Tomas Munita for The New York Times
Sonia Rojas, left, an art historian, and Gladiz Collatupa, an archaeologist, open packages with a customs agent at a post office in Lima to check for the smuggling of artifacts out of the country.
LIMA, Peru — Gladiz Collatupa, an archaeologist, once stashed six mummies at her parents’ house for safe keeping. That was when she dug for artifacts in the dirt of Peru, rich with the leavings of past cultures like the Inca and the Moche. Now she digs through packages at the post office instead, searching for ancient treasure being smuggled out of the country.
Ms. Collatupa and a colleague, Sonia Rojas, an art historian, are a pair of Indiana Joneses in reverse. Instead of swashbuckling around the world looting ruins, they try to keep Peru’s ancient riches from being spirited out of the country by mail.
“With less danger,” noted Ms. Rojas, a petite woman in glasses with a keen interest in colonial Peruvian paintings. She wears a khaki vest with a large button that says, “I defend my cultural heritage.”
The women work for Peru’s Ministry of Culture as part of a program aimed at stopping the illegal export of valuable historic and prehistoric objects and artwork, a depletion that began nearly 500 years ago with the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire and has never stopped.
Last year, the post office team, which Ms. Collatupa joined in August, replacing another archaeologist, made 22 seizures, totaling dozens of items. They included pre-Columbian textiles and pottery, fossils, a 19th-century saber, a 19th-century oil painting of St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary to read, a shipment of 56 books and other texts belonging to the National Library, and a group of religious and legal documents from the 18th century.
This year, they have made seven seizures of items that include old coins and replicas of pre-Columbian dolls that incorporate ancient cloth looted from archaeological sites.
“No matter how small a piece is, it’s important,” said Ms. Collatupa, who has learned to distinguish pre-Hispanic textiles by the way they feel — smoother and softer with age — and by the patterns in the weaving. “They are part of our identity.”
Many of the items are bound for the United States, mailed by tourists who may be unaware they are breaking the law. But others are shipped by dealers and collectors who know exactly what they are doing.
Mostly, Ms. Rojas, 36, and Ms. Collatupa, 32, do not confront the bad guys. But in March, a collector who had tried to mail a silver coin minted in Peru in 1838 to Canada showed up at the postal facility to complain. The coin was a fake, he said, and therefore should not have been seized.
The words “Firm for the Union” were stamped on the coin, and Ms. Rojas stood her ground: her examination showed that it was genuine, and it stayed in the country. Like most other items seized at the post office, it was added to the collection of the National Museum.
Still, there is little incentive for unscrupulous traffickers to obey the law. A Sotheby’s auction of pre-Columbian works, held in Paris in March, took in more than $13 million for about 150 items. The auction occurred despite claims by the governments of Peru, Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica that many of the objects had been illegally removed from their countries.
And the penalties are relatively minor. Since 2007, no one has been sent to prison for cultural trafficking in Peru, and only five people have been given the maximum fine of about $1,900, at the current exchange rate, according to Blanca Alva, who is in charge of the Culture Ministry’s efforts to stop trafficking.
“Compare that to the prices that our pieces bring” in auctions abroad, Ms. Alva said.
Ms. Alva has also stepped up efforts to recover objects that made it out of the country, often many years ago. Last month, the Foreign Ministry announced the recovery of 125 pieces from the United States, Mexico, Switzerland and Chile, including pre-Columbian ceramic pieces, a 17th-century manuscript, colonial paintings and a silver receptacle for carrying the eucharist that was stolen from a church in Cuzco.
In 2011, Yale University began returning hundreds of artifacts carted away decades ago from Machu Picchu, the famous Incan citadel.
All of this taps into powerful notions of national pride and a lingering resentment over the colonial past. Such themes may have added resonance today in Peru, a country with a strong sense of its heritage, where a decade of sustained economic growth has ignited hopes for greater recognition and influence in the region and around the world.
Ms. Alva said she cried when the Machu Picchu artifacts came back.
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