It is widely believed by archeologists that the city of Moenjodaro in southern Pakistan was remarkably advanced for its time, with sophisticated civil engineering and urban planning, and because of its size and the richness of its monuments, has been generally regarded as a capital of an extensive state.

Moenjodaro, which means “the mound of the dead’ was a major center of the pre-Hindu Indus civilization dating back to 3000 BC and one of the earliest cities in the world.  Archeologists estimate that over 40,000 people lived in Moenjodaro and the city which was rediscovered in 1922 has had extensive excavations but only one third of the site has been revealed so far.  The stupa mound, built on a massive platform of mud brick, is composed of the ruins of several major structures – Great bath, Great Granary, College Square and Pillared Hall – as well as a number of private homes.  The extensive lower city is a complex of private and public houses, wells, shops and commercial buildings.  These buildings are laid out along streets intersecting reach other at right angles, in a highly form of city planning that also incorporated important systems of sanitation and drainage (UNESCO).

However, the site which was  designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980 is now facing major environmental threats from extreme summer heat and high temperatures, winter frosts, torrential rains and humid air as reported by the Telegraph newspaper.  The structures which are mostly made of clay bricks (hardened unbaked mud bricks) have greatly been damaged by the humidity during the monsoon season, and salt crystals blown and deposited on the clay has caused extensive breakage and damage to the structures.  All of these environmental factors have caused this significant archeological site to literally crumble. 

It is also greatly believed that there is a lot more funding needed to help to preserve and maintain the site otherwise, Pakistan’s “Moenjodaro” will face an uncertain future. 

Last month (Sep 2013) after two decades of research and gathering data by the Ukrainian and US archaeologists the ancient city of Tauric Chersonese and its Chora was granted World Heritage status by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

A port city founded by Greeks in the fifth century B.C., Chersonesos is the site of an excavation led since 1994 by Professor Joseph Carter, professor of classical archaeology and the director of the Institute of Classical Archaeology (ICA) at University of Texas, Austin.

According to UNESCO, the site features the remains of a city founded by Dorian Greeks in the 5th century BC on the northern shores of the Black Sea. It encompasses six component sites with urban remains and agricultural lands divided into several hundreds of chora, rectangular plots of equal size. The plots supported vineyards whose production was exported by the city which thrived until the 15th century. The site features several public building complexes and residential neighborhoods, as well as early Christian monuments alongside remains from Stone and Bronze Age settlements; Roman and medieval tower fortifications and water supply systems; and exceptionally well-preserved examples of vineyard planting and dividing walls. In the 3rd century AD, the site was known as the most productive wine center of the Black Sea and remained a hub of exchange between the Greek, Roman and Byzantine Empires and populations north of the Black Sea. It is an outstanding example of democratic land organization linked to an ancient polis, reflecting the city’s social organization.

The excavation was supported by David Packard and the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI), which contributed more than $12 million during a 12-year period to the project.

Lumbini, Birthplace of Buddha is a new and joint publication of UNESCO and the Paris-based NGO Oriental Cultural Heritage Sites Protection Alliance.  The effort brought together eight photographers: three from Nepal and five from around the world who used their vision to capture the uniqueness of this World Heritage Site which has long been a sacred place for many pilgrims.  The result is a collection of over two hundred photographs depicting seven distinct themes of knowledge, beliefs, people, nature, spaces and dangers. Each theme is introduced by a short text written by national and international personalities affiliated with Lumbini. The national launch for Lumbini, Birthplace of Buddha will be in Kathmandu on 31 October, 2013, followed by a planned international unveiling at the U.N. Headquarters in New York in the spring of 2014.

Lumbini, set in the fertile plains of Nepal’s Terai region, was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1997, and is universally regarded as the place where Buddha was born.  As one of the most sacred sites significant to Buddha’s life and path to enlightenment, the Sacred Garden of Lumbini has been a center of pilgrimage for devout followers from as early as the 3rd century B.C.

