June 11, 2003

BY DAVE NEWBART Staff Reporter

From the air, the ancient historic sites were so full of holes dug by looters, they resembled waffles.

At other sites, hundreds of looters were so nonchalant about their activities that they smiled and waved at passersby.

Still other sites had been so heavily ransacked that artifacts thousands of years old were lying out in the open and easily stolen or damaged by the elements.

Those were some of the observations offered Wednesday by a team of experts who traveled to Iraq last month to survey a few dozen of the tens of thousands of archeological sites in what was once the cradle of civilization.

The teams--including a handful of current and former researchers at the University of Chicago--released a report Wednesday urging increased U.S. military patrols of the sites, more Iraqi guards and a retooling of the Iraqi government offices that protected the sites in the past.

"It's horrible,'' said McGuire Gibson, professor of Mesopotamian archeology at the U. of C.'s Oriental Institute, who has worked in Iraq since 1964. "You might as well take a bulldozer to the sites.''

The losses at the sites--many of which have not been excavated by scientists, so there is no record of what is there--could dwarf those at the Iraqi National Museum, where wide-scale looting took place after the fall of Baghdad.

"We may be talking about literally tens of thousands of objects going out from each of these sites,'' said Elizabeth Stone, an anthropologist at State University of New York at Stony Brook who got her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

Stone based her estimate on the fact that a British excavation of just one site in the 1920s and '30s dug up 20,000 artifacts.

McGuire also disputed a report that looting at the National Museum wasn't that bad. When he left Baghdad in late May, more than 1,000 pieces were missing from three of the museum's five storage vaults, but a vault containing cuneiform tablets with some of the earliest writing samples was untouched. The museum maintained records of its collections but lost computers, cash and other equipment.

While the number of missing items is well below some initial loss estimates, Gibson said he thinks the total missing will grow to a few thousand when the tally is completed. Although many priceless works were hidden and spared from looting, some of the 33 major pieces confirmed missing from the museum's main halls are equivalent to the Mona Lisa, Stone said.

"This would be a major disaster in any museum," Gibson said.

Still, the experts praised the U.S. military for not targeting historic sites in its bombing campaign and said military forces on the ground are eager to protect the sites if ordered to do so.

''Somebody in the U.S. government deserves positive credit for sparing the archeological sites from bombing, and we found nothing but concern and politeness from the military people we encountered,'' said Henry Wright, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan and a U. of C. graduate.

The teams traveled to Iraq in early May on an expedition organized by the National Geographic Society. McGuire also flew over other sites as a consultant for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Altogether, they examined nearly four dozen sites and found three-quarters had been looted or damaged.

The worst damage was in southern Iraq, where looting was widespread even before the war. Still, Gibson said looting had never been a problem in Iraq before 1994 because of tough laws protecting antiquities.

But from a helicopter, Gibson saw hundreds of men "working'' at at least three sites. The men, mainly poor residents of the area, did not realize the United States did not support the excavations, Gibson said, and first warmly greeted the surveying teams. U.S. Marines later fired over their heads to get them to leave the sites.

Nippur, a holy city that dates to 5000 B.C., showed evidence of looting for the first time since the U. of C. began excavations there in 1948, Gibson said.

Even small-scale looting can prevent crucial historical information from being recorded, Stone said. Looters often dig up and then leave behind fragments of clay cuneiform tablets, which then turn to dust. But one fragment found earlier at Nippur helped explain the flood recounted in the Bible, she said. "We don't know what we are losing,'' she said.