Profile of State Department's Archaeologist in Afghanistan

Excellent profile of Laura Tedesco, who as the State Department's archaeologist in Afghanistan is doing even more dangerous duty than her colleagues in Iraq, the only other country, as the article notes, where the State Department has posted an archaeologist. It takes great courage and commitment to put one's body on the line as archaeologists in both countries have done, and they deserve our gratitude for that.

As a matter of policy, it is interesting to compare the approach taken in the two countries. In Iraq, the focus has been on redeveloping Babylon and restoring the Iraq Museum as heritage tourism destinations, with little attention paid to the massive destruction of other sites by looting or encroachment. In Afghanistan, in contrast, the focus has been on one extraordinary recently deiscovered archaeological site, at Mes Aynak, that is certain to be destroyed, even though it could in theory have become a major tourist attraction if it did not sit atop mineable natural resources worth far more than tourism could ever generate. Tedesco is coy about how much is being spent on salvaging what can be saved from Mes Aynak, but admits it runs into the millions. It is worth asking how much might have been saved from being destroyed by antiquities looters in Iraq if the policymakers at the State Department and in the Pentagon had recognized that there was an equivalent need to protect Iraq's threatened archaeological heritage, and not just to exploit the part of it that would generate tourist revenues.

Archaeology vs. Development in Afghanistan: Bamiyan, Capitalist-Style

A major and largely unexcavated Buddhist site in Afghanistan, Mes Aynak, whose importance is comparable to that of Bamiyan, is being frantically studied by archaeologists to see what can be salvaged before the site is destroyed by a gigantic copper-mining operation. The Chinese government-run mining group is investing $3.5 billion, with the Afghan government standing to reap $1.2 billion per year, according to this article.  (That's in addition, one supposes, to the $880 million before production reported by the Wall Street Journal). Either way, it is big money. Only 18 archaeologists -- 16 Afghans and 2 Frenchmen -- are working the one square mile site with a few dozen laborers, an area that would normally need 100 laborers and several dozen archaeologists. The hoped-for budget for this minimal team? Only $10 million, of which the Afghan government has allotted $2 million. The US has promised funding but not said how much.

So to summarize: a major site is going to be destroyed after a totally inadequate salvage archaeological project, because the $20-30 million needed to do the job properly is not even going to be asked for, even though the profits following the site's destruction are going to be billions upon billions. The Afghan government should be going back to the Chinese and demanding that the costs of a fullbore salvage operation be covered, and the US government should be working the problem. Are we? Or does the prospect of destroying the equivalent of Bamiyam not matter when development rather than fanaticism is the motivation?

"Some scholars' opinions" collated by antiquities dealers

The International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art has added a new page collating "some scholars' opinions" about matters such as the importance of archaeological context (answer: not at all important) and the right of archaeologists to "show off" as guardians of the cultural heritage of mankind (none, apparently, insofar as they fail to publish their findings in a timely way).

This collection of quotations is most helpful in clarifying the logical weakness, not to say intellectual bankruptcy, of the arguments IADAA takes to be slamdunks. Take, for instance, the straw-man claim reiterated again and again by Cuno and de Montebello that archaeologists believe that antiquities have no meaning outside their archaeological context. Perhaps there are a few, but the vast majority of archaeologists recognize the obvious fact that artifacts can be studied by art historians for their aesthetic and iconographic value, or (if they bear writing) by epigraphers. The archaeologists' position, rather, is that archaeological context supplies meanings which aesthetic, iconographic, or epigraphic analysis often cannot supply, and that the contextual information supplied by archaeologists can and does serve as a control and check on the hypotheses of art historians and textual scholars.

If the archaeologist who says "no meaning without context" is a straw man, the museum director who says "context has no meaning" is all too real, however. Such claims -- or the pseudo-stastical "only 2% of what we know comes from context" -- are as silly as the ones purportedly made by archaeologists. It is a strange argument that does exactly what it accuses its opponent of doing.

