ABSTRACT
Objects, no less than people, can be threatened and securitized in politically charged contexts. Architectures have fallen to dramatic wartime air attacks and acts of local vandalism. 1 Heritage sites have been damaged by military performances of security. 2 Artworks are regularly taken as war plunder; meanwhile, pieces of ancient pots disappear daily from the deserts of the American south-west—sometimes taken and sometimes saved by archaeologists. 3 This chapter explores threats to objects of antiquity that are usually associated with war looting but are also subject to quotidian threats from unexpected sources. It does so using literatures that do not usually link to the field of International Relations or its cognate of security studies: archaeological research on object acquisition, and new materialist philosophy about the power and agency of nonhuman objects.
