About
The Museum of Looted Antiquities is a virtual gallery that collects, displays and studies looted antiquities that have been repatriated since 1950.
We’re working with a community of researchers from various backgrounds — academia, law, the art market and journalism — to build the dataset and study its contents. The goal is to elevate our understanding of the illicit antiquities trade from the anecdotal to the data driven.
Get Involved
As a collaborative research project, there are several ways to get involved:
- Contribute: Anyone can propose repatriated objects in include in MOLA through our Contribute page. Contributions will be peer reviewed, and contributors will be credited if we add them to MOLA.
- Visiting Scholars: Researchers interested in studying the illicit antiquities trade with us can apply for access to the MOLA dataset by contacting us
- Curators: Curators are subject matter experts who help design MOLA exhibits and research projects.
- Community: We have a Discord community of contributors who are looking to help out and dig deeper.
Contact us here to inquire about the above roles.
MOLA Peer Review
MOLA uses a peer review process to collect data from a broad array of sources while maintaining accuracy and reliability on a small budget.
To preserve these editorial standards, MOLA reviews all contributions for:
- Accuracy: All information in MOLA is drawn from reliable primary and secondary sources.
- Attribution: Sources of information are properly cited and attributed in text and source fields.
- Credit: Contributors to MOLA are credited by name (or handle, if they prefers to not be named publicly).
- Privacy and libel review: We review all contributions to ensure that they do not violate US privacy or libel laws.
- Data integrity: We use stable links generated by the Internet Archive to preserve data integrity in online sources, and perform regularly scheduled data preservation.
If you feel we’ve not lived up to these standards, please contact us here.
Technology
MOLA is built on Omeka, a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections. Learn more at Omeka.org.
In the future we plan to include additional features, including data analysis tools and curated exhibits to feature some of the stories of these repatriations.
Funding
MOLA is supported by grants and donations to the Achilles Research Group, a non profit 501c3 research collaborative studying the dark corners of the art market.
To support to our work, please contact:
Jason Felch
jfelch@achillesresearch.org