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GHF in the News - Featured Articles
GHF's The Forum on Global Heritage in a Developing World: Focus on Asia in the News
On May 3, 2012 at the Asia Society in New York, GHF hosted "The Forum on Global Heritage in a Developing World: Focus on Asia," a discussion of development challenges facing Asia’s most important and endangered heritage sites. The day-long event featured a diverse program of speakers and panelists, and was well-attended by leading experts in conservation, international development, venture philanthropy, technology, travel, academia and media.
Bill Draper on New Global Venture
May 2012
‘The Start Up Game’ author Bill Draper weighs in on his latest endeavor.
Click here to see the interview
Asia’s Vanishing Heritage
May 2012
Throughout Asia, historical marvels are being imperiled by threats both natural—floods, earthquakes—and human, as the populations of developing countries expand at an exponential rate. Now the Global Heritage Fund has highlighted 10 archeological sites at imminent risk of disappearing. While the following sites are at serious risk, they possess considerable economic potential; if managed properly, they could provide much-needed jobs to local communities as tourist destinations.
Saving Asia's Ancient Heritage Sites
May 2012
GHF Executive Director Jeff Morgan was interviewed by CNN about the state of global heritage sites, what we can do to protect them, and their potential to drive sustainable local economic growth.
Asia's architectural treasures 'vanishing'
May 2012
NEW YORK — Asia’s architectural treasures, from a Buddhist monastery in Afghanistan to an ancient city in China, are in danger of vanishing under a tide of economic expansion, war and tourism, according to experts.
The Global Heritage Fund named 10 sites facing “irreparable loss and destruction.”
“These 10 sites represent merely a fragment of the endangered treasures across Asia and the rest of the developing world,” Jeff Morgan, executive director of the fund, said, presenting the report, “Asia’s Heritage in Peril: Saving Our Vanishing Heritage.”
The architectural gems from Asia’s ancient and sophisticated cultures are struggling in the face of economic expansion, sudden floods of tourists, poor technical resources, and areas blighted by looting and conflict—in other words, the pressures of rapidly modernizing Asia.
“We’re looking at these millennial civilizations leapfrogging into the 21st century at a kind of pace that is unheard of, unprecedented,” said Vishakha N. Desai, president of the Asia Society, which hosted a conference based on the report.
Kuanghan Li, head of Global Heritage Fund’s China program, underlined the urgency in a presentation on work to preserve Pingyao, one of China’s last surviving walled cities. The stunning fortifications are impressively maintained and floodlit.
But “up to 20 years ago, there were hundreds of similar walled cities left in China,” she said. “They have been demolished.”
Experts said that global architectural preservation efforts are poorly coordinated and targeted, with the UN cultural body UNESCO focusing almost entirely on sites in already wealthy European countries, rather than in places like Latin America or Asia.
More than 80 percent of UNESCO World Heritage sites are located in the 10 richest states, the Global Heritage Fund said.
Global Heritage Fund in the News
Global Heritage Fund Announces 10 Most Endangered Sites in Asia
May 2012
LIVIO SINIBALDI/GETTY IMAGES
Wat Chaiwattanaram ruins, Ayutthaya, Thailand
Today, the Global Heritage Fund released its list of the ten most endangered archaeological and heritage sites in Asia—essentially a docket of fascinating historical attractions that are threatened by man-made hazards: development pressures, unsustainable tourism, insufficient management, looting, and war and conflict.
Digging Deeper
April 2012
Investing in the heritage of developing countries is one of the most
sustainable ways of lifting people out of poverty.
Fifteen kilometers north-east of the town of Sanliurfa in south-eastern Turkey, there used to stand a range of what the University of Chicago archaeologist Peter Benedict once described as “round-topped knolls of red earth”.
Current World Archaeology working with Global Heritage Fund
Celebrating World Heritage
April 2012
This year marks the 40th birthday of UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention, which to-date protects almost 1,000 sites of outstanding cultural and natural importance. Among these are some of the world’s most spectacular archaeological sites, from Angkor Wat and Hadrian’s Wall to the Pyramids at Giza and the ruins of Pompeii.
We have featured many of these stunning monuments in the pages of Current World Archaeology ; scroll down or click on the map (below right) to read more about some of our favorites.
Celebrations were launched at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris in January and a range of events to mark the anniversary are scheduled throughout 2012, including conferences in Norway and China, a youth forum in Spain, and a commemorative ceremony in Germany.
Just last year, Global Heritage Fund launched the Global Heritage Network (GHN), an online early warning system that allows experts, archaeologists and travellers to track and monitor the state of the world’s most endangered sites using satellite technology. Click here to find out more.
The history of the Convention
The need to have an international agreement on how to protect heritage sites sprang from global concern over the construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt in 1959, which threatened to flood the world-famous temples at Abu Simbel. UNESCO launched an emergency campaign funded by donations from 50 countries, highlighting our shared responsibility to preserve historic monuments.
The success of this campaign prompted others at Venice, at the 4,500-year-old settlement at Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan, and at Indonesia’s Borobodur Temple. A paper on how to safeguard cultural sites was subsequently drafted, and by 1972 the text had been agreed by all parties concerned. The Convention Concerning the Protection of Cultural and Natural Heritage was formally adopted at the General Conference of UNESCO on 16 November 1972.
World Heritage Sites – the list
Six years after the Convention was signed, member states drew up a preliminary list of sites of universal cultural and natural value. The initial list numbered just a dozen sites – including the 13th-century rock cut churches at Lalibela in Ethiopia and the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Canada – but it has been added to every June at the annual meeting of the World Heritage Committee.
Some 936 sites in 153 countries currently fall under its protection, and these will doubtlessly be joined by more this summer.
Seeking to Preserve the Past, but Stumbling on the Present
March 2012
MOSUL, Iraq — On land where Assyrian kings once reigned, an Iraqi farmer named Araf Khalaf surveyed the scrap of earth that has nurtured three generations of his family. It is little more than a mud hut and a scraggly vegetable patch, yet his land has become a battleground, one pitting efforts to preserve Iraq’s ancient treasures against the nation’s modern-day poor.
Many of the mud-walled homes sit in the shadow of the reconstructed Mashki Gate, a soaring entryway to Nineveh, described in the biblical Book of Jonah as “an exceedingly great city.” It was attacked and mostly destroyed in 612 B.C. and unearthed in the 19th century by British archaeologists who hauled away inscribed tablets, sculptures and stunning reliefs. Today, the Global Heritage Fund says looting and creeping development put the sprawling site in danger of being “buried forever.”
Celebrating Year of the Maya with tour of Latin America's ruins
January 2012
By Laura Allsop, CNN
The Global Heritage Fund has named 2012 “The Year of the Maya,”—the Maya calendar points to December 2012 as the dawn of a new age. La Danta pyramid, at El Mirador in Guatemala, is one of the sites which the Global Heritage Fund is fighting to protect.
London (CNN)—The year 2012 is a significant one in the Maya calendar.
The ancient long count calendar of the Maya, a Mesoamerican civilization that flourished across Mexico and Central America from 2000 BC to the time of the Spanish Conquistadores, states that on the 12th December, 2012, the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in approximately 26,000 years.
And 21 December, 2012, is said to mark the end of the 13th Maya Calendar, a 144,000-day cycle or “b’ak’tun” since the mythical Maya day of creation 5,200 years ago.
Though popularly interpreted as signifying the “end of the world as we know it,” scholars stress that the end of the “b’ak’tun” does not mean apocalypse.
While few Maya people still follow the long count calendar, the Global Heritage Fund is celebrating the event by naming 2012 “The Year of the Maya,” with members of the Fund greeting the winter solstice on top of La Danta pyramid at the El Mirador site in Guatemala.
GHF Banteay Chhmar: Cambodia's 'Second Angkor' Temple Enshrouded in Mystery
January 2012
Associated Press recently featured an article on Banteay Chhmar by Bangkok Bureau Chief Denis Gray, and the piece was picked up by many networks and print news outlets including Fox News, ABC News, CBS News, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
Cambodia's 'Second Angkor' Temple Enshrouded in Mystery
January 2012
Dec. 12, 2011: Restoration work continues around one of 34 towers at the Buddhist monastery of Banteay Chhmar in northwestern Cambodia. AP
It’s still entwined in mystery and jungle vines, but one of Cambodia’s grandest monuments is slowly awakening after eight centuries of isolated slumber, having attracted a crack archaeological team and a trickle of tourists.
“It takes awhile to unfold this temple — and everywhere there are enticements,” says John Sanday, the team leader, as he navigates through tangled undergrowth, past dramatic towers and bas-reliefs and into dark chambers of the haunting monastic complex of Banteay Chhmar.
Another Great Cambodian Temple Stirs To Life
The ancient temple has awoken from an isolated slumber, having attracted a crack archaeological team and a trickle of tourists. (AP Photo/Denis Gray)
BANTEAY CHHMAR, Cambodia—It’s still entwined in mystery and jungle vines, but one of Cambodia’s grandest monuments is slowly awakening after eight centuries of isolated slumber, having attracted a crack archaeological team and a trickle of tourists.
Cambodia’s haunting monastic temple stirs to life
After eight centuries in a slumber, one of Cambodia’s grandest monuments slowly awakens.
Cambodia’s ‘second Angkor’ stirs to life
Restoration work continues around one of 34 towers at the Buddhist monastery of Banteay Chhmar in northwestern Cambodia. Pic: AP.
IT’S still entwined in mystery and jungle vines, but one of Cambodia’s grandest monuments is slowly awakening after eight centuries of isolated slumber, having attracted a crack archaeological team and a trickle of tourists.
Cambodia’s “second Angkor” stirs to life
BANTEAY CHHMAR, Cambodia (AP) — It’s still entwined in mystery and jungle vines, but one of Cambodia’s grandest monuments is slowly awakening after eight centuries of isolated slumber, having attracted a crack archaeological team and a trickle of tourists.
Great Cambodian temple stirs to life
BANTEAY CHHMAR, Cambodia (AP) — It’s still entwined in mystery and jungle vines, but one of Cambodia’s grandest monuments is slowly awakening after eight centuries of isolated slumber, having attracted a crack archaeological team and a trickle of tourists.
The world’s oldest temple and the dawn of civilization.
THE SANCTUARY
December 2011
Formal religion is supposed to have appeared only after agriculture. The findings at Göbekli Tepe suggest that we have the story backward—that it was actually the need to build a sacred site that first obliged the hunter-gatherers to organize themselves as a workforce, to secure a stable food supply, and eventually to invent agriculture.
Colombia's Lost City may be next Machu Picchu
December 2011
Indiana Jones was never this wet.
River water sloshes in my shoes, sweat soaks my shirt, and rain pours from my cap into my eyes. My backpack clings to me like a hot, soggy slug as I struggle up a steep trail in the jungles of northern Colombia. I’m on day three of a six-day trek to Ciudad Perdida, the “Lost City,” a place shrouded in mystery as thick as the mist covering the mountaintops above me.
Despite the hardship, the 25 miles of trail is dotted with dozens of backpackers as Ciudad Perdida is fast becoming the next Machu Picchu, the go-to destination for adventure travelers in South America.
