We appreciate Michael Fradley and Nichole Sheldrick's response to our 2016 Antiquity paper. They claim that our results are “potentially misleading”, that there is an incorrect “emphasis on looting as the most significant problem facing Egypt's heritage” and that our prediction model is flawed. Our paper, however, clearly focuses on the major population centre of Egypt—the Nile Valley and Delta regions—where the bulk of the archaeological sites are located. This is a basic Egyptological fact.