Saving Mes Aynak

Mes Aynak (“little copper well” in Pashto) is a mountainous site in the Taliban-controlled Logar Province, Afghanistan, 25 miles southeast of Kabul near the Pakistan border. Mes Aynak contains the ancient remains of a 2,000-year-old Buddhist city, on top of a 5,000-year-old Bronze Age site. Massive, at nearly 500,000 sq. metres, this historic Buddhist city contains dozens of unique and never-before-seen stupas and temples, thousands of artefacts, and around 600 large Buddha statues – similar to those destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 at Bamiyan.

Rewriting the history of Buddhism

Although only 10% of the site has been excavated, the discoveries are already rewriting the history of Buddhism, Afghanistan, and us – who we are as human beings. Just imagine what is still there, waiting to be re-discovered and shared with the world.

Mes Aynak, however, sits on the second largest copper deposit in the world. More on the story
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Reference:

Past Horizons. 2015. “Saving Mes Aynak”. Past Horizons. Posted: May 5, 2015. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/05/2015/saving-mes-aynak

Help save the cultural heritage of Afghanistan

Brent Huffman, a documentary film-maker and professor at Northwestern University, USA, first visited the ancient Buddhist city of Mes Aynak in June of 2011 and immediately fell in love with the site. From that point onwards he has campaigned tirelessly to bring the plight of Mes Aynak into the public consciousness so that it can be saved for future generations of Afghans and the international community.

Environmental devastation

In addition to destroying one of Afghanistan’s most important archaeological findings, the copper mine that is due to start operating on the site will almost certainly devastate the environment by polluting the land and water supply in Logar province and kill all life in the area.

Raising money to raise awareness

Brent Huffman is now in the process of raising money through crowd funding to go towards completing a documentary film that will help create international awareness to both try to save Mes Aynak and prevent similar destruction from happening to other cultural sites in Afghanistan located on or near mineral resources.

The site of Mes Aynak

Mes Aynak (meaning “little copper well”), a desert region 25 kilometres southeast of Kabul, is an enormous archaeological treasure trove 400,000 square feet in size.

An ancient Buddhist monastery complex, extensive wall frescos, massive devotional temples, and more than 200 life-sized Buddha statues comprise a discovery of immense global importance.

At the same time, Mes Aynak is home to the largest undeveloped copper reserve in the world.  Directly beneath the Buddhist site lie mineral deposits worth an estimated $100 billion.

The fate of the ancient Buddhist artefacts hangs in the balance as the Chinese begin planning their destructive open-pit style copper mine.

Under immense international pressure, in early 2009 the Chinese company gave archaeologists three years to excavate and move the artefacts before the copper mine gets underway.

But with extremely limited resources, the dedicated archaeologists have made little progress. “We have only discovered the tip of the iceberg, a mere 10% of the site,” says French specialist Philippe Marquis, who believes this could easily be a thirty-year excavation project.

The documentary

The Buddhas of Mes Aynak is the story of a race against time. This documentary follows an international team of archaeologists as they fight to save a 2,600-year-old Buddhist city in volatile Logar province, Afghanistan.

Led by Philippe Marquis of DAFA, the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan, the specialists attempt to document Mes Aynak before its imminent destruction in December 2012.

The location, hailed as one of the most important archaeological discoveries in Asia, will be demolished by a Chinese government-owned mining company (MCC), who will exploit the location for over 100 billion dollars worth of copper located directly beneath the Buddhist temples.

The film will also examine the cultural and historical significance of the Mes Aynak complex and show in vivid detail what life was like for the Buddhist monks and nuns who lived, worked and worshipped there.

Story summary

The Buddhas of Mes Aynakwill be a feature-length documentary examining the volatile debate between cultural preservation and economic opportunity from all sides. This documentary will rely on the personal narratives of a diverse array of constituents in order to tell a multifaceted narrative.

The documentary will follow several main characters to tell this dramatic and multi-layered story. Philippe Marquis, a French archaeologist, is leading the effort to document and preserve the Buddhist statues. Dr. J. Mark Kenoyer, an American archaeologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is trying to raise international awareness about the site. Abdul Qadeer Temore, a leading Afghan archaeologist trained in France, is working to protect his cultural heritage. And finally Zhenguo Liu, a Chinese manager working for China Metallurgical Group Corporation in the compound at Mes Aynak is frustrated with the discovery of the archaeology site.

