Phanomvan na Ayudhya (Oxford University), Myanmar Archaeological Association and ICOMOS Nepal, this project will compare local community-based...

We are happy to announce that the new book, The Market for Mesoamerica: Reflections on the Sale of Pre-Columbian Antiquities, co-edited by our Donna Yates and Dr Cara Tremain is now available through the University Press of Florida. You can order the book here: http://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813056449 Use discount code AU719 before 31 July for 50% off the list price.   The Market for...

Dr Emiline Smith spoke at the Asian Criminological Society Annual Meeting, held in Cebu from 23–26 June, which was themed ‘Contextualizing Challenges in Criminology and Criminal Justice in Asia’ (see http://www.11thacsannualconference.com/). The very successful conference was attended by over 200 participants. Speakers represented a wide variety of emerging research originating from and focusing on Asia. Emiline was part of the...

Professor Simon Mackenzie will be speaking at and serving as resource person for Sub-regional Executive Symposium for Ministerial Officials on International Cooperation to Protect Cultural Properties and Curriculum and Methodology Review Meeting, from 10 to 14 June 2019 in Bangkok, Thailand. This symposium, designed by UNESCO, aims to create a high-level network of decision makers in this area across 6 countries...

On January 4, 2019 in San Diego, California, at the 140th Annual Meeting of the Council of the Archaeological Institute of America, Dr Neil Brodie was elected as a Corresponding Member of the AIA for achieving eminence as one of the leading researchers in the field of cultural heritage protection and the trade in antiquities. For more details, see: https://www.archaeological.org/about/corresponding Congratulations Neil!

Dr Neil Brodie will be speaking at UN House, in Mishref, Kuwait, as part of a “national capacity building and awareness raising programme” targeting experts in the field of culture. Dr Brodie’s talk is entitled “Understanding the international market in illicit cultural objects”. Further information, including the programme for the event, is available here: /uploads/2019/02/Illicit-Traffic-Capacity-Building-workshop-programme-Kuwait.pdf  

Brodie’s talk, entitled “The structure and organisation of the antiquities trade: results of some recent research”, will form part of “Fighting the Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property”, a training workshop hosed by UNESCO and the EU for European judiciary and law enforcement. Event attendance is by invitation only. More information about speakers at this event is available here: programme-workshop-fighting-the-illicit-trafficking-of-cultural-property

Part-time, teaching-focused position funded for at least 5 years!

For the next few months, Dr Christos Tsirogiannis will be in Denmark at Aarhus University. There he will be visiting as Associate Professor in the Museum of Ancient Art and Archaeology, within the School of Culture and Society.

The talk, titled “Ancient Art and Modern Crime: How Stolen Antiquities End Up In Our Most Respected Museums”, will be part of Carlton University’s Shannon Lecture Series. All are invited to attend this free lecture in room 252 of Carleton University’s MacOdrum Library at 2:30p.m. A reception will follow. For more information: https://events.carleton.ca/shannon-lecture-with-donna-yates-ancient-art-and-modern-crime-how-stolen-antiquities-end-up-in-our-most-respected-museums/ Ancient Art and Modern Crime: How Stolen Antiquities End...

For the project “Trafficking transformations: objects as agents in transnational criminal networks”

We are pleased to announce that Emiline Smith has passed her PhD viva with flying colours. Emiline’s dissertation, entitled “Illicit Markets in the Global City: The Cultural Property Trade in Hong Kong”, is the product of a year of dedicated fieldwork on the movement of cultural objects through the region. Her work expands upon the idea of Hong Kong as...

With partner Ecorys, Neil Brodie and Donna Yates have been selected to complete European Commission EAC/06/2017 “Improving Knowledge on Illicit Trade in Cultural Goods in the EU”.

Dr Christos Tsirogiannis will be speaking at the McDonal Lunchtime Seminar Series at the University of Cambridge’s McDonald Institute of Archaeology. The title of his talk is “Recent Developments in Illicit Antiquities Research” and it will take place on Wednesday, 17 January 2018, 13.15 pm in the McDonald Institute Seminar Room, Courtyard Building, Downing Site.

“Radiocarbon dating and protection of cultural heritage” has been organized by ETH Zurich and University of Geneva, with a support of the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Commission for UNESCO, Bern. Yates will be speaking about the antiquities market as a “grey market” with a special focus on how the actions of professionals and experts supports and facilitates illegal...

Prof. Mackenzie’s talk is entitled Policing white-collar crime and organised crime in international markets in trafficked cultural objects. The public lecture will be held on Monday 6 November from 7 to 8:30pm. More information is available from the Criminology Department at Wilfred Laurier University. An abstract for the talk is below: This talk will consider the challenges of policing the illicit...

Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis’ work has been featured on The History Channel’s website: In August 2004, Christos Tsirogiannis got a message that would change his life. Would he be interested in accompanying the Athens police on a raid? It might not seem like a job for an archaeologist, but police told him they might need his expertise once they got there....

Organised by Professor Duncan Chappell, Dr Saskia Hufnagel, and Ms Marissa Marjos, this is the third of three AHRC-funded Art Crime focused workshops, the first two of which were in London and were great. This workshop specifically focuses on the looting, plunder, and destruction of heritage. Yates will be be providing a regional case study: trafficking of antiquities in and out...

The theme of this year’s ARA conference is ‘Challenge the Past, Set the Agenda’. Dr Brodie’s keynote, held on 1 Sept from 9:30 to 10:20 am, is entitled: “Scholarly Engagement with Unprovenanced Ancient Manuscripts”: There is increasing concern in the UK and Republic of Ireland about the risk of theft, destruction or illicit disposal of cultural heritage, though much of...

Full story featured in The New York Times

Donna spoke about the “red flags” that were ignored by the purchaser of thousands of Iraqi artefacts. Both the audio of the interview and a written version can be found here: https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-07-06/hobby-lobby-ignored-red-flags-about-stolen-iraqi-artifacts

Donna’s presentation is titled “Sacred Security: Threat, Vulnerability, and the Protection of Sacred Art in Nepal”, and is based on a soon-to-be published paper co-authored with Simon Mackenzie. The workshop is free to attend, with registration available via this link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/workshop-on-disadvantage-tickets-35343002873 More information about the workshop: 6th and 7th July 2017 Fore Hall, Main Building, University of Glasgow This workshop focuses on ‘Disadvantage’...

Organized Crime along “One Belt - One Road” was hosted by the City University of Hong Kong.

The symposium and WCOM project is funded by the University of Helsinki Future Fund.

“Museum-Goers Beware: That Ancient Artifact May Be Stolen”

Join our Neil Brodie as he explores the Maya site of La Corona, Guatemala, a heavily looted ancient city which may be the mysterious Site Q. 

Neil Brodie will be in Providence, Rhode Island, today to speak at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology at Brown University. His talk is entitled: The Theft and Trafficking of Cultural Objects from Syria, and it is part of a year-long lecture series called ”Combating Crisis: New Responses to Cultural Heritage Preservation in the Middle East” sponsored by the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology,...

Simon will be giving a talk titled “Cultural Capitalism and Cross-Border Crime: International Trafficking in Cultural Objects”

This session at the 82nd annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology meeting.

His talk is entitled “The Global trafficking in Looted Cultural Objects and he will be joined by a collection of experts in this field. Although the symposium, hosted by The National Museums of World Culture, Sweden and the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO, is free and open to all, attendants must register before 23 March. For more information about the...

The Conference on the Ethics of Acquiring Cultural Heritage Objects is hosted by the Mudd Centre for Ethics.

Thanks to Dr Tsirogiannis’ work, a trafficked sarcophagus fragment is returning to Greece.

As part of the Cambridge History of Art Research Seminar series.

Neil Brodie will be spending January and February working with Lebanese NGO Biladi to offer a training course on international law and law enforcement as regards the theft and illegal trade of cultural objects. The primary aim of the course is to improve understanding among Lebanese and Syrian culture heritage professionals about the evidential and procedural requirements of European and...

Donna Yates is guest editing a special issue of the International Criminal Justice Review focused on the intersections of criminology and the security and protection of heritage. Submissions must be received before 31 August 2017. Feel free to contact Dr Yates with questions, ideas, and abstracts. The call for papers flier is available here: http://icj.sagepub.com/site/misc/ICJR_CFP_Oct2016.pdf International Criminal Justice Review (ICJR) invites submissions for a special...

“Antiquities trafficking - 21st century developments” is the title of Dr Brodie’s lecture.

Yates will be speaking in a session titled: Nation Builders or Breakers? Combatting the Looting and Destruction of Cultural Heritage. Also on this panel will be: Noora Al-Gailani, Curator of Islamic Civilizations, Glasgow Museums Robert Bewly, Project Director, Endangered Archaeology in Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA), Oxford Stephen Stenning, Director, Cultutre and Development, British Council The session will be...

The show will be broadcast live from 10am, and can be downloaded afterwards.

The Anthropology Dept at Michigan State University

Hosted by the Faculty of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Conference will involve academics, legal practitioners, the Hong Kong Police Force, Interpol and US Homeland Security. For full conference details and to register, please visit http://webapp1.law.cuhk.edu.hk/2016conference/1022/conf/index.php Mackenzie and Smith’s papers are: Temple looting and statue trafficking in Southeast Asia: the craft and the industry by Simon Mackenzie Based...

