FAYETTEVILLE -- When video shows Islamic State militants toppling statues and swinging hammers at ancient artifacts in Iraq, it's only a small part of the ruin taking place at Middle East archeological sites, said Jesse Casana, a University of Arkansas at Fayetteville associate professor of anthropology.
Destruction from armed conflict and looting poses larger threats, Casana said.
"There's a lot of incentive for people who are poor or desperate to loot the sites," said Casana. "An even bigger problem has to do with organized campaigns of looting."
Items leaving culturally rich areas in, for example, Syria, find their way onto antiquities markets that range from online seller eBay to high-end auction houses, Casana said. Key information can be scrubbed away in the process, he said.
"Once these objects have left Syria, it's almost impossible to determine their precise origin," Casana said.
Casana and other archaeologists will gather Thursday and Friday at UA for a symposium, Cultural Heritage in Crisis in the Middle East. Keynote speaker McGuire Gibson will describe efforts to protect these sites in a public talk at 7 p.m. Thursday on campus at Willard J. Walker Hall.
Gibson, an archaeology professor at the University of Chicago, is considered an authority on ancient Mesopotamia, one of several scholars from across the country meeting at UA for the event, which is being hosted by UA's King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies.
Casana, lead organizers for the conference, works using satellite imaging technology to keep track of known archeological sites in a region of the Middle East that includes Syria.
"It's an extraordinarily rich archeological record that's really unique globally. That's why we archaeologists study it academically," Casana said, describing how the sites date back more than 10,000 years and include "amazing ruins like huge Roman cities or giant Crusader castles."
The Islamic State group has of late drawn the most headlines, just last week with images showing the destruction of ancient statuary in the Iraqi city of Mosul.
The attack was "just the most recent in a line of many dozens of similar attempts to sort of destroy ancient monuments or things that they think of as idolatrous or heretical to their sort of version of Islam," Casana said, adding that such attacks have been ongoing for the past 18 months.
But Casana described a much wider problem for those seeking to preserve the past. Middle East government agencies established to protect historic sites have become casualties of militant unrest, he said. Military maneuvers also sometimes simply raze historic sites to establish garrisons. Fighting tactics also involve tunneling beneath buildings, sometimes of tremendous historical value, only to set explosives and blast away, Casana said.
"There's been some kind of tension in how much effort should be expended in dealing with that in the wake of all the other humanitarian crises," Casana said.
However, he credited the U.S. State Department for providing $600,000 in funding for the Syria Heritage Initiative, an effort that includes Casana as one of five co-directors. With continued violence in the region, Casana said a big part of the initiative involves setting priorities for when "hopefully that there's some sort of stability that emerges in the near future."
But "there's no clear road map to address these issues," Casana said, with a few proposing efforts like paying for guards to protect sites while others worry that such an action would increase the danger for locals. Part of the symposium's purpose "will just be for people that are engaged with this problem to kind of hear about other people's experiences," Casana said.
Metro on 03/04/2015