ABSTRACT
International antiquities protection policy aims to protect cultural heritage sites at source, and to provide mechanisms for the return of trafficked antiquities to their dispossessed owners, often source states. Protection and recovery—and in particular the ‘recovery’ element—stems from the development from the mid twentieth century onwards of attempts by various decolonised countries to reclaim as part of their sovereign identity and cultural self-determination the great volumes of antiquities that had been removed to collections in the west. This chapter proposes some main reasons for this failure. First, the emphasis of policy initiatives on cultural site protection at the source is unrealistic. Second, the reactive nature of policy initiatives means that they come too late to prevent either the establishment of regional looting and trafficking networks, or the massive damage such networks cause to cultural heritage sites. Third, the targeting of policy initiatives at single countries follows developments in media coverage.
