Lives in Ruins (25 page)

He was driven by a connection to this landscape, the people who once inhabited it, and the next generation who would inherit it. “The river below is full of fish,” Dupin said. “You can see why the Native Americans loved it. I take my three boys exploring in the caves in the bluffs, and we've found petroglyphs [rock carvings] and arrowheads.”

Coward told him about her work in the Southwest, and they found common ground in their love of the Native American past. Both were frustrated by the lack of economic support for Native American cultural history. These days, Erin and Dupin agreed, funding went to colonial sites and African-American projects. The extraordinary record of Native American life that stretched back more than ten thousand years was going begging.

Later Erin admitted that, after she met Dupin, “I had to reevaluate my thinking toward amateur archaeologists.” If they were as responsible as he was, she wouldn't mind seeing them train volunteers. Come to think of it, “teaching the public how to properly deal with accidental finds would be a huge help to a number of professionals.” She was ready to put the man to work!

Before Dupin's sons got home from school, we headed to Erin and Lane's family home in Annandale, Virginia, where we cooked
mahi-mahi and Erin talked about working on the Big Island in Hawaii. She remembered finding petroglyphs full of piko holes everywhere. Piko holes—tiny gouges in the basalt where natives once buried the stumps of their babies' umbilical cords for good luck.

Lane beamed at the daughter who could find such marvels in the world. But when Erin carried our dishes out to the kitchen, Lane leaned my way, the concerned mother harking back to the World Trade Center rubble, and whispered, “Did she tell you about finding the baby's T-shirt?”

“C
HAMPIONS, TAKE
your seats!” I heard the bark from a hotel meeting room and was swept from the crowded corridor and into a folding seat. I had been wandering the halls at the annual meeting of the AIA, looking for a tantalizing place to land, contemplating the sign posted outside this room: “Cultural Heritage Preservation in a Dangerous World.” I liked the sound of that dangerous world. Certainly it was a difficult world I entered, one where archaeology met the military and acronyms spawned more acronyms.
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This was a meeting of CHAMP, short for Cultural Heritage by AIA/Military Panel,
^†
a complicated name but useful, if only
so about fifty of us could be called to order with the words, “Champions, let's start!”

Who were these people? I looked around and noticed how many men wore suits and ties and sat coiled and alert: the military was here in force—the Army, Navy, Air Force, even Central Command,
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not to mention multiple members of the National Guard and a man who identified himself as the Special Assistant to the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General for Law of War Matters—now there was someone I hadn't expected to see at an archaeology conference. Polite, with a steely, attentive edge, the military people introduced themselves, along with several dozen archaeology graduate students and professors from multiple countries, a 3-D digital archivist, the former president of the American Institute of Archaeology, and me.

What was happening here? The archaeologists were collaborating with the military to protect the world's cultural heritage from tanks, bombs, guns, boots, and sticky fingers. With the blessing of high command, archaeologists had begun to arm U.S. soldiers with enough cultural information to conduct missions, and engage in combat without destroying the world's archaeological treasures.

Soldiers and archaeologists had worked together before. The Monuments Men and Women of World War II famously and cinematically helped reclaim the artistic heritage of Europe after it was plundered by the Nazis. But the collaboration stopped there. Then, in 2003, the National Museum of Iraq was looted, an event that tarnished the military and traumatized the archaeological profession. American troops had stood by while it happened, we were told in news reports; some accounts had the troops firing on the museum and opening the doors
to looters.
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Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld compounded the damage, dismissing the plunder with the memorable observation, “Stuff happens.”

The shock waves from this event and its aftermath galvanized Congress to finally sign the 1954 treaty, The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (called simply The Hague Convention). It also propelled some alarmed archaeologists and military personnel to discuss joining forces again. Though it's hard to imagine two more cautious, even paranoid, professions, their members shared a fervent desire to minimize damage to the institutions and artifacts that preserve cultural identity. The people behind CHAMP, I learned, had been working for the better part of a decade to create trust between the two groups and advance their mutual interests. Some of their contacts had never been to an archaeology conference.

After being told of the reasons CHAMP had been formed, we split up into working groups. I gravitated toward the take-charge woman in a leopard-print wrap dress and black boots who was organizing those interested in cultural heritage information. Corine (Cori) Wegener, a retired U.S. Army Reserve major and museum curator, had served as the Civil Affairs officer assigned to the National Museum of Iraq after its looting. She was the founder of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield
^†
—not the insurance company, but the American branch of an international nonprofit organization dedicated to the
wartime protection of cultural property worldwide, the cultural equivalent of the Red Cross. Now in her forties, she presided over the group gathered at this table with the mission to place crucial archaeological information into the hands of military strategists. Ah, information, as in intelligence! I settled into a chair in the outer row, a satellite, an eavesdropper, drawn by nothing more than the thought of archaeologists throwing their bodies on the treasures of past civilizations.

