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On March 15 from 9:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. the Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC ) in the U.S. State Department of State will hold a public hearing to decide whether to renew the bilateral agreement with Guatemala that has been in place since 1997 and that is set to expire in September 2007.

Guatemala and the US's collaboration on the problem began in 1991. Facing a flood of looted and smuggled Guatemalan artifacts, the U.S. took emergency action to restrict the flow of illegally excavated archaeological items. In September of 1997, Guatemala and the U.S. went one important step further, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that restricted imports of pre-Columbian archaeological artifacts from throughout Guatemala. In September of 2002, the MOU was extended for another five years.

We urge everyone who cares about this issue, and particularly people who can speak from experience, to attend the hearing and present testimony or send a letter in support of the renewal of the bilateral agreement. Whether you're a student, a volunteer on an archaeological dig, a professional archaeologist, we urge you to get involved and write to CPAC addressing the four determinations (found under Section 303(a) of the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act) summarized here.

Here's why…

What is at stake

The looting of archaeological sites for artifacts, in Guatemala and around the world, has exploded in recent years. Fueled by international demand, the multi-billion dollar black market antiquities trade strips known and unknown archaeological sites of their artifacts, architectural elements, and an incalculable amount of scientific context and history.

Looting and the antiquities trade have particularly damaged Guatemala's deep pre-Columbian archaeological past. The Maya civilization stretched throughout Northern Central America, and its written language, monumental architecture, and beautiful, expressive art and sculpture made it an attractive target for looters. Most at risk was the rich Petén region in the Northern Guatemala lowlands. There, a thick jungle cover had hidden a phenomenal wealth of Maya archaeological sites for centuries, and looters are free to cut stone sculptures from larger monuments, and tear jade artifacts and polychrome-pained pottery vessels from plundered tombs. These artifacts are then sold for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each, Robert Sharer, a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist testified to the Department of State in 2002, but their scientific loss is inestimable.

"Since far more sites have been destroyed by looting than scientifically excavated, we have already lost a huge amount of unique information that could have given us a far better understanding of Maya civilization. Now we will never know what has already been destroyed," Sharer told National Geographic magazine a year later.

What Guatemala is doing to protect its cultural heritage

In Guatemala, the country's Ministry of Culture protects the country's most prominent sites with guards. Government-sponsored archaeological programs locate, register and excavate additional sites. Joint America-Guatemalan excavations at sites like Waka —key in the power struggle between Maya superpowers Tikal and Calakmul —also discourage looting. But newly discovered sites are often looted by the time archaeologists arrive, or can be plundered by well-armed teams when the research season ends. In many cases, the looters operate from highly organized camps in the forest.

There have been successes in the fight against looting in Guatemala: in 2003, Guatemalan undercover agents, archaeologists from America's Vanderbilt University, and local villagers working together were able to recover a 600-pound stone Maya altar stolen from a royal ball court at the site of Cancuén. Near that same site in 2006, however, a rare and beautifully carved stone box that may have once contained a written Maya codex, was reported stolen by looters.

The problem remains the illicit international market, experts say. Guatemalan looters are only feeding the demand of private foreign collectors. "They're working for five or ten dollars a day to find all these things that end up selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars," Brent Woodfill, a Vanderbilt archaeologist, told National Geographic in 2006. A renewed MOU, therefore, allows the U.S. government to put legal pressure on the smugglers and American buyers that make looting lucrative and contribute to the destruction of the Guatemalan past.

—Christopher Heaney, journalist and SAFE volunteer. Additional research: Elizabeth Gilgan, Elvira Giraldez, Matthew Piscitelli.

For more information about CPAC, please visit the U.S. State Department International Cultural Property Protection website.