GHF Marcahuamachuco: Archeological star emerges
November 2011
Marcahuamachuco was profiled by global news agency AFP in a video documentary and accompanying written report, both of which illustrated the site’s significance and conservation goals. The video features an interview with John Hurd, GHF’s International Conservation Director, who joined the reporters on a recent trip to the site and suggests that “it could break the dependence of the tourism industry on Machu Picchu.”
Heritage: Of monumental import
November 2011
I recently attended “The Forum on Cultural Heritage in a Developing World,” a Global Heritage Fund meet. It became clear throughout the day that some of the world’s big development issues can be dealt with through heritage – the Fund estimates that the 500 major heritage sites in the world’s poorest countries have the potential to generate over $100 billion a year by 2025.
Cultural tourism is vital for ancient monuments’ sustainable maintenance – but it must be well regulated or else the very spirit of the place and its authenticity will be destroyed. The Forum was held in London’s Spencer House, an 18th century townhouse-cum-private palace that had lost its lustre until an authentic restoration by Lord Rothschild who purchased the house in 1985.
As Loyd Grossman (Chair, Heritage Alliance) explained in his keynote address, despite heritage making places worth living in, it rarely develops quick wins and there always seems to be more pressing demands on the public purse. This is where the Global Heritage Fund comes in. I asked its executive director, Jeff Morgan to give some examples of his organisation’s work. – Peter Myers
A new paradigm for heritage-based development
By Jeff Morgan, Executive Director, Global Heritage Fund
Three years ago, I met a man named Tath Sophal.
I was in the remote jungle of northern Cambodia, in one of the country’s poorest regions, at a ruined Khmer temple complex called Banteay Chhmar. My colleagues and I found Sophal sitting alone in the empty office of a French organisation that had withdrawn from the site a month earlier. All the lights were off, he could barely speak English, but he managed to explain his hopes and ideas for the site. We decided Banteay Chhmar – and Sophal himself – was worth the investment.
Fast forward to today and Sophal is coordinator of Community Based Tourism (CBT) at Banteay Chhmar, one of Southeast Asia’s most spectacular architectural masterpieces. CBT has created new jobs and business opportunities, promoted tourism and cultural heritage preservation at the site, and drastically improved living conditions and the lives of local people. Sophal is a local leader whose story symbolises the successful bridging of past and present to promote a better future. Likewise, Banteay Chhmar is a shining example of how conserving a cultural heritage site can stimulate local economic growth and alleviate poverty.
Halfway around the world, the jungles of Guatemala introduced me to Arnoldo Juarez Pinelo. He grew up in a remote village bordering Mirador, the cradle of Mayan civilisation. Uneducated and struggling to feed his family, Arnoldo subsisted on looting the nearby ruins. Today his daily life has changed entirely thanks to the conservation efforts at Mirador; he now defends the very assets he once plundered. For the past five years, he has worked as a park guard, which provides steady income and access to health care and education opportunities for him and his family. His oldest son completed high school and is now studying law.
These kinds of opportunities exist at hundreds of sites across the developing world. Restoring and conserving cultural heritage sites creates jobs that are safe, sustainable, legal and local, as opposed to the short-lived, dangerous and sometimes illegal work that takes mothers and fathers far from their homes. The restoration of heritage sites can transform people, countries and economies. But some of civilisation’s most important sites still remain endangered. No one will see these sites – let alone their potential economic benefits – if we don’t save them.
Once they are gone, they are gone forever
When GHF studied approximately 500 global heritage sites in 100 of the world’s lowest-income countries – places where per capita income is between $3-5 per day – we found that over 200 are facing irreversible loss and damage. This destructive trend is accelerating due to the simultaneous manmade threats of development pressures, unsustainable tourism, insufficient management, looting, and war and conflict. Like endangered species, these archaeological and cultural heritage sites are on the verge of extinction. They are irreplaceable and finite resources – the records of our civilisation.
At the same time, these disappearing treasures can bring hundreds of millions of dollars, in some cases billions, creating thousands of new jobs and businesses in poor communities and regions without any other economic opportunities. A single, sustainable, responsibly-developed global heritage site can profoundly affect a country’s GDP with money spent on hotels, meals, transportation, guides, side trips and local foods and arts. Investing in preservation can improve living standards for local communities and engender national self-respect.
Site-seers
Cultural tourism has proven to be one of the most promising economic sectors for developing countries with major cultural sites. According to UN statistics, worldwide international tourist arrivals increased from 460 million in 1980 to 940 million in 2010; that number is expected to exceed 1.5 billion by 2020. The emerging and developing nation arrival share increased from 31 percent in 1990 to 47 percent in 2010. Cultural monuments are a major reason why countries like Cambodia, Peru, Egypt and others see tourism among their largest economic drivers.
Unfortunately, the economic potential of the majority of these sites receives limited attention from governments and development donors. Most developed nations focus development assistance and loans on infrastructure, food, medicine, agriculture, schools, hospitals, drinking water, disaster response, anti-drug, anti-terrorism and the military. But these priorities are often directly served by investing in cultural resources, as we’ve seen at Banteay Chhmar and Mirador.
Global heritage should be a core strategy for international development. In many developing countries, global heritage sites now generate more foreign exchange revenue than other industries including mining, logging and agricultural exports. An estimated one-third of all international tourism is related to visiting cultural heritage sites.
Increased aid is needed for cultural monument preservation and visitation in developing nations, including proper training programmes and facilities. Plans should lead with action for the sites that are most significant, most endangered and best for properly managed tourism. Archaeological research combined with site conservation is essential. As sites like Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu have shown us, millions of people will fly across the globe to visit cultural landmarks. However, as both those sites have also proven, regulating the number of tourists is critical. Sites can be easily overwhelmed and damaged by crowds. A fair share of the income generated must be used for maintaining the site, with local communities deeply engaged.
Not only do global heritage sites remind us of a common past; they represent the future as well. They are among the most important economic assets of sustainable development for poor nations and their people. Women and children – the focus of so much of the developed world’s $200 billion annual giving in global aid – benefit directly from the long-term jobs, income, new infrastructure and social investments possible around heritage sites.
Each time a cultural heritage site is lost, so too is a piece of humanity and an invaluable economic opportunity. By saving these treasures, we not only restore part of our shared history but also create a safe, sustainable new industry that can lift local communities out of poverty.
To this end, GHF created Preservation by Design, a living framework that combines planning, conservation, community development and strategic partnerships. Our investments create thousands of new jobs, hundreds of businesses and long-term economic opportunities for communities living on less than $3 a day. This multiplier effect secures new in-country co-funding, government backing and private-sector investment essential to saving these sites.
Tath Sophal and Arnoldo Juarez Pinelo are but two of the many in the developing world whose lives have been forever changed by heritage conservation projects. The more we tell their stories and continue to invest in cultural monument preservation, the more incredible human impact stories and cultural landmarks we will have to share with future generations.
GHN in the News
Spy Satellites, Google Earth Now Guarding World’s Great Ancient Sites
September 2011
Conservationists are using spy satellites, cutting-edge computer technology, and an expert human network to build an “early warning system” for some of the planet’s greatest—and most threatened—archaeological sites.
“What we’re trying to do is really bring the world’s archaeologists, conservators, historians, and other experts together and help them organize and help manage these sites of interest. And we provide satellite mapping, scientific dossiers, information on legal status, all the relevant data about these sites so that people can make informed decisions,” explained Jeff Morgan, executive director of the Global Heritage Fund.
GHF Mirador in the News
Mighty Maya Cities Succumbed to Environmental Crisis
September 2011
Julio Godoy interviews the director of the Mirador Basin archeological research project in Guatemala, RICHARD HANSEN*
PARIS, Sept 7, 2011 (Tierramérica) - The latest archeological findings in the Mirador Basin of Guatemala lend further credence to the theory that the Maya civilisation that once flourished there was brought down by environmental causes such as deforestation.
A major exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly in París until Oct. 2, “Maya: From Dawn to Dusk”, features over 150 pieces of art and ceramics from El Mirador, in northern Guatemala, and illustrates the scientific and artistic sophistication of this ancient Mesoamerican civilisation.
The artifacts - cups, sculptures, portions of stele (carved stone slabs) and ceramic reliefs – were recently uncovered at the archeological site in the northern department of Petén, near the Mexican border.
They date from the Preclassic and Classic periods of Maya civilisation, approximately 1000 B.C. to A.D. 900.
The Maya civilisation developed over the course of 3,000 years, from the establishment of the first villages, over a vast geographical area, in what is now southeastern Mexico (the states of Yucatán, Campeche and Quintana Roo and parts of Tabasco and Chiapas), Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras and El Salvador.
The Maya civilisation never actually disappeared: there are more than four million people who continue to speak many Mayan languages throughout Mesoamerica today.
The Mirador Basin was a sophisticated urban complex encompassing numerous large cities, including El Mirador, Nakbé, El Tintal, Wakná and the recently discovered Xulnal, linked by causeways up to 50 meters wide and several tens of kilometers long.
The site includes structures up to 70 meters in height with volumes of more than two million cubic meters, larger than the Egyptian pyramids.
While they demonstrate the high degree of scientific and artistic development of the Mayas, the ceramics and especially the architecture suggest that their collapse was caused by the environmental degradation of the region, says U.S. archeologist Richard Hansen, the director of the Mirador Basin research project and scientific adviser for the Paris exhibition.
Q: What caused the collapse of the Maya civilisation?
A: When we talk about the collapse of a civilisation, what we mean is the disappearance, the complete abandonment of a region. At the end of World War II (1939-1945), the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in less than three years, both cities had been repopulated.
In the case of the Mayas, that didn’t happen. Why did they abandon such vibrant, apparently healthy and successful cities like those in the Mirador Basin? Generally, when we talk about the collapse of civilisations, the cause is always environmental.
That was the case of Babylonia. To irrigate their fields, the peoples of Mesopotamia used water from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. But intensive agriculture left the fields barren. Babylonia remains abandoned even today. It’s not because no one wants to live there, it’s because you can’t live there.
Something similar happened in Petén. The Mayas covered practically all of the walls and floors of their buildings and the surfaces of their monuments with stucco.
Our analysis of the walls in El Mirador indicates that, initially, the layers of stucco weren’t very thick, about two centimeters. But as time went on, the Mayas increased the thickness up to 20, 30 centimeters. To prepare that amount of stucco they had to burn a lot of green wood. To cover just one pyramid with stucco, they would have needed to cut down every tree in an area of 6.5 square kilometers.
The resulting deforestation, also aggravated by the agricultural needs of feeding a population of hundreds of thousands of people, led to the erosion and depletion of the soil, which at some point forced the Mayas to abandon their cities and emigrate.
Q: Why did they use such excessive amounts of stucco?
A: The only plausible explanation is, because they could. It’s the same explanation as for the behavior of rich people today who think they need a gold urinal in their bathrooms. Why do some people drive heavy duty vehicles in downtown Los Angeles? Because they can. But the example of the Mayas should lead us to think about the consequences of this excessive consumption.
Q: The pieces on display here demonstrate the level of development of Maya art. How old are the artifacts exhibited and the cities they came from?
