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| Davis has worked on-the-ground in Cambodia since 2003 |
“We are fortunate to have someone with such talent and
experience leading our efforts to fight antiquities looting and trafficking,
especially given ISIS’s recent destruction of temples, monuments, and antiquities
as a tool for cultural cleansing. The global community has no greater ally in
combating cultural racketeering than Tess Davis,” said Deborah Lehr, Chairman
and Co-Founder of the Antiquities Coalition.
Davis comes to the Antiquities Coalition after a three-year
campaign to help the Royal Government of Cambodia recover a stolen Khmer
masterpiece from a prominent auction house. The thousand-year-old statue had
been on the block for $3 million dollars, when Cambodia revealed that it had
been plundered by paramilitary forces during the country’s bloody civil war
with the Khmer Rouge. The auction house refused to return the piece, leading to
two years of heated litigation. Thanks in part to Davis’s efforts — and most
importantly the hard work of the Cambodian and United States governments — the
statue was successfully repatriated in 2014. Davis played a “critical” role in its recovery, in work that
was featured by The New York Times.
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| Davis speaking at the National Trust for Historic Preservation |
Davis joins the Washington-based nonprofit after devoting the
last decade to fighting the illicit antiquities trade: first in the field as an
archaeologist, and then by conducting ground-breaking legal and scholarly research
for leading academic institutions. She has been a consultant for the Cambodian
and U.S. federal governments, and works with both the art world and law
enforcement to keep looted antiquities off the market. She is affiliated with
the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of
Glasgow.
Davis frequently writes and speaks on the issue of cultural
racketeering. Her work has appeared in TheLos Angeles Times, The New York Times,
CNN, The Cambodia Daily and multiple
scholarly publications. She also contributes to both The Conversation and The
Huffington Post.
