UNESCO denounces killing of two leading scholars of Syrian antiquities

Within one week, the Syrian cultural heritage community suffered two immense blows with the murder of archaeologist Khaled Assad in Palmyra, and the killing of the Assistant Director of laboratories at the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums, Qasem Abdullah Yehiya, in Damascus, according to the United Nations.

Archaeological site of Palmyra in Syria 
[Credit: ©UNESCO/F. Bandarin]

In a press release UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Director-General Irina Bokova said: “I am both saddened and outraged to learn of the brutal murder of Khaled Asaad, who oversaw antiquities at the UNESCO World Heritage site at Palmyra… I in no uncertain terms condemn the horrific act.”

According to news reports, militants apparently killed the 82-year-old Mr. Asaad yesterday at the legendary Palmyra site where he had worked for more than 50 years. Having been held for over a month, according to these reports, he was being questioned about the location of valuable artefacts.

“They killed him because he would not betray his deep commitment to Palmyra,” the Director-General said. “Here is where he dedicated his life, revealing Palmyra’s precious history and interpreting it so that we could learn from this great city that was a crossroads of the ancient world. His work will live on far beyond the reach of these extremists. They murdered a great man, but they will never silence history.”

Khaled al-Asaad was taken hostage after IS seized the UNESCO
World Heritage site this year [Credit: Getty Images]

Ms. Bokova was also saddened to learn of the killing of Qasem Abdullah Yehiya, who, according to the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM), said the Assistant Director of laboratories died in a rocket attack on the Damascus Citadel and the National Museum last week. “The killing of Mr. Yehiya is a deplorable act, made all the more senseless that it was the result of an attack on the museum and ancient citadel,” she said.

The Director-General added that the untimely deaths of Mr. Assad and Mr. Yehiya “are a terrible loss to the cultural heritage community in Syria and globally.”

A number of museum employees were also injured in the attack on the Damascus Citadel and museum. The Ancient city of Damascus, including the Citadel, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.

In May, the so-called Islamic State (Daesh) took control of Palmyra, which was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980, according to the agency.

Source: United Nations [August 19, 2015]

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Antiquities looting surges in crisis-stricken Greece

The economic crisis has led many Greeks to antiquity looting and smuggling, with most of them being first-time offenders with no criminal record, says a National Geographic report.

The sharp rise in applications for metal detector permits is an indicative sign. However, a permit is only given to people with no criminal record and after the approval of the Ministry of Culture.

Police detectives and the Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage of the Ministry of Culture say that illegal excavations and theft of cultural artifacts have increased in the past five years of the economic crisis. But the profile of looters and smugglers has changed.

Before the crisis, antiquities looters were members of criminal rings who were involved in other criminal activities as well. Nowadays, regular people dig on their own in order to find ancient treasures and sell them.

The economic crisis has made their illegal “job” easier though, as severe budget cuts have left pertinent state agencies understaffed, the National Geographic report says. The resources to limit looting and smuggling are too small and the demand for black market antiquities is large.

“We need more staff, more people,” said Evgenios Monovasios, a lieutenant in the Security Police Division of Attica. He estimated that in all of Greece there are only about 60 employees who work exclusively to prevent and disrupt looting. While cooperation with local authorities across the country expands this capacity, it’s difficult to monitor more than a fraction of the country’s vast and varied landscape, which ranges from the mountainous north to hundreds of islands in the Aegean and Ionian Seas.

“It would take an army to catch everything,” said Elena Korka, General Director of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage. “It’s impossible not to find antiquities in Greece; they are literally everywhere.”

Greek police employ methods such as undercover police work. They gather information, infiltrate looting networks and then conduct raids to retrieve the stolen antiquities.

Most illicit excavations are done at night and the items found are reburied or hidden in locations such as sheep pens and then they are sold to middlemen who own legitimate businesses that can be used to launder the artifacts.

There are also cases where the looters do direct “custom orders” for collectors. The illegal artifacts circulate around the globe and they go from one private collection to another with misleading documentation in different parts of the world so they give the impression of legitimacy.

Since illegally obtained Greek antiquities appear anywhere in the world — from museums to private collections — the Ministry of Culture and pertinent state authorities go into legal negotiations with the owners of such artifacts in order for them to return to Greece. However, for every item repatriated there are several that remain in private collections.

According to the report, recent antiquities trafficking cases range from Byzantine manuscripts stolen from a monastery at Mount Athos and recovered from the Getty Museum and Duke University in 2014 and 2015 to a cache of neolithic Cycladic figurines, vessels, and statue parts confiscated in Attica in 2011 with an estimated value of almost twenty million euros.

Author: A. Makris | Source: Greek Reporter [August 18, 2015]

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Italy slammed for 'faking' Roman ruin

An ambitious restoration of a 2000-year-old monument inside the Roman Forum has provoked furious debate among experts about whether Italy is taking the right steps to save its cultural treasures.

Experts are angry about the use of cement to reinforce the seven columns 
of the Temple of Peace [Credit: Corriere Della Sera]

Archaeologists and art experts are angry about the use of cement to reinforce the seven columns of the Temple of Peace, a landmark built in 75AD by Emperor Vespasian, who also built the Colosseum.

