Heritage Watch.

Heritage Watch www.heritagewatch.org/over.htm

This month's review addresses a growing problem, the looting of museums and archaeological sites. This is especially prevalent in the poorest areas of the world, where there are fewer resources available to protect the sites. Besides professional looters who sell to collectors and museums, tourists and local villagers damage archaeological sites in the process of removing valuable artifacts. Heritage Watch is a nonprofit organization dedicated to stopping this theft, especially in Cambodia, where many large-scale architectural sculptures have been hacked apart and sold around the world. The site promotes public education and a sense of cultural heritage, exploring strategies, such as placing interpretive kiosks in airports, showing on-flight videos to educate tourists, developing site museums that instill a sense of ownership while stimulating the local economy, enlisting communities of monks to communicate with the local population, and exploring avenues to relieve the poverty that encourages looting. Photos of looting in progress and damaged sites illustrate the severity of the problem. The issues that are dealt with provide topics for classroom discussion, including who owns an artifact, various motivations for looting, the impact on a site when objects are removed, and how interpretation and scholarship are affected by looting. Students may be inspired to develop their own strategies for building a sense of cultural heritage and discouraging looting.