Dr. Neil Brodie will be in South Korea

Dr Tsirogiannis’ talk will present the main members of a trafficking network dealing in looted and smuggled antiquities, contra the 1970 UNESCO convention and will highlight connections between dealers, auction houses, private collectors and museums. Dr. Tsirogiannis will also make use of photographic evidence from confiscated archives of illicit antiquities dealers why antiquities should be repatriated and dealers and museum...

Neil Brodie will be at UNESCO addressing

Donna Yates will be at the Twentieth 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 (ICPRCP) which will take place at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on 29–30 September.  Working and Information documents related to this meeting are available on the website of the...

This exciting new course is his course is open to the public.

We’re excited that Antiquities Trafficking and Art Crime, a free online course developed by some of the members of the Trafficking Culture team, will have its 3rd run in October.

We are proud to announce that Neil Brodie has been appointed Senior Research Fellow on the Endangered Archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project at the University of Oxford. Supported by the Arcadia Fund, the EAMENA project is recording and responding to the increasing threats to archaeological sites in the Middle East and North Africa.

On 8 September, Neil Brodie will be attending the Second Culture Under Threat Regional Conference in Amman, Jordan. Hosted by the Government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, with support from the Antiquities Coalition and the Middle East Institute, the conference will launch the Middle East and North African Task Force, to take concrete steps to combat the trafficking of...

The Symposium will bring together leading academics and researchers for an innovative and ground-breaking one-day Symposium, covering many aspects of art crime both in New Zealand and beyond, at the City Gallery in the heart of Wellington. You can find out more about the Art Crime Symposium here. You can register for the Art Crime Symposium here.

Hong Kong’s first international art crime conference, Simon Mackenzie will be speaking at “Art, Antiquities, Heritage and Wildlife Crime in Southeast Asia”.

Her fellow panalists include Dr Maamoun Abdulkarim, Director General of Antiquities and Museums in Syria and Juliana Forero, external advisor for WHITRAP - World Heritage Institute of Training and Research for the Asia and the Pacific region, under the auspices of UNESCO. The panel will consider whether preserving cultural heritage is always a good thing. Does an exploration of the past always...

Congradulations Donna!

Donna Yates, along with Cara Tremain, are organising a session at the upcoming Society for American Archaeology meeting in Vancouver, with an eye towards a subsequent journal special issue or edited volume. If you would like to submit an abstract to the call below, please email it to either Cara or Donna before 20 August 2016. The Pre-Columbian Antiquities Market:...

Hosted by University College London

Hosted by the Univeristy of Geneva’s Art-Law Centre and the UNESCO Chair in the International Law of the Protection of Cultural Heritage.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and held at Queen Mary University.

Under the festival theme “Fragile Heritage”

His course is titled: Unravelling the Hidden Market of Illicit Antiquities: Lessons from Greece and Italy, and takes place in Amelia, Italy.

Neil Brodie,  Benjamin Isakhan, and Toby Dodge as they discuss the destruction of cultural heritage and the looting and illicit trade of objects from Iraq and Syria. The talk will reflect on the use of both to further political aims and ideologies, in particular reference to ISIS and other groups involved, as well as give context to the contemporary conflicts in...

Dr. Tsirogiannis has been appointed as a Senior Archaeologist at the Cambridge Archaeological Unit. Congratulations Christos!

Featuring members of Trafficking Culture.

Dr Brodie’s talk is entitled “Theft of Culture”.

US State Department’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee will meet on 24 May

Entitled: 20 years of Forensic Archaeology vs. the international illicit antiquities network

Dr Christos Tsirogiannis was selected by the Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, Lord Colin Renfrew,

Co-hosted by The V & A Museum and Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage.

The team will be in Paris on 30 March

Fair and Just Practices: Art and heritage worlds from the perspectives of markets and law

The Trafficking Culture Project was initially conceived of as a 4-year academic research project funded by the European Research Council.

We are pleased to announce that we have developed a free online course on Antiquities Trafficking and Art Crime.

Our researcher Neil Brodie has started a blog for expert commentary on the looting, trafficking, and sale of illicit antiquities. Please have a look at: Market of Mass Destruction: Commentary and opinion on the illicit trade in cultural objects  

The paid internship, which must be filled by a current University of Glasgow SPSS PhD student, will be from 4 to 8 hours per week up to 90 hours total.

The Hunterian Museum and the Trafficking Culture Project will be screening the film Dance of the Maize God by Night Fire Films. Dance of the Maize God explores the destruction to Maya archaeological sites at the hands of looters searching for beautiful, valuable pottery. Donna Yates and Simon Mackenzie will also be there to discuss antiquities trafficking and the Maya...

As part of the Dialogues in Heritage Science series, Donna Yates will be speaking at Yale University’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage. Her talk is entitled: Tracking Stolen Gods: Using criminological tools to prevent antiquities trafficking. The lecture will be at the Sterling Memorial Library, Memorabilia Lecture Hall, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut at 3pm on 24 November....

