© Musée Guimet/Thierry Ollivier
| DATE: | Friday-Saturday, November 14-15, 2008 |
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| PLACE: | Chevron Auditorium, International House, UC Berkeley |
| SPONSORS: | Center for Buddhist Studies (CBS), Al-Falah Program for Islamic Studies (CMES), Townsend Center for the Humanities, Center for South Asia Studies (CSAS), Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES), History of Art Department, Society for Asian Art, Association for the Protection of Afghan Archaeology (APAA), California State University-East Bay, Consulate General of France, International House, and Willis Deming on behalf of the Society for Art & Cultural Heritage of India (SACHI) |
This conference is organized in conjunction with the "Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul" exhibit which will be on display at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, October 24, 2008 - January 25, 2009. For more information regarding the organization of the exhibit by National Geographic Society, please visit http:// www.nationalgeographic.com/ mission/ afghanistan-treasures/.
This conference is free and open to the public. No pre-registration is required. The cafe at the International House opens at 7:15 on Friday and 9:30 on Saturday. The auditorium will open at 8:30 a.m. both days.
The "Recovering Afghanistan's Past: Cultural Heritage in Context" conference will focus on Afghanistan's cultural heritage in its past and present contexts and bring together scholars from various disciplines to address, among others, the following issues:
The almost three-decade long crisis in Afghanistan has had, in addition to tremendous human loss and suffering, an enormous impact on the country's cultural heritage. Since the 1920s, systematic joint excavations have been carried out by archaeologists from Afghanistan in collaboration with teams from France, Italy, the former Soviet Union, Japan, and the U.S. Over the course of 50 years, thousands of archaeological sites were uncovered, highlighting the country's rich archaeological past. Many of these archaeological sites — at the heart of nearly two millennia of Silk Road trade and exchange — have been pillaged, vandalized or destroyed. The willful destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas has received much international attention, and the National Museum in Kabul has been looted and heavily damaged, many of its objects destroyed. In addition to the destruction brought about by ideological struggles and acts of war, a more subtle vanquishing of the rich archaeological heritage of Afghanistan is occurring. Many objects are disappearing through a well-organized and well-funded illegal market, funneled into the hands of private collectors and unlikely ever again to see the light of day. One bright spot in this era of destruction has been the recent rediscovery of major archaeological finds, previously the core of the National Museum in Kabul's holdings, thought to have been looted or destroyed.
The "Recovering Afghanistan's Past: Cultural Heritage in Context" conference seeks to highlight the importance and current state of Afghanistan's artistic, archaeological and monumental remains and their centrality in the global discourse on cultural heritage. The conference will focus on objects from the National Museum of Afghanistan and highlight the sites which lie at the core of the "Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures" exhibit: Ai Khanum, Tillya Tepe and Begram. The conference also will address the damage that was inflicted upon archaeological and monumental sites, and the ways in which some of the archaeological remains of the three ancient sites were secured and subsequently recovered. In addition to outlining the importance of these sites in understanding the rich cultural heritage of Afghanistan, the conference will also highlight new research that has been conducted in Afghanistan over the last number of years. Further, the conference will take the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas as the starting point of a discussion on the complexities of iconoclastic episodes, addressing the question of how cultural heritage is defined and appropriated by competing ethnic, national and international groups. Finally, the conference will outline cultural heritage projects that have taken place in Afghanistan since 2001 and address the challenges of fieldwork and preservation of pre-Islamic and Islamic monuments today, delving deeper into the complexities of the legal framework in place to guard against the destruction and looting of sites.
The "Recovering Afghanistan's Past" conference is organized in conjunction with the "Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul" exhibit which will be on display at several venues in the United States in 2008-2009, including the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, October 24, 2008 - January 25, 2009. This exhibit highlights the objects thought to have been looted from the National Museum of Afghanistan, but later rediscovered in the vault of the Presidential Palace. The exhibit centers on three major collections — Ai Khanum, Tillya-tepe, and Begram — which represent important archeological discoveries that have informed our understanding of the development of ancient Afghan cultures.
