Archaeology, culture heritage, vandalism and armed conflicts

The article focuses on the fate of the culture heritage under modern armed conflicts and on the challenges it brings about to archaeologists. The author surveys a vast literature on the destruction of archaeological sites and looting of the museum’s collections in the course of contemporary wars as well as attacks on the archaeologists and a respond from them. A study of the modern international, inter-ethnic and religious conflicts demonstrates that an important aspect of their ideology is a reference to history, which provides a conflict with a symbolic language. In search of a legitimacy of their actions and demands the both hostile groups refer to culture heritage, which, as a result, is actively involved in the armed struggle. Thus, culture heritage is insecure and faces a mortal danger, because people believe that its destruction undermines enemy’s morale and challenges the world pub lic opinion as well as modern values. A destruction of culture heritage pursues the following objectives: firstly, looting and trade with antiquities; secondly, an enemies’ deprivation of historical resources, which could be mobilized to legitimate their demands; thirdly, a denial of the inappropriate (pagan) ancestors; fourthly, a struggle against infidels by annihilation of their important religious symbols; fifthly, a destruction of the neocolonial and despotic symbols that are sometimes associated with archaeology; and sixthly, a deprivation of the minorities’ historical heritage for the sake of national unity and consolidation. Over the last twenty to twenty five years an encroachment on the other’s culture heritage is often brought about by religious factors, and a religious renaissance is accompanied with a destructive activity of religious radicals and fundamentalists. They are mostly Moslems, but one can find vandals among Christians, Hindus and some others as well. Under this environment archaeology sometimes suffers from the attacks as it is accused of a service for hated regime or imperialism and neo-colonialism. Thus, quite unexpectedly, archaeologists find themselves at the center of a political struggle, and have to make a choice between various political lines. All this requires archaeologists to have a fine understanding of how and to what extent their scholarly materials and activity serve politics, which is far from their professional field, as well as who is a subject and who is a victim of this politics, and what are its goals. In addition, archaeologists have to overcome the former essentialism, which makes up a basis of their ethnogenetic constructions, which are extensively used and abused by the modern ethno-nationalist politics with its passion for references to historical rights. One has to consider that in the modern world archaeology plays an important social role, and the data on the deep past can be used to serve certain ethnic politics. That is why, an interpretation of this sort of materials and their offer to general public demands for a sense of delicacy and a good knowledge of the modern ethno-political environment.

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