Despite federal regulations put into place to protect Mexican antiquities in the 19th century, many sites in Oaxaca lost valuable pieces, often due to cooperation from local authorities.

And Theodore Roosevelt provided political muscle, setting the canyon aside in 1908 as a national monument under a new law designed to protect American antiquities.

The Antiquities Act of 1906 was designed to protect antiquities and objects of scientific interest on the public domain.

So it was originally expected that national monuments would be proclaimed to protect prehistoric cultural features or antiquities and that they would be small.

But they also made it clear that protecting antiquities was merely one of many tasks before them.

The major Federal law protecting "antiquities," as they were called in the statute, was passed in 1906.

A more rigorous choice would be the date of the relevant legislation protecting antiquities in the country of origin (in the case of Italy, June 1, 1939).

She had spent all of her adult life protecting and collecting stolen art and antiquities.

The United States prohibits the importing of these textiles under the Unesco convention on cultural property, which seeks to protect antiquities worldwide.

Under the 1954 Hague Convention, signed by Israel, an occupying power must protect antiquities that it finds in the occupied territory and may not remove them.