From: indigo

ICOM issued a statement this morning about the losses associated with a potential war in Iraq.  The question was then asked if it was ok to make a political statement.

The attached article was posted to MuseNews-History ( http://groups.yahoo.com/

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Casualty count could include Iraq antiquities
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By Bill Glauber
Tribune staff reporter

March 10, 2003

Across five decades, weathering local coups and regional wars, McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago has sifted through Iraq's rich soil in a quest to understand civilization's cradle.

Now, amid the threat of a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Gibson worries about the human and archeological cost of war on a land rich in antiquities.

"A 1,000-pound bomb put down through a major archeological site would make a great mess," said Gibson, a professor of Mesopotamian archeology who made his first visit to Iraq in 1964.

In the last few months, Gibson and other American scholars, art lawyers and museum curators have worked to head off an archeological catastrophe, making their case privately to Pentagon officials and publicly in media interviews.

They have raised alarms about the potential for inadvertent bomb damage, noting the harm done to archeological sites during the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

They have raised awareness that losses could occur after the bombing stops, recalling the looting of up to 4,000 objects from Iraq's provincial museums after the conflict that liberated Kuwait.

Gibson also has sought to speak up on behalf of some of his Iraqi colleagues, devoted scholars who may ride out the bombing as they did in 1991--sleeping beside antiquities in the bowels of Baghdad's Iraq Museum.

The message that Iraq's archeological treasures should be preserved has received a hearing in Washington, where Pentagon officials met with archeology experts in late January. Among those initiating the meeting were Gibson, who heads the American Association for Research in Baghdad, and representatives of the American Council for Cultural Policy.

"Roughly for an hour, they were on transmit and we were on receive," said Joseph Collins, a deputy assistant secretary of defense.

Pentagon expands site list

Pentagon officials said they began compiling a list of archeological sites before the 1991 war. They are working with scholars to expand the list.

The effort won't make targeting risk-free, but it could minimize destruction.

Collins said "a very large number of sites, well over 100," have been added to the Pentagon's database, which is "made available to the people who actually do the targeting."

He acknowledged that the military would attempt "to do whatever we can to avoid loss of life and do the minimum amount of damage to the nation's infrastructure, including its cultural heritage."

Cataloging Iraq's archeological wonders is an enormous undertaking. From palaces and ziggurats to desert mounds, the landscape abounds with the remnants of ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The first cities, first writing and foundations of irrigation and agriculture can be traced to the area.

Gibson said that about 10,000 sites are known, but thousands remain unmapped.

Iraq is an evocative land for Christians, Jews and Muslims. It is home to Babylon and Nineveh and Ur, believed to be the birthplace of Abraham. It is filled with treasures of Islamic art and architecture.

"This is where it all starts," Gibson said.

Many of the most priceless artifacts discovered over the years by archeologists are in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The museum was reopened in 2000 after 10 years lost to war and international sanctions and the painstaking rebuilding of a collection of about 10,000 objects.

In glass cases are 40,000-year-old stone and flint objects, 5,000-year-old cylinder seals in mint condition and 4,500-year-old gold leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses.

In the museum's basement are perfectly preserved Assyrian reliefs from the 9th Century B.C. The 10-foot-high marble slabs once lined a royal palace at Khorsabad; now they are arrayed on two walls leading to a pair of 38-ton winged bull gates.

During the gulf war, the Iraq Museum was evacuated, but the large reliefs could not be moved. Museum officials piled sandbags and giant sponge-like mattresses in front of the objects to preserve them. They also slept near the objects.

The operation to secure the museum's treasures was a group effort, said Donny George, the director general of research and studies at Iraq's Board of Antiquities and Heritage.

Missiles not the only threat

The museum didn't take a direct hit during the bombing campaign, but a communications tower near the front gates was destroyed by a missile, museum officials said.

Preservation efforts during the 1991 fighting weren't entirely successful; some objects stored in the basement sustained damage from water and humidity. Some objects transferred to provincial museums were lost in postwar looting.

John Malcolm Russell, an art history and archeology professor at the Massachusetts College of Art, described the looting at one such site at the ancient city of Uma.

"The site was looted with massive earthmovers and dump trucks," he said. "I'd say tens of thousands of objects were lost."

Restoring order, George said, has been a difficult and dangerous task, with archeologists at sites in southern Iraq often accompanied by security guards carrying assault rifles. But he refuses to back down in the face of risk.

"Antiquities are not like modern things," he said. "If a building is destroyed, it can be rebuilt. But if you have a piece of art that is the only one of its kind and that piece has reached you from 3000 B.C., then to lose that work is a great loss. Archeology is the substance of history, the evidence of mankind. Even a little loss is a great loss."


Copyright (c) 2003, Chicago Tribune


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