Arianna Traviglia and her staff of the Center for Cultural Heritage Technology (Ccht) in Venice could be the protagonists of a CSI-style series https://ccht.iit.it/. The laboratory of the Italian Institute of Technology studies how to protect cultural heritage, monuments, works of art and archaeological finds and helps law enforcement in combating illegal trafficking. It is a phenomenon that is spoken of almost only on the occasion of major operations by the Carabinieri of the protection nucleus, but which, like a karst river, digs and erodes beneath the surface. Today is the international day to combat the illegal trafficking of cultural assets https://www.unesco.org/en/days/against-illicit-trafficking, organized by Unesco to raise awareness against the looting, sale and purchase of artifacts of historical and artistic value. Arianna Traviglia, head of the Ccht, tells Repubblica how the Ccht supports the police forces in fighting this scourge with digital analysis techniques and artificial intelligence.
“The most important working group in Italy”
“For some years we have created what we can consider the largest and most important working group in Italy and internationally in the field of technology to combat the trafficking of cultural assets – says Traviglia – with a series of internal projects and financed by others. entities. The goal is to recognize the illegal activities that take place in the field, such as those of “grave robbers” or more generally of clandestine excavations. And then online, once coins, statues, pottery or paintings are put on the market. The archaeologist of the IIT explains that their role is not to investigate, however the collaboration with the police forces is already needed now. And in the future it will provide tools for investigating illicit trafficking. One of these started a month ago: Rithms, financed with five million by the European Commission, sees the Ccht at the helm of 20 international partners, including seven police forces and border forces from European and non-European countries.
Traffic networks
Rithms, acronym for Research intelligence and technology for heritage and market security, aims to draw maps of online criminal connections whose nodes are the traffickers, the buyers and the markets in which the goods are offered for sale, an IT platform that exploits the ‘artificial intelligence: “We use the data on the Internet or other databases to create intelligence information to support the police, on how they interact, through the photos posted on social networks by people closely or remotely involved in the traffic of certain goods” he explains the archaeologist.
He would like to point out that this is not an investigative tool, but a project to develop one to then be entrusted to the police of different countries to find criminal trafficking networks. “We get information from people within these closed groups who send us pictures of the goods being offered for sale. But in the development of the platform we will use cases that have already been concluded so as not to insert ourselves in the vein of investigations. Cases closed to create an IT system “. Traviglia’s group thus obtains material to train artificial intelligence to recognize online connections.
Collaboration with the Carabinieri
The collaboration with the Italian Carabinieri is also implemented with a recently signed agreement for the reporting of potentially plundered sites, or analysis of materials from seizures of works, which in this case can be brought to court as proof of origin, authenticity, or even counterfeiting. In fact, a good portion of the seizures concern the counterfeit market. The economic estimate of the “shit” seized by the Carabinieri in 2021 is almost 430 million euros (“if placed on the market as authentic”). Three times the value of all the other kidnappings.
A big brother of illicit trafficking
In the Center which is based in Venice, the experts, a dozen in all, work by pooling skills in different disciplines, also involving students. One of the ongoing projects concerns the recognition and identification of items offered for sale, again keeping an eye on groups on social networks and online auctions. A task that integrates the Rithms project but which has already reported suspicious objects and situations to the investigative police, in particular Carabinieri and Interpol.
For now we rely on experts who know how to recognize an artifact of undoubted antiquity and illicit origin: “We will soon also use artificial intelligence to recognize stolen objects, it must be developed by observing what is in the databases of world countries that are only partially public, to find analogies on the net. It is very complex and will take years. Then there are a whole series of objects that have the so-called red flag, to say ‘attention: if you meet on the market an object that has this specificity, it can only have that origin’. We have examples in Italy, from Etruria, of objects that are identifiable even at the village level, because they have such a specificity that they can only come from that area and not from others “.
Italy the ‘paradise’ of grave robbers
Italy is the country that possesses the largest material cultural heritage in the world, much of which is still buried. Also for this reason it is among the most affected by the trafficking of stolen goods, just dig. Not surprisingly, in the latest report of the Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection nucleus https://www.beniculturali.it/comunicato/23137, the most numerous category of objects recovered is precisely that of archaeological finds: 23,441. Among the busiest and most requested, attractive for the market, Traviglia mentions “museum specimens, worth millions of euros”: coins, statues and jewels, and in particular the finds from Magna Graecia, therefore from Southern Italy, such as the vases with black or red figures.