A: El Mirador was abandoned around A.D. 150 and repopulated about 500 years later. The architecture from that second period consists of corbeled-vault stone buildings, sculptures and reliefs, and polychrome ceramics and pottery, similar to the illustrations in the four Maya codices.
The ceramic pieces include cups and plates for daily use, as well as ritual utensils. We believe all this pottery was produced in the city of Nakbé in the Mirador Basin.
Q: What are the mathematical foundations of the architecture at El Mirador?
A: We have discovered that the Maya knew about and regularly used proportions and correlations to construct their buildings. At El Mirador we excavated the most extensive urban complexes in the Americas of the time. In the Late Preclassic period, between A.D. 350 and A.D. 250, the Maya constructed buildings more than 70 meters high and built cities for hundreds of thousands of people, connected by many kilometers of roads.
Q: What does the Mirador Basin represent in terms of the interpretation of Maya civilisation?
A: Until recently, the Maya were viewed as a people of hunters and gatherers. But the Mirador Basin demonstrates a very complex civilisation, which developed a written language, a number system and extremely sophisticated art and architecture.
Temple works have become a labour of love
July 2011
RANN REUY
Photo by: Rann Reuy Restoration work is ongoing at the 800-year-old Banteay Chhmar temple, in Banteay Meanchey province.
PRASAT Banteay Chhmar, the biggest temple in northwestern Cambodia, is three years into a long-overdue restoration.
Nhok Lo, chief of the restoration team based at the temple, says the project began in 2008, focusing on repairs to the eastern gallary and the nearly-collapsed 18th tower.
The poor condition of the structure means it needs a lot more more work just to make it safe, Nhok Lo says, adding: “The work here is quite difficult because this temple is very much ruined.”
The damage to the temple, built in the late 12th and early 13th centuries during the reign of King Jayavarman VII and believed to be dedicated to his son, stems from the ravages of nature as well as human activities, he says.
Nhok Lo, who has 15 years’ experience in this field, was hired by the Global Heritage Fund to move from Siem Reap and begin the restoration project.
Under an agreement between the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts and the Global Heritage Fund, the work is due to be completed by next year.
There are two work sites, on the eastern gallery and at the 18th tower, one of most damaged of the temple’s 56 towers. Nhok Lo’s main task is to unearth missing stones or make new stones to replace broken ones.
“Only about 20 per cent of the work has been completed, because we’ve only just started. But I enjoy temple restoration work,” he says.
Nhok Lo says there is much more work to do because it took time to train the labourers recruited from a nearby village to recognise the correct kinds of stones to put in place, and to handle them with care to avoid more being broken.
“It’s very easy to destroy things; we just have to break them, and they’re ruined forever.”
About 40 labourers are working at both restoration sites. They earn between 330,000 and 340,000 riels a month.
The main body of the temple measures 200 metres by 250 metres, but the entire site is four kilometres around.
“The temple will not continue to deteriorate if they pay attention to conserving it,” Nhok Lo says.
Nhok Lo never obtained a university degree before working on restoration sites but, through practical experience and the advice of experienced teachers at previous construction sites, he quickly learned the techniques required.
Banteay Chhar temple is in the Banteay Chhar commune in the Thma Puok district of Banteay Meanchey province. The temple site lies at the end of a very bumpy 63-kilometre road, so not many tourists have seen it.
Mao Sy, secretary of the Banteay Chhar CBT committee, which covers the temple, estimates that about 50 foreign tourists visit the temple every month.
He says the main obstacle is the poor condition of the road from Sisophon to the temple, because it’s very bumpy in the dry season because of big potholes and very slippery in the rainy season as result of mud.
Nhok Lo says MCFA officials are preparing documents to have the temple placed on the World Heritage list, which will ensure that the temple is properly cared for.
“Once the temple is listed with World Heritage, many construction works will be carried out here,” he says.
Cambodia's Ancient Wonders Suffer Modern Ills
July 2011
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SIEM REAP, Cambodia (AP) — The blistering heat at Cambodia’s Angkor temples eases, and the sun’s last soft shimmer will soon brush some of the most wondrous monuments ever created by man. A moment for peaceful reverence? Hardly.
A traffic jam of up to 3,000 tourists surges up a steep hillside, trampling over vulnerable stonework and quaffing beer at a sacred hilltop that provides spectacular sunset views of the massive beehive-like towers rising from the main temple in this ancient city: Angkor Wat.
Below, guides describe its wonders through blaring loudspeakers in a host of tongues as buses circle what is said to be the world’s largest religious edifice, one of hundreds erected by Angkor’s kings between the 9th and 14th centuries.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Associated Press reporter Denis Gray has covered Southeast Asia for more than 30 years and first visited Angkor in 1980.
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“Nobody should be allowed to walk on 1,000-year-old stones,” says Jeff Morgan, executive director of the U.S.-based Global Heritage Fund.
He says limits on tourists at the temples are decades overdue.
The influx hastens the deterioration of edifices already buffeted by invasive tropical vegetation and monsoon rains. The relentless tread of feet and the fumes from heavy traffic wear away the soft sandstone. Oily fingers harm the magnificent bas reliefs. Noisy crowds rob visitors of near-mystical moments of quiet contemplation or the chance to imagine they are jungle explorers discovering a lost city.
Too many tourists are not Angkor’s only woe.
The UNESCO World Heritage Site and its gateway town of Siem Reap are also beset by crass development, alleged corruption and endlessly delayed plans on how best to preserve the temples.
Once abandoned and overgrown by the jungle, and isolated by wars, these stone buildings have emerged as one of Asia’s top tourist draws and a vital money spinner for one of the world’s poorest nations. Cambodian Tourism Minister Thong Khon says some 6 million visitors per year are projected by 2020.
The growth curve has been spectacular.
On one day in 1980, shortly after the overthrow of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, this correspondent was the sole tourist in the entire complex. The inauguration of direct international flights to Siem Reap in 1998 was pivotal, and the filming at the temples of Angelina Jolie’s 2001 Hollywood hit “Tomb Raider” also helped put Angkor on the map.
Tourist arrivals quadrupled from 60,000 in 1999, to 250,000 in 2001. This year’s expected total is 2.5 million.
“Mass tourism is the major challenge. There will be an accelerated use of temples that were not constructed for that purpose,” says Anne Lemaistre, who heads UNESCO, the U.N.‘s cultural and educational body, in Cambodia. “It’s not time to talk about it anymore. We need to act.”
There has never been a lasting master plan to preserve and regulate the 160-square-mile (400-square-kilometer) site, although an Australian-devised Heritage Management Framework enacted this year should help, she says.
“It’s just the beginning. I am not going to say if it is going to be successful or not but we will try,” Lemaistre says.
Previous plans over the past two decades have been violated or became outdated.
In 1994, zoning rules to keep approaches to the temples development-free were openly flouted. Today, the once-grand avenue flanked only by towering trees leading to Angkor Wat is a congested line of top-end hotels mingling with cheap, ugly shophouses.
Vann Mollyvann, an architect who headed an independent Cambodian agency to manage Angkor, fought for the zoning and other measures to prevent what he called an “Angkor Disneyland.” He eventually was fired for being obstructive, and the agency, Apsara, was put under the direct control of Deputy Prime Minister Sok An.
A company owned by Sok An’s son was later awarded a contract to light up the temples. It was revoked after widespread criticism that the installations were damaging the monuments. Still, a high-profile critic of the project was sentenced to prison in 2009, accused of spreading disinformation.
The way entrance fees are collected also has drawn criticism.
In a hushed deal with no bidding, Sok Kong, a tycoon close to Prime Minister Hun Sen, was granted a concession to collect the fees. Opposition lawmaker Son Chhay and others allege some of that money flows into the dealmakers’ private pockets rather than government coffers and Angkor’s restoration.
Morgan says Sok Kong’s company “is just milking the site.”
“Everyone knows it. It’s a great deal. You are getting lots of money without putting in any investment,” he says.
The government denies any wrongdoing, and the tourism minister said it’s “a good mechanism. We can get a lot of money.”
Critics say such deals at Angkor merely mirror today’s Cambodia, dominated by Hun Sen and the powerful politicians and tycoons around him.
“They control Siem Reap and Angkor like everywhere. They could do whatever they please no matter what the law says,” Son Chhay says.
The population of Siem Reap is projected to double to a quarter million by 2020. Unrestricted pumping of underground water has sparked fears that the earth under Angkor’s temples might sink and collapse.
The once-charming town now has 320 hotels and guesthouses. More will soon rise after the construction of a new airport that can handle long-haul jets. The current airport now takes smaller planes from regional points.
Many protectors of Angkor say the time has come to strictly limit the number of tourists per day, as is done at Spain’s Alhambra palace and Peru’s Inca citadel Machu Picchu, or to require slippers and severely curtail where visitors can walk.
Starting this past year, only 100 people have been allowed entry into the uppermost section of Angkor Wat at any one time, and they can stay for no longer than 30 minutes. Some wooden walkways have been installed at the most popular temples.
But much of the temples remain free-for-all zones.
“Tourist management at Angkor sucks and they’ve had 20 years to work on it,” Morgan says.
Lemaistre agrees that Angkor’s romantic charm has faded — standing alone on the glorious causeway of Angkor Wat is no longer possible — but that all is not yet lost.
“It’s very complicated to maintain Angkor’s great quality but it must be maintained,” she says. “It cannot become a tourist factory. That would be a nightmare.”
GHF Mirador Featured at the Maya Exhibit at Quai Branly Museum in Paris
June 2011
Maya, destruction of a civilization
RD Hansen/Fares
Gigantic pyramids lost in the rainforest; temples forgotten and overgrown with vegetation; imposing limestone blocks thrown up by roots of trees. Idealized images of cities taken over by the majestic jungle and wilderness have made the Maya one of the most fascinating archaeological riddles. Why and how this civilization collapsed will be at the heart of an international symposium held at Quai Branly Museum July 1-2 in the wake of the new exhibition “Maya: from Dawn to Dusk.”
Commerce of black gold and archaeological findings in the Land of Maya
Under the photo mosaic on the beautiful poster that announces “Maya: from Dawn to Dusk,” an exhibition that opens Tuesday, June 21 at Quai Branly Museum in Paris, reads in fine letters: “With the sponsorship of Perenco.” A leading oil producer in Guatemala, Perenco is located in the heart of Laguna del Tigre national park, a protected area in the department of Petén. In recent years, the French-British group claims that their actions “extend the field of culture” and evoke “active” support of archaeological excavations in Guatemala.
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The Greeks of the New World
At Quai Branly, the exhibition “Maya: from Dawn to Dusk” highlights the ruins and collections of Guatemala.
City-states founded in the heart of wooded darkness, tall pyramids, temples springing to sometimes more than 70 meters (as at Tikal) above the trees! How did the Mayans construct this “New York” of ancient tropics, built with an abundance of sculptures, long-nosed gods bristling the slopes of the pyramids, carved reliefs sumptuously colonizing the stelae, altars, lintels, as well as graves beneath which slept sometimes, as in Palenque, Mexico, the bodies of kings with death masks of jade?
