| It's way more boring than you're thinking. The goal is to reduce looting by 1) educating people about the harm it does 2) convince the audience that whatever goals might be sought in looting are unlikely to be met (profit, cool-stuff-factor, "helping archaeologists", etc) 3) Ensuring site security and getting legal frameworks in place to monitor/enforce heritage preservation. The first is usually pretty easy. The NPS used to have this video called "Assault on Time" that they show to people. People who don't want to fill out requisition forms from the government usually just show pictures of looted sites. I had a professor who liked to use pictures of Mimbres sites in New Mexico. I prefer to use Ai-Khanoum because the before [0] and after [1] is so stark. For the second, usually this takes the form of inviting locals out to see what you're excavating and showing them any finds. This will usually be rocks, charcoal, lithics, and other profoundly unprofitable things. It also humanizes the historical people to help locals build personal connections with the sites. In a lot of cases you'll also be hiring locals to help with the excavations, so they know there's nothing hidden because they're present for everything. This usually isn't effective on the "collectors" and "metal detectorists" (see e.g. Coping with Site Looting [2]), so other things are necessary. That tends to be site monitoring and heritage protection laws, which depend on the country and situation. Sometimes it's best to just invite local officials to the site. Meeting with important officials can be very inconvenient though. Ever tried getting wrinkles out of a suit in a field site 2 days from the nearest city? Those clothes did not survive the expedition. That's just the lowest level of cooperation that has to happen as well. The key is having embedded experts making connections with the people who can implement those laws and fines, then enforce them. This is also the level most affected by the budgetary constraints of heritage programs globally. Last I checked, there were fewer than 100 positions for this sort of work available in the US every year. Some countries may have less than a dozen people total. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ai_Khanoum_landscape_phot... [1] https://m.psecn.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000lqdxnldw3QE/s/... [2] http://npshistory.com/series/archeology/seac/rapp/1.pdf |
