Three Antiquities Traffickers and Their Fall from Grace

Agreed. Maoists (which the Khmer were) would bulldoze two thousand year old cultural sites. They were simple minded communists and could care less...Some of the most complex and distributed forms of government in the history of human kind existed in ancient china and these maoist boneheads wiped a lot of that history out of existence.

The same issue arises over and over. Like the destruction of antiquities by religious radicals in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's good to round up antiquities at risk and export them, but with the right provenance and to suitable institutions to hold with a public display of that provenance, so that when an appropriate time comes, they can be returned. I.e. treat it as "borrowing" or "safe-keeping".

Not just take it and sell it to unscrupulous buyers who will keep it.

How would you like it if someone swooped down on your house in advance of a hurricane and said "hey, your house is going to get destroyed anyway; why don't I take your appliances and electronics and sell them to other interested parties for my profit? After all, you won't be able to use them while you don't have a home, so what's the harm?"

say Latchford now goes to occupied parts of Ukraine and buys up all their atifacts from the Russian regime and sells them around in order to preserve them

not only would he symbolically support the Russian regime by uprooting Ukrainian cultural heritage from the area, but he'd also support it financially by buying the stuff in the first place

No, those are vastly different things unless you're a looter looking to gain a veneer of ethical legitimacy. Let me explain as an archaeologist:

1. Consent is key in any excavations or artifact collection. Sometimes this will be through broad government-granted powers to specific organizations to rescue sites in immediate danger of destruction (i.e. rescue archaeology), but more commonly it's through permits to conduct research. You have a duty to find the stakeholders and ask permission.

2. You need to document provenance and minimize damage both to the site and collected artifacts. In many cases, leaving things in situ is the best way to preserve them. Most sites don't need to be excavated.

3. Artifacts need to be collected in accordance with ethical norms. That means things like no public photos of the deceased.

4. You don't ever sell anything you've collected. You're rescuing it or collecting it for scientific purposes. You don't own it.

Some customers might see it as a positive attribute if anything. Viewing it as signaling they might be able to acquire items that would otherwise be impossible to obtain.

This is far from the first time someone has pointed out that Sothebys is selling looted antiquities with bogus provenance. It's no secret that virtually the entire antiquities market is guilty of these kinds of things. If you listen to experts in this material outside the institutions that participate in this market, the unanimous message is: don't buy antiquities. The buyers who continue to participate in it are either willfully ignorant or they just don't care.

I'm no expert in art or antiquities. The only reason I even know the name "Sotheby's" is because it was mentioned in a John Oliver piece about stolen antiquities.

So as a layman I can tell you: The only reason I know Sotheby's is in the context of this.

Major auction houses have been involved in a whole lot of fraudulent and/or shady dealing. It's essentially part of their business model.

Whenever there is money to be made, people corrupt. Why do you think Sothebys would be any different?