Architect Sandro Maccallini has claimed the restoration includes “a totally fake column, with a fake base, with a fake core and a capital that is probably fake” and the daily Corriere Della Sera has published photos of the materials being used at the site.

The city council’s cultural superintendency is seeking to restore the temple’s seven columns made of the highly prized pink granite which were shipped from the Egyptian city of Aswan during the Roman Empire.

Reinforced concrete is making its entrance to the 
Roman Forum [Credit: Corriere Della Sera]

“The Roman Forum will lose its identity as an archaeological site, unique in the world, where everything is precious and unique because it is authentic,” Maccalini said in a complaint cited by Corriere della Sera.

Tomaso Montanari, an art expert from Naples, also criticized the project. “You don’t have to be Doctor Freud to understand that the erection of the Temple of Peace’s columns is the result of an archaeology desperate for a pill that will revive it, naturally with the highest media profile.”

But the capital’s cultural superintendency said the decision to use the cement was based on the recommendations of a scientific technical committee, which said it was about “bringing back the ancient artefacts that are in pieces”.

The project aims to raise seven columns of the Temple of Peace, the first two 
of which should be ready next April 21 [Credit: Corriere Della Sera]

Claudio Parisi Presicce, who heads Rome City Council’s arts and culture department, said the approach was akin to anastylosis, the reinforcement method used to restore the acropolis in Athens.

But Andrea Carandini, who heads Italy’s environment protection group Fondo Ambiente Italiano, said:“I am completely against choices like this. And even the works on the Parthenon are too invasive.”

The fiery debate over the Temple of Peace is the latest to emerge in Italy. Culture minister Dario Franceschini has recently been under fire over plans to restore the Colosseum’s arena for concerts and other performances, causing some critics to dub it the new “Las Vegas”.

Source: The Local [August 17, 2015]

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Pre-Hispanic stone engravings vandalized in central Mexico

Mexico attorney general's office says it has opened an investigation into the spray-painting of pre-Hispanic stone carvings in a cave in central Mexico.

In this combination of photographs provided by the press office of Totolac, 
pre-Hispanic rock carvings in a cave near Totolac, Mexico are shown 
on Dec. 29, 2013, top, and again on Aug. 5, 2015, after being defaced
[Credit: J. Guadalupe Perez/Totolac Municipality Press Office]

The office says unknown vandals defaced ceremonial carvings of a celestial sky inside a site known as the Devil's Cave in Tlaxcala state.

The site is believed to have been used by shamans for agricultural rituals and is surrounded by hallucinogenic plants used in the ceremonies, said anthropologist J. Guadalupe Perez, director of social communication for San Juan Totolac, the town where the damaged petroglyphs were found.

In this combination of photographs provided by the press office of Totolac,
 pre-Hispanic rock carvings of a celestial sky, on the ceiling of a cave near Totolac, 
Mexico are shown on Dec. 29, 2013, top, and again on Aug. 5, 2015, after being 
defaced [Credit: J. Guadalupe Perez/Totolac Municipality Press Office ]

The attorney general said in a statement Tuesday that red spray paint was found on the carvings, violating a federal law protecting monuments and archeological sites.

Tlaxcala is the same state where residents recently tore down an 18th century chapel.

Source: Associated Press [August 12, 2015]

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Peru uses drones to protect archaeological sites

Peru, a country with a rich historical heritage, has added drones to archaeology's classical tools for surveying, registering and protecting archaeological sites from climate- and human-caused damage.

Drones can reduce explorations by months and even years to days and weeks 
[Credit: Reuters/Mariana Bazo]

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, has so far helped in registering 375 archaeological sites, or 63.5 percent of those in the Lima metropolitan area, and most of them are located among buildings and avenues in the city of more than 9 million people.

While a drone hovers above a pre-Columbian truncated pyramid in the Lima district of San Borja, the project coordinator at the Culture Ministry, Aldo Watanave, described for EFE how difficult it was to develop a registry of archaeological sites before the arrival of drones.

"Back then, to obtain aerial images, we had to check records of aerial photography from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, or we were required to wait until a satellite orbited over a specific area and took a picture," Watanave said.

Watanave recalled the long hours of work required to prepare scale and 3D maps of an archaeological site on the ministry's equipment.

Almost three years into the program, there are already nine drones that the archaeology team can use to register sites, a job that continues on a day-to-day basis.

The fleet consists of four octocopter drones (eight propellers) used to take photos and five quadcopters (four propellers) used to shoot video.

The workload has been reduced by the drones and now a single expert can operate the device's controls while a co-worker controls altitude and speed via a screen.

Where the traditional method for producing a map might take two to three days in the past, "now it can be done in a matter of minutes," Watanave said.

In Cajamarquilla, built in A.D. 600-730 and the largest adobe citadel on Peru's central coast, drones detected trash dumps on the roadsides.

As efforts continue to preserve Peru's architectural heritage, drones are allowing the detection of damage caused by people who enter archaeological areas illegally and the adoption of preventive measures in the face of climate events, such as "El Niño."

Author: Carolina Cusirramos | Source: EFE [August 13, 2015]

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