Even where there is an argument to be made that the legal structures designed to protect cultural heritage have failed, the experts quoted by the IADAA overplay their hand. Take the sad story of how Afghan antiquities in the Kabul Museum were left to the hammers of Taliban iconoclasts because UNESCO refused to authorize their export to Switzerland. Why did UNESCO refuse? Appiah thinks it is because UNESCO acts on the basis of nationalist ideology enshrined in its convention, an ideology that says art properly belongs in the state whose cultural patrimony it is -- even when the state disagrees that the art in question is a part of its heritage, and wants to destroy it. That is a radical oversimplification of the situation faced by UNESCO at the time, and it begs the question of whether UNESCO could have been certain in 1999 that the Taliban would actually destroy the artifacts under its control. Moreover, it is difficult to see how it is that the case of the Taliban -- surely an exceptional one -- discredits an entire international system that puts the primary responsibility upon states to care for cultural heritage within their boundaries. The response should be to close the policy loophole, as UNESCO has done in the wake of the bitter lesson of Afghanistan, not to give up on the nation-state as a means to the end of protecting cultural heritage.

Appiah himself does not go so far as to suggest that "the nation state has lost its implicitness [sic] as a political paradigm," as Luca Giuliani is approvingly quoted by the IADAA. Nor does the philosopher, one presumes, share John Boardman's bizarre apologia for the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, also quoted approvingly by the IADAA:

And who are we to blame them for this rather extreme exercise of their deeply felt faith? The major loss in this case is probably to the tourist trade... The act of the Taliban was exactly that of Moses with the Golden Calf made by the idolatrous Aaron, which he “burnt with fire, and ground to powder and scattered upon the water.” No doubt the calf might have been judged a distinguished example of animal sculpture for its day, but we do not question Moses’s motivation or deed.

Boardman does at least raise one interesting analogy worth pursuing -- though like the other argumentative moves made by the IADAA's scholars, it doesn't achieve the argumentative aim it intends. Boardman:

The argument holds that since robbing cannot be controlled at its source, it must be controlled, blindly, at its eventual home in a collection, public or private, and indiscriminately so, regardless of evidence. But this is topsy-turvy. Surely (and the example is the international trade of illegal drugs) it is more appropriate and more effective to target the sources of criminal activity, and especially those middlemen who handle the material long before it arrives in the pockets of street dealers. In terms of the antiquities trade this suggests the need for a far more serious approach by source countries, often with the policing of their own officials, and a far more determined international effort to bring to justice the middlemen and anyone who sponsors such activities, something quite beyond the imagination of UNESCO.

Yes, both drugs and antiquities are being dealt on an international market, and yes, it is important to target not just the dealers but the middlemen and, a fortiori, the looters who supply the illicit good. But the analogy breaks down when Boardman equates street dealers with antiquities dealers. The demand for antiquities is not driven by hundreds of thousands of daily users paying small sums to poor gang members; it is driven by a relatively small number of very wealthy collectors paying tens of thousands of dollars for their artifacts. In the drug trade, the big money is made by the drug lords; in the antiquities trade, by the dealers and middlemen, as the Medici Conspiracy made clear. And, of course, the antiquities trade, unlike the drug trade, operates both legally and illicitly, complicating enforcement efforts enormously.

On the other hand, Boardman is right to suggest that more could be done to target the source of illicit antiquities. We know that Italy has dramatically improved its anti-looting efforts by increasing its budget substantially. The problem is how to help source countries less well-off than Italy do what Boardman wants them to do. And here neither Boardman nor the IADAA have any constructive suggestions. The answer, however, is not hard to see -- if one shifts one's analogy. Antiquities, even illicit ones, are more like oil than like drugs: they are goods that do us good, but producing them causes harm (in the form of permanently lost knowledge of our human past). The antiquities trade, one might say, generates a kind of pollution.

The rational way to regulate markets that generate externalities is to internalize the costs. Make the polluters pay, and use the funds generated by taxing their trade to mitigate the harm. You want to sell or buy antiquities? Fine, but we want you to pay into a fund that will pay for more site guards, more antiquities police, more INTERPOL agents, and the like.

Is that a policy position that IADAA is likely to get behind? Don't hold your breath.

Australian Archaeologists Use Google Earth to Map Sites -- and Suggest Info Could Help With Site Protection Efforts

This is a potentially important project. Money quote at the end:

"The most important aspect of the work is that we'll be able to go to the Afghan archaeological institute and say these are the sites in this area, if you've got guys down there you can either go and visit them or you can at least start thinking about trying to protect them," Thomas said.

