From the April 2003 Anthropology News

History in Jeopardy: Anthropologists See a Different Crisis in Iraq

Bomb crater and zigguart at the site of Ur, January 1992. Photo by Paul Zimansky (Boston U)

War conjures up cruel images of loss of life, widespread destruction, and pervasive fear and anxiety. But for some anthropologists, war in Iraq is also a crisis of another dimension: the loss of history, the destruction of what’s left of Mesopotamia, the very cradle of Western civilization.

Elizabeth Stone, anthropologist and archaeologist at the State U of New York at Stony Brook, has been visiting Iraq since 1971, since the Gulf War traveling on her British passport to circumvent the US travel ban. She studies ancient Mesopotamia, the land which first developed writing, astronomy, urban cities, the prediction of time, large monuments, written records, even literature with stories which later appeared in the Bible.

Stone remembers the destruction that occurred during the Gulf War and was the first archaeologist to visit the site of Ur which had been bombed during that war. “There was damage to antiquities, the war was bad, the rebellion was worse and the long term effects of embargo have been the worst,” she says. Stone was among those hoping to stop the hemorrhage of artifacts from leaving Iraq. Those antiquities that remained were subsequently stored in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad for safekeeping. Now that museum may be in jeopardy.

“During the rebellion some regional museums were looted, but later impoverished Iraqis found antiquities to be their best source for the hard currency that they needed. Meanwhile, professionals—organized from outside the country—took advantage of the weakened state of the department of antiquities to move in on major sites and excavate huge areas,” Stone explains. Recently, a group of American dealers, collectors and art museum curators have created an organization that has a goal of “distributing objects in the basement of the Cairo Museum to institutions around the world,” according to an article in Art News. Stone is afraid that in addition to potential damage to the Iraq museum during the war, it may be further depleted if any post-war US military administration follows the recommendations of this group rather than that of the professional archaeologists.

“This is a building full of treasures that could be damaged by ammunition or depleted by looting,” concurs McGuire (Mac) Gibson at the U of Chicago. Like Stone he also worries about the excavation sites themselves that, from the air, look like military establishments and therefore could be bombed. Iraq is a flat land dotted with small hills. “Every hill, every bump is an archeological site,” he says.

Anthropologists have been proactive. First, they have submitted lists of site locations to people in the US Central Command. Second, they have stressed the vulnerability of the Iraq museum in Baghdad.

They have also asked for protection for the archeologists. Both Stone and Gibson worry about the scholars with whom they have worked and whose lives may be at risk. “What happens when people cut and run when the US Army gets there?” Gibson asks. “Those people will be killed,” he says.