Roundtable and session on criminology and antiquities trafficking.

“Toward a Framework for Critical Engagement with Crime Control Policy in Trafficking Cultural Objects” will be presented by Simon Mackenzie, Neil Brodie, and Donna Yates. This public talk, hosted by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society is associated with the project The Past for Sale: New Approaches to the Study of Archaeological Looting The talk will be from 12:00...

Simon Mackenzie, Neil Brodie, and Donna Yates will be speaking at the DePaul University Arts Law Colloquium, hosted by the Center for Art, Museum & Cultural Heritage Law and the Center for Intellectual Property Law & Information Technology. Their talk, entitled Organized and White-Collar Crime in Trafficking Networks, will explore the illicit market in cultural objects from end to end:...

As part of the Trafficking Culture exhibition at the Hunterian Museum, Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis will be giving a lunchtime “Insight Talk” at 1pm. All are welcome to attend. Christos will discuss the exhibition, the illicit trade in antiquities, and in particular his work identifying looted antiquities for sale in the international market. In addition, Christos will be giving a longer...

Along with other “leading archaeological and political figures”, Drs. Brodie and Yates were invited to Lancaster House in London for discussion hosted by the Department for Culture, Media, & Sport as well as the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. On the agenda was the formation of a new cultural property protection fund administered by the UK Government. Dr. Brodie made the...

Nevşehir, Turkey from 18 to 22 October.

“Antiquities Trafficking and Art Crime” will run for three weeks starting on 1 Feb 2016.

Held at the Kelvingrove Museum, Donna’s lecture is part of the Explorathon’s Museums Unlocked event.

The Trafficking Culture Society is pleased to announce it’s Fall 2015 seminar series, which will explore how students and researchers from art history, museum studies, archaeology, criminology, and law, both at Glasgow and within the wider world, are affected by issues of looting, trafficking, collection, and exhibition of illicit cultural and art objects. How do these issues affect you and...

The members of the Trafficking Culture project will be presenting a number of papers at the European Association of Archaeologists Meeting in Glasgow on 3 Sept.

Annemiek Rhebergen, Emily Bushhold, and Matiana Gallegos will be presenting their research at Histories of Archaeology Research Network (HARN) conference in Glasgow on 1 September. Annemiek’s paper is entitled: “And they never came back” - Historical practices and current local views on archaeological work in Northwest Argentina Emily and Matiana, both current criminology masters students with Trafficking Culture, will be...

The event, hosted by Kathmandu Metropolitan City and ImPACT! Productions, will take place at the Nepal Tourism board at 10:30 until noon. The talk is entitled: Stolen Gods: Criminological Approaches to the Illicit Trade in Antiquities from the Trafficking Culture Project Donna will present an overview of international illicit trade in antiquities from source to market. Using case studies from...

Jessica Dietzler was invited by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies to participate as a roundtable discussant in ‘Fighting Terrorist financing: the threat from Cultural Destruction and ISIS’. Discussion focussed on the need for new security strategies and international action to prevent extremism and its funding through the destruction of cultural heritage. The...

Project researcher Donna Yates will be in Kathmandu from 9 until 19 July to observe heritage site security measures following the country’s April earthquake.Yates will be learning from stakeholders, officials, and NGOs about their work on heritage protection. This is part of her greater focus on the theft, trafficking, and sale of Sacred Art. Donna welcomes contact from anyone in...

Members of the Trafficking Culture Team will be attending The Association for Research into Crimes against Art  (ARCA) Interdisciplinary Art Crime Conference from 27 until 29 June in Amelia Italy. Their presentations are titled: “Perspectives on Crime and Crime Control Policy from the Trafficking Culture Project” Neil Brodie, Simon Mackenzie, and Donna Yates   “Discovering and Visualising the Criminological Value...

Neil Brodie, Donna Yates, and Emiline Smith will be presenting at the Art & Law: Art in Peril Interdisciplinary Conference being held at Pembroke College, Cambridge, on 22 and 23 June. They will be speaking in the “Lines that Divide” session. Emiline’s paper is entitled Cross-Border Cultural Property Crime in Hong Kong. Neil and Donna’s paper is entitled Cultural Property...

Neil Brodie and Donna Yates will be attending the 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in San Francisco from 15 until 19 April. We will be chairing a multidisciplinary session from 8am to 10:15am on Saturday, 18 April in room “Golden Gate 4”. All conference attendees are invited and we look forward to an interesting discussion. Investigating...

Trafficking Culture is pleased to announce a new section of our website. Tracking Illicit Antiquities will present brief case studies of the identification and return of illicit cultural objects identified in the seized photographic archives of convicted antiquities smugglers and dealers. Stemming from the work of our research Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis, this evidence is offered here to assist researchers and...

