'This is a story about buried treasure': The 1970s tomb raiders who plundered 'million-dollar pots'

It was one of the finest pieces of art ever bought by the Met. But it had been excavated by an Italian grave robber, then smuggled to the US. In 1975, the BBC investigated the lucrative global trade in stolen antiquities.

In September 1972, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) purchased an ancient Greek vase for $1.2m ($9.6m or £7.1m today). Created around 515BC and signed by the painter Euphronios, it is considered one of the best surviving examples of ancient Greek pottery. "From this moment, histories of art will have to be rewritten," boasted the Met's director after the sale was announced, claiming that the vase was one of the two or three finest works of art ever owned by the museum.

But there were soon accusations that the vase had been illegally excavated and smuggled into the US, giving it the nickname "the hot pot". A BBC reporter, John Percival, followed its trail to the underground tombs of a necropolis just outside Cerveteri, Italy, where a professional grave robber, or tombarolo, was said to have unearthed it. And the excitement generated by its price meant that there was renewed activity in the area. "The Italian robbers are chasing million-dollar pots," said Percival. "The Italian cops are chasing the robbers."

Speaking on the BBC's Treasure Trail in 1975, Percival summed up the situation: "This is a story about buried treasure, about gold, silver and precious things hidden in the Earth long ago. It's about the thieves who dig for it by night, about the dealers who smuggle it across frontiers, about the collectors and the great museums that act as receivers of stolen goods."

"The destruction starts at the place where the object is found," Dr Nusin Askari, an expert at the Istanbul Museum, told the BBC. "It's broken so that it can be sold for a higher price in the end and so that it can be transported and smuggled out of the country easier."

To try and control the stolen antiquities trade in the Cerveteri area, a special team of police was trained in ancient art, attending lectures by an expert at Rome's Villa Giulia Museum. Yet illegal excavations were difficult to patrol, and kept appearing like giant potholes dotted around Italian fields. 

"The whole area is littered with absolutely hundreds of tombs which can be opened up easily," said Percival, crouching next to a freshly dug pit that had appeared that morning. It was an early Etruscan tomb, with grave goods not as rich as those found in some later ones, and the robbers had left behind multiple fragments not worth removing.

In a nearby area also plundered by grave robbers, Etruscan pots recovered from illegal excavations were piled in a museum courtyard. Next to them was a stack of long metal skewers or kiavi, which the robbers used to probe the ground, looking for hollow places in the soft bedrock.

Yet some tomb raiders had more sophisticated kit. "Nowadays, there's some very fine electronic equipment that's available, and these people do use this," the US explorer Howard Jennings told the BBC, describing the activities of treasure hunters in South America at the time. "It eliminates an awful lot of digging if you can locate metal objects, and it's metal objects that these people are generally after because gold is more easily smuggled out than bulky pottery."

He explained how the value of the loot was determined in a straightforward way. "The wholesale price of pre-Columbian gold artefacts is around 15 times its weight in gold. So if the curator of a museum agrees to purchase, the gold objects are simply weighed, and a bit of multiplication is done on the basis of 15 times that weight, and that's how the payment's made."

While laws have since been tightened, there was almost a Wild West feel to the situation Jennings described in 1975. "There are vast areas of South America, particularly in Ecuador, that are totally unexplored and unmapped, and it's very easy for a person to simply disappear into a jungle for months on end in areas where there are literally hundreds of burial mounds," he said. "They can work there without any question of the authorities finding them. And they stay until they've acquired all that they feel that they can smuggle out of the country – and then out they come and away they go."

Disposing of smuggled antiquities was easy, according to Jennings. "They're in great demand. The only thing the museums, the auction houses, the dealers, private collectors want to know is, is this artefact authentic? Once that's been determined, that it's an authentic antiquity, there are no other questions asked."

Yet countries rich in archaeological sites have passed laws forbidding the export of antiquities. Illegal shipments are regularly intercepted by the authorities, and many stolen artefacts have been returned to their countries of origin. The Met's "hot pot" was sent back to Italy in 2008, after it was found to have passed through the hands of antiquities smuggler Giacomo Medici, convicted of trafficking in looted objects in 2005. "But as long as there's a market," said Percival, "the pillage of the past goes on." 

More like this:

• The US explorers who found a lost ancient city

• The dazzling discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb

• The theory that Stonehenge was a prehistoric computer

"From murderous temple thieves in India to church pillagers in Bolivia to hundred-man bands of tomb raiders in China's Liaoning Province, looters are strip-mining our past," said a 2016 National Geographic article, arguing that "satellite imagery, police seizures, and witness reports from the field all indicate that the trade in stolen treasures is booming around the world". 

All that plundering damages our understanding of our history. "It matters because it's destroying knowledge," museum curator Nick Thomas told the BBC. Looting any archaeological site, "whether it's a grand temple or a minor tomb with just two or three pots and a skeleton… is simply destroying knowledge about our past which we can pass on to the future."

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