Archaeology deployed for the Gulf War

A small but recurrent component of media reports on Iraq and Kuwait during the period from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 through the Gulf War and its aftermath ’ dealt with archaeology in the region and the potential and actual impact of the war on archaeological remains. An index of the salience of archaeology for formulating the meaning of the war is that one of the first editorials printed in the New York Times the day after the bombing of Baghdad began (18 Jan. 1991) centered on this subject. Entitled ’The Cradle, Ironically, of Civilization’, it warned the US military against ’bombing cities, religious shrines or renowned archaeological sites ’ but went on to focus entirely on the prehistoric sites. It used descriptors that were to recur constantly throughout media coverage of the archaeology of the region, describing Ur, for example, as ’the very cradle of civilization and the birthplace of Abraham’, and evoking images of ’ancient’, ’unexplored’, and ’sacred ’ cities scattered through Iraq. Why did archaeological remains have this centrality? In a society still enamored of an evolutionary view of human societies, did the story of a glorious Iraqi past get its power through the devolutionary reversals it displayed, its clear legitimizing function for an avenging Allied campaign to preserve or even restore what was referred to as ’our common heritage’? Did ancient artifacts, like the incubator babies of Kuwait, allow for narratives of innocence in a story that was otherwise too full of moral responsibility- with evil or invisible Iraqis, noble Allies and victimized Kuwaitis? Or, has the fetishizing of the commodity in our society grown over time to such a point that artifact survivors become more important than human Iraqi ones? We explore these questions in the context of an analysis that rests on a systematic search of four major American newspapers. ’ Analysis of th