Emiline Smith will present ‘Cross-Border Cultural Property Trade in Hong Kong’

Neil Brodie will be delivering the keynote lecture at a conference entitled Archaeological Looting: Realities and Possibilities for New Policy Approaches to be held at the University of Chicago. Dr. Brodie will be speaking on Cultural Property Protection Policy Failure in Syria. The conference will be held on Friday, February 27 and Saturday, February 28 at the Regenstein Library, Room...

Neil Brodie will be speaking alongside a panel of experts on the antiquities trafficking and protection situation in Syria in an free and public event put on by the Council for British Research in the Levant. The event is free but attendees must register here: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/syrian-heritage-in-crisis-tickets-14895445679   Time: Friday, 16 January 2015 from 13:30 to 17:00 (GMT) Location: The British...

Neil Brodie will be presenting at the international conference ‘Unmasking Ideology: the Vocabulary and Symbols of Colonial Archaeology’. The paper will be entitled ‘Cultural Internationalism or Cultural Colonialism? The Case of the Benin Bronzes and Ivories’ and will be given at the Harn Museum of Art Classroom at 14:00. The conference will take place from 8 until 11 January 2015....

Following the identification and withdrawal of the rare Sardinian idol in Christie’s, Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis, Research Assistant in Trafficking Culture, identified from convicted dealers’ photographic archives three more antiquities in Christie’s and one in Sotheby’s due to be auctioned in New York. In Christie’s, an Egyptian alabaster figural jug (lot 51), estimated at $150,000 -$250,000 and a Roman marble column...

Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis, Research Assistant in Trafficking Culture, on Friday 21 November identified in the photograph archive of a dealer in illicit antiquities a rare marble Sardinian idol, due to be auctioned by Christie's as lot 85 in their antiquities auction in New York on 11 December. The idol was the most expensive object in the auction, estimated at $800,000-1,200,000...

Neil Brodie will be giving the evening lecture at the international conference ‘Cultural Heritage in Danger: Illicit excavations and trade’. The lecture will be entitled “Transnational Organised Crime and the Antiquities Trade” and will be given in the Rotunda of the Altes Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The conference will take place in Berlin, on 11 and 12 December 2014....

We are pleased to announce the publication of a Special Issue of the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research edited by Simon Mackenzie and Neil Brodie: EJCPR: Special Issue on Trafficking Cultural Objects Volume 20, Issue 4, December 2014 Trafficking Cultural Objects: Introduction By Neil Brodie and Simon Mackenzie Provenance and Price: Autoregulation of the Antiquities Market? By Neil...

Simon Mackenzie and Donna Yates will be in San Francisco this week to present at the American Society of Criminology meeting. On Thursday 20 Nov, Simon and Donna will present papers in a session entitled “Art and Antiquities Trafficking”. Simon’s paper, written with Tess Davis and Blythe Bowman, is called “The Global Illicit Antiquities Trade as Economic Crime”. Donna’s is...

Neil Brodie will be presenting and Donna Yates will serve as a discussant at “To publish or not to publish? A multidisciplinary approach to the politics, ethics and economics of ancient artefacts”

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'....

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 Crisis’. Jessica’s talk will...

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)...

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...

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...

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 working,...

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 years?’

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...

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.

Neil Brodie will be in Amsterdam to give two lectures during the first week in April.

Are you interested in joining a dynamic, international, interdisciplinary research team? Trafficking Culture have a vacancy for a Research Assistant or Research Associate. The role is full time, funded until 31 January 2016. Further details, including the main duties and responsibilities, and the knowledge and qualification requirements, can be found via the University of Glasgow vacancies, by searching in the...

Trafficking Culture’s Simon Mackenzie has recently published a couple of articles on the trafficking of cultural objects in French and British media. In Alternatives Internationales, he has an article titled Pas de plan de vol pour le trafic d’objets d’art (‘No flight plan for traffic of works of art’). Meanwhile, in The Conversation, an article titled ‘While Elgin Marbles debate...

On Friday 7th February, Suzie Thomas is presenting a networked seminar as part of the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) Archaeology Seminar Series. The seminar, taking place from 1pm until 2pm, is titled ‘Understanding the international trade in trafficked cultural objects’. Suzie’s presentation will be broadcast via Video Conferencing at the following UHI locations: Orkney College, Kirkwall, Shetland...

The University of Geneva, in partnership with UNESCO, is holding an international conference on 13 and 14 June 2014. The conference, ‘convening all those engaged in research and teaching in the field of Art and Cultural Heritage Law’, includes a session chaired by Simon Mackenzie. The session is titled ‘Beyond the Law: Fighting Illicit Traffic in the Field’, welcoming papers...

Today the Trafficking Culture team teach their first seminar in the new Masters course ‘International Trafficking in Cultural Objects’. The ten-week course, with sessions from Neil Brodie, Simon Mackenzie, Suzie Thomas and Donna Yates, also features sessions led by Dr Christa Roodt, who is a Lecturer in Art Law and Business at the University of Glasgow. The course is offered primarily...

