ABSTRACT
Looting is 'simple' and increasingly 'professional'. Yet, considering the legal situation, online communities cannot be expected to provide meaningful evidence of the scale of potentially illicit activity. In China and Tibet, antiquities underground or on the ground belong to the state; excavation and export are licensed activities. Unlicensed detecting for modern losses would appear to be legal. Yet modern losses would exclude all cultural objects from 1911 or before, some cultural objects from as recently as 1949 and some other cultural objects from as recently as 1966. While capital punishment for cultural property crime has technically been ended, antiquities traffickers continue to be 'sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve'. Metal-detecting of conflict archaeology is dangerous to the community as well as to the metal-detectorists, as munitions sometimes explode after extraction. Unexploded ordnance is cause to be 'careful' across the region. Yet its unsafe extraction persists, even in licit detecting.