A “success” started by the case of the “Euphronius Crater” https://roma.repubblica.it/cronaca/2014/12/18/news/dopo_40_anni_torna_a_cerveteri_il_cratere_di_eufronio-103229326/, the result of the sacking of an Etruscan tomb in Cerveteri and illegally exported in the US in the early 1970s, then sold for a million dollars at the Metropolitan Museum in New York: “It was the stone of the scandal, which led to the investigations of the 1990s – he recalls – and the return by the Metropolitan . But it is also recognized as the moment in which the Italian grave robbers realized what they had under their feet and went wild in search of objects of that type ”.
The ‘technical’ study of cases that emerge on the net can lead to a report, when you notice, human or machine, a recent case that can be an alert, for the Carabinieri or for Interpol: “Sometimes we remain open-mouthed seeing photos or videos of the clandestine excavation of an open tomb in Egypt, posted to prove that an object was indeed found in that spot, which is authentic, because it circulates so much fake. It’s really crazy that they come to this ”.
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The most attentive countries are those from which the artifacts may come, Italy is among them but it is also, as Traviglia points out, one of the transit countries of works that then end up in markets where there are more permissive laws “mainly Holland, Switzerland and England, eventually ending up perhaps in the United States, Russia or Arabia. The collections never lose value ”. A phenomenon that has given rise to international investigations to bring stolen works back to Italy, which disappeared and then reappeared overseas. Not only in private villas for the exclusive enjoyment of a few billionaires: “There were these crazy collections of the Getty or the Metropolitan, museums that were in contact with Italian grave robbers – recalls the archaeologist – thanks to the prosecutors Ferri and Muntoni they returned to home. And then there was the work of Francesco Rutelli who, with cultural diplomacy, facilitated the return by offering in exchange, for example, long-term loans of important works that were lying in the warehouses. But there are very long lists of materials whose provenance the Carabinieri have proven ”. Among these, one of the most striking examples is the Athlete from Fano https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2018/12/04/news/atleta_vittorioso_di_lisippo_cassazione_la_statua_torni_in_italia_-213382473/, attributed to Lisippo, or in any case to his school , fished in the Adriatic and ended up right at the Getty. The Californian museum refuses to return it, claiming it was caught in international waters.
The destruction seen from satellite
In Italy we generally call them grave robbers, in reality they dig everywhere. They know where they are looking and then flee, leaving behind the scars of the massacre. Here, too, Ccht puts AI into the field with another project co-financed by the European Space Agency (ESA). The basic idea is simple: to understand where there are anomalies, new excavations, potentially all over the world, because the satellites scan the entire globe: “They make holes here and there and then go away quickly without covering them, they work in the countryside , away from the centers, or in remote areas of Syria or Iraq, for example. The ISIS militiamen destroyed the vestiges of the ‘infidels’ in favor of the chamber but then threw the rest into the clandestine market to finance themselves. We use the Copernicus platforms to search in satellite images for the presence of sites subjected to looting, clandestine excavation – explains Traviglia – and we develop new artificial intelligence methods to ensure that the system recognizes new excavations created by grave robbers, to create an alert system for police force. We are working, with a further project, with laser instruments on aerial platforms and drones, which can also see under the vegetation ”.
https://www.repubblica.it/scienze/2021/03/30/news/l_occhio_del_satellite_archeologo_scopre_le_tracce_del_passato-300856344/
Also in this case, it is a question of training the machine, feeding it archive images so that it learns to recognize the places where it has been excavated illegally from other, perhaps legitimate, operations, such as the excavation of a swimming pool or simple work in progress. The team of the Venice Center includes experts in the analysis of satellite images, including Traviglia herself, who has already conducted studies to find possible sites of archaeological interest in the subsoil from space: “We work closely with teams of theoretical expertise, as the Art crime project https://www.artcrimeproject.org/, while the satellite images are the responsibility of the group – he underlines – the grave robbers are usually local people, locals, who talk to the farmer to find out if at some point fragments of pottery or bricks emerge from a field during plowing. They use long metal pins to feel if there is resistance or a void, to understand if there is something underneath. It happens in the areas of the Etruscan necropolis, they do not go by chance. In some situations they dig to recover coins reported by the metal detector, in others they destroy necropolis contexts with gigantic losses. In one case, in Pompeii, someone had dug a tunnel that led right under a domus ”.
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A cultural problem
“We will communicate to the public to draw attention to this problem which is still little known – finally reflects Traviglia – many people think that since an Etruscan statuette is found online on websites, auctions or in groups on mainstream social media, it is possible to buy it. quietly. However, it must be pointed out that there is also the crime of careless purchase “. And the spectacularization of a certain type of practice, such as that of research with the metal detector, which does not do a good service: “There are television broadcasts with metal detector enthusiasts who show what are in effect clandestine excavations. Everything underground belongs to the state. These people therefore, when they extract objects of historical and artistic interest, intercept the cultural heritage. In this case, wrong behaviors are nurtured ”.