Guatemala displays its most beautiful Maya pieces at Quai Branly Museum in Paris
Guatemala is displaying some of its finest Mayan pieces at Quai Branly Museum in Paris: a vase of jade mosaic, a zoomorphic urn, sacrificial knives, a shell representation of the god of death—all give life to this fascinating and complex civilization. Titled “Maya: from Dawn to Dusk,” the exhibition, which runs until October 2, features 160 objects (decorative pieces, funerary elements, architectural relics, ornaments) lent mainly by the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Guatemala.
Treasures and Mysteries of the Mayan Pyramids
Guatemala lends some of its best pieces to Quai Branly for an evocation of this four-thousand-year-old Mesoamerican civilization.
They worshiped the jaguar, the quetzal, rain and death. They covered their temples with hieroglyphics and codices. The Mayan civilization was at least four thousand years old.
Known by archaeologists as the “Machu Picchu of the North”, the great ancient Pre-Incan Peruvian site of Marcahuamachuco gets a major facelift.
Great Ancient Monumental Center in Peru Lies Forgotten, But Not for Long
June 2011
By Dan McLerran
 Cover Photo, Top: Marcahuamachuco: Remains of a castillo. Courtesy David Almeida, Wikimedia Commons. |
The ruins of this mysterious ancient monumental center bespeak a majesty long forgotten through centuries of abandonment and decay. Built over 1,600 years ago atop a highland mesa at 3,200 meters (10,000 feet), it commands a sweeping view of the three Northern Peruvian mountain valleys below it. Archaeologists call it the “Machu Picchu of the North”, and rightly so. Covering more than 3 kilometers of land, it is known for its impressively massive castillos and circular double-walled structures and enclosures. But over the years, its impressive remains have fallen prey to the elements, both natural and human-derived, such as weathering, plant growth, livestock grazing, and lack of conservation. Now, it appears its long decline ends and a new lease on life begins.
Through a cooperative effort between the Government of Peru, the Unidad Executivo de Marcahuamachuco (UEM, a Peruvian regional development organization), and the Global Heritage Fund (GHF) based in Palo Alto, California, the ancient site of Marcahuamachuco will receive long-in-coming planning, funds, technical resources, and not-a-little local community elbow grease to conserve and restore it to at least a semblance of its former glory. The project is expected to set the stage for a local economic renaissance for the indigenous population. Says Jeff Morgan, Executive Director of GHF, “After intensive investigations, we are pleased to announce Marcahuamachuco as our newest GHF Project. It is one of Peru’s most important archaeological treasures, and like so many of the country’s top heritage sites, it has suffered in the shadow of Machu Picchu for too long.” The GHF reports that “with excellent potential to be one of the first UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the northern highlands of Peru, Marcahuamachuco will provide a major focus for economic development in an area with few opportunities for local communities.”
The GHF, in concert with its Peruvian partners, will apply a unique conservation and development strategy that has worked very successfully on scores of similar situations throughout the world. Called Preservation by Design, the approach employs a methodology of community-based planning, science, development and organizational partnerships to achieve long-term preservation and sustainability. It is hoped that, just as it has done with many other sites and associated communities in other parts of the world, it will capitalize on the cultural heritage of the area to not only renew and resurrect a valuable archaeological treasure, but also reinvigorate the local economy and bring hope and prosperity to an otherwise depressed community. “It is a race against time, the elements and other forces of slow destruction,” says one observer, “but it is done very systematically, in a way that will ensure lasting success and a better future for those who are the closest stakeholders - the people who live there.”
Marcahuamachuco: Double walls of a circular gallery. Courtesy David Almeida, Wikimedia Commons
Archaeological investigations of the site began around 1900 by Max Uhle of the University of California, Berkeley, when he photographed the site and corrected older maps made of the site by previous explorers. Theodore McCown of the University of California continued investigations from 1941 to 1942, producing more detailed maps and developing a chronology for cultural development at the site. A student of McCown, John Thatcher, later returned to the site during 1968 - 1969 and 1973 - 1974 to establish cultural phases and chronologies based on ceramic studies. Since 1981, the Huamachuco Archaeological Project, a Canadian project, has been conducting studies of the area.
Built around 400 A.D. and lasting until 800 A.D., Marcahuamachuco was the center of a Pre-Incan civilization and thought to have been ancient Peru’s most important economic, political, spiritual, and military center during that time period. Some of the site’s functions still remain a mystery, but scholars suggest that it was a religious oracle for the population, later used as a sacred burial ground. The site consists of several major compounds surrounded by curved stone walls, in some places as much as 12 meters high, with interior plazas, rooms and galleries that are interpreted by archaeologists to have served ceremonial and administrative functions.
Marcahuamachuco is GHF’s second project in Peru, joining Chavín de Huántar, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site high in the Andes mountains. The successful work done at Chavín de Huántar will, in part, serve as a model for the work being done at Marcahuamachuco.
GHF Göbekli Tepe in the News
The Birth of Religion
June 2011
By Charles C. Mann
Photograph by Vincent J. Musi
Every now and then the dawn of civilization is reenacted on a remote hilltop in southern Turkey.
The reenactors are busloads of tourists—usually Turkish, sometimes European. The buses (white, air-conditioned, equipped with televisions) blunder over the winding, indifferently paved road to the ridge and dock like dreadnoughts before a stone portal. Visitors flood out, fumbling with water bottles and MP3 players. Guides call out instructions and explanations. Paying no attention, the visitors straggle up the hill. When they reach the top, their mouths flop open with amazement, making a line of perfect cartoon O’s.
The huge number of people who visit Machu Picchu every year are threatening the site’s very survival.
From lost city of the Incas to tourist trap in 100 years
May 2011
Simeon Tegel reports
Machu Picchu was closed for three months last year because of flooding and landslides caused by deforestation. AFP/GETTY
As Hiram Bingham hacked his way through remote Andean cloudforests in search of a lost Inca citadel in 1911, little could the American adventurer have known of the tourism juggernaut that his archaeological expedition would unleash – or how it might threaten his breathtaking find.
Now, Peru is gearing up to mark the centenary of Bingham’s rediscovery of Machu Picchu with a series of glitzy events on 6 and 7 July. Sponsored by Coca Cola, the festivities will include international broadcasts of a son-et-lumière show and a concert expected to feature the Spanish tenor José Carreras.
But many in the archaeological community are deeply worried about the pressures on Machu Picchu from the 2,000 visitors it receives every day and the rapid growth of over-priced hotels, tacky souvenir shops, fast-food restaurants and other unregulated infrastructure around the citadel and along the Sacred Valley that links it to Cusco, the former Inca capital.
“In 10 years’ time, the valley will be like a giant amusement park, like Disneyland,” warns Jose Canziani, an expert in the strategic development of archaeological sites and professor at Lima’s Catholic University.
The World Heritage Committee of Unesco, the United Nations cultural organisation, agrees. In 2008, it voiced its “grave concern” regarding the mismanagement of Machu Picchu, and in 2009 expressed its frustration at Peru’s refusal to allow the ruins to be placed on a list of endangered sites. The panel highlighted problems from the wearing away of the original stone paving to the increased risks of landslides caused by deforestation as a result of the chaotic construction boom.
The committee is due to report next month on Peru’s progress. Anything less than a ringing endorsement could prove highly embarrassing for President Alan Garcia’s administration.
The Peruvian authorities have made some headway. The government banned the helicopter overflights enjoyed by some of Machu Picchu’s more affluent visitors. Yet problems persist. In January last year, landslides in Aguascalientes, the tourist trap at the base of the mountain on which Machu Picchu sits, killed five people and left several thousand sightseers stranded for days. Machu Picchu remained closed for three months. And there has been no response to the erosion of the original stone paving. Wooden walkways or a requirement for visitors to wear rubber-soled shoes are two obvious solutions, says Jeff Morgan, executive director of the Global Heritage Fund, a San Francisco-based group working to protect archaeological remains in the developing world, but there has been no word from the Machu Picchu research team run by Cusco’s regional government.
Further down the Sacred Valley, tourist traffic over-runs Ollantaytambo, an Inca fortress that was the scene of one of the Andean empire’s few military victories over the invading Spaniards. Buses clog the narrow, cobbled streets of the village.
“Peru has been selling this idea that we are this amazing tourist destination but the reality is that we are not attending adequately to our visitors,” complains Joaquin Randall, the manager of El Albergue, the town’s oldest hotel, founded in 1925.
Suggestions by Ricardo Vega Llona, the businessman presiding over the centenary celebrations, that more people should visit Machu Picchu have been met with alarm by conservationists, who argue tourist traffic needs to be directed to other sites. Peru has 100,000 identified sites of archaeological interest. But only 2,800 have been officially signposted and marketed as attractions, while as few as 200 are protected with barriers or personnel.
“Everyone wants to go to Machu Picchu but there are 25 other sites in Peru that are just as amazing,” Mr Morgan told The Independent. Channelling visitors to these other sites would also better distribute the economic benefits of tourism in a country where nearly half of rural residents still do not get enough to eat.
Yet some of Peru’s greatest ruins, such as the imposing mountain fortress of Kuelap in northern Peru, have no road access and require strenuous treks of several days.
Meanwhile, the directorate of archaeology in Peru’s recently-founded Culture Ministry struggles with an annual budget of less than £1m and just 100 employees. According to Elias Mujica, a consultant on the development of archaeological sites, the directorate is “crippled” despite Peru’s immense archaeological resources and the economic opportunity they provide.
“Just imagine it,” sighs Hector Walde, head of the directorate, when it is pointed out that the equivalent agency in Mexico has around 2,500 staff working to protect Aztec, Maya and other ruins. The backlog of issues piled up in his inbox includes looting, uncontrolled urban development and inappropriate reconstruction by foreign archaeological teams.
Last month, authorities removed 4,500 tons of rubbish dumped by local communities inside the perimeter of the World Heritage Site Chan Chan, a spectacular pre-Inca adobe city on the Pacific coast. And farmers have been attempting to seize land at Caral, just north of Lima, a complex from 2,600BC and one of the Americas’ oldest known inhabited sites.
One exception to the troubling picture is the Moche Route, a successful new tourist circuit on Peru’s northern coast, linking ruins from the Moche people, famous for their lewd ceramics. The sites, including the giant Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, are well conserved and local communities were involved in its strategic planning.
Yet even here there are serious problems, with unprotected Moche ruins providing one of two archaeological looting hotspots in Latin America. The other, in Guatemala, sees the smuggling of an estimated 1,000 Maya ceramics a month, with a market value of more than £6m. No one seems to have an equivalent figure for Peru although Mr Walde estimates there are around 25,000 people involved in the trafficking nationally, most of them impoverished locals who earn a pittance, while a handful of middlemen make millions. The margins are comparable to the drugs trade, with retail prices around 1,000 times greater than the amount paid to the looter.
“Looting has gone on for centuries. It is a tradition in Peru,” Mr Walde says. “There is no awareness that looting tombs is prohibited. It is not socially censured.”
The courts, meanwhile, lack teeth. Peruvian law provides for sentences of up to eight years for illegally trading artefacts but prosecutors are usually unable to prove a suspect was knowingly involved in ransacking a marked archaeological site.
