New case: Perge Theater Head, contributed by Damien Huffer This ancient bust was taken from the heavily-looted archaeological site of Perge in modern-day Türkiye. In 2000, it appeared on the art market at a Sotheby's auction.

As the Sudan war rages on, curator Shadia Abdrabo is on a yearlong research grant in France with one mission: to build an online database of the African nation’s archaeological sites, museum collections and historical archives. abcnews.go.com/Internationa...

Dr Christos Tsirogiannis has identified two lots that were due to be auctioned at next week's sale of antiquities at Bonham's (4 December 2025). Both feature in the Becchina archive. They have now been withdrawn (along with lot 126). lootingmatters.blogspot.com/2025/11/two-...

Australia returns 17 rare Pharaonic artifacts to Egypt, the result of a case before Australian courts since 2019 ordering the seizure of the 17 artifacts, previously held by a private company, and their return to their rightful homeland. www.egypttoday.com/Article/4/14...

New case: Bronze figure of Zeus, contributed by Casey Bennett This bronze statue of Zeus was stolen from the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome, Italy, in 1980.

restitutionmatters.org/news-item/im... @museumofloot.bsky.social @drtrishbiers.bsky.social

NEWS: Coordinated operation across Europe dismantles antiquities smuggling ring Around 20 people face charges of antiquities trafficking and money laundering. The criminal group has been operating in Western Europe, the Balkans, the United States for over 16 years. apnews.com/article/bulg...

In practice: case study | Collaborative approaches to repatriation 🤝 Laura Van Broekhoven, director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, shares learning from the museum's projects.

New post: The Savior on the Throne, contributed by Damien Huffer This 16th-century icon of the Savior on the Throne was looted from the Christ Antiphonitis Church during the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, along with many other Byzantine artifacts.

New Case of the Day: Cycladic standing figure and frying pan, contributed by Gabe Malinski After Cambridge professor Colin Renfrew alerted Greek authorities about their presence in Germany, these looted Cycladic artifacts—a standing female figure and vessel known as a "frying pan"—were returned.

Great news for open source art crime researcher: The International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR)'s publications are now digitized & free at the Internet Archive. Congrats to our MOLA colleague Lisa Zeballos and team on this important preservation effort!

Operation Inherent Vice: The OSCE-led Heritage Crime Task Force assisted the London Met Police with a large-scale antiquities recovery involving nearly 200 objects linked to a heritage trafficking network across Asia and Europe www.osce.org/secretariat/...

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EVENT: Please join us tomorrow for a webinar on conflict looting and recovery, with insights from researchers focused on Afghanistan, Ukraine, Cambodia, Nepal, the Middle East and beyond. Scan the QR code below to register and attend this free event, hosted by @nhrcampaign.bsky.social

An ancient Inuvialuit kayak that has been held in the Vatican Museums' collection since 1925 will be returned to the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Québec, in a historically significant restitution. www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/11/06/v...

Egypt’s Grand Museum Is Finally Open. Now, ‘We Need Our Stuff Back.’ For many Egyptians, the state-of-the art museum is a stage from which to renew demands that Egypt’s most iconic antiquities belong in their homeland — not the marble halls of European museums. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/a...

Egypt has recovered 36 looted artifacts were recovered from New York. The pieces include: 11 artifacts confiscated by @manhattanda.bsky.social 24 manuscripts featuring Coptic and Syriac texts and a limestone relief from the 18th Dynasty, returned by the Met www.egypttoday.com/Article/4/14...

Denver Post confirms what we’ve been hearing: nearly all federal HSI agents with expertise on cultural property crimes have been reassigned to immigration duties in recent months. Major loss of law enforcement capabilities in the world’s largest art market. www.denverpost.com/2025/11/06/u...

The French press have identified one of the suspects arrested for the Louvre heist at a street racer from Aubervilliers who goes by Doudou Cross Bitume #babydriver www.liberation.fr/societe/musc...

Soft power: At the end of his talks with Vietnamese Defense Minister, Hegseth handed over a leather box, a belt and a small knife — wartime artifacts once taken by U.S. soldiers. Such returns have become part of broader reconciliation efforts between the two countries infonews.ca/news/7409764...

A small army is racing against time and Trump to preserve U.S. history Over 1,600 volunteers have created private archives with more than 50,000 photos and videos of museum exhibits before Trump’s directives take effect. www.latimes.com/california/s...

New Case: The Bronze Durga sculpture from Mỹ Son, Vietnam. Contributed by Jason Felch. This ornate bronze sculpture of the Hindu goddess Durga was stolen from the Mỹ Son Sanctuary, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Vietnam, in 2008. It has been called "the finest Asia bronze sculpture that exists.”

The stone head, dating from the dynasty of Pharaoh Thutmose III, was likely plundered during the Arab Spring in either 2011 or 2012. A decade later, it turned up at the art fair in Maastricht and, following an tip-off, Dutch authorities determined it had been stolen and exported illegally.

New Case: The Salerno Seizures, contributed by Michela Herbert. As the world celebrates the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum, the public will have an opportunity to see some of the tens of thousands of looted Egyptian artifacts that were seized at the Italian port of Salerno in May 2017.

A Tunisian man tried to sell 30 Punic bronze coins, purportedly from an underwater hoard off Tunisia’s coast, to an antiques dealer in Oslo. The dealer, suspecting the coins’ dubious provenance, alerted Norwegian authorities, who started an investigation. archaeologymag.com/2025/10/cart...

