Assessing Damage to Archaeological Heritage in Criminal and Administrative Proceedings

The economic assessment of damage to movable and immovable objects considered part of archaeological heritage is a matter of increasing interest, both at the legal level and in terms of government management. The primary reason for this interest is the urgent need to agree on a sound and reliable approach to economically quantifying not so much the cultural value of the damage caused as the civil liability for having caused it in those cases in which it was produced by a harmful human act. Assessment methods require a broad consensus to be considered reliable. The lack of consideration given to this matter has only made the absence of such a consensus more acute. This paper offers a mainly Spanish case-based analysis of the most common valuation methods for both movable and immovable archaeological objects. With regard to movable objects, it examines the problems involved in both the exclusive use of an object’s market price as its cultural value and the lack of justification for the chosen valuation system, concluding that current methods are insufficient. This insufficiency, also perceived by the authors of the expert reports used in the analyzed proceedings, has been dealt with arbitrarily. With regard to immovable object, it concludes that the systems currently used to assess the damage to sites are likewise insufficient, despite having been legally acknowledged in some cases. This paper will thus examine the methods used in environmental assessments—whose parallels with archaeological heritage are clear—and proposes that they be adapted for this purpose