Saving Afghanistan's Incredible Heritage

As it is utterly impossible to summarize this wonderful article written by CNRS News, giving a thorough insight in the problems archaeology is facing in Afghanistan, I'll limit myself to the following short introduction. For further reading, I gladly refer to the link that I attach at the end.

For nearly a century, the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA) has been drawing up an inventory of the archaeological heritage of one of the world’s most unstable countries. Some 5000 sites have already been discovered, both on the ground and from the air. They reveal Afghanistan's remarkable archaeological wealth, including protohistoric, Greek, Buddhist and Islamic remains, as archaeologist Julio Bendezu-Sarmiento explains.

For the last thirty years, Afghanistan has been associated with images of war, of the Soviet occupation, civil strife, and the Taliban—to the point of concealing the extent to which the country once fired the imagination of archaeologists and adventurers of every sort. It was there that Alexander the Great, who had set out to conquer Asia, is said to have met and married the beautiful Roxana around 330 BC. Buddhism found fertile ground there too, yielding some of its most beautiful works of art, such as the tragically renowned Buddhas carved into the cliffs of the Bamiyan valley, and destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. It was also through Afghanistan that goods, such as tea, spices, precious stones and silk, travelled for centuries along the Silk Road. Located at the crossroads between central Asia, the Persian world and the cultures of the Indian sub-continent (Pakistan and India), Afghanistan has always been a source of envy, and with good reason: it is one of the countries that boasts the greatest number of mines of copper, gold, silver and even of lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone found in the Mesopotamian tombs of Ur and in the jewelry of the Egyptian Pharaohs.

Julio Bendezu-Sarmiento, a CNRS researcher and French-Peruvian archaeologist, has headed the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA) since 2013.1 He explains why it is urgent to list Afghanistan's archaeological heritage, as a growing number of economic development projects are underway, such as the gas pipeline planned to cross the south of the country, and looting has never been so widespread. 

The French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA) is the only foreign archaeological team with a permanent presence in Afghanistan. Why?

Julio Bendezu-Sarmiento: Our offices are located in Kabul, in an old building that houses a research center, a library containing 20,000 books, a restoration and a photo laboratory and storerooms. Today, we are quite simply the only foreign archaeologists still working in the country: since the bomb attack that killed 90 civilians in Kabul's diplomatic quarter in spring 2017, every other international scientific team has left. This has to do with our very close ties to Afghanistan. The DAFA was set up in 1922 at the request of King Amanullah, when the country was just beginning to open up to the outside world: in fact, the archaeologists got here before the French diplomats!

For the entire article, please click here.