Introduction
The 1992 Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage (Council of Europe 1992a), known as the Valletta Convention after the city in which it was signed, is a revision of the 1969 Convention with the same title (Council of Europe 1969). Following ratification by four Member States, it came into force on 25 May 1995. At the time of writing (June 2011), it has been ratified by 40 of the Member States of the Council of Europe (the States that have so far not ratified it are Austria, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Montenegro, San Marino, and Spain).
The major threat to the archaeological heritage was seen in the immediate postwar period as resulting principally from clandestine excavation, and as a result, the 1969 Convention was concerned principally with the regulation of archaeological excavations and the dissemination of the results of those excavations. By the 1980s, it was recognized that a far more destructive menace had arisen as Europe...
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References
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Cleere, H. (2014). European Convention on the Protection of Archaeological Heritage (1992). In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1050
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