Sarah Parcak: commitment

Transcript context

…But given the constraints we face, right? Right, right. I’ve talked a lot to the villagers that work at Lisht because many of them were involved — not just them, but the people from the surrounding area — they were involved in looting post–Arab Spring, so in 2011. And I’ve learned a lot about who loots and why they loot and when they loot. You have to think of archaeological sites in some ways like community piggy banks. It’s not like local people are out digging every day, robbing the site down to nothing. They’ll tap it every now and then. Someone needs surgery, someone needs to go to school. It’s like a gig income. Post–Arab Spring, the village or villagers would organize into collective groups, and not just there — all over Egypt. This is how things work across the Middle East. They’d organize collectively. They’d go loot a tomb. They’ll find whatever they find, and then they’ll split the proceeds. That’s a very different kind of looting than someone comes from Cairo via a dealer in Jordan, via a dealer in Dubai, via a dealer in Paris or a dealer in New York, and they’ve specifically said, “We want X, Y, and Z objects from these types of sites.” Someone will come to the village and say, “I will pay each of you $20 a night to go loot.” That’s very different. They work much faster. It’s very dangerous. They could loot a tomb in a night, and these are people that dig down 40 or 50 feet into a shaft tomb. Again, we have to understand the kinds of looting that are happening in different places in the world. People loot because they need money. It’s not a black or a white issue. Villagers aren’t getting rich off of this stuff. It’s the collectors; it’s the middlemen. It’s much bigger questions around shutting down trade and understanding networks. It’s very similar to the international wildlife trade or gunrunning or money laundering. It’s all connected. I once did fieldwork on other issues in a small Mexican village, very rural. They had a small Aztec pyramid in the center of town. One year they decided to knock that down and just put up a modern, small municipal building. They seemed really quite unsentimental about that decision. If anything, there was a slight fear that if they kept the pyramid around, it might attract interest from the outside world, which they didn’t want, viewing the outside Mexican police and governance as forces that would take resources from them. Should I have tried to talk them out of that decision? Or should I have just been gung ho? “Yes, sorry, all you people, but this is the best thing for you to do.”…

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