Grave robbery

"Grave robber" redirects here. For other uses, see Grave Robber (disambiguation).

Grave robbery, tomb robbing, or tomb raiding is the act of uncovering a grave, tomb or crypt to steal commodities. It is usually perpetrated to take and profit from valuable artefacts or personal property.[n 1] A related act is body snatching, a term denoting the contested or unlawful taking of a body (usually from a grave), which can be extended to the unlawful taking of organs alone.

Hole that was dug by looters in Chan Chan, Peru

Grave robbing has caused great difficulty to the studies of archaeology, art history, and history.[1][2] Countless precious grave sites and tombs have been robbed before scholars were able to examine them. In any way, the archaeological context and the historical and anthropological information are destroyed:

Looting obliterates the memory of the ancient world and turns its highest artistic creations into decorations, adornments on a shelf, divorced from historical context and ultimately from all meaning.[3]

Grave robbers who are not caught usually sell relatively modern items anonymously and artifacts on the black market. Those intercepted, in a public justice domain, are inclined to deny their guilt. Though some artifacts may make their way to museums or scholars, the majority end up in private collections.[4]


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  1. ^ Daniel (1950), p. 11
  2. ^ Atwood (2004), p. 9
  3. ^ Atwood (2004), p. 10
  4. ^ Huffer, Damien; University, Stockholm; Graham, Shawn (2017). "The Insta-Dead: The rhetoric of the human remains trade on Instagram". Internet Archaeology (45). doi:10.11141/ia.45.5.