Dr. Christopher Beekman recently contributed to Collecting Mesoamerican Art Before 1940 (Getty Research Institute, 2024), in which he discussed the history of looting and trafficking antiquities out of western Mexico. Members of the art community shaped the market for these objects around a “brand” that appealed to specifically West Coast elites by mid-century and distorted how even archaeologists thought about these materials.
He also just published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology with his colleagues from the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis. In this article, the authors mine the archaeological record for examples of migration to inform policymakers on the impact of barriers to migration and the capital that migrants need to overcome them.
