Abstract
After a horrific rise in looting at archaeological sites near Jenne-jeno (Mali, West Africa; looting to feed the illicit international traffic in terracotta statuettes) that began in the late 1970s, looting essentially came to a complete halt by, roughly, 1995. That success was due to a concentrated effort of local public education and site monitoring (by the Ministry of Culture’s Jenne Mission Culturelle), to the government’s efforts to interdict objects leaving the country (orchestrated by the National Museum and by the principal heritage protection agency, the Direction National des Arts et de la Culture (DNAC)), as well as due to the effects of the Mali–US bilateral protection accord (initiated in 1993). Since 1995, periodic survey circuits of the several hundred archaeological sites within, roughly, a 40 km radius of Jenne show negligible evidence of renewed looting. This would seem to be the cause for celebration. Yet in sworn testimony before the State Department’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee in 2012, art/antiquities dealers and museum directors argued that the Mali–US bilateral accord had failed. What is at the root of this massive “cognitive dissonance”?
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McIntosh, R. (2016). A Success Too Sweet: Who Sheds Tears when Looting Ends?. In: Underhill, A., Salazar, L. (eds) Finding Solutions for Protecting and Sharing Archaeological Heritage Resources. SpringerBriefs in Archaeology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20255-6_4
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