The film will also have a well-rounded cast of supporting characters including Buddhist scholars, Afghan politicians and citizens in support of Chinese investments, U.S. military strategists and Chinese veteran businessmen living and working in Afghanistan.

Cultural significance

The Buddhas of Mes Aynak will in particular examine the cultural and historical significance of the Mes Aynak Buddhist site.

Archaeologists believe that Mes Aynak flourished for centuries as a cultural crossroads of trade and Buddhism along the Silk Road. Developed around the first century AD, the site is a trove of Buddhist monastic ruins, statues, and stupas attesting to the seminal role that Afghanistan played in the proliferation of Buddhism in Central and East Asia.

Buddhists, who began settling the area almost two millennia ago, were drawn by the availability of copper at the site.  Monks, who lived and worshipped there, once exploited the lucrative copper deposits to make relics, statues and coins for trade.

Historians are particularly excited by the prospect of learning more about the early science of metallurgy and mining done at Mes Aynak. The site is known to contain coins, glass and tools for making these, going back thousands of years. Archaeologists have also unearthed manuscripts in scroll form that may provide evidence of the presence of Alexander the Great´s troops.
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References:

Huffman, Brent. 2012. “Help save the cultural heritage of Afghanistan”. Past Horizons. Posted: November 7, 2012. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/11/2012/help-save-the-cultural-heritage-of-afghanistan

National Museum of Afghanistan welcomes return of looted treasures

The National Museum of Afghanistan has seen the return of 843 heritage objects including items recovered in 3 separate seizures of smuggled artefacts by the UK Border Force and another group from other investigations by the Art and Antiques Unit of the Metropolitan Police.

A precious cargo

The precious cargo, weighing just over two tonnes, left RAF Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire on the 12 July 2012 after the British Museum and the Royal Air Force worked together to make the historic repatriation possible.

Travelling onboard a C17 transport aircraft, the material was first transported to Camp Bastion, the main military base in Helmand. After a short stop, it took off again on the second leg of the journey, on a C130 Hercules aircraft, to Kabul.

These objects were identified as originating in Afghanistan by the British Museum and were stored there for safekeeping and recording until their return to Kabul.

Additional objects were saved by private individuals which included exquisite examples of the Begram Ivories, which were featured in the exhibition Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World in 2011 and an important sculpture of Buddha. Both these priceless treasures were stolen from the National Museum of Afghanistan during the civil war (1992-1994) and found their way onto the black market.

Exquisite art

The Begram Ivories date to the first century AD and originally decorated Indian wooden furniture excavated in hidden store-rooms at the ancient city of Begram. Those in the consignment had been feared lost since the civil war until they were identified on the black market and acquired on behalf of the Kabul museum by an anonymous private donor in 2010. They were conserved at the British Museum through additional support from the exhibition sponsor Bank of America Merrill Lynch as part of its Art Conservation Project, and temporarily exhibited as part of the exhibition in 2011.

The Buddha dates to the second or third century AD and was found in 1965 at Sarai Khuja, north of Kabul, and was exhibited in the museum there until the civil war during which period it disappeared abroad into private hands. It was again identified and acquired on behalf of the National Museum of Afghanistan and is offered by the donor in memory of the late Carla Grissman (1928-2011), who did much to work with the Afghan museum staff and who was one of the founding members of SPACH (Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage).

5000 years of cultural heritage

The additional objects date from the late third millennium BC onwards and include Bactrian Bronze Age cosmetic flasks, stamp seals and statuettes of types known to have been buried as grave-goods; three decorated stone compartmented bowls of a type previously only known from excavations at the Greek city of Ai Khanum in northern Afghanistan; Greco-Bactrian, Kushan and medieval Islamic coins; Islamic metal and pottery vessels, and assorted other minor items of mixed date and materials. These items therefore cover almost all the great periods of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. The items were seized by UK Border Force and the Art and Antiques Unit of the Metropolitan Police as they passed through Britain, presumably for sale on the black market.

The opportunity has also been taken to send the National Museum a large number of copies of the exhibition catalogue including copies specially translated into Dari and Pashto.

Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum said “I am delighted that these important artefacts have been safely returned to the National Museum in Kabul. This is the outcome of the ongoing dialogue between our cultural institutions as well as the support of the authorities to identify and preserve items from the national collection of Afghanistan that had been illegally removed during years of conflict.”

