Cultural violence

Cultural violence has been defined as “any aspect of a culture that can be used to legitimize violence in its direct or structural form” (Galtung Reference Galtung1990: 291). Archaeology has participated in legitimising structural violence in several ways: this can be seen in the way that archaeological practices have underpinned dispossession, for example in Syria, operating through colonial frameworks to remove contemporary inhabitants from their homes so that certain places could be curated as archaeological sites. This was the case at Palmyra, where the creation of the archaeological site of the Temple of Bel marked the simultaneous erasure of the local community, as well as other histories, from the site (Mulder Reference Mulder2017: 237; Shaw Reference Shaw2017: 347; Baird et al. Reference Baird and Raja2024). However, the academic structures of archaeology have made the discipline’s implication in such violence difficult to recognise, because frameworks of archaeological practice and education reproduce unequal structures (Bernbeck Reference Bernbeck2008). The co-responsibilities that archaeology has for the direct and indirect consequences of its work—for instance, in the dispossession of people from their homes and communities—have scarcely been recognised (Holley-Kline Reference Holley-Kline2022) and still less filtered through to reflective archaeological practices (Hutchings & La Salle Reference Hutchings and La Salle2015). Whether through sanctioned processes of archaeological excavation or illicit looting, the focus in archaeology has tended to remain on archaeology as a “discipline of things” (Olsen et al. Reference Olsen2012) rather than one that has had a profound and sometimes violent effect on communities, with a dearth of attention to the reasons archaeology becomes part of conflict, despite its many military entanglements (Pollock Reference Pollock2016: 219–20), and questions over the beneficiaries of archaeological knowledge production (Kersel Reference Kersel2008). As we argue below, to move towards a more equitable future enabled by collaborative practices, we need first to understand the nature of archaeology’s impacts on communities.

Looted landscapes: Salhiyeh and Dura-Europos

The destruction of monuments and the looting of antiquities in Syria was widely decried early in the conflict (Cunliffe & Global Heritage Fund Reference Cunliffe2012), and especially from the period during which Daesh/Islamic State turned it into an international spectacle through actions such as the deliberate destruction of ancient monuments at Palmyra (Barnard & Saad Reference Barnard and Saad2015; Harmanşah Reference Harmanşah2015). While the public narratives focused on Daesh as a perpetrator, and the group undoubtedly played a central role in the most destructive phases (Al Azm Reference Al Azm, Chen and Brody2025), the situation was complex, with a variety of national and international actors involved in damage to archaeological sites (Hardy Reference Hardy2015a), including members of the Assad regime (Almohamad Reference Almohamad2021: 8; Syrians for Truth and Justice 2022) and Turkish forces (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights 2020). Among those complexities is the role of the economic value of antiquities looting, sometimes misrepresented in its scale with regard to other types of illicit trade (Yates & Brodie Reference Yates and Brodie2023), but nevertheless substantial: one quantification attempt put the damage of looting at Dura-Europos at an estimated value of US$18 million (Greenland et al. Reference Greenland2019: 35). High monetary values are coupled with moral indignation about looting (Loges Reference Loges and Richardson2024), which has not been matched with international action to prevent or address such activity. The true price garnered for stolen antiquities will never be known, nor will most of the objects taken from the site, but Syria’s Roman-era urban landscapes, including Apamea and Dura-Europos, were looted on an industrial scale (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

An abandoned metal detector in the looted landscape of Dura-Europos on 16 January 2025 (photograph courtesy of durat.org).

The importance of community voices and the value of the testimony of local archaeological workers has recently been recognised (Mickel Reference Mickel2021), as has the need for a form of archaeological practice that facilitates more diverse engagements and dialogues between a range of actors, including publics and academics (Hamilakis Reference Hamilakis2011). However, in Syria, local inhabitants have long been ignored, with the focus instead on monumental architecture (Azzouz Reference Azzouz2022), lacking the reflective critique that has emerged from engagement with Indigenous communities in other parts of the world (Atalay Reference Atalay2012), with few exceptions (e.g. Loosley Leeming Reference Loosley Leeming and Apaydin2020; Ali Reference Ali2023). In Syria and Iraq, it has also been noted that site destruction and looting has increasingly been considered by international organisations as a security issue rather than a humanitarian one (Isakhan & Meskell Reference Isakhan, Meskell, Saloul and Baillie2024), and that advantages from foreign funding for heritage during war were asymmetrical, with the benefits of funding and knowledge primarily going to foreign archaeologists (Selover Reference Selover, deBergh Robinson and Osanloo2024: 285). Building on these themes, we seek to understand the local contexts and ways in which local relationships to heritage might frame and enable larger-scale and longer-term antiquities looting. Further, we ask if material harm to archaeological sites is the best focus for attention, when the fate of such sites and local communities is inevitably intertwined (Sabrine & Ali Reference Sabrine and Ali2025). With Syria now at a turning point after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, it is necessary not only to document the damage of the conflict, but to consider the local and community contexts of archaeological practice, and its perhaps unintended consequences, and how memories might aid post-conflict reconciliation (Munawar Reference Munawar2019: 158).