For Bingham, his rediscovery of Machu Picchu heralded a triumphant return to America, where he eventually became a senator and, after his death, the model for the Indiana Jones movies. Yet the legacy of his momentous find is less clearcut for Peru. As the centenary celebrations get under way, a questionmark continues to hang over the government’s ability to protect the archaeological riches many regard as a global as well as a national patrimony.
Cradle of civilisations
* The Inca empire, which started off as a tribe in what is now Peru and established a dominion that stretched from modern-day Chile to Colombia, actually only lasted 200 years yet was the culmination of millennia of civilisation in the Andean region. The diversity of cultures rivalled that of the Mediterranean basin.
* Cuzco was the capital of the Inca empire from which kings ruled. The empire was tied together by an extensive road system. Inca architecture is distinguished by the use of stones sculpted to fit without the use of mortar.
* Known as fearsome warriors, the Incas built their empire through both force and diplomacy. But it was destroyed when Spanish invaders, led by Francisco Pizarro, arrived in Peru in 1532. The Incas were unable to match the firepower of the Europeans, and the explorers also brought with them diseases such as smallpox that devastated the indigenous people.
* Peru is today littered with the stunning ruins of cultures that scholars know little about. Among the most notable are the Paracas people from the deserts of Peru’s southern coast in about 500BC, who made dazzling textiles; the warlike Wari empire from the southern Peruvian Andes, from 500AD to 1000AD; the Moche, from 100AD to 800AD; and the Chachapoyas people of Peru’s northern cloudforests, who left a mausoleum full of mummies chiselled into a cliffside.
* The Incas worshiped a number of gods. The most important of these was Inti, the sun god. According to Inca belief, the Inca emperors descended from him.
Other tourist sites at risk
Angkor Wat, Cambodia
Illegal pumps withdrawing millions of litres of groundwater every day from beneath the city of Siem Reap may threaten the stability of the nearby ancient temples of Angkor Wat, Unesco says. Growing numbers of tourist hotels are blamed for such high water demand. More than 800,000 people visited Angkor Wat in the first nine months of 2010 – 24 per cent more than in the same period the year before.
Pompeii, Italy
The 2,000-year-old House of the Gladiators in this ancient Roman city collapsed last November, pictured right, prompting an outcry from historians who fear the government is neglecting Italy’s priceless national treasures. Three chunks of mortar also fell off Rome’s Coliseum in May last year.
Everest Base Camp, Nepal
Refuse, medical waste and an ever growing number of tourist cafés are blamed for creating the “highest junkyard in the world” at the popular trekking destination. Conservationists continue to call for a temporary closure of the site in an attempt to reduce visitor numbers and their negative environmental impact.
Grand Canyon, Arizona, US
Noisy air tours and pollution are putting the Grand Canyon National Park at “grave risk”, according to a report released last year. Every year, more than 400,000 tourists fly above the canyon in helicopters and light aircraft, which are blamed for ruining the park’s natural soundscape.
Great Barrier Reef, Australia
The world’s largest reef system, housing over 400 species of coral and 2,000 species of fish, is threatened by a combination of climate change, rising sea levels and shipping. Last year the Chinese trawler Shen Neng 1 destroyed over 3km of coral when it ran aground.
GHF Mirador in Smithsonian Magazine
El Mirador, the Lost City of the Maya
April 2011
By Chip Brown
Photographs by Christian Ziegler
Now overgrown by jungle, the ancient site was once the thriving capital of the Maya civilization
The peak of La Danta—one of the world’s largest pyramids—pokes through the forest canopy. “All this was abandoned nearly 2,000 years ago,” says archaeologist Richard Hansen. “It’s like finding Pompeii.” Christian Ziegler
Had we been traveling overland, it would have taken two or three days to get from the end of the road at Carmelita to El Mirador: long hours of punishing heat and drenching rain, of mud and mosquitoes, and the possibility that the jungle novice in our party (that would be me, not the biologists turned photographers Christian Ziegler and Claudio Contreras) might step on a lethal fer-de-lance or do some witless city thing to provoke a jaguar or arouse the ire of the army ants inhabiting the last great swath of subtropical rain forest in Mesoamerica.
Mercifully, Itzamna, the supreme creator god of the ancient Maya, had favored us with a pilot named Guillermo Lozano, who was now easing his maroon-striped Bell helicopter into the air. It was a Sunday morning in northern Guatemala, late October. Next to him up front was the archaeologist Richard Hansen, the director and principal investigator of the Mirador Basin Project. About a half-hour’s flying time due north was the Mirador basin itself—a 2,475-square-mile tract of jungle in northern Guatemala and Campeche, Mexico, filled with hidden ruins that Hansen and others refer to as “the cradle of Maya civilization.”
Spy satellites watch ancient ruins
April 2011
By Dan Vergano
Indiana Jones seems a bit more like James Bond in archaeology these days, with the intrepid explorers of the ancient world growing ever more fond of high-tech tools.
Archaeological site of Umma, in present-day Iraq, taken in 2003. By Global Heritage Network, Digital
Everything from laser mapping to radioactive dating has been added to the spadework that once defined archaeology. One that might make the most difference?
Spy satellites.
“The ability to survey substantial amounts of remote structures from space is immensely appealing,” said Stony Brook University archaeologist Elizabeth Stone, at the recent Society for American Archaeology meeting in Sacramento. “Entire, unsuspected building sites can suddenly be seen,” Stone said, displaying new views of Iraq’s 3000 B.C. city of Kish, (” the first city founded after the Flood,” basically the Sumerian version of Noah’s flood in cuneiform records) at the meeting.
But that’s not all satellites can do for archaeology, and really, for everyone interested in the past. In March, the Global Heritage Fund launched its ” Global Heritage Network,” in cooperation with Google Earth and private imaging satellite firm DigitalGlobe, an ” early warning and threat detection system” for archaeological sites. In essence, antiquity now has its own spy agency, created to allow armchair archaeologists (as well as real ones), to watch for looting, disasters and other calamities at some of the most endangered sites of human history.
“Some of these places are being treated like junk,” says Jeff Morgan, executive director of the Global Heritage Fund, the Palo Alto, Calif., nonprofit organization dedicated to preservation of World Heritage Sites. The sites include some 911 cultural locations, ranging from Pompeii to Angkor Wat, deemed especially significant by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). “Our goal is to build a worldwide network,” Morgan says, of scholars, lawyers and people living near the sites to aid in their conservation.
As an added bonus, anyone online can explore the sites, seeing video, maps and slideshows that put UNESCO’s records to shame.
DigitalGlobe has contributed overhead imagery of about 600 sites to kick-start the project. Each site (580 now are in the network) will get a regularly-updated assessment.
“Ideally, the most-endangered sites will get the most frequent updates,” Morgan says, sites such as Ur in modern-day Iraq, damaged by Saddam Hussein’s historically-inaccurate restoration efforts, and the 12th-Century temple complex of Banteay Chhmar in Cambodia, looted of statues for decades.
“Monitoring sites and looking for changes fits very comfortably with what we already do for our customers,” says Chuck Herring of DigitalGlobe, based in Longmont, Colo. With increasing numbers of private spy satellites overhead, the network can get daily updates for sites, weather permitting. “The experts on the ground know their sites very well and can spot changes very quickly,” Herring says.
Obviously, he adds, a lot of the most endangered sites, such as the Maya ruins in areas run by drug traffickers or buried cities in war-torn regions of the world such as Iraq, aren’t places that monitors can always reach easily or safely. Umma, yet another ancient city in Iraq, from around 2,300 B.C., “looks like a moonscape,” Stone said, a product of the widespread looting that took place after the 2003 war.
Looting remains the bane of archaeologists, Stone noted, but other threats also loom for many sites. Development, from farmers clearing new fields to parking lots for tourists, encroaches on many of them. Natural disasters can also wreak havoc — last year’s hurricane winds tearing up trees that held together Maya sites was a common complaint among archaeologists at the meeting — and also threaten many sites.
“We’re seeing most of the sites are just being neglected,” Morgan says. “That’s why we have to involve the people who live nearby.” Tourism that preserves the sites might be the best way to keep them from crumbling further, he suggests, and provide local folks a better living. “Right now, we are seeing tourists run rampant over sites,” he says. “The first step we hope for (from the network), is letting people realize how much they are losing.”
Cambodia’s forgotten temple
Saving Banteay Chhmar
March 2011
A magnificent Khmer temple lies crumbling in forest near the Cambodian border. John Sanday and the Global Heritage Fund must overcome more than just neglect to save this site for posterity.
Banteay Chhmar is one of the crowning glories of King Jayavarman VII’s reign (AD 1181-c.1219). This Khmer king was a prolific builder, crisscrossing his dominion with roads, founding hospitals to care for his subjects, and creating magnificent temples to honour his family. But Banteay Chhmar, nonetheless, is something special. An architectural tour de force, it has the size and architectural refinement of a major metropolitan temple in the capital at Angkor. Yet Banteay Chhmar is not in the capital. It lies a considerable distance away, 170km northwest of the capital, in a remote region that has been described as ‘the most desolate place in Cambodia’. Why?
To understand this historic Buddhist monastic complex, it is important to relate it to the major Khmer sites in Angkor, as their impact on me and my team was essential to the development of the Global Heritage Fund (GHF) Banteay Chhmar Conservation Training Project. Their historical influence on Banteay Chhmar will also soon become apparent.
City of shrines
The sprawling city at Angkor covered, at its peak, an astonishing 1,000km², and formed the heart of a Khmer Empire which spread across present day Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand.
The religious needs of its inhabitants were sated by over a thousand shrines, of which the most famous is the great temple of Angkor Wat. This aesthetic triumph – built by Suryavarman II and, reputedly, the largest place of worship on the planet – preceded Jayavarman VII’s reign by about 50 years. Prior to his creation of Banteay Chhmar, Jayavarman VII built the two significant Buddhist monastic complexes of Ta Phrom and Preah Khan, and founded the walled city of Angkor Thom, which incorporated a group of 10th century monuments from a previous capital. He expanded one earlier temple there to create his new state temple – the Bayon – that is celebrated as the pinnacle of Jayavarman VII’s architectural innovations.
The Bayon, which was extended at the end of the 12th century, around the same time as Banteay Chhmar was built, is famous for its enclosure wall of bas relief panels, showing mystical and historical scenes, very similar to those found in Banteay Chhmar. Another example is the famous mythological bas reliefs in Angkor Wat, which were the first to be sculpted. All of them are examples of a breathtaking architectural tradition.
Another connection between the Bayon and Banteay Chhmar is that they have similar, fine face towers, and, following exhaustive study, it appears that those sculpted in Banteay Chhmar were prototypes for those of the Bayon. The gigantic faces on all four sides of the tower were probably Jayavarman VII’s imprimatur on the monuments he built. Appropriate, then, that these face towers are widely viewed as his finest architectural innovation.
The temple complex was built to commemorate the king’s son, and its remote location is believed to be because he fell in battle there.
