What archaeologists can gain from markets, or lose by ignoring them
The initial reports from Iraq last spring confirmed the worst fears of archaeologists around the world. Warnings and pleas about safeguarding important cultural sites had gone unheeded. With coalition forces still struggling to accomplish key objectives and put down resistance, mobs ran riot through Iraqi cultural institutions, including the National Museum and several libraries. Looting merged with violent expressions of hatred for Saddam's Ba'athist regime. Exhibits were smashed, books burned, computers stolen, and records destroyed; the looters made off with a massive number of priceless and irreplaceable artifacts. In fact, early wire dispatches pegged the National Museum as a complete loss: all 170,000 items just...gone.
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It's unfortunate that the antiquities issue became grist for the domestic squabbles of the U.S., because the controversy obscured a much more interesting and long-running conflict within the profession of archaeology, one with ramifications that are anything but academic. Everyone agreed that what happened in Iraq was a tragedy. With the news that the National's catalog might have been destroyed, several independent efforts were launched to reconstruct it from records at other museums and post the results on the Internet. But there the consensus splintered into two schools of thought.
I'm still digesting the article but I thought I'd throw it out there.