Before the ancient names of Dura-Europos were restored to it (Breasted Reference Breasted1924), the site was often known by the same name as the nearby settlement of Salhiyeh: the Pennsylvania expedition to Babylonia (Punnett Peters Reference Punnett Peters1897: 131–35) and travellers such as Gertrude Bell (Diaries, 8 March Reference Bell1909) both referred to the ruins by that name. The settlement, adjacent to the site alongside the Euphrates, was one of the sources of labourers for the large expeditions that occurred throughout the 1920s and 1930s by the French Academy and Yale University, although official publications tended only to credit “local Arabs” (Baur & Rostovtzeff Reference Baur and Rostovtzeff1929: 2). Local workers appeared extensively in archaeological photographs (Figure 3) but were not named in publications in which their images appeared, nor was their labour acknowledged as a vital part of the archaeological project (Baird Reference Baird2011), in a pattern now recognised more widely (Riggs Reference Riggs2017; Mickel Reference Mickel2019). This lack of engagement between archaeologists and the local community continued with the more recent Franco-Syrian expedition (Leriche Reference Leriche, Leriche and Coqueugniot2012).

Figure 3.

Un-named workers in an archival photograph from the Yale-French Academy excavations at Dura-Europos. Originally recorded as ‘Discovery of Venus and Cupid fresco’ (photograph courtesy Dura-Europos Collection, Yale University Art Gallery).

To understand the relationship local communities have with the archaeological site, we undertook a series of remote oral-history interviews with people from the community of Salhiyeh during the Syrian conflict. A small number (n = 10) of semi-structured interviews were undertaken in 2021 and 2022, with people who had worked as archaeological labourers, other adult members of the community and a Syrian archaeologist who had worked at the site as a representative of the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums before the conflict. Interviews were conducted remotely, necessarily, through a mixture of platforms (WhatsApp, Teams) depending on the access informants had to technology, with the approval of the School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy research committee at Birkbeck (approval SSHP191021), and with funding from the Open Societies University Network Threatened Scholars Initiative.

Local voices: the archaeological site as a resource

In Syria, the local uses of archaeological sites are often at odds with professional archaeological activities and foreign expeditions (Gillot Reference Gillot2010: 11). At Salhiyeh, for local inhabitants the site is both a physical and economic resource and a locus of memory. Sometimes, the two places are physically intertwined: homes of the village incorporate reused stones from the site (particularly stone lintels and door jambs). According to one of our informants, the use of archaeological stone in village architecture was particularly important after a flood in the 1970s, which destroyed many of the mudbrick houses (on the use of ancient building material for contemporary homes in Palestine, and the disapproval of this practice by archaeological professionals, see Irving Reference Irving2024: 5–6). Yet, this use of the ancient site for building materials, as contemporary spolia, would be considered a form of looting by archaeological authorities.

The people we spoke to were unanimously proud of the site of Dura-Europos, and had affection for it. However, there were many mixed feelings about the foreign expeditions. Some individual members of the recent expeditions were spoken of positively, where individual friendships had been kindled, but the positive feelings often stopped there. Community members noted the importance of employment at the site at a time of year when there was no agricultural work and the economic opportunity that provided, although those who actually worked as labourers (including one that worked with the French expedition for 13 field seasons) said they did it to be able to find out more about the site, and to work with foreigners; the pay was so meagre it was scarcely worth it as a form of employment. In the words of one individual

We spoke only to adults, but for everyone we interviewed who grew up in Salhiyeh, when asked what they thought of when they thought of Dura, their responses often involved childhood memories. Children were the ones with time to spend at the site during the day, sometimes grazing sheep, and it was the playground for many. One of the things they would do was look for coins, beads and other small objects that were visible on the surface of the site after a rainfall; this was a lucrative enterprise for children, who would receive cash from tourists: “Some of us found the ancient coins and they will sell them …They got the best money for a child in that time. They would take like 100 Syrian lira, $2.00 at the time, [it] was a lot of money in the [19]80s” (individual from Salhiyeh now living abroad, in 2021). Even on this small-scale, surface-find end of the antiquities market, supply is driven by demand—that is, the presence of mostly Western tourists—and we heard specifically about how people did not tend to pick things up for themselves, but to sell: “The people of the village were children … went out to the site during the rain or after it fell to collect the artefacts that came out … they were not digging, but they were collecting what appears on the surface … Most of the pieces were sold to foreign tourists, and very few were kept” (person who lives at Salhiyeh and was formerly an archaeological worker at the site, 2021). One informant told us how he wished he had known something about the site so that he could have been a tour guide instead, as he would have preferred to make money from the tourists that way. Children picking up a few coins on the surface of the site is not ‘subsistence digging’ in the sense of being necessary for survival (Hardy Reference Hardy, González-Ruibal and Moshenska2015b), or even ‘undocumented digging’ as no destruction of contexts is involved, but as has been noted, “If the real objective is to protect what remains of the archaeological record, it makes sense to focus on what is happening ‘on the ground’” (Hollowell Reference Hollowell, Scarre and Scarre2006: 70).

