Investigating the trafficking of cultural objects: novel and interdisciplinary approaches

Significant advances have been made in curbing the trafficking of cultural objects and regulating the illicit trade in this material. By embracing a multidisciplinary approach, scholars, practitioners, governments, and stakeholders are increasingly able to move beyond ethical and theoretical debates towards empirical research and valuable data gathering and analysis. As cultural property researchers are drawing upon new technologies and methodologies developed in such diverse fields as archaeology, law, computer science, criminology, development studies, policing, sociology, and beyond novel approaches to the study and, ultimately, the disruption of the illicit trade in cultural objects are emerging.This session will contain current multidisciplinary research into the illicit trafficking of cultural objects. Topics of particular interest are use of new technologies to monitor either looting or the antiquities market, regulatory analysis and development, field work results, and applications of methodologies from outside archaeology to address this problem.