The 1970s treasure hunters who looted ‘million-dollar pots’ from ancient tombs
In September 1972, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art paid $1.2m — roughly $9.6m, or £7.1m, in today’s money — for an ancient Greek vase dating to around 515BC and signed by the painter Euphronios. The museum’s director called it one of the finest works of art the Met had ever acquired, declaring, “From this moment, histories of art will have to be rewritten.” The celebration didn’t last: allegations soon surfaced that the vase, nicknamed “the hot pot,” had been illegally dug up and smuggled into the United States.
BBC reporter John Percival traced its origins to underground tombs near Cerveteri, Italy, where a tombarolo, or professional grave robber, was said to have unearthed it. The vase’s record-breaking price triggered a surge of illicit digging in the area. As Percival put it at the time, “The Italian robbers are chasing million-dollar pots. The Italian cops are chasing the robbers.” Reporting for the BBC’s Treasure Trail in 1975, he described the trade in stark terms: “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.”
Destruction at the source
Istanbul Museum expert Dr Nusin Askari explained that looted objects were frequently smashed on site to make them easier to smuggle and more profitable to sell piecemeal: “The destruction starts at the place where the object is found. It’s broken so that it can be sold for a higher price in the end.” Italian authorities responded by training specialist police units in ancient art at Rome’s Villa Giulia Museum, but the illegal digs — appearing across the countryside like scattered potholes — proved nearly impossible to stop. Percival, crouched beside one freshly opened Etruscan grave, noted, “The whole area is littered with absolutely hundreds of tombs which can be opened up easily.”
The problem wasn’t confined to Italy. American explorer Howard Jennings described similarly organised looting across South America, where treasure hunters used electronic detection equipment to locate metal objects rather than dig blindly, since “gold is more easily smuggled out than bulky pottery.” Pricing, he said, followed a simple formula: pre-Columbian gold was typically valued at around 15 times its weight in gold, with buyers rarely questioning anything beyond authenticity. Vast unmapped stretches of countries like Ecuador allowed looters to “simply disappear into a jungle for months on end,” emerging only once they had gathered as much as they could smuggle out.
A trade that persists
Despite export bans in many countries rich in antiquities, smuggling has never fully stopped. The Met’s “hot pot” was eventually returned to Italy in 2008 after investigators linked it to convicted antiquities trafficker Giacomo Medici. As Percival observed, “as long as there’s a market, the pillage of the past goes on.” A 2016 National Geographic report found the trade still thriving worldwide, from India to Bolivia to China. Museum curator Nick Thomas summed up the stakes: looting any site, however modest, “is simply destroying knowledge about our past which we can pass on to the future.”
Source: BBC News