Investigations into the collecting patterns of major US museums resulted in two immensely readable and influential books covering today’s illegal trade in trafficking antiquities: Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum and The Medici Conspiracy.

The co-author of the former, Jason Felch, once an investigative reporter on the Los Angeles Times, has built on this research and created a new and accessible online database within a ‘virtual’ museum environment. Called the Museum of Looted Antiquities (MOLA), it sets out to record and display the thousands of looted antiquities that have been returned successfully to their countries of origin.

The website (mola.omeka.net), not to be confused with the Museum of London Archaeology (mola.org.uk), has been launched with the source details for 118 cases. Together, these cases involve thousands of artefacts trafficked since 1950. As well as individual items repatriated, there are useful references to larger collections formed by illegal traffickers. Such as the Costa Rican antiquities dealer Leonardo Patterson, found guilty by a Bavarian court of possession and illegal export of over 200 cultural assets in 2015. And the US collector and hedge fund pioneer Michael Steinhardt, who accepted a lifetime ban on collecting antiquities in lieu of prosecution after investigators revealed Steinhardt’s ties to multiple art trafficking networks.

“The project is really a culmination of some efforts that I’ve been making over the last 20 years to build a unique data set on the illicit antiquities trade,” he explained during an interview with the US Center for Art Law.

The data published so far underlines the critical importance of collecting provenance data on looted objects. It will become even more useful as a research tool once the preliminary information Felch and his team have collected on a further 700 cases is added to the website. This information involves nearly 1 million additional artefacts.

By systematically collecting information and anecdotes about each case, Felch believes the resulting data will provide a much broader analysis of the antiquities trafficking problem. “Broader statements about the scope of the market, about the trends, about whether there are more or fewer repatriations every year, and about who’s behind these trafficking cases,” he explains.

He is especially hopeful that curators, people with specialist knowledge, or just people interested in returning looted artefacts will contribute their research and knowledge. There’s an extremely useful section on the MOLA website that enables anyone to provide source information on a physical object.

Click here for more information.

Photo courtesy of Museum of Looted Antiquities