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. Using a framework of routine activity theory, this project proposes a new possible approach that considers spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal relationships to establish baseline data on patterns of archaeological looting attempts in Lower Egypt from 2015 to 2017 relative to sociopolitical, economic, and environmental stress. Specifically, it proposes a methodology for collecting and coding data on archaeological looting attempts from satellite imagery and then applies a series of spatial (clustering, proximity), temporal (SEM, VAR, ARDL), and spatio-temporal methods (clustering, hot spots analysis, spatial time series) to these data to demonstrate the importance of analyzing this phenomena multidimensionally.

This database contains 994 incidents of attempted archaeological looting at 140 archaeological sites from 2015 to 2017 in Lower Egypt. Each row in the data represents a month-year and archaeological site location. Incidents of looting were identified and coded from 3,199 satellite images. The data can be explored by method of defining looting as well as by site and time period.

Detailed codebook containing the specific definitions and operationalizations for each variable across the four datasets above.