California Museums Raided

Four Southern California museums were raided late last week in the continuing effort to crack down on stolen artifacts being offered as donations to museums. According to an Associated Press story, federal agents raided the museums mostly in search of artifacts allegedly taken from Thailand’s Ban Chiang, one of the most prehistoric settlements ever discovered in Southeast Asia. The artifacts were likely smuggled into the U.S. and donated at inflated prices to collectors could claim fraudulent tax deductions.

The story also says that some museum officials initially questioned how the artifacts were obtained, but eventually accepted them.

In the past year some of the largest institutions in the nation (The Metropolitan Museum in New York, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the J. Paul Getty Museum in California) have been found to have knowingly accept looted artifacts. If the crackdown on stolen art and artifacts is to ever be successful — and if museums hope to improve their tarnished reputations – they need to better investigate where the art comes from and how it got to the U.S.