This relatively non-invasive gathering of surface finds pales in comparison to the scale of organised looting that happened during the conflict, particularly the peak around 2014 (Brodie & Sabrine Reference Brodie and Sabrine2018). However, such activity should not be considered entirely disconnected, with local children learning of the economic opportunities the site offered early on, just as local site workers whose labour was not recognised as knowledgeable were nevertheless trained in what objects were valuable to professional archaeologists, and what parts of the site were likely to yield them. Thus, archaeology in the Middle East has, for more than a century, demonstrated to local communities through their actions what is valued: through low wages, the lack of the transfer of knowledge and lack of engagement (Gillot Reference Gillot2010), all of which came up in our conversations with local people. For instance, some informants who had worked as labourers at the site wondered about precisely what had happened to the finds that they helped excavate. Except for the trained Syrian archaeologist of the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums, no one we spoke to had seen the objects from Dura in a museum, or even cleaned, after they had excavated them. They wondered where the objects were, and if they were safe. As one informant said, the site was “… a mystery like the pyramids …” (individual from Salhiyeh now living abroad, 2021). The missed opportunity for children to learn about the archaeological site that was their playground was mentioned by people who had grown up there: “The education system was so detached from the site, and I’m now thinking in retrospect maybe they could have put something in there, in school, to educate us about the site … we know something about Tadmor more because it was, you know, the country’s face, but Dura was invisible … Nothing educated us. Nobody was aware of its history” (individual from Salhiyeh now living abroad, 2021). That is, local people are acutely aware of the fact that formal knowledge about the site and its objects was not being shared with them, and this fostered feelings of alienation, not from the site itself, but from its official, sanctioned and academic study and curation.

Such alienation from the results of archaeological labour is a pattern in Middle Eastern excavations conducted by foreign teams (Irving Reference Irving2024: 7). Like many foreign projects in Syria, the expeditions to Dura-Europos have never had an aspect that involved community engagement. For more than a century, the knowledge produced at Dura-Europos was for export, and only recently has any scholarship become available in Arabic (Tawil Reference Tawil2019; the translation of Rostovtzeff by Showhane in Reference Rostovtzeff2022). Like the papyri that were meant to be returned but never made it back to Syria, or the archive of the site that was summarily exported to New Haven each year the Yale expedition took place, knowledge has been taken and not returned (Baird Reference Baird2018: 8–9, n.38; Reference Baird and Bobou2022: 164–66). Perhaps because so little monetary or intellectual benefit has been shared locally, some people questioned the motivations of the expeditions entirely, asking if they were truly there for archaeology or something more sinister: “I don’t like foreigners … Whether a tourist or an archaeological excavator. I have a question, what brings them to our country and our regions? It doesn’t make sense that they came only for antiquities. Perhaps they have other goals and ambitions, which is to photograph and spy on our country” (individual from Salhiyeh, now in Qatar, 2021). This suspicion of archaeologists is not without foundation, there being long histories of archaeologists working as informants for foreign governments in the Middle East and at Dura-Europos specifically (Richter Reference Richter2008; Baird Reference Baird2018: 16, 44; Meskell Reference Meskell2020). While people expressed affection for the archaeological site, archaeological work was experienced locally as both alienating and extractive: people from the town were aware that knowledge was not being passed to them, and was being taken elsewhere, for the gain of others, even if they were not certain of, and were suspicious towards, what those gains were.

The structures that underpin the relationships of communities with archaeological sites and with foreign expeditions are complex (Almohamad Reference Almohamad2022). For decades, Syrian security agencies have regarded archaeologists and excavation missions with suspicion, perceiving them as a form of espionage that infiltrates small communities, such as families and villages. This perspective was rooted in the belief by the former Syrian government that such missions exploited the simplicity of the local population, low levels of education and widespread poverty in rural areas. As a result, security agencies closely monitored the activities of archaeologists, conducting thorough investigations into their religious, intellectual and political backgrounds, as well as their affiliations and networks, as experienced by one of the article’s authors, Almohamad, in 2011 when they were the Syrian representative of the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums with a foreign expedition (the Japanese expedition to Tell Seker al-Aheimar in Al-Hasakah), and Baird (the other author for this article) who was surveilled by the mukhabarat (Syrian secret police) while working in the Hama Museum in the early 2000s. The movements of foreign archaeologists within and beyond archaeological sites were meticulously tracked, along with their interactions and communications with local individuals and institutions. Thus, archaeology was a tool for the Syrian state, in the sense of contributing to the production of official narratives, and to the justification of territorial claims to a greater Syria (Gillot Reference Gillot2010: 7–8; Jones Reference Jones2018: 40), while also being suspect to the state apparatus of surveillance and repression.

