Word: etruscans
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...along the watery plains of the Po River delta, set up a special new intelligence corps and dispatched motorized patrols to strategic spots in the hills of central Italy. The time had come, said the government, to break up the booming $8,000,000-a-year black market in Etruscan art objects. Beneath hill and plain lay buried treasure-the vases, statues and coins that the energetic Etruscans had placed in the tombs 25 centuries ago. This was part of the "national patrimony," said the government, and no one would be allowed to dig up or sell them without government...
...Cigar Disguise. Etruscan grave robbing is now thought to involve a network of 200 thieves, 25 middlemen and a dozen fences. Last year the government's special contraband corps arrested 89 looters. Not realizing that much of the booty is stolen, and some faked, Americans bought 85% of the Etruscan objects in respectable-looking shops. Customs officers, traditionally easygoing with American tourists, let them pass. "Americans could walk out of Italy with the Colosseum," complained one contraband officer. But last month frontier customs guards caught an Austrian carrying a vase dating from the 6th century...
...scrubby, rolling country northwest of Rome lies rich archaeological pay dirt, but the worthwhile pockets are as hard to hit as producing oil wells. Some of the underground tombs left by the Etruscans who lived there 2,500 years, ago still contain priceless art treasures, while others, robbed centuries ago, are not worth the trouble and expense. When a modern, authorized graverobber (archaeologist) finds a tomb and digs laboriously into it, he often finds only dust and broken crockery. Last week Amateur Archaeologist Carlo Lerici was proving that modern scientific techniques can take the gamble and much of the secret...
Green & White. Handsome, grey-haired Carlo Lerici, who says "grave-robbing is the second oldest profession in the world," is an engineer whose family owns a steel mill in Milan. When he became interested in Etruscan tombs, one of his first steps was to get copies of a photographic air survey that Britain's Royal Air Force made of southern Etruria during World War II. Studied carefully, the photos often show hundreds of shadowy circles. These are Etruscan tombs, which affect slightly the fertility of the soil and therefore the darkness of the chlorophyll in green plants growing...
Guided by the air photos to a tomb area near Cerveteri (the ancient Etruscan Caere), Lerici trotted out another scientific trick. From the ground the tombs are invisible, but he found that sensitive photometers could detect the slight differences of color between grass growing over a tomb and ordinary grass...