Green Saharas, Grey Markets: Commercial Exploitation of North African Prehistory, an Overview

It is nice to get some notice taken of one's work from time to time. The issue of the damage done to sites by artefact hunting tends to be dominated by metal detectors, here I step aside from that. It was noticed (though I am not sure I agree with the bit at the end) robertvernet Publié le 13 juin 2022, on the blog 'Préhistoire de l'Ouest Saharien Un projet d’inventaire de l’archéologie préhistorique dans l’ouest du Sahara' ("Une plongée dans le pillage archéologique du Sahara en août 2019"): 

Un archéologue, P.M. Barford, a consacré un mois, en 2019, à explorer les sites internet vendant, au Etats-Unis et en Europe, des pièces archéologiques paléolithiques et néolithiques provenant du Sahara :

Paul M. Barford Green Saharas, Grey Markets: Commercial Exploitation of North African Prehistory, an Overview Archaeologia Polona, vol. 58 : 2020 : 311 – 336
http://paul-barford.blogspot.com/2020/05/artefacts-from-northern-africa.html

C’est un travail méticuleux de description des raisons poussant les acteurs de ce commerce illicite (vendeurs et acheteurs), de leurs méthodes, des résultats (impressionnant tableau des « prises » (!) pendant seulement un mois) et des conséquences sur le patrimoine des pays concernés. Une bibliographie conséquente permet de se faire une idée plus concrète (cf. par exemple : Barker, 2018 ; di Lernia, 2005 ; Keenan, 2013 ; Fay, 2013 ; UNESCO, 1970 ; Vernet, 1995, 2000, 2011, 2013). La conclusion est d’une grande clarté :

« The number of Saharan Neolithic artefacts currently on sale online is disturbingly high. Although it seems that the turnover of this trade is not as rapid as other artefact claim that since the mid 1990s, several million artefacts have been removed from sites in the Sahara and scattered on the international antiquities market, and this pran industrial scale. It seems that some areas have been stripped of diagnostic material. As long as a lucrative market for this material exists, the extent of the areas stripped out will only spread. In the Sahara, the majority of Neolithic sites consist of shallow surface spreads of material and the bases of negative features exposed desert conditions that have prevailed here for six millennia. As such, they are extremely fragile and sensitive to interference. A single unrecorded search episode removing the most collectible (and therefore diagnostic) material will irreversibly alter not only the composition of the site assemblage but, above all, the pattern of distribution of material that constitutes the main body of evidence that the site holds. In analysing prehistoric landscapes in the desert, the stratigraphic, artefactual and environmental data from single sites are not the main type of evidence. Desert surveys analyse the cumulative distribution of elation to each other but also to the geological effects of changing landscapes and natural environment. Rendering unrecognizable sites and findspots forming part of those patterns disrupts that research. […] Artefact hunting, alongside erosion and other geological processes, agricultural expansion, military activity, road construction, vandalism or mining and other extractive industries, is just one of the threats to archaeological sites in the fragile environment of the Sahara region. Yet it is one that arguably we can still be doing something about. Why aren’t we? » 

Références

Barker, A. 2018. Looting, the antiquities trade, and competing valuations of the past. Annual Review of Anthropology 47: 455–474.

Di Lernia, S. 2005. Incoming tourism, outgoing culture: tourism, development and cultural heritage in the Libyan Sahara. Journal of North African Studies 10(3–4): 441–457.

Fay, E. 2013. Trading in antiquities on eBay: the changing face of the illicit trade in antiquities. PhD Thesis, Keele University October 2013. Electronic document: http://eprints.keele.ac.uk/197/1/Fay%20PhD%202013.pdf.

Keenan, J. 2003. Tourism, development and conservation: a Saharan perspective. In D. J. Mattingly, S. McLaren, E. Savage, Y. al-Fasatwi, and K. Gadgood (eds), Natural resources and cultural heritage of the Libyan Desert: proceedings of a conference held in Libya. 14–21 December 2002, 14–21. London.

UNESCO 1970. Convention on the means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit import, Export and transfer of ownership of cultural property. Paris.

Vernet R. : Tourisme saharo-sahélien et archéologie : dangers et remèdes, communication au colloque de Chinguetti : Cités et patrimoine culturel du Sahara et du Sahel, oct. 1995, La Revue Anthropologique, Paris, 1996, p. 166-169

Vernet R. : Le pillage des sites archéologiques mauritaniens : des conséquences dramatiques, Colloque “Le Patrimoine Culturel en Mauritanie”, Nouakchott, 1999 ; Nouakchott, 2000 : 239-244

Vernet R. : Souvenirs, pillage, modernité et archéologie : un siècle de détérioration du patrimoine préhistorique en Mauritanie
In : Halte au pillage, G. Compagnon, éd., Éd. Errance, 2011 : 375-389

Vernet R., Choplin A. : Disparition d’un patrimoine archéologique : le cas de Nouakchott (1955-2008). Cahiers de l’AARS, 2013,n° 16 : 251-257

Vernet, R. and Le Quellec, J.-L. : Recension de : Eckhard Klenkler, Robert Dreikluft, Mark Milburn and Z. Jiang 2016. Sahara. Material culture of early communities. Cahiers de l’AARS, 2017 – 19: 295–297.