US Academics: Afghan Government "Not Honoring Their Promise"?

A 2021 satellite image (left) of an unknown archaeological site in the Balkh province of Afghanistan shows evidence that bulldozers have scraped the left side of the site. By late 2022 (right), it appears looters have dug numerous pits in the cleared area.MAXAR/DIGITAL GLOBE/PREPARED BY CHICAGO CENTER FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE PRESERVATION

Looting of archaeological sites in Afghanistan is continuing, despite attempts by the Taliban government to protect the nation’s cultural treasures, a recent analysis finds (Ruchi Kumar, 'Looters continue to pillage Afghanistan’s rich archaeological heritageDespite Taliban promises to protect sites' Science 3 Nov. 2023). Science is a journal of the Washington DC-based American Association for the Advancement of Science. It is not clear why the Americans apparently think the current Afghan government owes THEM a promise of this nature...

Using artificial intelligence (AI) to help comb through a trove of satellite images, researchers at the University of Chicago’s (UC’s) Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation found that looters are still actively pillaging at least 3 dozen sites that had been targeted before the Taliban came to power in August 2021. Researchers say the finding suggests the Taliban government, like its predecessor, is having difficulty cracking down on local leaders who profit from selling artifacts. [...] The borders remain porous, and there are no clear policies or laws and regulations to punish those violating Afghanistan’s cultural heritage[...]

These results come from the 'Afghan Heritage Mapping Partnership', a U.S. government–funded effort to identify archaeological sites across the nation that has been operating since 2015. This has used various sources, in collaboration with Afghan archaeologists, including satellite imagery and has expanded knowledge of the location of sites across the region. Previous efforts had documented some 5000 sites.

[The AHMP] worked with computer scientists to develop an AI that could recognize archaeological sites, training it on nearly 2000 images of known sites. By 2021, such tools had enabled teams in Chicago and Kabul to identify more than 29,000 archaeological sites—the largest ever data set gathered for Afghanistan.[...] The researchers soon discovered the tools could also “identify which sites were looted,” Stein says. At some sites, the imagery shows pits dug with picks and shovels. Damage done by bulldozers begins to show up in images taken after 2017, when conflict with the resurgent Taliban was ramping up. Looters “would essentially bulldoze an already looted site … exposing a completely new undisturbed area,” Stein says. When the researchers examined 162 sites known to have been looted between 2018 and 2021, they found 37 that showed signs of continued looting since the Taliban came to power.

I wrote about these guys earlier (PACHI Thursday, 23 September 2021, ' Archaeological Sites and Objects in Afghanistan'), the two news items seem very similar. And of course it is, among others, Chicago dealers that continue to offer objects from this region of the world, it seems part of the solution to this problem lies closer to home for the Chicago team, who if their primary concern was curbing the looting could be looking more carefully at the US market that is creating the demand instead of "blaming the Taliban".

We recall the disgraceful repetition by US scholars (to use the term loosely in some cases) of the ISIL-looting mantra of the US Department of State ignoring the evidence documented elsewhere (including on this blog) that the actual situation is much more nuanced. Recently we've had the same thing over "Russian looting/cultural property destruction in Ukraine" (again more nuanced than the picture presented by grant-winning academic projects intended to bolster a particular picture favoured in the USA).