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In January 2008, the Milken Institute, with organizational assistance from the University of Chicago’s Center for Cultural Policy, brought together economists, representatives from museums and the archaeological community, attorneys, and antiquities dealers and collectors for a Financial Innovations Lab in Santa Monica, California. Lab participants explored market-based solutions to finance and accelerate the legal discovery and conservation of archaeological heritage, with the goal of slowing and halting the devastating effects of looting. They discussed both regulatory and economic innovations and incentives. “Open markets are more efficient than black markets,” wrote Lab participant Bernard Frischer, director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at University of Virginia, in 2006. “Ironically, this is as true for the black marketeers themselves as for the collector.”