Unesco verifies damage to 43 cultural heritage sites in Gaza

Unesco verifies damage to 43 cultural heritage sites in Gaza

In addition to the enormous human cost of the Israel-Gaza war, cultural heritage has been heavily impacted by the conflict. At least 43 cultural heritage sites in Gaza have been damaged since the war began on 7 October 2023, Unesco has verified. Although on-the-ground assessments are currently impossible, the UN agency is conducting preliminary damage assessments for cultural properties through remote monitoring based on satellite imagery and analysis. As of 8 April 2024, Unesco has verified damage to 43 sites – 10 religious sites, 24 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, two depositories of movable cultural property, three monuments, one museum and three archaeological sites. This is almost double the number of damaged sites listed by the agency in January 2024, which stood at 22. Unesco has called for the protection of cultural sites and for all involved parties to strictly adhere to international law.

As if what Netanyahu's Israel was doing in the Gaza enclave was in any way in accord with "international law".

Another Getty Trophy Piece Goes Back to Turkey. Museum-Speak Translation

“In light of new information recently provided

by Matthew Bogdanos and the Antiquities Trafficking Unit

of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office indicating the illegal 

excavation of this bronze head, we agreed that the object

needed to be returned to Türkiye”

museum director Timothy Potts.

.

A disembodied life-sized bronze head of a young mandating back to 100 BCE–100 CE currently among the rophy pieces in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has been removed from view and will soon be repatriated to Turkey (Adam Schrader, 'The Getty Museum Returns an Ancient Bronze Head to Turkey' Artnet.news April 24, 2024 - see also NYT). "The museum said it had received new information from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office indicating it had been illegally excavated". Translated, that means that when the bought it, and all the time they've had it on display, the Museum had zero documentation verifying that it had been legally excavated.

The head had been in the antiquities collection at the Getty Villa Museum since it was acquired in 1971. But the museum said it had received new information from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York indicating it had been illegally excavated. The California museum did not reveal what new information had come to light about the excavation, and officials in New York did not yet respond to a request for information. [...] said in a statement. The district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the details of its investigation.

It is likely that this bronze head is another of those items excavated clandestinely in the late 1960s at Bubon, in the Burdur province of southwestern Turkey and smuggled out onto the international antiquities market.

There are many resources for reading about the looting on Bubon, including this feature on Smart History worth revisiting: 'Looting, collecting, and exhibiting: the Bubon bronzes (video) by  Dr. Elizabeth Marlowe and Dr. Steven Zucker Aug 29, 2017.

"Additional resources:

Dr. Elizabeth Marlow, “Marlowe on the Real Issue with the Glyptotek Head” from the Illicit Cultural Property Blog.

Dr. Elizabeth Marlowe, “When Will Museums Tell the Whole Truth About Their Antiquities?,” Hyperallergic, September 14, 2022

Bubon on Chasing Aphrodite

Bubon on Looting Matters"

The Getty bronze head (acc. no. 71.AA.458 ) had been bought in 1971 for $90,000 from Nicolas Koutoulakis, an antiquities trafficker based in Parishead

Ram Raid at Antiquities Auction House

Hansons’ saleroom in Derbyshire has been the victim of a ram-raid break-in, the auction house in Heage Lane, Etwall suffered a burglary during the early hours of April 18.( Laura Chesters, 'Jewellery taken during ram raid at Hansons auction house', Antiques Trade Gazette, 22 Apr 2024). Hansons has previously been involved in a number of controversial sales of portable antiquities straight from the ground for huge profits.

Criminals used a vehicle to reverse into the building six times, breaking through its roller shutter, a window and parts of the brick structure. They took jewellery that was destined for auction that day.[...] alarms were linked to the police and officers and people from the security firm were on the scene “promptly”.[...] The first day of a planned four-day sale - a silver, watches and jewellery auction - was postponed.

Shame, eh?

Oh, I see

Jimmy Corsetti @BrightInsight6
Ancient civilizations were FAR more advanced than they teach in school.
Something disastrous happened to destroy them, and cause us to forget.
The fact the woke left Media are viscerally attacking this topic and those discussing it should be a wake up call. *Everything they deny or attack = Truth*
7:22 PM · Apr 18, 2024

· 68.9K Views

What about the sleepy left and the yawning right? If they ignore the topic, does that also make it "true"?

Of course if something disastrous happens to a community, their natural human reaction is just to "forget" about it, and forget their past "greatness" before it happened. Yes?

Just look at the comments underneath... laugh, or cry? Should archaeologists feel some kind of obligation to engage with that kind of mindset? Would it do any good, or is it a waste of time? But then whose heritage is it, who has rights to ignore it being publicly misrepresented like this? What do professional ethics say about just turning a back to it?

