How did hundreds of antiquities end up in a London warehouse? These sleuths are on the case.
National Geographic Explorer Peter Campell provides an inside look at the early stages of a heritage crime investigation.
On a cold, rainy London morning last month, investigators entered a two-story warehouse and found shelves and filing cabinets lined with Buddhas, Shivas, and other religious icons that been potentially looted. Under the leaky roof sat statues, figurines, frescoes, and even chain-mail armor, all suspected of having been previously trafficked from across Asia.
“It was like stepping into a museum, but no labels,” says Peter Campbell, a National Geographic Explorer and archaeologist at Cranfield University in the United Kingdom. “It was overwhelming seeing the quantity of artifacts and from many different cultures and many different regions.”
Campbell works with a heritage crime task force run by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) that specializes in returning stolen art and artifacts to their home countries. He helped document the scene, along with police officers and other investigators, before movers transported the roughly 200 objects to another warehouse for temporary storage.
Many of the objects seem to have been “roughly removed” from religious shrines, says Campbell. Some Buddha heads showed clear marks from power tools, which an archaeologist would never use, indicating their illicit detachment from walls. And the artistic styles indicate heritage from Asian cultures—Cambodian, Bactrian, and Gandharan, among others—whose religious and archaeological objects are often looted and trafficked on the black market, investigators say.
Campbell estimates it may take weeks to months to go through the full inventory of objects from the London warehouse and map out where the different artifacts likely came from. In addition to the photos of the objects, soil samples from the artifacts and their placement in the warehouse may help trace their origins.
London’s Metropolitan Police are still trying to determine whether these objects are connected to any large international heritage crime ring or criminal network, says Sophie Hayes, a detective constable in the Art and Antiquities Unit. The artifact seizure was also just the beginning of a global effort to determine how old the objects are and whether they are authentically historic, to trace their rightful ownership, and to return them to their home countries.
(The Louvre has a wild history of being robbed in broad daylight.)
Assembling a team of heritage crime fighters
Founded in 2016 as a pilot project to raise awareness about cultural heritage crimes, the OSCE Heritage Crime Task Force expanded in 2020 to fight the trafficking of cultural property and investigate ties to organized crime and terrorism circles.
Today, the task force is unique in the world in terms of its scope and diversity of skills dedicated to addressing heritage crimes, says Cameron Walter, who leads the program and also serves as an OSCE Customs Advisor. Its membership encompasses a wide range of expertise from around the world—art historians, archaeologists, customs officers, prosecutors, military professionals, forensic investigators, and more.
Since 2022, task force members have worked on the recovery or seizure of more than 3,400 objects, whose value approaches $232 million, he says. The task force focuses on heritage object trafficking in all 57 OSCE member states across North America, Europe and Asia, but could collaborate with any country in the world if cultural property has been illegally moved from it into an OSCE country.
Requests for the task force to jump in on investigations of heritage crime have been growing daily, Walter says, and the organization responds quickly. For example, if a museum has been robbed and would like an Egyptologist, a prosecutor, a cyber investigator and a customs officer on the scene, “I can then pull various parts of the team together and deploy them within 72 hours to the city and then to help with that,” says Walters.
(Are museums celebrating cultural heritage—or clinging to stolen treasure?)
The investigation of a lifetime
In London, the police first became aware of the warehouse horde following an overseas criminal conviction related to cultural heritage crimes. After the conviction, they received information about “problematic material” located at the site, Hayes says. Police have declined to identify their source.
A team of four officers, including Hayes, made an initial assessment. They then brought in the OSCE Heritage Crime Task Force to photograph, package, transport, and support the investigation into the provenance of the objects.
“It was extraordinary, a real investigative opportunity of a lifetime, really, to see so what a variety of material, and often in an unrestored state,” says Hayes.
Two standouts from the lot are life-sized statues, each about six feet tall: One is a formerly four-armed Shiva, with only two arms remaining, that appears to be in the style of the Khmer Empire, known for building the famous Angkor Wat religious complex in Cambodia around 900 years ago. It may be “heavily reconstructed,” Campbell says. The other, a bodhisattva—representing a person striving for or who has attained enlightenment in Buddhism—is made of schist stone and seems to be from Gandhara, an ancient civilization spanning the third century B.C. to the third century A.D. that once straddled eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan.
Walter noted a nearly-intact bowl that appears to be from the Indus Valley Civilization, possibly even dating back to about 5,000 years ago, during the Bronze Age.
“You get chills when you hold something that old and are able to give it back to where it goes and just to help humanity to continue to understand what we've created, where we've come from,” Walter says.
(Kenya wants its treasures back. Replicas could spur their return.)
The road to repatriation
Since the November seizure, OSCE Heritage Crime Task Force members have been hard at work, attempting to identify each piece and trace its origins. Hayes and her colleagues at the police department are additionally looking to establish who has an ownership interest in these objects, such as countries from which the objects might have been illegally removed.
It’s not always possible to determine precisely where objects came from, and not all objects will necessarily turn out to be as old as the styles in which they appear. For the last century, a huge amount of forgery has taken place of ancient objects, particularly from Gandhara, says Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who was not involved in the investigation. OSCE Heritage Crime Task Force members are also looking into the authenticity of the objects from the London warehouse.
Cambodia has a particularly notable history as a target of looting and, more recently, an instigator of repatriation efforts. From the 1970s into the 1990s, while the country suffered significant political turmoil and civil unrest, networks of looters stole thousands of artifacts. In recent years, Cambodia has set “an example for other source countries, because they have made repatriation claims a priority and have convinced former looters to cooperate,” Thompson notes.
When stolen religious and archaeological finds do find their way back to their original sites, the homecoming is often emotional. If a returned artifact had been looted from a temple, there might be a parade through the town to restore it to its proper place.
“Sometimes people start crying, sometimes people are joyful,” Campbell says. “They start playing music and singing. Often people wear their nicest clothes.”
When Thompson attended a repatriation ceremony for a sculpture returned to Nepal, she recalls the locals showering the object with gifts. “In Nepal, similarly, in Cambodia, you treat the sculpture as if it were a living deity,” Thompson says. “You give it offerings of food, of perfumed powders. You light candles to give it light. You make music to entertain it.” She adds, “By the end of this ceremony in Nepal, you couldn't tell that this sculpture had been in a museum for decades. It looked like it had always been hanging out in its shrine.”
