Black Market Artifacts: Smuggled Monoliths (Clip) | To Catch a Smuggler | National Geographic

They're importing a sculpture. You got some dirt in here about that. Some grass. So this was on the ground for a long time. You can tell.

Yeah, well, I better. I wouldn't consider this a handicraft. I would consider this something completely out of that remnants of sculpture. They have the actual dirt still falling off from there. So you can tell that it was somewhere for a very, very, very long time; it's dug out right from the dirt. If it came in legally or not, we don't know. We just want to make sure what it is for us so we can make that final assessment.

So let's find the other pieces; an even bigger base. Well, what do you think they're from? They're gonna have to call somebody on these things, lift this one up so we can get pictures. The sculptures will follow very similar patterns, so it seems like one person made this or the same group of people made it look like the same kind of rock, the same material.

I don't know what kind of rock. Neither do I. Since it no longer has any materials related to agriculture, I have to refer it off to the Bonn team to see what further action might be needed.

Hey, officers. How are you? So these are a couple of the sculptures that we found. This is awesome. I'm with the bond enforcement team; we're a specialized unit that responds to either artwork, artifacts, any type of item that might have cultural significance.

I suspect they're monoliths. If it was new, the lines would be sharper. We probably see tool marks, but in this case, there aren't any. The fact that it's still covered in soil, we're thinking they're authentic artifacts.

This seems like a misrepresentation. They said they're $100 each based on other items we've seen. That's not an accurate price. We could see the line where it was buried in the soil. And people bring this into the country, but they know this. Crap. You know, like the paperwork says it's a certificate of origin from Cameroon.

We'd have to contact the Cameroonian government, see if this is legitimate and make certain it's not falsified. This could possibly be a black market if it does belong to Cameroon, the patrimony. I would highly doubt they would allow these items to be taken out of the country.

And now we're going to contact the subject matter expert. I got that funny feeling. It will be significant, but that will be yet to be determined.