On Friday 4 and Saturday 5 November 2011, a comprehensive conference at the American Academy’s splendid seventeenth-century Villa Aurelia highlighted the work of a dozen internationally renowned scholars of cultural heritage and cultural property. Their common thread? Highly effective preservation work in zones that faced extreme challenges, whether by conflict, natural disaster, or toxic bureaucracy.
What followed in this conference—entitled Saving Cultural Heritage in Crisis Areas—was an animated conversation across two days on topics such as the protection and preservation of museums and sites of archaeological importance in the absence of the rule of law, and international responsibility for cultural heritage protection and documentation following natural disasters and armed conflicts.
The multi-disciplinary Saving Cultural Heritage conference featured presenters from challenging contexts that ranged from Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, and Libya, to Turkey, Albania and Bosnia—indeed, as far east as Indonesia, and as far west as Haiti. Italy featured too, with strategic response models such as those used by the Carabinieri receiving sustained attention.
The United States Ambassador to Italy, the Honorable David H. Thorne, opened the conference with welcome remarks; as AAR Director Christopher S. Celenza, FAAR’94 noted, the Ambassador’s “presence underscores our shared commitment to the importance of safeguarding world cultural heritage”.
You can read Ambassador Thorne’s comments here.
You can see the full conference schedule here.
And a full description of the proceedings of the conference is available here.
On the face of it, the Villa Aurelia—whose exceptional beauty Ambassador Thorne praised in his opening comments—seems an incongruous choice to host an international conference on preservation in crisis areas. But it was not so very long ago (1849, to be precise) that the savage fighting occasioned by Garibaldi’s attempt to establish a Roman Republic practically leveled the Villa to the ground. Its wholesale reconstruction (in the late 19th century) and renovation to its present brilliant state (in the late 20th) indeed offer an important lesson of hope to all who labor against the odds in the field of cultural and historical preservation.
This conference was organized by two AAR Fellows: C. Brian Rose (FAAR'92) and Laurie Rush, FAAR'11. Rose, an AAR Trustee who is currently in Rome at the Academy as Lucy Shoe Meritt Scholar in Residence, is immediate past President of the Archaeological Institute of America, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, and an acknowledged pioneer in the field of preservation in crisis zones. Laurie Rush is a civilian archaeologist attached to the US Army, and based at Fort Drum, New York. Saving Cultural Heritage in Crisis Areas was funded by the Getty Foundation through the Council of American Overseas Research Centers and by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The conference culminated in a lively installment of the Academy’s Conversations that Matter, moderated by AAR Director Celenza, with Mounir Bouchenaki (Director-General, ICCROM, Rome), Brian Rose, and Laurie Rush as featured participants. You can view the full 90 minute discussion below.
A Facebook group continues the conference’s discussion at http://www.facebook.com/groups/savingculturalheritage/.
T. Corey Brennan (FAAR’88, and AAR Andrew W. Mellon Professor), commented that the conference must have marked “the most important summit of world specialists on this topic since the dizzying series of events of the 'Arab Spring' first unfolded in December 2010. It is particularly appropriate that the conference unfolded in a world city such as Rome, a capital defined by sites and monuments of immeasurable and profound cultural impact."