Posted on 06/11/2003 5:27:06 PM PDT by FairOpinion
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some of Iraq's more important ancient sites have been badly damaged by post-war looting and thousands of items are still missing from Baghdad's Iraq Museum, leading U.S. archeologists said on Wednesday.
The archeologists, who carried out a survey for the National Geographic Society in Iraq, said while U.S. bombs had avoided hitting Iraq's treasures, many archeological gems had fallen victim to thieves and illegal digging.
The U.S. military was doing its best to protect many important sites but the scientists said some places they visited in May were unguarded.
"Several important sites have been badly looted and remained unguarded while we were there," said survey leader Henry Wright, curator of near eastern archeology at the University of Michigan's Museum of Anthropology.
"What we are seeing now is extraordinary damage being wreaked, even as we speak, on this irreplaceable cultural resource," said Wright in a conference call.
Wright and his team, which included Iraqi experts, visited several dozen historical sites in Baghdad and northern and southern Iraq last month.
Little archeological work had been done in key parts of Iraq and Wright said much of the history still lay in the ground, making it even more important to protect the sites.
"Protecting these places for future research at this very vulnerable time is crucial if we are to have any hope of understanding the fundamental processes that gave rise to the earliest civilizations," he added.
SITES LOOTED
Once ancient Mesopotamia, Iraq is considered the "crucible of civilization" by many. It is the birthplace of the written word as well as of complex agriculture, written laws and organized religion. Archeology also reveals the first cluster of cities arose in lower Mesopotamia in around 3500 BC.
The U.S. military was criticized worldwide for not doing enough to protect Iraq's cultural heritage from looters, a claim the Bush administration says has been exaggerated.
McGuire Gibson, professor at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, said the media had underplayed the amount of damage to Iraq's historical sites and in particular the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.
"It was in fact nowhere near as bad as we initially feared but they have lost several thousand objects, it's not 33," said Gibson, referring to the number of objects quoted by U.S.-led administration in Iraq as being missing from the main collection of the museum.
Gibson visited more than a dozen archeological sites in southern Iraq and he said illegal digging in some places gave the landscape the appearance of Swiss cheese or waffles.
"The day the war started people went out on the site and started digging," said Gibson of one site.
Some of Iraq's important sites, such as the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud, showed serious signs of stress. Bullet shell casings were on the ground and the team was told of a recent firefight between thieves and a guard.
At Nineveh, the most important site in ancient Assyria, there was only a part-time guard watching the historical area and thieves had dug holes in the floor of the chambers in search of gold or ivory artifacts.
The museum at Babylon, the capital of Babylonia for more than 1,000 years and which rose again to become the world's greatest city, was heavily looted and its library reduced to a pile of ashes.
"thousands of items are still missing from Baghdad's Iraq Museum" indeed. What's the matter with journalists? Did they all take instructions from Jason Blair?
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