Irregularly regulated collecting markets: antiquities, fossils, and wildlife.

This paper examines the dynamics of 'irregularly regulated markets', specifically those dealing with what we term 'criminogenic collectables': antiquities, fossils, and wildlife. Through the lens of 'irregular regulation' we consider how inconsistencies and loopholes in legal frameworks contribute to criminal activities in these markets. We outline five ways that such markets can be considered irregular: socially, jurisdictionally, temporally, culturally and discursively.

Investigating antiquities trafficking with generative pre-trained transformer (GPT)-3 enabled knowledge graphs: A case study.

There is a wide variety of potential sources from which insight into the antiquities trade could be culled, from newspaper articles to auction catalogues, to court dockets, to personal archives, if it could all be systematically examined. We explore the use of a large language model, GPT-3, to semi-automate the creation of a knowledge graph of a body of scholarship concerning the antiquities trade. We give GPT-3 a prompt guiding it to identify knowledge statements around the trade.

The cultural capitalists: Notes on the ongoing reconfiguration of trafficking culture in Asia.

Most analysis of the international flows of the illicit art market has described a global situation in which a postcolonial legacy of acquisition and collection exploits cultural heritage by pulling it westwards towards major international trade nodes in the USA and Europe. As the locus of consumptive global economic power shifts, however, these traditional flows are pulled in other directions: notably for the present commentary, towards and within Asia.

Collectors on illicit collecting: Higher loyalties and other techniques of neutralization in the unlawful collecting of rare and precious orchids and antiquities.

Trafficking natural objects and trafficking cultural objects have been treated separately both in regulatory policy and in criminological discussion. The former is generally taken to be 'wildlife crime' while the latter has come to be considered under the auspices of a debate on 'illicit art and antiquities'. In this article we study the narrative discourse of high-end collectors of orchids and antiquities.