Thursday, December 18, 2003

THE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2004 ISSUE (57.1) OF ARCHAEOLOGY MAGAZINE IS ONLINE, marking the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Archaeological Institute of America. Articles of interest include:
"Albanian Synagogue Surfaces"

"Letter From Switzerland: Theme Park of the Gods"

"Building Trust in Iraq"
Manhattan assistant district attorney and Marine Corps colonel Matthew Bogdanos on tracking down the looted artifacts of the Iraq National Museum

Excerpt from the last:
What's still missing?
You have the public gallery from which originally forty exhibits were taken. We've recovered eleven. Turning to the storage rooms, there were about 3,150 pieces taken from those, and that's almost certainly by random and indiscriminant looters. Of those, we've recovered about 2,700. So there's about 400 of those pieces, excavated pieces, missing. The final group is from the basement. The basement is what we've been calling the inside job. And I will say it forever like a mantra; it is inconceivable to me that the basement was breached and the items stolen without an intimate insider's knowledge of the museum. From there about 10,000 pieces were taken. We've only recovered 650, approximately.

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