It has been 24 years since Christopher Chippindale and I published our study, 'The material and intellectual consequences of esteem of Cycladic figures'. Our concern at that particular time was that there was a growing threat to the archaeological record, and that Cycladic figures, found in a relatively narrow geographical area, were able to indicate not just the scale of looting, but also the impact on the way that scholarship interpreted the finds. The responses to our research have been mixed: a New York based gallery owner dismissed our work as atypical for archaeological material on the market; a senior UK archaeologist expressed the view that our research was not aesthetically sensitive; and an academic lawyer considered that our approach was particularly and unnecessarily bleak. Yet the revelations of the Medici Conspiracy have confirmed the worst of our concerns. Pat Getz-Gentle's continuing work on attributing Cycladic figures to anonymous artists has now acknowledged our concerns about groups of material that have no secure archaeological contexts. Indeed our research rightly predicted that some of the 'insecure' sculptors (or 'Masters') were indeed the result of modern creative activity.

A study of the Cycladic corpus of figures highlights the way that looting affects the way that we study the past. This can be applied to the intellectual consequences of studying Bronze Age pottery from Crete, or, from a later period, the Sarpedon krater. There needs to be a desire to place secure or grounded archaeological material at the heart of our discussions.