The ancient city of Bagan, Burma or Myanmar, has re-submitted an application to UNESCO to receive World Heritage status. In 1996 Myanmar nominated eight properties for UNESCO World Heritage Site status. However, not a single one has been accepted yet. While these sites remain on UNESCO’s tentative list, Myanmar is considering UNESCO’s suggested improvements, working towards building heritage sites founded upon stable and effective conservation and preservation strategies.

The territory where Bagan lies stretches over a 26-square-miles plain which encompasses over 3,000 temples, monasteries and pagodas. For several centuries (from the 9th to the 13th century), the area was the capital city of a kingdom that consolidated and controlled most of modern-day Myanmar, and served as a hub of Buddhist scholarship.
In 1975, a major earthquake destroyed many of Bagan’s crumbling structures and the governing junta began a campaign of reconstruction which was poorly done without much attention to heritage reconstruction standards and techniques. In fact, the government even commissioned the construction of new monuments within the designated historical zone. Although the restoration of the site provoked international criticism, many locals see the refurbishment as a necessity to accommodate Bagan’s function as a living and breathing Buddhist pilgrimage site.

The ruling military junta changed its name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, a year after thousands were killed in the suppression of a popular uprising. Rangoon also became Yangon. The Adaptation of Expression Law also introduced English language names for other towns, some of which were not ethnically Burmese. The change was recognized by the United Nations, and by countries such as France and Japan, but not by the United States and the UK.

Myanmar has been extremely politically isolated and as a result until recently only had received very little aid and technical assistance from the outside world. However, the situation has changed over the last few years with new international investment and even a trip by President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Myanmar in November 2012.  At the same time, the internal ethnic conflicts and tensions have resulted in the ongoing destruction of Muslim sites and mistreatment of minorities.

Many experts are now calling for this recent bid to be accepted by UNESCO bringing attention and much needed help for Myanmar’s heritage sites.

On Wednesday, September 25^th, 2013, an event was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where UNESCO officials including Director-General Irina Bokova joined the President of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), Dr. Hans-Martin Hinz, and United States Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, Ms Anne Richard, to launch an Emergency Red List of Syrian Cultural Objects at Risk.

Since 2000, ICOM has published 12 Red Lists for cultural objects at risk from all over the world.  The ICOM Red Lists further facilitate the work of police, customs officials and all other professionals concerned with the protection of heritage objects by helping them identify the categories that are particularly vulnerable to illegal purchase, transaction and export. The Syrian Red List contains many objects from different periods of Syrian history including prehistory and ancient history, Islamic era and middle ages as well as Ottoman period.

After tower destroyed

Aleppo before destruction

Over the last two years, the world has witnessed loss of lives as well as the destruction of heritage sites in Syria caused by the ongoing conflict.

  Brazil is busy preparing the country for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016, but last month another big news came out of Brazil. Finnish archeologists reported finding the remains of an ancient civilization in the Amazonian area of Brazil. The team has unearthed artifacts including new forms of ceramics and over 200 kg of pot fragments. In addition, many of the geometrical earth mounds found have geometrical patterns and are large in dimension measuring over hundred meters. These structures have been discovered in the Brazilian state of Acre.

     Professor Martti Pärssinen who leads the Danish team of archeologists points out that these large multiple structures perhaps required as much effort and energy for the native ancient civilization to build as the pyramids in Egypt. 

     You can watch a TV report on this story here.

As reported by CNN, and announced by the US State Department a 2,700 year-old Persian artifact has been returned to Iran.  In a tweet the US State Department announced the return of a silver chalice, the ancient Persian artifact to its homeland. The ceremonial drinking vessel or rhyton was confiscated in a U.S. customs warehouse many years ago. The chalice had been in New York since 2003, when an art dealer smuggled it into the country from Iran.  Customs officials have long wanted to return the rhyton to Iran, according to a New York Post report. But decades of bad diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington made it impossible.

