The large online marketplace site eBay, which was launched about a decade ago, has made archaeologists fear from the start that the number of looted antiquities that could be moved via the Internet would increase considerably. For example, Charles Stanish, who is a UCLA archaeologist with more than 25 years of experience in digs and handling precious artifacts, believed that the number of illegitimate sales would skyrocket. However, it turns out that the popular shopping site had an adverse effect on this segment of the market.

Stanish, who is also the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archeology director, has recently said that, “My greatest fear was that the Internet would democratize antiquities trafficking, which previously had been a wealthy person's vice, and lead to widespread looting.”

Writing in the May/June issue of the journal Archaeology, the expert now concludes that the site, indeed, changed the way in which antiquities were moved online, but not in the way he and others had feared. “For most of us, the Web has forever distorted the antiquities trafficking market in a positive way,” he writes.

Stanish and the vast majority of the archeology community considers looting to be one of the most harmful forms of theft in the world, because, by removing artifacts from their locations and selling them to the black market, the thieves basically deprive people of their right to know their history. This also makes archaeological and anthropological efforts of placing the objects in a more deep and meaningful context increasingly difficult, which, in the end, amounts to the same negative results for everyone. Also, while looting, some thieves also ruin the artifacts they cannot carry, or precious paintings, looking for secret caches or passage ways.

“Chinese, Bulgarian, Egyptian, Peruvian and Mexican workshops are now producing fakes at a frenetic pace,” he tells about the unexpected side-effect that eBay had on the antiquity market. “People who used to make a few dollars selling a looted artifact to a middleman in their village can now produce their own 'almost-as-good-as-old' objects and go directly to a person in a nearby town who has an eBay account. They will receive the same amount or even more than they could have received for actual antiquities,” the archaeologist explains.

“The value of illicit digging decreases every time someone buys a 'genuine' Moche pot for $35, plus shipping and handling. Who wants to spend $50,000 on an object 'guaranteed' to be ancient by today's standards, when someone can come along in five years with a new technology that definitively proves it to be a fake,” he writes in the journal entry. Stanish also adds that a genuine Moche artifact would sell for prices upwards of $15,000.