Thursday, December 05, 2013

Kaylan profiles IICAH

Nice profile of the Iraqi Institute for the Conservation of Antiquities and Heritage by Melik Kaylan. I'm especially happy to see him report without challenge that,  "according to Ms. Price, 400,000 to 600,000 objects were looted in Iraq from 12,000 sites." Given Kaylan's earlier denialist position ("So Much for Looted Sites"), this marks a step forward. Maybe the next step could be to focus on efforts not just to conserve shrines and monuments (good and noble work, to be sure), but to secure and protect archaeological sites, since according to other reports, looting continues on Iraq's archaeological sites albeit not at the catastrophic levels of the 2003-2006 period.

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