Why do armed groups deliberately destroy cultural monuments? How does monument destruction correlate with patterns of direct violence against civilians? And what types of empirical evidence can we use to assess the impacts of rebuilding communities through the recovery or loss of shared cultural property?

This project seeks to understand patterns of archaeological looting in Lower Egypt and how the broader contextual factors influence these patterns. Not only has there not yet been extensive scholarship to understand the link between looting and contextual forces, there is a dearth of research on the most effective ways to study these interconnected variables.

This project investigates how the collaboration between archaeological science and counterterrorism studies impacts the robustness and reliability of data generated. Satellite remote sensing (SRS) data are an essential element of this collaboration and the resulting quality of data.

In Quantifying Art Crime, we are amalgamating, analyzing, and synthesizing ten years’ worth of quantitative studies of art crime. In light of the complexity of this area of research, the project looks at the issue from multiple angles including monetary value, volume of material moving through the market, network connections, regional scales, and spatial social relationships between the market and trafficking networks.

This project studies the efforts of the Italian state to regulate the extraction of archaeological materials, including legal, diplomatic, and economic tools to combat tomb robbing. One of the most prominent of these tools is the “Art Squad” (Comando Carabinieri per la Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale, or TPC). The Art Squad is an elite military-police unit whose members are trained in art history, archaeology, and conservation, in addition to standard law enforcement investigation and field techniques.