An update on the looting of archaeological sites in Iraq

Abstract

Even by the depressing standards of modern archaeological vandalism, the pillaging of sites in Iraq that followed the demise of the Saddam regime was appalling in its scale and intensity. Iraq had experienced site looting in the past- indeed it is largely as a result of this activity that the world's museums have Mesopotamian collections, but in the decades before 1990 a strong system of site protection was in place and the local population was sufficiently prosperous to have little interest in acquiring antiquities for sale. Two unrelated events changed everything in 1990. One was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and its aftermath-including the Shiite uprising; the second was the filling of the lake behind the Ataturk dam in Turkey which initiated a decrease in the water critical for irrigation in southern Iraq (Beaumont 1998). The net result was an impoverishment of the population of the south due to reductions in both agricultural production and support from the central government. It is thus perhaps not surprising that the local population began to turn to an alternate source of income: the retrieval and sale of antiquities.