Despite this general atmosphere of surveillance, certain missions maintained privileged relationships with the state even during the years of the conflict. Directors of these missions cultivated close ties with high-ranking officials, including President Bashar al-Assad himself. With the onset of the Syrian conflict in 2011, most foreign excavation missions withdrew from the country. While some continued limited engagement with the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums, their direct interaction with local communities was entirely severed. Meanwhile, co-operation persisted between the Assad regime and select excavation teams, notably the Italian mission at Tell Mardikh and the Hungarian mission at Qal‘at al-Marqab. These relationships were reflected in state-sponsored honours awarded to prominent archaeologists, such as the Italian scholar Paolo Matthiae, who received the Syrian Order of Merit (First Class) from Assad in 2023, after he returned to work at Ebla (Tell Mardikh) while the Syrian war continued (Othman & Qreima Reference Othman and Qreima2023). The publicity around Matthiae’s return to Syria was one aspect of Assad’s legitimation at a time when it seemed his international image might be rehabilitated despite his continued deadly oppression of Syrian peoples (Kardas & Aras Reference Kardas and Aras2023). It is evident that certain archaeological missions demonstrated greater success in fostering relationships with centres of power than in establishing meaningful connections with the local communities where they operated. The conduct of these missions and their close ties to the Assad regime is likely to have lasting implications for how they are perceived by local populations, as they openly endorsed a regime responsible for the use of barrel bombs and chemical weapons, the destruction of civilian homes and the forced displacement of communities (Almohamad et al. Reference Almohamad2023: 6–7).

The willingness of internationally renowned scholars such as Matthiae to resume excavating and to receive honours from Assad was an indication that, for some, archaeological work was valued over human lives (Almohamad Reference Almohamad2024). This also raises questions for foreign archaeologists about their ongoing involvement. Syria is now under the authority of a transitional government, led by former members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly designated a terrorist organisation by the US Department of State (removed in July 2025). The decision to engage or refrain from working in such contexts must be subject to a careful balance of the risks of contributing even symbolically to legitimising a controversial authority, and those of disengaging with colleagues or leaving archaeological sites vulnerable to neglect, destruction or illicit exploitation. Sensitivity to both the political context and our professional and human duties of care for the past and the present is difficult but crucial work.

The problematic legacies of the lack of engagement with local stakeholders are thus legion: communities have been effectively looted both for their labour and of the knowledge local archaeological sites held (Hutchings & La Salle Reference Hutchings and La Salle2015). As the evidence from Dura-Europos demonstrates, in line with other Syrian contexts (Almohamad et al. Reference Almohamad2023), the way that archaeologists have practiced in the Middle East has a direct impact on the relationships local communities have with archaeological sites. To even begin to address this issue, a first step needs to be listening to what local people have to say and understanding local relationships with heritage (Loosley Leeming Reference Loosley Leeming and Apaydin2020). In a time of transition in Syria there is an opportunity to reflect on the roles not only of communities, but also of government agencies and non-state actors, including non-governmental organisations (Al Azm Reference Al Azm, Newson and Young2017; Licci & Sabrine Reference Licci and Sabrine2025), as new documentation, preservation and reconstruction efforts are being designed. We hope that community co-design might be considered as a next step (Colwell-Chanthaphonh & Ferguson Reference Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson2007; Atalay Reference Atalay2012), not only to mitigate looting, but in an effort to build positive collaborations and consider the ways in which archaeological practices can contribute towards the wellbeing of communities (Munawar & Symonds Reference Munawar and Symonds2022; Kamash Reference Kamash2024). But, as we have shown through the context of the local community at Dura-Europos, the legacy of a century of foreign archaeological practices in the Middle East will make this task a difficult one.

The ground in Syria has shifted in ways that no one imagined or predicted with the sudden fall, in late 2024, of the Assad regime that had held the country for more than half a century. After many years without significant international collaborations in the heritage sector, the country’s Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums issued an invitation, on 30 January 2025, opening its doors to new expeditions. With the sudden shift in the political landscape in the country, it is important to learn from the situation created by previous structures, and the legacies of extractivism that underlie so many archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, operating as they do within systems designed in the mandate era. At this time of opportunity to imagine new futures in Syria, we believe building archaeological projects in tandem with community needs and relationships, from the ground up, has the potential to underpin productive relationships with archaeological sites in what we hope will be more peaceful times. The time for looting Syria’s present for the remains of its past is over.