A new book has just been published by Vita e Pensiero in Milan, titled Beni culturali e sistema penale (Cultural heritage and the criminal justice system). The book, with chapters in both English and Italian, features a chapter co-authored by Neil Brodie, Jessica Dietzler and Simon Mackenzie, titled “Trafficking in cultural objects: an empirical overview”. The publication is edited by...

Suzie Thomas is speaking at the “Current Trends in Archaeological Heritage Preservation: The National and the International Perspectives” conference in Iaşi, Romania.

On 24 October, Neil Brodie will be in Ancient Olympia offering a keynote lecture at the Third International Conference of Experts on the Return of Cultural Property, organised by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, which takes place from 23-27 October. Neil will be talking about the role of auction houses in the illicit trade of cultural objects.

Trafficking Culture Research Associate Suzie Thomas will be giving the opening lecture at Archaeology Scotland’s Annual General Meeting this year. On Saturday 12 October, the Scotland-wide archaeological charity hold their AGM at the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art in Glasgow. Suzie’s presentation, titled “Trafficking Culture - Global Research at a Scottish University” is an opportunity to hear...

Donna Yates is travelling to Vienna today to present at a training session hosted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Donna will be leading discussion about cultural property issues in a workshop on emerging crime. She will discuss the ways criminals circumvent the existing cultural property regulatory framework and are able to sell illegally-acquired cultural products on...

The Trafficking Culture team are delighted to welcome three new PhD candidates. The three are carrying out research that connects to the overall themes of the Trafficking Culture project, and so will be working closely with the various team members during their time at Glasgow. Meg Lambert starts a PhD having previously studied for a MRes in Criminology at Glasgow...

For the past month Donna Yates has been in La Paz, Bolivia, conducting preliminary research into the looting of Andean churches and the trafficking of cultural property from these often-remote buildings. In 2013 alone there have been six major church robberies in Bolivia. Most troubling to Bolivians was the April 2013 robbery of the silver and gold embellishments of the...

Trafficking Culture’s Senior Research Fellow Neil Brodie has written a piece for SAFE - Saving Antiquities for Everyone

On Friday, 26th of July, Donna Yates and Suzie Thomas both contributed to the Day of Archaeology. The Day of Archaeology project, which began in 2011 and is run by volunteers, aims to provide a window onto the daily lives of archaeologists from all over the world. The project asks people working, studying or volunteering in the archaeological world to participate by recording...

Neil Brodie will be in Paris on 4 and 5 July at a meeting hosted by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) to discuss the the illicit traffic in cultural objects. It marks the launch of a major new initiative by ICOM on behalf on the international museums’ community aimed at monitoring the traffic and promoting appropriate normative standards. More...

Donna Yates met with a delegation from Bolivia’s Asamblea Legislativa Plurinacional in Edinburgh yesterday. The Senators and Deputies, who are on an official visit to the UK, were touring Scotland and were keen to hear about  Donna’s previous and upcoming fieldwork in their country. A big ‘Thank You’ the Bolivian Embassy and the Bolivia Information Forum for organising the event and to the representatives for some...

Trafficking Culture Researcher Tess Davis attended the official repatriation ceremony for two 10th century Khmer masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Kingdom of Cambodia. This took place on 16 June at the opening of the 37th session of the World Heritage Committee, which is now being held in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. The museum announced that it...

Last week, the Guardian’s University Guide 2014 placed Sociology at the University of Glasgow first in Scotland and second in the whole of the UK in its Sociology league table. The league table, published by the Guardian newspaper, is based on feedback and satisfaction levels from undergraduate students. League tables were compiled for all the major subject areas taught at universities in the UK. For Sociology, Glasgow...

A chapter by Donna Yates appears in a new book released this month by the Oxford University Press.

Trafficking Culture PhD researcher Jessica Dietzler is going to be a guest speaker at the ‘NYU-London Seminar: Art Crime Today–Fakes, Forgeries, and Stolen Art’. The course, run by New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, runs from 17th to 21st June. Jessica’s presentation, on the work of Trafficking Culture and an overview of research into the international traffic...

Neil Brodie is once again returning to the Cyclades to conduct archaeological survey work on the uninhabited island of Keros. This is follow-up work stemming from excavations conducted with Cambridge University’s Keros Project, which is led by Trafficking Culture friend Colin Renfrew. It is a continuation of fieldwork carried out on Keros over several seasons, including last summer. This year, Neil will be participating...

On 30th May Suzie Thomas will give the keynote lecture at the Contactdagen voor Belgische en Nederlandse Archeologen en Bouwhistorici (BNA), an annual conference held alternately in Belgium and the Netherlands. A key issue for debate this year is that of hobbyist metal detecting and its interaction with archaeological sites, especially in light of proposed changes to legislation in the Belgian region...

