Grave robbery
[4] Grave robbing in China is a practice stretching back to antiquity; the classic Chinese text Lüshi Chunqiu, dating to the 2nd century BCE, advised readers to plan simple burials to discourage looting.
[6] In modern China, grave robbing has been perpetrated by both amateurs (such as farmers and migrant laborers) and by professional thieves associated with transnational criminal networks.
[5] The practice reached epidemic proportions in the 1980s, as the development and construction boom following the Chinese economic reform led to many archaeological sites being revealed.
[5] Other peaks of tomb robbing occurred in the early 2000s and in the 2010s, when the plunder of graves was on the upswing due to an increase in global and domestic demand (and prices) for Chinese antiquities.
[10] Oftentimes, warnings would be left by the Pharaohs in the tombs of calamities and curses that would be laid upon any who touched the treasure, or the bodies, which did little to deter grave robbers.
Many grave robbers work with metal detectors and some of the groups are organised criminals, feeding the black market with highly prized archaeological artifacts.
However, a Secret Service agent was present and had notified the police beforehand, so the grave robbers only succeeded in dislodging the lid of his coffin.
[17][18] Grave robbers often sold stolen Aztec or Mayan goods on the black market for an extremely high price.
didn't often suffer the repercussions of being in possession of stolen goods; the blame (and charges) were placed upon the lower-class grave robbers.
A grave robber could wait discreetly in the distance until nobody else was in sight, then quickly and easily disinter the body from its shallow resting place.
[19] Once the railroad was invented and tracks laid, the sale of the bodies of African American slaves from the South for dissection began in earnest.
The bodies were robbed from graves by night doctors and shipped to medical schools in the northern part of the United States.
One New England anatomy professor reported that, in the 1880s and 1890s, he entered into an arrangement in which he received, twice each semester, a shipment of 12 bodies of southern African Americans.
[20] State laws in Mississippi and North Carolina were passed in the 19th century which allowed medical schools to use the remains of those at the bottom of society's hierarchy—the unclaimed bodies of poor persons and residents of almshouses, and those buried in potter's fields for anatomical study.
[24][25] This belief was reflected in the work of anthropologists and scientists who travelled to Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to collect Aboriginal remains for study.
After the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal woman died in 1876, her body was exhumed and her skeleton sent to the Royal College of Surgeons in London for study.
The theft and desecration of Aboriginal burial sites and remains has had profound and ongoing impacts on Indigenous communities in Australia.
[citation needed] A mortsafe or mort safe was an iron coffin or framework which helped to protect a grave by preventing the body from being dug up and taken away.
Prior to grave robbers, they were used to store dead bodies in the winter, being that the ground was too cold and in some cases impossible to dig into.
[citation needed] Mausolea do not play a major role in the history of graverobbing and are largely built as a display of wealth rather than security.
Grave robbers could break a window, recover the body, find the key, and walk straight out the front door of the mausoleum.
Typically these would be a semi-enclosed stone structure with an ornamental cast iron access gate and usually plainer rails to the roof or sides.
[citation needed] One of the most simplistic and low-tech methods to prevent grave robbing were to have an individual guard over the newly buried body.
[citation needed] Within the Great Pyramid of Giza (completed around 2560 BC),[46] an Egyptian deterrent system was built to guard the tomb of Pharaoh Khufu.