One hopes that the coalition forces are also going to be contacted, so that if any are operating in these areas they can at least avoid damage to sites where possible. And it would seem reasonable to try to build on the work already done by developing ways to use Google Earth to monitor a large number sites over time; it seems hard to believe that some sort of automated program could be devised to register whether holes are appearing. It would make little sense for the Afghan antiquities board -- or whoever is in charge of site policing -- to devote scarce resources to the dangerous work of protecting sites if they are not under threat while others are.

Tons of Looted Afghan Antiquities Heading Back-- Why Now?

National Geographic has an interesting story about England's return of literally tons of Afghan antiquities seized at Heathrow over the past six years since the destruction of the Taliban regime. Although the story notes that

Poor villagers lacking other sources of income use shovels and wheelbarrows to cart off precious objects from historic spots around the country, while criminal gangs smuggle the loot to Pakistan and onwards.

The Kabul government remains too cash-strapped, and too caught up fighting the Taliban-led insurgency, to do anything about it. (Afghanistan's own Ministry of Culture was the target of a suicide bomb attack last October.) And despite efforts to raise awareness among Pakistani customs and law enforcement officials, the situation is no better across the border.

What is missing from the article is any indication of what, if anything, is being done by overstretched coalition forces to assist the Afghan government to protect some small fraction at least of its sites. Nor is there any indication whether the criminal gangs smuggling the loot to Pakistan might be linked to the Taliban, as Matthew Bogdanos has argued the antiquities smugglers in Iraq were also supplying insurgents there with weapons and even taxes on their revenues from antiquities sales.

Afghanistan offers an opportunity for all those who did far too little to protect Iraq's sites -- the military, the State Department, UNESCO, cultural heritage NGOs, collectors, dealers, and the museum community -- to develop a coherent, focused, and cost-effective set of initiatives. Granted, the task in Afghanistan is more formidable than in Iraq, for a number of reasons: the sheer size of the country; its not having developed the kind of well established cultural heritage protection bureaucracy that Iraq had over many decades; the lack of pizzazz associated with fabled Biblical names like Babylon, to name just a few. But surely a task force given modest resources could come up with some measures that could make a real difference. Is anyone working on this problem?

Iraq Redux: No help for site protection in Afghanistan either

The plight of Afghanistan's archaeological sites has been even more underreported than that of Iraq's, but losses there have been enormous -- literally tons of artifacts. Now the Afghans are making a push for attention, announcing a new campaign. The initiative calls for building 10 provincial museums, training more archaeologists, repatriating stolen treasures, making a red-list of [looted] art works, and educating young Afghans about the importance of their culture.

All these are important steps, but just as with recent State Department and Defense Department initiatives in Iraq, they are unlikely to stanch the looting of sites. To do so requires investing not only -- or even primarily -- in archaeological training or museum-building or recovery efforts, but in local, on-site anti-looting measures. Unfortunately, according to deputy culture minister, Omar Sultan,

attempts to hire extra guards to protect sites have failed because the authorities were unable to pay them more than $10 (£6) a month, or even equip them with telephones and cars. The security vacuum has allowed illegal smugglers to prosper. Working at night, gangs of Afghans in the pay of warlords and plunderers have turned swaths of the country into the moonscapes that now stand as testimony to the cultural desecration.

"People are hungry and they're desperate, and smugglers play on that," said Sultan, a Greek-trained archaeologist. "There are heroes in Afghanistan who have worked without any credit to save our treasures. But I worry that if this continues, looters will take everything - such is the scale of the organised crime."

He is appealing for international funding to provide stronger protection for important sites and better equipment to guards.

The $10/month per guard figure says it all. At that rate, for $1.2 million a year, one could hire 10,000 guards (or 5000 if one doubled the salary); throw in another $800,000 for equipment and one is at $2 million per annum for a level of site protection that would almost certainly put an end to most looting. That is a piddling sum compared with what we are spending on the war there. International funding to secure Afghanistan's heritage (not to mention providing jobs and buy-in to their own country's cultural assets) would be wonderful, but to my knowledge no countries have contributed anything to the fund that UNESCO established for such purposes. Where then can the Afghans expect to find this funding? Are foundations listening? Antiquities collectors, dealers, museums? If such a relatively small sum is not going to be forthcoming voluntarily from either the collecting community or from the military or State Department, should lawmakers not be considering measures to raise the needed sums by taxing the market for antiquities?