20 archaeological sites ransacked by treasure hunters

In Jabal Maragha, in eastern Sudan, illegal gold miners used heavy machinery to dig a trench through a 2,000-year-old Kushite site. They were searching for what appeared to be promising signs of ore, but they left behind a huge hole in the heart of an archaeological site of great importance.

Saqqara was severely affected in the early 2010s, during the Egyptian revolution. Looting became widespread in the major archaeological areas. Satellite data revealed the appearance of numerous pits dug at one of Egypt’s most important burial sites.

Lisht, south of Cairo, experienced a similar wave of looting after the revolution. The pits covered such a large area that the damage was visible from space. When a site suffers damage on a scale visible from space, the losses are already considerable.

In El Hibeh, Lower Egypt, looting intensified between 2009 and 2013 as archaeological monitoring was scaled back. The area included a village and a cemetery; as a result, looters desecrated the final resting places of people who lived a very long time ago.

In Abusir el-Meleq, thousands of looting pits have disfigured a cemetery dating from the Late Period through the Ptolemaic era. A funerary landscape shaped over generations has come to look as though it has been attacked layer by layer, with each illegal pit carrying away another fragment of history.

Apamea has become one of the most striking examples of what systematic looting looks like in times of war. Satellite images from 2011 and 2012 showed the Roman city covered with pits, row upon row, as if the ground itself had been transformed into a grid of excavation sites.

At Dura-Europos, organized looting during the Syrian conflict has left the site littered with traces of excavations. This city, which was one of the most important border cities of the ancient world, was a place where Roman, Greek, and Near Eastern histories intersected; yet the looters ravaged it as if it were a quarry.

Archaeological excavations at Ebla have opened our eyes to the scope of the Bronze Age. The looting that took place there at the start of the war in Syria damaged precisely those areas where the context is most important, making this loss all the more tragic.

Located on the banks of the Euphrates, Mari was one of the great cities of Bronze Age Mesopotamia; it was also one of the Syrian sites regularly mentioned in reports assessing war damage. The looting of this city was not limited to the mere loss of artifacts. It dealt a terrible blow to one of the sites that had been helping researchers reconstruct diplomacy, administration, and daily life in the Ancient Near East.

The damage to Resafa has accumulated over time, which is part of what makes the situation so bleak. Some looting took place before the war in Syria, but it is not surprising that more pits appeared during the conflict. By that point, the site had already been under pressure for years. Sometimes a place is destroyed all at once; sometimes it deteriorates little by little.

Palmyra is remembered for the massive destruction it suffered—and rightly so—even though looting also contributed to its plight. When the city was occupied, artifacts related to Palmyrene funerary culture and sculpture were diverted into smuggling networks.

Huaca Rajada, better known as Sipán, might have been much more severely looted if the looters had arrived a little earlier. In 1987, treasure hunters broke into the Moche site and began taking gold artifacts just moments before Walter Alva’s team arrived. In fact, this site was one of the most important in Peru, and its excavation began as a race against time to prevent looting.

Before La Corona was formally identified, researchers referred to this site as “Site Q,” because many of the carved Maya stelae had already been looted and scattered.

In Los Placeres, near Campeche, looters discovered a large stucco facade from a Mayan temple around 1968; they reinforced it, detached it from the building, and carried it away. This was not a hastily committed act of vandalism. The operation had been planned, and it was the architecture itself that bore the brunt of it.

Koh Ker, the 10th-century Khmer capital, was severely looted during a period when regulations were lax and the illicit antiquities market was booming. In some temples, the sculptures were cut away so cleanly that only the feet and legs remained on the pedestals.

Prasat Chen has found itself at the center of some of the most famous restitution cases involving Khmer statues. Major figures that had been removed from the temple were able to be linked back to the site thanks to their still-intact pedestals and old photographs, meaning that the evidence of the theft had been there, in plain sight, from the very beginning.

In Hatra, looters and stonemasons have removed carved architectural elements directly from the ancient site, including fragments of a frieze. Once people begin extracting materials from the still-standing ruins to sell them, the building itself becomes the target, and the line between looting and demolition blurs very quickly.

Isin suffered some of the worst looting ever recorded in the region after 2003. Reports describe large-scale illegal excavations carried out using machinery and by numerous groups of looters, clearly showing that this was not simply a matter of a few people armed with shovels sneaking onto the site after hours.

Tell Jokha, identified as the ancient city of Umma, was under such constant pressure from looters that archaeologists have repeatedly stressed the urgency of conducting surveys and excavations before more remains are lost. A field report documented looting across approximately 65 hectares of the site.

Excavations at Umm Al-Aqarib have unearthed significant remains from the Archaic Dynastic Period, including monumental structures, although the work had to proceed while taking into account the fact that looters had already ransacked other parts of the site. This kind of archaeology is almost heartbreaking. We do learn something, of course, but we also arrive after the damage has already been done.