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Illicit Antiquities |
Looting, heritage management and archaeological strategies at Jam, AfghanistanDavid Thomas
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
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The scourges of cultural vandalism and illicit excavation, and the flood of artefacts reaching Western antiquities markets from Afghanistan have been well reported in previous issues of Culture Without Context (see Issues 8 and 11, for example). Estimates of the annual value of the illicit trade in Afghan antiquities vary wildly and are impossible to verify, but one source in UNESCO suggested that it is double what the drugs trade is thought to be worth (roughly $2 billion in 2003, according to UN figures). These figures are staggering, but not totally implausible — in May 1999, Pakistani authorities in Peshawar seized six boxes containing $47 million worth of carvings, coins, metal weaponry and gold jewellery, which probably originated in museums and illicit excavations in Afghanistan; none of the 30,000 ancient coins formerly in the National Museum in Kabul can be located, while reports of a hoard found near the northeastern city of Gardez in 1992 suggest that it amounted to over 550,000 items (3–4 tonnes of gold, silver and bronze coins)! Although the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 has improved the situation, to a degree, and the Afghan Institute of Archaeology continues to try hard to operate at a national level, the current government’s influence is variable outside Kabul and the resources available to the Institute are very limited. Since the Taliban’s destruction of the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001, and the systematic looting of the Hellenistic city of Ai Khanoum, the Minaret of Jam has become the cultural heritage icon of Afghanistan (Fig. 1). The magnificent, 63-metre-high, mud-brick minaret was probably built around ad 1194 by Ghiyath ad-Din Muhammed (ad 1163–1203), possibly to commemorate a victorious campaign. It remains one of the few standing monuments from this period in Central Asia to have survived the devastating campaigns of Ghengis Khan and the Mongols c. ad 1221. The monument’s multifaceted significance, and the threats that it faces, were recognized internationally in 2002, when the Minaret of Jam and the surrounding archaeological remains were designated as Afghanistan’s first World Heritage Site (Fig. 2).
Jam is located in the remote Ghur Province, roughly two-thirds of the way from Kabul to Herat, as the crow flies (a road is currently under construction). It is probably the site of Firuzkoh, the Ghurid Dynasty’s summer capital. The Ghurids came to prominence in Central Asia in the eleventh century, and eventually controlled a swathe of territory stretching from Nishapur in Iran to the Bay of Bengal, before being defeated by the Khwarzemshah in ad 1210. Rather like the Nabatean city of Petra in Jordan, knowledge of the site of Jam was ‘lost’ to the outside world until 1943, but it was not until a French expedition was launched in 1957 to record the Minaret that its existence became more widely known in the West. The conflicts of the last 25 years have obviously greatly limited the opportunities for archaeological work in the region, and had other deleterious effects. Although the area has largely escaped war damage, unlike the sixteenth-century Tomb and Gardens of Babur in Kabul, for example (Fig. 3), centuries of fluvial erosion have caused the Minaret of Jam to start leaning to an alarming degree. Fortunately, Jam is starting to receive the multi-disciplinary attention it deserves — an architectural conservation project has started to arrest the tilt of the minaret and in July 2003, the Istituto Italiano per L’Africa e L’Oriente initiated the Minaret of Jam Archaeological Project (MJAP), on behalf of UNESCO, of which I am field director.
The aims of our short, preliminary season in 2003 were to assess the extent of illicit excavations at Jam, the current state of preservation of what remains and to provide an archaeological impact assessment report, in the light of plans to construct a much-needed road and bridge close to the Minaret. The accounts of visitors, and comparison of recent aerial photographs with those published by the French in 1959 suggested that looting had been extensive, particularly during the Taliban years, and this proved to be the case (Fig. 4). Indeed, during our stay we observed ‘suspicious’ activities in the distance and mounds of fresh spoil in a neighbouring valley. As a result, we succeeded in persuading UNESCO to increase significantly the number of guards employed to protect the site, and it is hoped that this and continued work in the area will convince the locals that the archaeological remains are a long-term source of employment, rather than something to be plundered in the short-term. It would be naïve, however, to think that the looting will stop totally as a result, but we hope that it will at least be curtailed and that building good relations with the local militia commanders, the effective authority in the area, will cement this process. To this end, we benefited greatly from being accompanied by Mr Abdul Wasey Feroozi, Director of the Afghan Institute of Archaeology, whose presence and assistance in the field proved invaluable.