Such early inaccessibility creates, today, both an opportunity and a problem. Following the king’s death, the state religion changed and the Angkorian temples were subjected to Hindu iconoclasm and subsequent alterations; but, at Banteay Chhmar there is a chance to study a site that remained untouched. This lack of modification, nevertheless, has come hand in hand with neglect, and for centuries the jungle has been encroaching, causing the towers and the bas relief arcades to collapse. In the mid 1990s an even more destructive force arrived: looters. They knocked down a unique stretch of bas reliefs with jackhammers and spirited away four out of a set of eight Avaloketesvaras (the Bodhisatva of compassion) on flatbed trucks to Thailand. Banteay Chhmar lies 170km northwest of Siem Reap, and only about 12km as the crow flies from the Thai border. Two of the panels have subsequently been returned to Cambodia, the remainder are still at large. Such theft was not without its risks. Banteay Chhmar was one of the last strongholds of the notorious modern Khmer Rouge, and ringed by minefields.
These deadly relics of conflict were only finally cleared in 2007, leaving Banteay Chhmar more vulnerable than ever to human depredation. Because of its architectural significance, Banteay Chhmar is now on UNESCO’s World Heritage ‘Tentative List’. Yet if the site was to survive, a preservation programme was urgently needed, and that is what the Global Heritage Fund (see box below) has provided. But before looking at how the temple is being saved, it is important to understand what makes the site exceptional.
The Buddhist builder
Jayavarman VII was an oddity, as his path to power appears to have been forged in war. Chinese sources record how, in 1178, the Cham, from Vietnam, seized the Khmer capital and executed the king. The Cham had little chance to savour their victory, as that very same year a Khmer force under the command of a prince repelled the invaders. In 1181 that prince became King Jayavarman VII, and only the second Buddhist to rule over the Khmer Empire. The new king’s building zeal ensured that his religion was swiftly set in stone.
Although architectural styles varied, the basic grammar of a Khmer temple proved remarkably enduring. At its heart was a wish to evoke the world of Indian mythology, with a wide moat representing the primordial sea, an outer temple enclosure wall mimicking the mountains that ring the world, and a central tower shrine symbolising Mount Meru, home to the gods. But whilst the barays (extensive man-made reservoirs) and moats served a powerful symbolic function, they also had a crucial practical purpose. Sophisticated water management schemes were the key to Khmer success, and vital if a sizable population was to endure the rigors of the dry season. The moats and barays were part of this hydraulic life support system, storing water to irrigate fields, and to support fish stocks. The additional task of supplying water would have been critical at Banteay Chhmar, in a region where even in the wet season the fields and forests are parched for weeks at a time.
The GHF is a private, non-profit organisation based in California, USA, and London, UK. It specialises in the conservation and long-term preservation of historic monuments of significance within developing countries. The Banteay Chhmar Conservation Training Project exemplifies the GHF’s approach to historic sites through a technique known as Preservation by Design – an approach to repairing, conserving, and presenting an historic site alongside plans to develop its own revenue to ensure long-term sustainability. Demonstrating that heritage sites can provide an income to local communities helps them to value it, an important step towards ensuring its survival. The GHF also monitors the status of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, keeping tabs on those at risk and publishing their findings.
Banteay Chhmar is a vast complex, with the total archaeological site covering an area of approximately 12km². At its centre is the main temple, which measures 750m by 700m, and is enclosed by a 60m-wide moat. To the east, closely associated with the temple and moat, is a large baray, covering an area of 1,400m by 500m. These water management features were sited with care, as there is evidence of a spring in the southeast corner of the moat in this otherwise arid zone. Various local rumours that this water source was augmented by canals coming from the hills to the northwest prompted the GHF to carry out an extensive survey of Banteay Chhmar’s water supply. A similar on-going study has produced an excellent understanding of the hydrology of Angkor. The Banteay Chhmar study has, indeed, proven the existence of supplementary water sources, and is an essential tool to identify a suitable water supply for the present community.
Nothing remains the same
There is every chance that future study will decipher Banteay Chhmar’s many mysteries, but this can only happen if the monument survives. The dangers facing it became apparent to me when I led a team to Banteay Chhmar in the early 1990’s. What greeted me made a lasting impression. Although I marvelled at the size of the temple complex, I was equally appalled by its condition – the priceless sculptures had been brutally looted, and the jungle was desecrating its shrines and courtyards. It was a far cry from the situation at Angkor, which, by then, enjoyed extensive international support and a government body dedicated to safeguarding Cambodia’s first World Heritage Site.
When, in 2007, I became Field Director for Asia at the GHF, I remembered Banteay Chhmar and, spurred by the confidence that came from 12 years working in Angkor, resolved to do something about it. This earlier work meant I had an experienced team to call upon, and crucially one that had learnt the merits of conservation versus restoration and reconstruction – the predominant approach in Asia.
The key to the success of such a project is to assess its condition and potential, and to develop a philosophy that takes into consideration its present status as an historic monument, its future use as a centre of learning, and the impact that any work to conserve and repair it will have on the local community.
As with any project in a developing country, practical considerations play a significant role. It is essential to identify and build an enthusiastic team of professionals and craftsmen, and to develop a sound knowledge of conservation techniques, as well as funds to undertake the proposed activities. In its formative years the GHF has worked on a sound set of principles ‘Preservation by Design’, which it has developed over the years. These were adopted at Banteay Chhmar, and have helped the team develop a well-coordinated programme.
The process of surveying and recording the site is a major challenge. Over 75% of the arcaded structures and bas reliefs that they once covered have fallen and are buried under mounds of stone rubble. Conserving these priceless artworks was perceived as essential. As at Angkor Wat and the Bayon, there is unique historical data to be found in the images depicted. After an overall assessment of structural stability and areas of potential collapse, we identified a sector of the complex with our partners – the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts (MCFA) – where we could begin a series of interventions. The first step was to record each and every stone in 1m2 grids and then referencing them to create an archive. The stones were carefully lifted and placed in the stone graveyard, where they were identified and slowly reassembled. Each stone is unique in shape and size, which has made the puzzle somewhat easier to solve! Where sections of the structure were still standing, precise architectural drawings were prepared.
At every stage, the structures were assessed to consider ways of reassembling them and design the simplest ways of ensuring their future stability. A typical example was devising ways to provide support for the bas relief walls, once we discovered they had no proper foundations.The combination of this, and the fast growing shrubs that had taken root on the walls, was the principle reason for Banteay Chhmar’s ruinous state.
The heavy monsoon rains had percolated the raised stone platform on which the bas relief walls were set, thus exacerbating their structural settlement. The platform had to be weatherproofed and the non-existent foundations were strengthened by the placement of new stone and laterite supports. Reforming the platform itself required several tons of specially selected clays mixed with slaked lime. Dug locally, the clay had to be beaten into powder. Original methods using a wooden mallet were found to be a tedious and lengthy process. Someone came up with the idea of using a traditional stone rice grinder and, with some adaptations, it did the trick – a good example of Preservation by Design!
Once the structural consolidation of the platform is complete, we can reconstruct the recently unearthed bas relief stones, and replace the sections that were threatening collapse. All the stones have been moved by hand using a simple block and tackle and a large structural tripod. After the procedures had been established, however, we found locally a mobile crane and a skilled operator who has trained up our team of craftsmen. In one day, they managed to carefully move 60 stones – each weighing over 500kg. By hand, it would have taken the team at least eight days!
For over a decade, a group of young Khmers underwent training in stone conservation at Angkor Wat, thanks to the German Apsara Conservation Project. This team, under the guidance of its master conservator, has recently formed its own company – the South Asian Conservation and Restoration Agency (SACRA) – and GHF has commissioned them to provide theoretical and practical training in Banteay Chhmar. The Banteay Chhmar team, consisting of eight local workers, spent time learning basic Angkorian history, studying the different conservation methods in Angkor, as well as undergoing practical stone conservation training on site in Banteay Chhmar. Under SACRA’s supervision, the team is now repairing and conserving the stones of Banteay Chhmar.
Another very exciting innovation has been collaboration with the Department of Scientific Computing (IWR) at Heidelberg University. Their challenge has been to help with the recording and development of a database for the thousands of fallen stones in Banteay Chhmar. The IWR has sent a team of its postgraduates along with state-of-the-art 3D digital camera technology. This team, working on site in Banteay Chhmar, as well as back in the IWR laboratories, is developing a highly sophisticated process for recording stones with the aim, as one of the senior professors aptly put it, ‘of solving John’s puzzle’.
They still have a huge task ahead of them and several refinements need to be made; but we hope that one day soon it will be possible to reassemble a group of disparate stones with the click of a button.
The indications that the Banteay Chhmar face towers are the proto-type for those at the Bayon of Angkor gives them a unique architectural importance. Realising their significance, the GHF has studied Face Tower 18 North with a view to its repair and structural consolidation, as it was threatening collapse. Emergency funds were found to document and dismantle 75% of it, and all the new technology and skills are being applied to repair and to rebuild it, providing added structural security and opening a new phase of research.
A topic with a much broader spectrum in Banteay Chhmar has been the ongoing hydrological research. Many theories have been proffered to date, but few of them have been based on proper research. Unlike in Angkor, there is no constant water source in Banteay Chhmar. The present supply for the local community is pumped from the moat. Due to extensive recent deforestation around the temple complex, rainwater run-off has become excessive, causing damaging floods. An added problem has been the rapid siltation of the moat itself, reducing the amount of water stored. Recent drought conditions have meant that local farmers abandoned planting rice in favour of cassava, which is a good cash crop. As a result, the forested areas have been destroyed to plant more and more cassava, thus reducing the absorption of rainwater to top up the aquifers.
Results of flash flooding can be seen in the drastic erosion of the historic East Causeway leading to the temple itself. This causeway, together with that to the west, acts as a dam, causing the water level to differ by more than 2m between the south and the north moats. If these dams fail, as a result of further flooding, not only will the community’s major water supply disappear, but also those living below the dam will lose their fields and dwellings.
While this painstaking work is gradually bringing Banteay Chhmar back from the brink, much depends on finding funds to establish a permanent Conservation Unit for the MCFA. This would be made up of trained Cambodians, and, ultimately, it is they who will determine the fate of Jayavarman VII’s masterpiece, and the many other sites in the region.
12 Ancient Landmarks on Verge of Vanishing
October 2010
by: John Roach
Cradle of Medieval Architecture
Photograph by Umit Bektas, Reuters
Damaged frescoes in the Church of St. Gregory of Tigran Honents tell a story of neglect in the medieval city of Ani, now part of Turkey.
Sitting in a militarized zone near the current Turkish-Armenian border, the city is one of 12 cultural sites on the verge of collapse, according to a report released this week by the San Francisco, California-based Global Heritage Fund.
Settled by Armenians in the 10th and 11th centuries, Ani holds churches and other buildings that helped inspire the Gothic style across Europe. The city was abandoned in the 14th century, when all Armenians were forced to leave under Turkish rule. Today the unprotected ruins are prone to looting and vandalism.
Similar sites around the world also hold significant archaeological and cultural value but are at risk due to looting, development pressures, unsustainable tourism, insufficient management, and wars or other conflicts, the report says.
“I don’t think they’ll vanish completely. They’ll just be ruins that are far less than they could be,” said Jeff Morgan, the Global Heritage Fund’s executive director. Modest investments could help restore and develop these sites for generations of sustainable tourism, according to the preservation group.
GHF Vanishing In The News
The World's Vanishing History
October 2010
By JASON CHOW
More than 200 heritage sites are in a state of irreversible disrepair and will be lost unless communities, governments and international groups act to prevent their destruction, said the Global Heritage Fund, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on historical preservation.