Wegener reported to us on the Blue Shield's response to the Libyan conflict in 2011. After civil war broke out there, and the UN Security Council approved a no-fly zone over the country, a colleague at U.S. Blue Shield called her and said, “What are you doing? We should be doing something.” Wegener in turn called on Susan Kane, an archaeologist with experience in Libya, and the two began reaching out to their contacts. Their mission: to compile a no-strike list of Libya's important archaeological sites, museums, and libraries, and to get the list into the hands of those who, ultimately, designated the bombing targets. “After The Hague Convention, each country is supposed to be doing this for itself,” Wegener said, working up its own list of its archaeological treasures, but few are able to. “Some sites are obvious,” she noted, like the five World Heritage sites in Libya, “but then it gets to be like asking people to pick their favorite kid. And I need it in twenty-four hours. You're going to have to make some choices. This is why you want to do it ahead of time.” Kane drew in British archaeologists who had also worked in Iraq and who were collaborating with their Ministry of Defence. Once the lists were consolidated and coordinates checked, the archaeologists grouped and ranked the cultural sites.

Putting together this list was one thing. Where to send it turned out to be the tricky part. “The military is not one monolithic organization,” Wegener said pointedly. She sent it to her high-ranking military contacts—including two of the men now sitting next to her here at this table—and to several of her Blue
Shield colleagues in other countries, who shared it with their military liaisons.

One of Wegener's contacts was Richard Jackson, the man who bore a title too long for a business card, Special Assistant to the U.S. Army Judge . . . etc. He pointed out that no-strike lists of cultural sites were already part of military planning. “All the branches do the same thing in terms of intelligence preparation for the battlefield. We define the battlefield, including the cultural landscape. We have a joint targeting doctrine: public infrastructure is essential for civilians,” so hospitals and schools are on their no-strike list. Churches, mosques, and protected cultural property sites are also off-limits. “There has to be a very high level of approval to override that list,” Jackson added. “A general is only authorized to attack such places if [his troops are] receiving fire [from them].” When these no-strike lists work, they work well. “Garbage in, garbage out—if good information gets to [the targeters], we can have good results.” He mentioned a sensitive archaeological landmark, the Ziggurat of Ur, which was located on the edge of an Iraqi airfield in the first Gulf War. The ziggurat (a pyramid-shaped temple), which dated back twenty-three centuries, had been on their no-strike list, even though “Saddam purposely parked aircraft there. We didn't target it because of collateral damage.”

The archaeologists' no-strike list for Libya was, predictably, more extensive than the military's, and included sensitive information from professionals who had worked at sites around that country. They submitted it about twenty-four hours before the first NATO bombing runs in Libya. Did they get the list into the right hands? Had it made a difference? An International Blue Shield contingent that had toured the strike zone afterwards reported no significant damage to cultural sites, and none from bombing. So far, so good: NATO reports mentioned that the archaeologists' no-strike list might serve as a model for future operations. At this point, Wegener paused to look around the table. One of the suits, Timothy
Melancon, of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, cleared his throat and said, “It worked in Libya. We factored [the list] into the bombing.”

There was a crackle in the air, the unmistakable sense that here, at last, was what the archaeologists had been working for since the Iraq debacle in 2003. They had succeeded in bringing the military to the table. They had rerouted those bombs. Melancon leaned forward. “Sites were not damaged,” he confirmed, “and not by accident.” He acknowledged that he and his team were the last ones to relay target information to the combatants taking aim. “I am the point of contact, yes. My shop—we focus primarily on stuff we don't want to blow up, and we continually feed that database worldwide,” he said.

This was the first time that Melancon and Wegener had met. Like the others here, they were too professional to exchange high-fives and huzzahs, but there were knowing smiles around the table.

“We've been searching for you and we found you,” Wegener said to Melancon.

“Is the journalist here?” asked one of the uniformed men, a cultural resources contact for the U.S. Air Force. What business I was in might be a matter of debate, but I squared my shoulders and raised my hand. Now what? But the man wanted only to make sure that I got it right. “You understand what's happening here?” These people had taken me behind the scenes of a world conflict, recounting and reliving their roles as first-time collaborators. They had made a difference. The man in the suit gave me a nod: witnesses were welcome. Before the archaeologists had gotten involved, the Department of Defense had perhaps thirty cultural sites to protect in their database for Libya. Afterwards, the list contained 242. And after seven months of bombing, the sites survived.

Other archaeologists had tried to share their knowledge to keep the bombs from destroying cultural heritage. I learned later that during the first Gulf War, a professor at the Oriental Institute in
Chicago had been sending information about archaeological avoidance targets to the Department of Defense,
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but his warnings had not reached the right agencies and went unheeded. The challenges involved in penetrating the military bureaucracy are formidable.

But persuading archaeologists to cooperate in compiling a massively sensitive database is no small feat, either. Some archaeologists don't want to engage with the military for ethical reasons; even if their efforts might help contain the destruction, they don't want to help those who make war. Or they have practical objections to such a collaboration. One of the biggest problems archaeologists face in the field is looting and plundering; in war zones, looting often helps finance the conflict. And in a leaky world, did archaeologists want the sites they knew about on some government list? It was like flagging your antiques for the movers, so they would take extra care of the valuable stuff. In the right hands, they did take care. In the wrong hands—well, what do you know, here was an excellent list of things to loot and plunder, conveniently ranked, most valuable first.

The man from the Air Force acknowledged the sensitivity of this data to those of us around the table. “We're cautious, very conservative right now, and pretty confident that we can control it,” he said. Wegener thought the success in Libya would help their efforts. “We do have good networks, but it will take time for trust to build,” she said.