For anyone in Los Angeles who is interested in the politics of cultural heritage, put this event on your calendar! Renowned scholar and anthropologist Lynn Meskell will speak at the Getty on Saturday November 22, 2025 at 3 pm. Register here: www.getty.edu/calendar/rui...

Billions in treasure lie on the seafloor. Finders keepers? 
As treasure hunters pursue gold and silver, they both aid and compete with archaeologists. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

NYT: Four Decades After It Was Stolen, a Renaissance Treasure by Fra Antonio da Monza Returns to Rome The Italian art police still don’t know who took the brilliantly illuminated manuscript page from a Franciscan friary, and many more pages have yet to be found. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/w...

5 more people arrested in Louvre Museum heist.

The MFA has reached a first-of-its-kind ownership resolution for 2 vessels by the enslaved potter David Drake. This restitution to his family takes its place alongside other resolutions we've reached, but it's the first that addresses theft during slavery. www.mfa.org/press-releas...

Remarkable: “This marks the first time that the [Boston MFA] has resolved an ownership claim for works of art that were wrongfully taken under the conditions of slavery in the 19th-century U.S.” www.mfa.org/press-releas...

“The museum says it had no idea at the time” - AGAIN? “the lawsuit says the transaction was overseen by Theodore Rousseau Jr., the museum’s curator of European paintings and an expert on art looting by the Nazis” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/a... #Met #Museum #loot

New Case: Persephone of Cyrene, contributed by Julia Granato This ornate marble sculpture of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, was looted from the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Cyrene (Cyrenaica) in Shahhat, Libya during the 2011 uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.

A rare alabaster statue believed to depict the head of a princess from the ancient Kingdom of Saba is set to be auctioned in Vienna next month, drawing renewed attention to Yemen’s looted heritage and calls for repatriation. yemenonline.info/land-of-sheb...

The British Museum has been accused of “provocative indifference” and “covering Greek culture in the shade of Barbie” by officials in Greece after it hosted a fundraising gala that included dozens of celebrities and billionaires seated near the Parthenon marbles. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

‘Bone Box’ by Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas at the Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, BC. “Fabricated out of discarded trays that once stored archeological collections, this interactive work calls for us to engage with one another.”

New case: The Dallas Bhairava Mask This is one of two sacred masks stolen in 1994 from Dolakha, Nepal. The masks date to c. 16th century CE and are effigies of Shiva—one of Hinduism’s most important deities.

Congrats to @brenthuffman.bsky.social who was awarded with a @buffett.northwestern.edu Faculty Fellowship to pursue his research. His documentary, “Yemen Mosaic,” is about Yemeni women working to save the cultural heritage of Yemen as they face threats including war and climate change.

News: Another looted antiquity seized from the Met Museum this year goes back to Italy, along with 8 other antiquities manhattanda.org/d-a-bragg-an...

New Case: The Aubin Tonalamatl, contributed by Damien Huffer In June 1982, Mexican attorney and journalist José Luis Castañeda del Valle entered the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris using a false student ID and permits. He convinced curators that he was a student there to study the ancient text.

Thank you to the Antiquities Coalition @combatlooting.bsky.social for interviewing me on Douglas Latchford's "first big heist," of Thailand's Prakhon Chai bronzes, and how he successfully marketed them by exploiting particular art world practices theantiquitiescoalition.org/inside-the-h...

Breaking: Thieves broke into the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon, which houses the French crown jewels. They targeted two display cases and fled on motor scooters within seven minutes, taking jewelry that had “patrimonial” and “historical” value that made it “priceless.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/w...

NEWS: Manhattan DA returns 29 looted antiquities to Greece, valued at $3 million. Some were seized from the Metropolitan Museum or Art, and had ties to convicted antiquities traffickers Robin Symes and Eugene Alexander manhattanda.org/d-a-bragg-an... Some highlights below...

New Case: Alabaster Ram, contributed by Damien Huffer This 5th century BCE alabaster ram was one of three Yemeni objects seized from collector Shelby White's Manhattan apartment in January 2023.

At least 100 out of 1,000 well-known archaeological sites around Sudan have already been destroyed so far, especially through the use of heavy, gold-digging machinery. allthatsinteresting.com/sudan-jabal-...

New Case: Statue of Dionysus, contributed by Emily Hamann In 1996, this life-size Roman bronze statue of Dionysus was seized from a Swiss warehouse that belonged to Turkish trafficker Nevzat Telliagoglu after he was convicted in the UK of drug trafficking charges.

Thieves used a power saw to remove a painted section from the historic wall inside the tomb of Khentkaus in the Giza Governorate in Egypt. apnews.com/article/egyp...

New Case: The Don Miller collection represents the largest single cultural property recovery in the FBI's history. The intricacies of the investigation and its aftermath are detailed in a new book by Special Agent Tim Carpenter called The Grave Robber, due out on Oct 14th.

While Ankara celebrates its triumphs [of repatriations from] abroad, opposition figures argue that Turkey's remaining cultural heritage at home is often mismanaged or threatened by short-term political and commercial interests. www.al-monitor.com/originals/20...

New Case: Head of Asclepius, contributed by Lisa Duffy-Zeballos This Hellenistic head believed to depict Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine and healing, was stolen from the Butrint Archaeological Museum in southern Albania in April 1991.