The group, which is unrelated to Unesco’s World Heritage division, said that sites in the developing world are most at risk.
“Especially in places in Asia, we’ve seen rapid growth destroying these sites and government regulation hasn’t kept up to protect them,” said Jeff Morgan, executive director of Global Heritage Fund (GHF). War, looting and insufficient management has also contributed to the degradation, GHF said.
This year’s GHF report, released last Sunday, included a list of the 12 most endangered sites. The list included two sites in Asia—Fort Santiago in Manila, Philippines, and India’s early 18th century Maluti Temples.
John Hurd
Fort Santiago, Intramuros, Philippines
Fort Santiago, Intramuros, Philippines
The GHF and Unesco work toward the same goal of heritage preservation, but with slightly different approaches. When a site is awarded a Unesco World Heritage designation, it remains the responsibility of the local and national government to raise funds and orchestrate preservation efforts. GHF selects projects, often in the developing world, and provides financial and technical resources to assist with preservation.
For instance, at Pingyao—a Chinese city from the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911) that was designated a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1997—GHF has provided $250,000, and secured a $1.5 million commitment from the local government, to help restore a major courtyard and street, using local traditional materials. GHF also established a training program for craftspeople and artisans to preserve Pingyao’s “living heritage”— its centuries-old traditions of arts, crafts, cooking and performing arts.
GHF’s Mr. Morgan said Unesco’s process deters some developing nations from applying for recognition. “There are 45 sites that are recognized in Italy and yet Peru, which is home to ancient civilizations, only has 11. Pakistan only has six. Governments in developing countries can’t fill up the paperwork,” Mr. Morgan said.
Unesco said it is aware of GHF’s report and said any form of heritage protection is positive. Unesco has 34 sites on its own list of “World Heritage in Danger.” In these cases, Unesco draws international attention to the site, provides technical support and know-how, and in some cases provides urgent funding, said Gina Doubleday a Unesco spokesperson in Paris.
GHF Vanishing In The News
Ancient ruins worldwide 'on verge of vanishing'
October 2010
By Mark Tutton for CNN
October 18, 2010 8:09 a.m. EDT
Khirbat al Mafjar, or Hisham’s Palace is the remains of a winter palace built by the Islamic Ummayad dynasty. It was destroyed by a major earthquake around 747 A.D. and is now threatened by urban development.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Three historic sites in the Middle East are “on the verge of vanishing,” says report Global Heritage Fund has identified 12 sites at risk of irreparable loss Well-preserved sites can pay for themselves by attracting tourists, says GHF UNESCO warns that badly managed tourism can be just as much of a threat (CNN)—Twelve historic sites around the world are “on the verge of vanishing” because of mismanagement and neglect, according to a new report.
The report, by San Francisco-based Global Heritage Fund (GHF), identifies nearly 200 heritage sites in developing nations as being at risk, highlighting 12 as being on the verge of irreparable loss and destruction.
Three sites in the Middle East, Iraq’s Nineveh, Palestine’s Hisham’s Palace, and Turkey’s Ani, are among those most in danger.
The ruined city of Ani, on the border of Turkey and Armenia, dates back to the 11th century. Once known as “The City of a Thousand Churches,” many of its remaining buildings are now on the brink of collapse.
GHF executive director Jeff Morgan told CNN, “Ani is probably one of the top 10 sites in the world, right up there with Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat. It’s incredible.”
Morgan said Ani has been “caught in a political morass,” because of its position on the border of two countries that don’t have diplomatic relations.
Nineveh, near Mosul, in northern Iraq, was capital of the Assyrian empire from 705 to 612 B.C.. But Morgan says it is now at risk—not from the conflict in Iraq, but from lax planning regulations that have led to around 40 percent of the archaeological site being covered by modern development.
Hisham’s Palace, in the Palestinian territories, is the remains of a winter palace built by the Islamic Umayyad dynasty. It was destroyed by an earthquake around 747 A.D. and, like Nineveh, is now threatened by urban development.
“There’s no expertise there to be able to care of it,” said Morgan.
He said that in the Palestinian territories “there are all these ancient sites that are being destroyed because they’re building apartment blocks and commercial builds on top of the core archaeological areas and there’s no regulations to stop them.
“They feel like, ‘We’ve been doing it for thousands of years, so what the hell?’ But the difference is today, those sites can be economic engines for those places.”
Morgan argues that restoring these heritage sites will attract tourism that can pay for their ongoing preservation and bring sustainable income to local communities. He said there is huge potential for cultural tourism throughout the region.
“The whole Middle East is a treasure trove,” he said.
“Petra [in Jordan] is already huge. There’s Palmyra and Aleppo in Syria. Jordan has Jerash, Libya has Sabratha and Iran has huge tourism to all its sites because they’re so incredible.”
But outstanding heritage sites may not be enough to attract tourists to locations such as Iraq and the Palestinian territories.
As well as security issues, developing nations often lack the necessary infrastructure to encourage tourism.
The “Versailles of the Caribbean” was the royal residence of Haiti’s King Henri I until 1820.
A UNESCO World Heritage site, the palace has been mostly ruined since an earthquake in 1842.
A UNESCO World Heritage site, the palace has been mostly ruined since an earthquake in 1842.
UNESCO’s Art Pederson, an expert in sustainable tourism, told CNN, “We say we’re going to use tourism for economic development purposes, but you really need an assessment of the economic geography of the place. Do you have the roads, the transport, the needed infrastructure to make this possible?
“There’s a lot of talk about using heritage assets to generate these kinds of benefits but we need to really get serious about doing the legwork to assess whether it’s possible or not.”
Badly regulated tourism can itself present a threat to historic sites, said Pederson.
Although Morgan said there is a dire shortage of funding and regulation for historical sites in most Middle Eastern countries, he said there are success stories in the region.
Among them, Catalhoyuk, in Turkey, where Morgan said locals had been trained to conserve the site and preserve its murals, and where tourism is well controlled.
“In the Middle East, sites have been looted and pillaged and rebuilt on for thousands of years,” he told CNN.
“That’s why what’s happening now is so critical—because of scarcity. There are so few intact ruins and historic districts left.”
GHF’s 12 sites ‘on the verge of vanishing’:
• Mahansrhangarh, Bangladesh
• Mirador, Guatemala
• Palace of Sans Souci, Haiti
• Maluti Temples, India
• Lamu, Kenya
• Famagusta, Cyprus
• Taxila, Pakistan
• Intramuros and Fort Santiago, The Phillipinnes
• Chersonesos, Ukraine
Why Heritage Matters
October 2010
Josh Bernstein
International explorer and educator
October 18, 2010
This is the tale of two archaeological sites. The first I’m guessing you haven’t heard of. Roughly 11,500 years ago, a community of nomadic hunter gatherers in what is now southeastern Turkey created the oldest human-built place of worship we know of. It’s called Göbekli Tepe, and it sits on a hilltop sanctuary not too far from Turkey’s border with Syria. What’s most fascinating about Göbekli Tepe is the glimpse it gives us into the Eurasian pre-Neolithic period and what role ceremony played in pre-agricultural groups. Before there were domesticated animals or cultivated fields, the nomads around Göbekli Tepe decorated monoliths with icons of lions, gazelles, vultures and snakes (among others) and, in all likelihood, worshiped beneath them.
The other site can be found a hemisphere away, 8,000 miles to the southwest, nestled in the mountains of southcentral Peru. It’s called Machu Picchu and, of course, you’ve heard of it. Similar to Göbekli Tepe, Machu Picchu was also a ceremonial center, the royal estate of Incan Emperor Pachacuti. Although the stones of Machu Picchu don’t have any iconography carved into them, there’s no doubt their placement and shape played an important role in ceremonies and, in this regard, the sacred monoliths of both sites reveal certain aspects of their respective cultures. The stones of both sites also reveal a silent crisis that exists today. It’s called the crisis of vanishing heritage and it’s occurring all over the world.
On one end of the crisis’ spectrum sit the heritage sites you’ve never heard of, the Göbekli Tepes of the world. They’re found in developing countries like Turkey, China, India, and Guatemala. Their archaeological treasures often lie unprotected, subject to the effects of time, weather, and looting. The technology to conserve these sites exists, but obtaining proper funding, regional support, and on-site management can be challenging when public awareness and interest are lacking.
On the other end of the spectrum sit the heritage sites everyone has heard of… the Machu Picchus, Tikals, and Angkor Wats of the world. While time and weather (and some looting) affect these sites, too, the largest threats to their survival are overpopulation and unsustainable tourism - the sites are overrun with tourists who, in their eagerness to walk everywhere and touch everything, are literally destroying the places they sought to preserve. Management plans rarely include proper visitor control and even the best managers are under tremendous pressure to accept tourist dollars today despite the cost tomorrow.
So, how can we manage these sites in a sustainable fashion? How can we create a system of site selection, preservation, and conservation that helps the local economy protect a cultural treasure that ultimately belongs to the world? How can technology be leveraged to assist these efforts? These are just some of the questions being asked today at Stanford University in California, where a group of experts in conservation, development, archaeology, philanthropy, technology, tourism and travel have gathered to attend the first Forum on Cultural Heritage in a Developing World. Our goal: to review the data on heritage conservation efforts, discuss what’s working (and what’s not), and determine what solutions make sense for the future. As someone in the media who’s been to hundreds of archaeological sites around the world, I’ve happily agreed to serve as the Master of Ceremonies for the Forum. The keynote address—“Turning Oppression into Opportunities”—will be delivered by Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist and author Nicholas Kristof.
The Forum and the accompanying 68-page report titled Saving Our Vanishing Heritage are the product of the Global Heritage Fund (GHF), a California-based international conservancy whose mission is “to protect, preserve, and sustain the most significant and endangered cultural heritage sites in the developing world.” (Full disclosure: I’m on GHF’s board.) GHF isn’t afraid to tackle heritage problems head on, to find solutions that help turn the tide, create public interest and ultimately protect these cultural treasures from their greatest threat: us.
The hard truth is that our planet is facing a number of population-driven crises right now, including environmental destruction, the loss of biodiversity and the collapse of ocean life. But whereas the rainforests and the oceans have their champions, little has been said on behalf of cultural heritage sites. Perhaps it’s because the stones and bones of archaeological sites hold less appeal than the fur of pandas and fins of sharks. Perhaps it’s because civilizations have always devalued and destroyed the accomplishments of those they’ve conquered—the churches of the Spanish, for example, where built on top of the temples of the Inca.
I sincerely hope that GHF and the Forum can help create a new vision for sustainable tourism and conservation, a model in which heritage sites generate revenue without sacrificing long-term preservation. Without a proper plan, sites will continue to disappear and, unlike a rainforest, once a heritage site is gone, it’s gone forever. What managed to survive for 10,000 years may disappear—silently, suddenly—within just a few decades.
The cultural tapestry that depicts the story of our collective heritage benefits from diversity; it celebrates the richness of language, the expressiveness of religion, the beauty of art. In a world too often focused on short-term issues and Western ideologies, we must make the effort to protect cultural heritage sites. Whether it’s Göbekli Tepe or Machu Picchu, the stories of our ancestors matter. Heritage matters. Our challenge is to recognize this before it’s too late.