Trafficking Culture has been given permission to disseminate two images captured using Google Earth showing Apamea in Syria. 

Neil Brodie and Donna Yates are both speaking at the forthcoming conference, “The past for sale? New Perspectives on the Economic Entanglements of Cultural Heritage”, taking place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Center for Heritage and Society, May 15-17. Donna presents a paper titled “Sticks v. Stones: A Comparative Discussion of the Commericialization and Regulation of Palaeontological and Archaeological Material”,...

This summer, Tess Davis will lead Tulane University law students to the Southeast Asian Kingdom of Cambodia, where they will work to study and combat the illicit antiquities trade. In recent years, looters have have decimated Cambodia’s archaeological heritage in search of buried treasures to sell on the global art market.  The trafficking of these artefacts has developed into a criminal industry that...

Simon Mackenzie, Neil Brodie and Jessica Dietzler are all giving papers at the forthcoming conference “Vulnerability and Cultural Heritage I: heritage crime, illicit trade, stewardship and ethics”, to be held at the University of Leicester, UK, on Thursday 9th and Friday 10th May. On the 9th of May Neil talks about “Provenance and price: The invisible hand of the antiquities market?”, and Simon talks about...

In early 2013 Belize’s Institute of Archaeology, a division of the National Institute of Culture and History (NICH) launched an anti-looting campaign and were kind enough to share two of their posters with us. We are very interested in popular media campaigns against looting and look forward to sharing more examples from around the world. The posters are available in the Data section of...

We have a new addition to our social media! In an effort to reach a wider audience of students, scholars, and the general public, we will now be sharing entries from our encyclopedia on the official Trafficking Culture Tumblr: traffickingculture.tumblr.com You can expect bi-weekly updates, as well news and reblogs of related objects and issues. If you're on Tumblr, be sure...

Neil Brodie will give a talk on the trade in looted antiquities in Liverpool on 25 April.  The talk will be at 6:30pm at Cafe 17, 17 Hatton Garden, L3 2HA. All are welcome to attend.

The Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, in which Trafficking Culture is based, recommences its Working Lunch series of seminars next week. These are a regular opportunity, usually on Wednesdays between 12.30 and 2pm, at the Meeting Room, Ivy Lodge, 63 Gibson Street, Glasgow. The Working Lunches offer an opportunity to hear about and discuss current criminological research from...

On Monday 22nd April, Suzie Thomas talks about her research for Trafficking Culture at the Nordic TAG conference, hosted by the University of Iceland, Reykjavik. In the session, ‘Behind the (Iron) Curtain: Looking back on Soviet Archaeology’, Suzie speaks last, discussing ‘The trafficking of cultural objects in post-Soviet Russia’, drawing on her recent qualitative and literature research. On Tuesday 23rd April she...

We are pleased to report that the Bolivian Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) will be serving as the host institution for the duration of Donna Yates’ Fulbright-funded field research. We believe that this will be a mutually beneficial partnership and look forward to interesting results. Donna will be conducting fieldwork on the impact of national and international...

As part of the University of Helsinki’s Chair of Archaeology Speaker Series ‘Archaeological Encounters’, Suzie Thomas is giving a public lecture on Wednesday 27th March. The abstract for her talk, titled ‘Trafficking Culture: Measuring the global traffic in cultural objects’ is: ‘Trafficking Culture’ aims to produce an evidence-based picture of the contemporary global trade in looted cultural objects. This research programme is...

Suzie Thomas and Stuart Campbell, a Friend of Trafficking Culture, have co-edited a special issue of the online peer-reviewed journal Internet Archaelogy.

On 27 February 2013 in Washington, DC, Trafficking Culture Researcher Tess Davis testified before the Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC) at the US Department of State. Davis spoke in support of the proposed second extension of the Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Government of the United States of America Concerning the Imposition of Import...

Neil Brodie is contributing to a day school in London on Saturday 23 March.

Trafficking Culture Research Associate Suzie Thomas is going to be in Finland for a month from this coming Monday. She will be based as a Visiting Fellow at the Department pf Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies at the University of Helsinki, and as well as building links with university colleagues, she will be spending time interviewing numerous different actors...

New Data has been added to the website, with an opportunity to hear Simon Mackenzie’s presentation from the ’Prevention and fight against illicit trafficking in cultural property, the national and international dimension’ conference. The talk was delivered on 16th January 2013, and the conference was organised by the International Scientific and Advisory Council of the UN Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Programme, at...

Trafficking Culture Researcher Tess Davis will be the main discussant at a special roundtable lunch session at Boston University Department of Archaeology on 21st February.

The University of Glasgow and the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research has announced the launch of the new Dawes Trust Bursaries.