Public Archaeology: Whether to laugh or Cry

Whether to laugh or cry

Kam Borne @Whambahhlamm · Apr 16
How they come into conclusion that there is no lost civilization is Sahara. When there used to be lakes and rivers. Plus the knowledge of Atlantis In Egypt. That is an end to end civilization in the continent. They are doubting there is no settlement in the middle.

ummm? Read, notta lot, much confu?

Jimmy Corsetti @BrightInsight6 · Apr 17
Establishment academics and archaeologists are inherently Naysayers.
Numerous Studies exist stating ancient humans once inhabited the Green Sahara.
Yet, only 1% has been excavated. And not only that, the only ones talking about it are the alternative researchers!

and arrowhead collectors? So if the academicsw are the naysayers, who wrote the "studies"? It's not much point excavatinbg a desert site denuded by deflation. Everything [that the looters have not already removed] is there on the surface. A lot of the work is extensive surface survey, plotting settlement location, size, collecting material, moving on. This is also compared with the detailed study of sediments in wadis and valleyys, or soil horizons buried by later accumulation (eg., dunes, or material deposited at the base of a slope).

Ramon @RAMolledo · Apr 17
Establishment academics and intellectuals are simply “Gatekeepers” to ensure that regular people don’t explore, study, and do their own research. There seems to be a concerted effort to do this.
People get shamed and discouraged from exploring topic’s themselves. This is a sin.

These people are so pathetic, playing the victim not even because nobody handed them something on a plate, but because they are totally oblivious to there being something that would immediately set them straight.

My advice to them:

There's literally HUNDREDS of open access texts out there in the public domain, full of basic source information on precisely the archaeology of the Green Sahara that anyone can access, read, download - for example here [totally random openaccess archaeological journal article From onlinelibrary.wiley.com], then check the links it gives in the bibliography to access others, and so on.

The issue is not that somebody's keeping this from you, its that you can't be bothered to read it - just a mouse click away. @Whambahhlamm can find out about communities on the lakes and rivers and what kind of civilisation they actually had. Nobody is saying they were not there.

But what's clear IF you delve into it (please do before complaining again that "nobody's done any work there"), is that there was not the type of civilization that Hancock seems to be postulating or not (the debate leaves it very unclear what his claims now are)

Do you reckon they'll be happy that they can fulfil their ambition to find out at first hand about Saharan archaeology of the Late Pleistocene and Holocene to confront with Hancock's "might have been"s?




Cited text: Nutz A, Kwiecien O, Breitenbach SFM, et al. Fluvio-lacustrine sedimentation in the Agadir-Tissint Feija (anti-Atlas, Morocco): A promising palaeoclimate archive for the last glacial cycle in northwest Africa. Depositional Rec. 2019; 5: 362–387. https://doi.org/10.1002/dep2.65

Another one, "Eyes to See" = "Looks Like"

 
The "Looks like" argument again.

1) Suppose the erosion on the Sphinx is wind and salt crystallisation and not flowing water... but I'd like to ask, given the relief of the hill into which the Sphinx enclosure was dug (and its relationship to the causeway to its south), this water was "flowing" from where, though? Why was it not flowing downhill, but along the slope? (Look at the relief of the TOP of the sides of the Sphinx enclosure, highest on the NE corner). Anyone care to draw us a plan of where this imaginary deluginuous water was collecting and flowing from and to - taking into account the form of the land before the tomb cemetery was built...

.

2) I would like to ask those who think an outcrop at Yonaguni is a building, to give us a reconstruction of it in use, showing people to scale, using its various spaces and platforms. What were the various bits of it used for? All those superfluous steps that lead nowhere, a threesided "pool"... So you stand on the top... and do what? How do you actually get ON the top without having to scale a sheer wall? Where is the door? How can this rock function as a building? Can we see the othr outcrops in the vicinity? Like the one to the left in this visualisation... 

. 

What Happens When you Do Public Archaeology?

 I just want to make a record of this behaviour. The sociology of popular science.

Here's a tweet:

In my opinion, in the debate, Flint Dibble produced a very balanced and well-argued response to what Hancock had written and said in the past. Here's some of the reactions of Hancock's supporters. Question: How many of them actually listened to the points being made? 

Pretty mind-boggling. What kind of mind-world do these people inhabit? Why are they reading an archaeology thread if they have not the slightest intention of making any effort to understand what they read there? What kind of social inadequate is it that sees a post like this only as a space, an opportunity to show their own ignioorance, disregard and how 'alternative science' empowers boors like these? This is the primitive tribal mentality that votes Brexit, votes Trump  and drives like an idiot with zero regard for otthers on the road.