"The sea is the biggest museum in the world," Michel L'Hour, an archaeologist by profession and a member of the French Marine Academy, likes to say. For 15 years, from 2006 to 2021, he directed the country's Department of Underwater Archaeological Research (DRASSM). "When a painting is stolen from a museum, it shows. Our problem is that our paintings are underwater and we don't have an inventory."
It is difficult to detect theft from shipwrecks. On land, a prospector for buried objects can be seen with his metal detector; underwater, looters become invisible because police officers do not don flippers to patrol the Mediterranean. "The area is colossally huge," said Mr. L'Hour, "and the depth is an additional obstacle to surveillance. No one will be spotted unless a boat of divers is regularly stationed above the same point."
It is therefore almost impossible to put a figure on the extent of the looting of wrecks in French waters. "When I started, in the very early 1980s, it was estimated that 90% of the accessible wrecks on the coastal edge had had 40% to 60% of their contents removed," recalled Mr. L'Hour. "We could see the craters on the bottom, and we had the feeling that we were in a hurry... and always too late."
The archaeologists were therefore forced to add a string to their bow: "looter hunters". "With my colleague Luc Long, we were called Starsky and Hutch, like the two policemen in the famous TV series. He was the brown-haired guy and I was the blond; he was Starsky and I was Hutch."
The fight was organized little by little, in essentially two directions. Archaeologists first began to work with customs officers and the police. "Until the early 1980s," said Mr. L'Hour, "this was not really the case, because we had the old 1968 reflexes in human sciences research: 'I'm not a snitch' didn't allow us to work with law enforcement." However, collaboration is essential to track down looters. Not only do underwater archaeologists know the world of divers well, but also they are able to immediately recognize an object extracted from a wreck, or even to identify the wreck from which it was taken.
The second angle of attack concerns the legal framework. The law of the sea, which defines the responsibilities of nations along their coasts, has long limited the protection of underwater archaeological sites to the first 44km, in keeping with the Montego Bay Convention signed in 1982. The exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which extends to 370km, did not benefit from any particular protection. The UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, ratified by France in 2013, compensates for this lack. As the French EEZ is the second largest in the world, with nearly 11 million square kilometers, DRASSM's playground has become gigantic, as has its task of managing the sunken heritage.
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