The government of Mali passed a law against excavating and exporting the wonderful terra-cotta sculptures from the old city of Djenne-jeno, but it could not enforce it. And it certainly could not afford to fund thousands of archaeological excavations. The result was that many fine Djenne-jeno terra-cotta sculptures were illicitly excavated in the 1980s and sold to foreign collectors who rightly admired them. Because these sites were looted, much of what we would most like to know about this culture—much that we could have learned had the sites been preserved by careful archaeology—may now never be known.

It has been natural to condemn such pillaging. And, through a number of declarations from UNESCO and other international bodies, a protective doctrine has evolved concerning the ownership of many forms of cultural property (the "UNESCO doctrine"). Essentially the doctrine provides that cultural artifacts should be regarded as the property of the culture. For an individual belonging to that culture, such works are, using UNESCO's terminology, part of an "artistic and cultural patrimony." Further, a number of countries have strengthened the UNESCO doctrine by declaring all antiquities that originate within their borders to be state property that cannot be freely exported.

Accordingly, it seems reasonable that the government of Mali, within whose borders the Djenne-jeno antiquities are buried, be the one to regulate excavating Djenne-jeno and to decide where the statues should go. Regrettably, and this is a painful irony, regulations prohibiting export and requiring repatriation can discourage recording and preserving information about cultural antiquities, one of the key reasons for the UNESCO regulations. For example, if someone in London sells a figure from Djenne-jeno with documentation that it came out of the ground there after the regulations were implemented, then the authorities committed to the restitution of objects taken illegally out of Mali have the very evidence they need to seize the figure.

Suppose that from the beginning, Mali had been helped by UNESCO to exercise its trusteeship of the Djenne-jeno terra-cotta sculptures by licensing excavations and educating people to recognize that such artifacts have greater value when they are removed carefully from the earth with accurate records of location. Suppose Mali had required that objects be recorded and registered before leaving the excavation site, and had imposed a tax on exported objects to fund acquisitions of important pieces for the national museum. The excavations encouraged by such a system may have been less well conducted and less informative than proper, professionally administered excavations by accredited archaeologists. Some people would still have avoided the rules. But would this not have been better than what actually happened?