Archaeologists cover up Afghan heritage
AFGHANISTAN: “It's there,” says an archaeologist pointing to
the ground, where fragments of a Buddha statue from the ancient Gandhara
civilisation have been covered up to stop them being stolen or
vandalised.
Just months before the US-led invasion in 2001, the Taliban regime
shocked the world by destroying two giant, 1,500-year-old Buddhas in the
rocky Bamiyan valley, branding them un-Islamic.
More than 10 years on Western experts say Afghanistan's ancient
Buddhist and early Islamic heritage is little safer.
At the foot of the cliff where the two Buddhas used to stand 130
kilometres (80 miles) west of Kabul, an archaeological site has been
found and parts of a third Buddha, lying down, were discovered in 2008.
The area of the lying Buddha is around half the size of a football
pitch. A dozen statues or more lie under tonnes of stone and earth.
“We covered everything up because the ground is private and to
prevent looting,” says Zemaryalai Tarzi, the 75-year-old French
archaeologist born in Afghanistan who is leading the project.
Tarzi says he dug first in the potato fields to find artefacts, which
he buried again afterwards. All around him, under a large area of
farmland, he says, lie exceptional treasures.
In the West, the presence of such riches would lead to a large-scale
excavation, frantic research and in time, glorious museum exhibitions.
In Afghanistan, ground down by poverty and three decades of war, it
is the opposite.
“The safest place is to leave heritage underground,” says Brendan
Cassar, head of the UNESCO mission in Afghanistan, adding that policing
the thousands of prehistoric, Buddhist and Islamic sites dotted around
the country was impossible.
Below ground, the relics are protected from endemic looting, illegal
smuggling and the corrosive effects of freezing winters.
“There is looting on a large or small scale at 99.9 percent of
sites,” says Philippe Marquis, director of a French archaeological
delegation in Afghanistan.
Middlemen pay Afghans $4 to $5 a day to dig up artefacts, which are
smuggled abroad and sold for tens of thousands of dollars in European
and Asian capitals, he says.
Cassar believes the solution is educating locals about the value of
their history and the need to implement the law, and a global campaign
using Interpol and customs to stop smuggling.
UNESCO added the rocky Bamiyan valley, with its old forts, temples
and cave paintings, to its list of endangered heritage sites in 2003.
But sites have been destroyed throughout the country.
Hadda in the east was home to thousands of Greco-Buddhist sculptures
dating from the 1st century BC to 1st century AD, but it was devastated
in the 1990s civil war. Hundreds of pieces have disappeared or been
destroyed.
AFP |