The looting and smuggling of millennia-old Iraqi artifacts are forcing archaeologists and Boston University professors to spend more time raising awareness of the illegal activity rather than digging for unique finds.
“No one is digging in Iraq today, except armed looters,” said BU archaeology adjunct professor Paul Zimansky in an email.
The Iraqi Museum, founded in 1923, is “more or less in hibernation at the moment,” Zimansky said, since all Iraqi museums are shut down and the countryside is closed to digs.
“Policing the cities, keeping people from killing each other, there is enough of a challenge at the moment,” he said in an email, “so not many resources are going to be put into protecting antiquities in the countryside.”
Zimansky, now a professor at Stony Brook University in New York, was the only BU archaeology professor to work in Iraq in 2004. Zimansky said he doubts the world has ever experienced looting of artifacts on the scale that it is happening in Iraq now.
Archaeological finds in modern-day Iraq include Uruk — the world’s first city — Sumerian cities of the third millennium B.C., capitals of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, as well as other cities from the second and first millennia B.C., Zimansky said.
The war in Iraq, which began in 2003, has brought all official archaeological work in the area to a standstill, said BU archaeology associate professor Michael Danti, who is the field director of two digs in Syria and one in Iran.
Many American archaeologists specializing in Middle Eastern work have done much to educate the public about looting, Danti said. He said an important measure in preventing smuggling is to have good museum inventories with photographs. This was not the case in many of Iraq’s museums.
Given the current chaos in Iraq, many American scholars doubt archaeologists will be able to dig in Iraq in the foreseeable future, Zimansky said.
“I doubt that another opportunity to work there will arise in my lifetime,” he said in an email. “We can continue to work with satellite images and rework the data that are accessible.”
Zimansky was involved in a plan to teach Iraqi students archaeology in the United States so they would later return to excavate sites in Iraq, he said. The project’s outcome is now uncertain because of unsafe conditions in the region, as well as students being seen by Iraqis as “collaborators with the invaders.”
Multinational agencies are trying to stop artifact looting and smuggling, including the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — an agency aiming to bring universal dialogue on emerging ethical issues — and Saving Antiquities for Everyone — an organization addressing cultural heritage preservation.
Although archaeologists are trying to raise awareness individually, security comes before archaeology, Danti said.
“Much of the money that was [meant for] cultural heritage management projects had to be redirected to security as the situation in Iraq worsened,” he said in an email.
Archaeology department research fellow Howard Wellman said he is part of the American Institute of Conservation, an organization that holds annual conferences on illegal antiquity trade and archaeological conservators’ role in that trade.
There is always a market for antiquities, because reputable dealers and collectors will buy illegally obtained artifacts when they are often unaware of their illegality, Zimansky said.
“Trade seems to work with a series of middlemen who falsify papers, and usually [the artifacts] will end up in reputable auction houses,” Wellman said.
Zimansky said looters are well-organized and are in it for the money, “some of which is going into funding terrorism, apparently.” The money is sometimes used in the illegal drug trade as well, Wellman said.