Looters, collectors and a passion for antiquities at the margins of Italian society

Abstract

Unearthing old objects was for centuries a widespread activity in Italy. Artefacts were removed from the soil and re-incorporated into the social realm as votives, chits and treasure. Women and men knowledgeable about old things and old places were respected repositories of history. The twentieth century brought significant changes to this sphere of cultural activity: archaeology became a professionalized discipline, regulated by the state, and artefacts became scientific objects belonging to the Italian nation. Today, unauthorized excavators risk prosecution, fines and imprisonment. In this paper I ask: What is the effect of state power on the use and circulation of antiquities by unauthorized excavators and collectors? How do the men and women who inhabit the cultural margins distinguish themselves from each other? My analysis draws on ethnographic data and textual analysis of newspaper articles concerning tombaroli or ‘tomb robbers’. I focus on marginalized cultural production, a key dimension that is missing from most accounts of looters.

Keywords::

• Antiquities
• beni culturali
• black market
• cultural policy
• social marginalization
• tombaroli

Notes

¹ In order to protect their privacy, subjects' names have been changed. Interviews were conducted with approval from the Institutional Review Board of the University of Michigan (study number HUM00064574).

² To get a sense for how this worked, Yannis Galanakis's (2008) work on the nineteenth-century antiquities trade in Greece is illustrative. The cases of Italy and Greece are broadly comparable along lines of market dynamics and local relationships with cultural objects.

³http://www.ultimoetrusco.it/biografia-int/testo4.htm [‘1982’ page 4/5]).