More Crowdsourcing: Track Illicit Antiquities with Wikiloot

Crowdsourcing is going to play a big role in archaeology's future. This month I'm bringing you four projects that use it to harness the enthusiasm of ordinary people to fuel innovative research. 

WikiLoot is a project by Jason Felch, one of the authors of Chasing Aphrodite: the Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum. The idea is to "create an open source web platform, or wiki, for the publication and analysis of a unique archive of primary source records and photographs documenting the illicit trade in looted antiquities." Says Felch:

The inspiration for WikiLoot is the vast amount of documentation seized by European investigators over the past two decades during investigations of the illicit trade in Classical antiquities smuggled (primarily) out of Greece and Italy. The business records, journals, correspondence and photographs seized from looters and middlemen during those investigations comprise a unique record of the black market.

Much of that documentation remains tangled in legal cases that are likely to end inconclusively, like that of former Getty antiquities curator Marion True and dealer Robert Hecht. Despite remarkable investigative work by authorities in Italy and Greece, only the trial of Italian dealer Giacomo Medici reached a verdict.

WikiLoot will make these records and photographs publicly available on the web and will enlist collaborators around the world to tag and analyze them. As with Wikipedia, participants will be given credit for their contributions. Ultimately, we hope to create the world’s most authoritative dataset of a black market whose size and reach is still poorly understood. (Estimates of the illicit antiquities trade range from $200 million a year to $10 billion dollars a year.)

This Polaroid seized from the warehouse of dealer Giacomo Medici shows the Getty Museum's Statue of Apollo shortly after it was looted from a tomb in Southern Italy.

Researchers and the interested public are invited to collaborate to help fight the destruction of archaeological sites for the antiquities trade. They've applied for funding from the Knight News Challenge.

While the project is still in development, the WikiLoot Facebook page has become a nexus for fascinating discussions about collecting, looting and museums. The posts and comment threads are a regular who's who of scholars and journalists researching the antiquities trade, including David Gill, Derek Fincham, Larry Rothfeld, Neil Brodie, Fabio Isman, and others. This is a project worth following - it has the potential to not only be tremendous fun but also an innovative precedent for future research projects.

Publish or Perish?

The TAY Project is a private NGO based in Istanbul. They document looting, record threatened sites, and have started an inventory of archaeological sites in Turkey. They also have a site looting hotline, where you can report ongoing illegal excavations.

I'm struck by their latest project, called 'Publish or Perish':

Today, if there is no scientific need or a rescue purpose, the general attitude is leaning towards not to excavate. And, if there is a real need for an excavation, that ‘need’ and purpose has to be definitely included in the ‘final report’. We also have to remember that, first of all and before the ‘report’, there must be a “final” for the archaeological excavation, which is very rare in our country.

At that point, our discussion at TAY turned to “final reports” and we wondered how many archaeological excavations we had in Turkey and how many of them had their “final reports”. This was not a very easy question to answer. Apart from “final reports”, there was not an archaeological excavations list for Turkey.

So, at first hand, we began preparing that list, which took unnecessarily long time. Main reason for this delay also proved our main idea; there was not many ‘final reports’.

The list that follows is pretty depressing: by TAY's reckoning, barely 10% of sites in Turkey have final reports, and many projects keep digging every year and only publish a paper here and there.

This is not to say that _nothing_ has been published from these sites, which makes the list a little bit unfair. For example, the Summers' team at Kerkenes Dağ publishes quite a lot: annual excavation reports, popular bulletins, and papers yearly in Anatolia Antiqua or Anatolian Archaeology. The same can be said of Gates and Redford's work at Kinet Höyük/Issos (also see here). But it's true that neither has a book that can serve as a reference work for the site, as far as I can tell. Which means that if you want to know something about the excavations, you have to work your way through a lot of diverse material to get an overview of what's going on.

And many sites, of course, have no publications whatever.

Way back in '89, Chris Tilley famously observed that 'digging is a pathology of archaeology': a disease. His point was to say that excavation is not the point of archaeology, but a distraction from the real work of interpreting past human experience. Excavation gives the archaeologist an ego boost and makes us feel like we're 'adventuring' or 'having an authentic experience'. But for sites it's an illness: excavation destroys deposits and exposes materials, like ancient walls, that may require long-term conservation.

Given that, I like TAY's attempts to 'name and shame' and create peer pressure to publish data. Because, really, if you're not publishing data, why are you digging? You should be ashamed of yourself. (Actually, you should stop digging first, then feel ashamed.)

However, I wonder if it isn't time to jettison the notion that 'final publication' has to be in book form. There's no reason excavation records can't be presented to the public as a website, wiki, or other form of online database. (Especially given the state of the publishing industry, where high costs and low print runs ensure that most publications exist only in the most specialized university libraries.) One problem with even the best-kept archaeological data is that it is usually treated as the private property of one particular professor, and not made accessible to the publics for whose benefit archaeology claims to work. In an age where everything is going open-source, archaeological information should follow suit.

Anyone know examples of best practices for online final publications?