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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;The Meat man, post: 13255678, member: 135271&quot;]While I agree that unrestrained looting of important archaeological sites is not a good thing, I don&#039;t necessarily agree that it&#039;s an &quot;emergency&quot; - that term has been used too many times to justify all sorts of bad ideas.</p><p>I also don&#039;t think that doing &quot;something&quot; is automatically better than doing nothing. I&#039;m not going to praise any country for &quot;just doing something.&quot; It all depends what that &quot;something&quot; is. </p><p>And what&#039;s wrong with saying that other countries should adopt the UK&#039;s strategy, which appears to be working quite well for everyone involved? From what I&#039;ve seen, it has greatly incentivized the discovery of new archaeological sites by providing a legal avenue for amateurs to profit from their finds. You seem to be arguing for a false dichotomy of either doing nothing at all, or else doing something that doesn&#039;t work very well and opens the door for targeting legitimate activity. Why not scrap both options and go with what has been shown to work best?</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>And anyway, the fact that an artifact has been looted doesn&#039;t mean that it now loses all historical or cultural value. You could look to the past and argue that it was a net benefit that the European colonial powers took artifacts from other countries - studying and preserving what may well have otherwise degraded and been lost under primitive regimes with no interest or ability to study them.</p><p><br /></p><p>We can all agree that looting is generally a bad thing and should be stopped. But perhaps we could also agree that it would be better for a looted artifact to be studied and appreciated in a private collection, than for it to disappear forever in a government storage facility?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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