The Syrian civil war exacted a massive toll on the country’s population, with hundreds of thousands of children, women, and men killed, injured, or forced to flee. Part and parcel of the human suffering is the widespread loss of artistic and historical materials—the deliberate and collateral destruction of artworks and monuments, mosques and marketplaces, books, artifacts, churches, synagogues, and archaeological sites. One aspect of this destruction, in particular, has generated vigorous debate among scholars, policymakers, and art market professionals: the intensive looting of archaeological sites by insurgent groups and their possible links to the antiquities trade. The war did not introduce site looting to the region, of course, and the antiquities trade did not endorse insurgent looting. But, for several reasons, the cultural loss from this war has attracted sustained media and scholarly attention. One important outcome of this attention is research investment. In the years since the world learned of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) campaign of cultural destruction, considerable efforts have been made by scholars and market professionals to separate myth from fact by prioritizing reliable data to piece together the complex components of the Syrian artifact pipeline. These efforts have already borne fruit, as numerous recent publications attest.1 Any attempt to situate the looting in the broader space of the art market, however, eventually hits the causal wall: does looting proliferate because the antiquities trade encourages it, even if inadvertently? In other words, is there something about the current structure and ethos of the trade that provides the conditions that are conducive to illegal excavation and the transfer of archaeological materials? How these questions get answered tells us about much more than one particular civil war; their answers—and the contentious grounds on which the questions are

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简介：古物市场的新见解

叙利亚内战对该国人口造成了巨大损失，数十万儿童、妇女和男子被杀、受伤或被迫逃离。人类苦难的一部分是艺术和历史材料的广泛损失——艺术品和纪念碑、清真寺和市场、书籍、文物、教堂、犹太教堂和考古遗址的故意和附带破坏。这种破坏的一个方面尤其引起了学者、政策制定者和艺术市场专业人士的激烈争论：叛乱团体对考古遗址的大肆掠夺及其与古物贸易的可能联系。当然，战争并没有给该地区带来遗址掠夺，古物贸易也不支持叛乱分子的掠夺。但是，出于多种原因，这场战争造成的文化损失引起了媒体和学术界的持续关注。这种关注的一个重要成果是研究投资。自从世界了解伊拉克和叙利亚伊斯兰国 (ISIS) 的文化破坏运动以来的几年里，学者和市场专业人士做出了相当大的努力，通过优先考虑可靠的数据来拼凑文化的复杂组成部分，将神话与事实区分开来。叙利亚神器管道。这些努力已经取得了成果，正如最近的许多出版物所证明的那样。1 然而，任何试图将掠夺置于更广阔的艺术市场空间的尝试最终都会碰壁：掠夺之所以激增，是因为古物贸易鼓励了它，即使是无意的? 换句话说，目前的贸易结构和精神是否为非法挖掘和转移考古材料提供了条件？如何回答这些问题告诉我们的不仅仅是一场特定的内战；他们的答案——以及提出问题的有争议的理由