Most of the valley slopes are pockmarked with robber holes, up to several metres wide and deep. In an attempt to glean as much information from the existing robber holes, and to limit our own impact on the archaeological remains, our work in 2003 concentrated on a precipitous slope opposite the Minaret, where the route for the road and bridge has been proposed. We investigated ten robber holes, exposing fragmentary architectural remains consisting of stone and mud-brick walls and plastered surfaces. All too predictably, given thorough looting, we found little else, other than numerous fragments of fine, painted wall plaster, and a wide range of ceramics, including glazed sgraffiato wares. We also recovered shards of glass and a couple of small coins, the better preserved of which is Seljuk in origin and has been dated to the early twelfth century. Although limited, these finds indicate the import of luxury items, a relatively high standard of living and concern for aesthetics amongst the twelfth-century inhabitants of Jam — a more detailed archaeological report will appear in the 2004 issue of the journal East and West. One robber hole near the Minaret also provided us with a tantalizing glimpse of what is likely to have been a massive Islamic building (either a mosque, or madrasa — an Islamic school), associated with the Minaret. Beneath a metre of alluvial deposits, we exposed a well-laid pavement of fired mud-bricks (Fig. 5). Its intricate ‘herring-bone’ pattern is different from other paving patterns (checkerboard and ‘figure-of-eight’ swirls) reported in robber holes nearby. The extensive paving points to the presence of a series of courtyards, probably bounded by a large wall — we found a stretch of fired mud-brick wall preserved nine courses high in the side of the riverbank a few metres away. Juzjani, the one major source for the Ghurids, records that the main mosque at Firuzkoh was washed away in a flash flood — we hope to investigate the veracity of this report during our next season, when Dr Kevin White, a geomorphologist and specialist in remote sensing will accompany us, although we have had to postpone the 2004 season due to security concerns in the run-up to the national elections in the autumn.
The looting at sites such as Jam presents UNESCO and other NGOs, whose primary emphasis is on conservation rather than excavation, with a dilemma — does the most realistic form of preservation involve archaeological excavations, which are inherently destructive? This is particularly pertinent for little-studied regions and periods, such as Afghanistan and the Ghurids. We could conduct a systematic programme of surveying and soundings over the site, attempting to record each robber hole; this would certainly aid attempts to assess how much looting is being conducted between seasons, but it is doubtful that such work would yield more than a demoralizing catalogue of destruction, particularly in the light of our findings in 2003. Field-walking using Global Positioning System devices seems to provide a much quicker way of recording the extent of looting, whilst simultaneously defining the currently unknown limits of the site. The apparent single-period nature of the occupation at Jam, and overburden of alluvial deposits in the area around the minaret suggests that non-intrusive remote sensing technique, such as ground penetrating radar, may be applicable. We hope that remote sensing would delineate the mud-brick walls and courtyard areas of the major structure associated with the Minaret, with minimal impact on the remains, but such high tech equipment is obviously very expensive, and delicate, and it remains to be seen whether funding bodies are prepared to finance such research. The surface collection of artefacts is another obvious, non-destructive avenue of research, and valuable in establishing the extent of the site and the variety of material and activities present. One major problem, however, is that we are effectively working in a ceramic typology vacuum, with few well-excavated comparanda available, against which to relate our assemblage. These factors suggest that the best way of gleaning and preserving knowledge about the archaeology of Jam and the Ghurids is to conduct carefully targeted excavations at the site, before looting further damages the site irreparably. This is particularly the case for Qasr-e Zarafshan, the hill-top fortress overlooking the Minaret, whose inaccessibility seems to have protected it from looting for the moment. Regardless of the physical and logistical challenges of excavating test-trenches in Qasr-e Zarafshan, however, we also have to be mindful of the risk of drawing unwanted attention to it, by merely working there — there are no easy answers to the dilemmas facing the project. The best strategy seems to be a combination of these approaches. We need to utilize surface survey and non-intrusive techniques where possible, and to gather as much data as possible from the debris associated with the robber holes. Simultaneously, we need to establish a well-stratified and representative assemblage of ceramics and artefacts, which can only be gained from the careful excavation of undisturbed deposits. Without such excavations, whatever we collect from the surface and robber holes will literally remain culture without context. All our work, however, must coincide with efforts to educate the local people as to the heritage and long-term (albeit small-scale) economic value of the archaeological remains, as a source of historical, religious, cultural and social information, pride and employment. Ultimately, the responsibility for this falls on the West, both as the funder of archaeological projects, development aid, and as the primary market for the rapacious trade in illegal antiquities. As the tattered banner outside the Kabul Museum reads: ‘A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive’. First posted March 2005; Page design updated September 2006 |
