by Laura Chesters
The antiquities trade has welcomed a new independent report that estimates the volume of looted objects on the market is much smaller than previous reports have suggested.
Tracking and Disrupting the Illicit Antiquities Trade with Open- Source Data was penned by US policy think tank Rand Corporation. The 145-page document concludes that the “market for all antiquities, both licit and illicit is… at most, a few hundred million dollars annually rather than the billions of dollars claimed in some other estimates”. It adds that the approach hitherto adopted had “damaged legitimate market interests”.