Returning a countries legacy

In 2011 the British Museum signed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding with the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul and both parties agreed to continue collaborative efforts to identify and return objects to Kabul which had either been stolen from the National Museum during the civil war or otherwise illegally exported from Afghanistan. In 2009 UK Border Force in conjunction with the British Museum and the International Red Cross returned 1490 seized objects, thus bringing the total number of objects returned to over 2,330.
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References:

Past Horizons. 2012. "National Museum of Afghanistan welcomes return of looted treasures". Past Horizons. Posted: August 5, 2012. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/08/2012/national-museum-of-afghanistan-welcomes-return-of-looted-treasures

Mining threatens Afghanistan's Buddhist treasures

For almost 2,000 years a monastery has perched on a rocky outcrop amid the khaki moonscape of Aynak in Afghanistan. In its heyday a pair of mighty turrets towered over an affluent community of monks who exploited local copper deposits and built beautiful places of worship.

Archaeologists describe it as a site of global historic importance and have in recent months been uncovering intricately constructed mound-like structures called stupas – with vaulted corridor and painted statues, including a magnificent reclining Buddha.

But the monastery, which is about 20 miles from Kabul, is under threat from the land on which it stands. Directly underneath runs a rich vein of copper for which a Chinese state-owned mining company has agreed to pay $3bn (£1.9bn) for the extraction rights.

From what was once a courtyard of stupas on top of the monastery, Afghan archaeologists have a clear view of a modern fortified camp of prefabricated buildings with bright blue roofs and housing Chinese workers and technical experts charged with creating the world's biggest opencast copper mine.

The project, and several others like it, will bring significant revenue to one of the world's poorest countries. But the mine will also threatens to destroy yet more of Afghanistan's rich archaeological history, which has already been ravaged by years of civil conflict, puritanical leaders and unscrupulous antiquities hunters.

"It is very shameful for the Afghan government to let the Chinese come here and destroy our history," said Abdul Khalid, one of the archaeologists. "People around the world only hear of the war in Afghanistan but they do not know that we have the best of things from our forefathers."

For him what the Chinese have to offer is beside the point: "It will all just be wasted any way. Much more money comes from foreign countries now than will come from this mine but nothing has improved."

Philippe Marquis, from the French archaeological delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA), which is assisting the Afghan-led dig, said: "The people need to know more about their own history. If they did that then perhaps people would not think that Afghanistan is a doomed country. This site shows how rich it once was and that during parts of its history a powerful country that was able to do great things."

The argument is unlikely to impress an Afghan government eager for a copper bounty. When production starts in six years, the government should receive about £250m a year in direct payments; the total benefit to the Afghan economy is estimated at £745m, or 10% of current GDP.

It is unlikely that the monastery, which is Helmand province, will survive, nor the 12 other Buddhist sites that have been discovered in the area in the past year.

One option is to move much of the archaeological material, some to a new museum to be built in nearby Logar and some to the rebuilt national museum in Kabul.

Unfortunately, the statues of Buddha will have to be displayed without their heads, which have been hacked off and sold on the illegal international antiquities market.

The site was ransacked some time in 2002, when well-organised thieves took advantage of the power vacuum following the fall of the Taliban. Less than 2% of what was taken has been recovered.

The ground is still littered with tubes of the superglue that the thieves, rumoured to be important local officials, used to try to keep the fragile clay statues together as they were pulled through holes bored into the then yet to be excavated mound.

The remains, which include fragments of once extensive city walls, are testimony to the immense wealth the ancient settlement once generated from copper. The surrounding hillsides are littered with slag piles of black, pock-marked stones.

Marquis says the metal was probably used to mint coins and that production halted only when all the available trees had been cut down for fuel.

Today Chinese projects will not only transform the area but also Afghanistan. Not only has China committed itself to building two electricity generating plants, it is also creating two rail lines in a country that has never had a rail network.

In an area where insurgency is strong, the Afghan government has already invested heavily in security. That included recruiting 1,500 policemen to guard the perimeter of the site; previously there had only been 750 officers for the entire province.

Wahidullah Shahrani, Afghanistan's mining minister, said everything is being done to protect the monuments.

Marquis hopes the government is beginning to think about cultural as well as economic potential to the country.

"This mine is going to be a test," he said. "Is it possible to develop this country and also preserve its history?"
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References:

Boone, Jon. 2010. "Mining threatens Afghanistan's Buddhist treasures". Guardian. Posted: November 15, 2010. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/15/mining-threatens-afghanistan-buddhist-treasures