Are you interested in carrying out post-doctoral research in a UK institution?

Trafficking Culture have been given permission to reproduce the images used for a new deck of playing cards which will be distributed among armed forces, customs and police in Norway. 

Donna Yates will be presenting a seminar at the McDonald Institute of Archaeology as part of the Cambridge Heritage Research Group Seminar Series on January 30th: Cultural Property, Andean Church Theft, and Mummies in the Post: Developing Method and Theory to Understand Transnational Heritage Crime Until quite recently, the study of the looting, theft, and trafficking has been the pet...

The Data section of our website has some exciting new pages.

On 16th January, Professor Simon Mackenzie will be speaking at a conference on Prevention and Fight Against Illicit Trafficking in Cultural Property: The National and International Dimension.

Today we welcome Tess Davis, who officially starts working with the Trafficking Culture project as a Researcher.

Trafficking Culture has been provided with a series of images of archaeological objects stolen from the Museo Arqueologico Pre Inca Chiribaya in Ilo, Peru, in March 2009. These images and descriptions of the stolen objects in both English and Spanish are available in our Data section. 

On Tuesday 18 December there is an opportunity to see Professor Simon Mackenzie talk about Trafficking Culture in a special lecture at the University of Hong Kong.

The Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, and the ESRC Doctoral Training Centre which it hosts, has announced a wide range of ESRC PhD studentships available for 2013/14 entry. Successful candidates will receive research training from the best departments across Scotland, which have joined forces to create the biggest Doctoral Training Centre in the social sciences in the UK. The...

The University of Glasgow is currently looking for applicants for the Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Fellowship scheme. 

The Theoretical Archaeology Group, an annual conference, takes place this December at the University of Liverpool. 

On Wednesday the 28th of November at 4pm, there will be an opportunity to hear about the research of Trafficking Culture. 

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research is a peer-reviewed international criminology journal with a special interest in transnational organized crime. It is run by Editor-in-Chief Ernesto U. Savona (Professor of Criminology, Università Cattolica del S. Cuore- Milan Director of TRANSCRIME (Joint Research Centre on Transnational Crime) and Managing Editor Dr. Stefano Caneppele (stefano.caneppele@unicatt.it). Each year thematic special issues of the EJCPR...

The University of Glasgow’s College of Social Sciences’ Scholarship Competition for 2013 has opened.

Trafficking Cullture have been given images from the 1993 excavation of the Metiokhos and Parthenope mosaic at Zeugma in Turkey. The photographs came courtesy of Dr Philip Freeman of the University of Liverpool, who worked on the excavations at Zeugma. This is the second set of images that we are able to show in our new Data section, an area of...

We are excited to announce the launch of our new Data section. We see this as a means through which useful data across varied media can be presented and used by researchers and other interested parties. It will no doubt grow over time. Our first addition to the Data section is a collection of forty-seven photographs taken during the looting of the...

Trafficking Culture are really delighted to welcome Tess Davis, who will be joining the project as a Researcher in January 2013. Tess has extensive experience of working in both archaeology and law, and is currently the Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation, based in the USA. She holds a Batchelor of Arts in Archaeology from Boston University,...

Simon Mackenzie, Neil Brodie, and Jessica Dietzler will all be presenting papers at the ASC conference in November.

Neil Brodie is headed to the Cyclades to conduct archaeological survey on the island of Keros. This is follow-up work stemming from excavations conducted with Cambridge University’s Keros Project, headed by Trafficking Culture friend Colin Renfrew. Several other Friend of the Project and Project Team Members have previously worked on Keros as well.

Professor Simon Mackenzie, the Principal Investigator for Trafficking Culture, will be attending the European Society of Criminology conference next week.

Suzie Thomas from the Trafficking Culture team will be at the EAA annual meeting (29th August to 1st September) in Helsinki next week.

On Tuesday the 21st of August there is an opportunity to see Dr Neil Brodie give a lecture about the illicit trade in antiquities from Iraq.

Welcome to the Trafficking Culture project website! We hope you will find its content useful, informative, and easy to navigate. Over the coming years, this website will keep visitors informed of Trafficking Culture and its development, provide access to related publications , signpost to other useful resources and links, and offer key information through our Encyclopedia on key case studies, terminology, research...

We are really happy to welcome Jessica Dietzler, who has been awarded the Illicit Antiquities and Global Criminal Markets Scholarshipat the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, funded by the University of Glasgow College of Social Sciences. This doctoral research will complement the work of Trafficking Culture, and her findings will feed directly into the broader research programme. Jessica...

We are very pleased to announce that Dr Donna Yates, who has been working as a Research Associate with us since May, will be starting her Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship on 1 September. Donna also holds a Core Fulbright Grant, and will be researching the illicit trade in Latin American antiquities, looking primarily at Andean South America with a particular focus...