The decision to return the artifact came after President Obama called the Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, as he was on his way to the airport in NYC and returning to Iran after the UN meetings.  The rhyton, which takes the shape of a mythical beast with the body of a lion and the head of a bird of prey, was fashioned in the Achaemenid era, the early Persian Empire, around 700 BC. The U.S. officials handed it off directly to the Iranian delegation, who BBC reports have already met with officials from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art about potential exhibitions of Iranian artifacts.  It is still not clear if Iran will ever put more restrictive measures in place in order to stop the smuggling of Persian artifacts out of Iran.

Forty-seven thousand books, documents and maps relating to ancient monuments, along with thousands of pieces of historic photographs, documents and handmade historical artifacts from the Center of Cultural Heritage have disappeared as one of the former employees of the center has reported to WCHV.  

Reportedly, the missing documents were ordered to be transferred to Shiraz, a city in Fars Province, Iran.  According to the reports, only one of the center’s staff actually traveled with the documents to Shiraz.In addition (as reported), it looks like that the irresponsible mishandling of the situation by the staff of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Cultural Heritage Organization has resulted in worsening the situation.  

What is most disturbing is that many of the missing books and documents were not even digitally recorded and did not contain barcodes, therefore making it impossible to determine which books and documents have now been lost.

As recently reported Aborigines have claimed that Australia’s cultural heritage recognition has been greatly dominated by the country’s colonial past.  Earlier this year, UNESCO recognized and designated a number of sites in Australia as “outstanding universal value”.  Among the sites added to the World Heritage List this year are Sydney’s 19th century Hyde Park Barracks and Tasmania’s Port Arthur penal settlement.

The move has actually outraged Aboriginal activists, who have claimed that their own cultural heritage is in danger of being destroyed since the sites are also in need of protection and that very few of their sites have been nominated by the Australian government.  The activists also claim that this suggests a strong ethnocentric bias towards everything Anglo-Saxon and a prejudice or ignorance about the Aboriginal past and a lack of understanding of its value to the county’s history.

It has also been reported that Aborigines representatives wrote to UNESCO calling on it to deny approval to the “white Australian sites” while the country’s indigenous heritage was in danger of extinction.  But, when UNESCO released the list, it said that the sites were the best surviving examples of large-scale convict transportation and the colonial expansion of European powers through the presence and labor of prisoners and that they deserved to be conserved while sites like 20,000-year-old rock art in the Northern Territory, a recently-discovered treasure trove of ancient artifacts outside Hobart and scarred trees in New South Wales, which were used by indigenous tribes during coming of age ceremonies have not been recognized or listed.

Australia’s activists believe that the lack of Aboriginal sites on the list could be blamed on the fact that there were no indigenous members of Parliaments (MPs) in federal parliament and no indigenous people on the board that decides on the country’s UNESCO nominations as reported by the Telegraph.

When Maya archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli and his team accidentally found an enormous frieze which measures nearly 26 feet by 7 feet in a tunnel in Guatemala, they realized that they had found one of the best preserved examples of its kind.  The looters had come close to it but had not seen it. The frieze which was discovered last month (July 2013) in the buried foundations of a rectangular pyramid in Holmul is so amazingly preserved that only a small corner of it shows any damage.  In fact, despite being mostly faded away now, traces of red, blue, green, and yellow paint are still visible on the frieze.

As described in The National Geographic Magazine the section of the temple at Holmul where the frieze was found dates back to about A.D. 590, which corresponds to the Maya classical era, a period defined by the power struggles between two major Maya dynasties: Tikal and Kaanul.  The two kingdoms competed with one another for resources and for control of other, smaller Maya city-states. An inscription on the newly discovered frieze reveals that the temple was commissioned by Ajwosaj, ruler of a neighboring city-state called Naranjo, which archaeologists know from other discoveries was a vassal city of the Kaanul kingdom.

The excavations at Holmul were supported by the National Geographic Society/Waitt Grants Program and the findings were reported in the National Geographic magazine.