Follow Josh Bernstein on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JoshBernstein
GHF Vanishing In The News
Opinion: Investing in world historic and cultural heritage sites is good business
October 2010
By William H. Draper III
Special to the Mercury News
10/19/2010
What ventures will succeed and fail? As a venture capitalist, I’m often asked what the secret is.
There is no real secret. No one knows what will or won’t work. But experience, imagination and identifying the right strategies and players are critical ingredients in any recipe for success.
This not only applies to for-profit venture capital but also to one of my first nonprofit investments. The Draper Richards Foundation provides selected social entrepreneurs seed money to start new nonprofits. Kiva and Room to Read are among our best known successes, but a less-known organization—and the economic implications of its work—also deserves attention.
Global Heritage Fund (GHF) works in the developing world to rescue significant cultural and historical sites before they vanish forever. Think the next Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. And just as a venture capitalist evaluates potential investments, GHF has a unique lens through which it selects its sites. It looks for places that offer economic promise and local partners who will help to fund, preserve and manage the restored sites.
GHF has discovered something that the international development world should take note of: Heritage sites can be economic engines for countries that desperately need sustainable industries. The organization is sharing that news today at a “Forum on Cultural Heritage in a Developing World” at Stanford.
In a new report on the world’s most endangered and promising heritage sites, available at www.globalheritagefund.org/vanishing, GHF estimates that such places could be a $100 billion opportunity for developing nations by 2025. Tourism is already the leading industry for many poor countries, bringing jobs, infrastructure and regional growth.
Look at Guatemala, one of Latin America’s poorest countries. The restoration of Tikal, the immense Mayan ruin, has brought 12 million visitors and $200 million in annual revenues.
That’s just the start. Deep in the Mayan biosphere is Mirador, considered to be the cradle of Mayan civilization and home to the earliest and largest Preclassic Maya archeological sites in Mesoamerica, including the world’s largest pyramid. Coming in with a plan and money of its own, GHF secured $4 million from the Guatemalan government and $3 million from its private sector (including Citibank Latin America and Wal-Mart Centro America) to create an economically sustainable, 810,000-acre archaeological and wildlife preserve that will rival Tikal when it’s complete.
Restored sites bring jobs that are safe, sustainable, legal and local, as opposed to short-lived, dangerous and sometimes illegal work that takes mothers and fathers far from their homes.
Juan Carlos Calderon, for example, grew up in a remote village bordering Mirador. Uneducated and struggling to feed his family, he subsisted on looting nearby ruins. Since the restoration began, Juan Carlos now defends the assets that he once plundered. For the past five years, he has worked as a park guard, which provides steady income, access to health care and education opportunities. His eldest son completed high school and is studying law.
The restoration of heritage sites can transform people, countries and economies. But some of civilization’s most important sites remain endangered. We are missing a huge opportunity.
I may not always know which ventures will succeed, but I know a good bet when I see one. No one will see these sites, however—let alone their potential economic benefits—if we don’t save them.
WILLIAM H. DRAPER III is managing director of Draper Richards L.P. and Draper International, as well as chairman of The Draper Richards Foundation and author of the upcoming book, The Startup Game. He wrote this article for this newspaper.
As the ill effects of mass tourism become evident at Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple complex, conservationists are fighting to save a nearby site from the same fate. Loyd Grossman reports
Temples of Doom?
June 2010
THE HELICOPTER raced over the great rice fields of Cambodia, and I peered into the distance for a first glimpse of my destination. The silvery flash below was a straight line of water, which soon revealed itself to be part of the moat surrounding a temple complex. As we descended, heading towards a tangle of huge blocks of stone and tropical vegetation, I noticed that the moat was dotted with lovely pink lotus flowers. Then the workings of an archaeological site became evident: scaffolding, storage sheds, a pick-up truck.
My destination was the temple site of Banteay Chhmar, largely created 800 years ago by the great Khmer builder King Jayavarman VII. Despite all the work going on, the site still felt like antiquity in the raw. Scrambling over the ruins, also a playground for adventurous local kids, was certainly more Indiana Jones than Time Team.
Although much less celebrated than the nearby temples and palaces of Angkor, Banteay Chhmar is full of interest and delight. In the 1990s the site suffered badly from looters attracted by its remarkable bas-reliefs; and some of its stone towers, which weigh in at around 150 tons each, were on the verge of collapse. But now Banteay Chhmar is being saved from damage and decay. And saved, too, from the almost unrestricted development which has done so much harm to Angkor.
Angkor is the Venice of South-east Asia. Not just because of the beauty of its waterways but because, like Venice, Angkor is being crushed under the weight of tourism. The parallel goes further: the combination of sheer numbers and poor management of visitors is common to both. Most visitors to Venice seem to head for St Mark’s Square and then follow a tightly circumscribed route around the city, which results in overcrowding at key points. Ditto Angkor, where buses disgorge an unending stream of tourists at a small number of popular sites.
In Venice, though, it is the tides that are the enemy; in Angkor the threat comes from within. The Khmers were visionary builders, but not good at structural engineering. Conservation architect John Sanday explains that ‘the Khmers were carpenters. They didn’t really understand stone.’ Their vast works were erected quickly: the building of Angkor Wat by King Surayavarman II is said to have taken 34 years. But sandstone and the local volcanic rock, laterite, were the chosen materials; and both can be as crumbly as shortbread. With two million visitors annually (the Cambodian government’s estimate for 2009), the result has been a conservation nightmare.
Since Cambodia’s 1997 coup d’etat, tourism has flourished. Siem Reap, the modern city that serves Angkor, is a boomtown. A dozen years ago it had 25 hotels: now there are more than a hundred, plus the inevitable T-shirt shops, pubs and massage parlours. It is a major short-break destination for Japanese, Chinese and Korean tourists - understandably so, since the Angkor site is a huge attraction. At 400sq km, the UNESCO World Heritage Site is more than a quarter of the size of Greater London. The scale and beauty of its infrastructure are hard to grasp. The Angkor Wat temple is the largest religious building on the planet; the reservoir of the West Baray is the biggest single manmade structure in the pre-industrial world. Fortunately, theft and vandalism are less significant problems now than they were; but unless visitor numbers are managed more carefully, Angkor will literally collapse under the weight of its own success. Also, tourist dollars don’t always reach the local economy: Korean tour groups, for example, often stay in Korean-owned hotels and travel on Korean-owned coaches.
Banteay Chhmar lies to the north-east of Angkor, three hours away by car (half of it on roads that are either mud or dust, depending on the time of year) or 35 minutes by helicopter. It is a different world. At this large, 12th-century temple complex, the California-based Global Heritage Fund is combining archaeological scholarship and conservation with a long-term commitment to developing skills and a sustainable tourism business for the local economy. It has a number of partners in this enterprise, ranging from the Cambodian Ministry of Culture to the US-based Friends of Khmer Culture.
Global Heritage’s strategy offers a practical solution to many of the problems that affect remote ancient sites. Local people are being trained in a number of skills, from basic excavation to stone carving: there are already 40 villagers working on the site. Equally important is the decision to avoid over-restoring the temple complex: the plan is to keep it as a partial ruin so that visitors can share the excitement and mystery of a great site emerging from the jungle. Integral to the project is Global Heritage’s commitment to what it calls Community-Based Tourism. Visitors are encouraged to stay with local families who have been helped to set up B&B accommodation, so that more of what is spent in the village stays in the village. The rooms may be pretty basic, but they are clean and cheap (US$7 per person), and the closest a foreign visitor will get to living like a Cambodian.
Banteay Chhmar is not Angkor, although it is about to be nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is much smaller, and even when the new road gets built it will remain remote. The site currently attracts about 100 visitors a month; however, that figure is expected to rise to 10,000. But these visitors will contribute both to preserving the site and ensuring the prosperity and stability of the local community.
GHF Banteay Chhmar Featured on CNN:
Cambodia's Hidden Gem
December 2009
December 11, 2009
Banteay Chhmar, Cambodia - It’s hot and I have a headache.
The sun is too bright and reflecting off the corrugated tin roofs of tiny shops. And there are so many people, it is dizzying.
Everywhere you look, throngs of people walking from home to store, store to home, milling around street vendor carts, begging for change, or sitting on plastic chairs by the side of the road silently watching it all unfold.
Sitting in this backseat of a cramped crew cab pickup truck, I’m sharing with two other guys, our backpacks, and a 16 kilogram camera.
It’s 33 degrees Celsius and I’m told it’s winter: The end of the rainy season. I can’t imagine it could be any worse than this, so I ask our Cambodian driver what it’s like here in the summer.
He looks at me through the rear view mirror.
“Hotter,” he replies, focusing his smirking eyes back on the road.
No matter how tropical or humid the climate, dry humor exists everywhere.
Out the window, I see there are far too many people on the road and too many types of vehicles. Bicycles. Bicycles with motors rigged up to their frames. Motorcycles. Motorcycles with carriages rigged up to their backs. The Cambodians call those tuk-tuks: their equivalent of a taxi. Toyota Camrys and well-worn Nissan pickups. All fighting for space on the road with the cattle and chickens and men and children and women carrying woven wicker baskets on their heads.
There are no stop-lights, no stop signs. No rules or order to the roadway that I can make out, except that if you are going to pass, you have to honk.
A man on a motorcycle weaves around an old piece of farm equipment plodding down the road, then swerves awkwardly to avoid an oncoming car. The man’s wife and two small children clutch on to each other’s clothing, to avoid being thrown off.
It’s all too much. I look in my backpack for a bottle of water. All the activity is making me nervous and nauseous.
Some of my crankiness can be attributed to the fact I’m just a few hours removed from an arduous 17 hour trans-Pacific flight that started in Atlanta, crossed the Arctic Circle, dropped me off in Seoul to catch my breath and stretch my cramping legs, and then carried me on to Siem Reap.
We’re going to be here for the next 10 days shooting a documentary on human trafficking and the personal impact it has on the lives of families. Before we do that, though, we’re taking a side trip to a place called Banteay Chhmar, to file a story about climate change and the effects it can have on a civilization.
Banteay Chhmar is the kind of place I didn’t think still existed on Earth. An ancient ruin, it’s discovered but still unknown. Built in the 12th century by the great Khmer ruler Jayavarman II, today it sits empty. Historians still don’t know why the city was built or why it was abandoned. It’s hard even to understand why it’s still here. Just a few meters from a village with the same name, there are no tourists, no squatters and very little evidence that there ever have been.
There are only a few dozen local laborers who, under the supervision of project leader John Sanday, are working to restore the site to the point it’s safe and attractive to outside visitors. The hope is, they’ll be able to train locals to set up a responsible, sustainable tourist industry, where the money goes to members of the local community, not foreign investors from countries like South Korea, the United States, China, or Japan.
The city was abandoned more than 500 years ago. Sanday, who is an architect by trade and lives in Katmandu, is our guide. He tells us that scientists believe that changes in the climate coupled with political instability and an aging infrastructure. He surmises that a period of prolonged drought created water scarcity, food shortages and unrest, which forced the royal family to move south to the area which is now Phnom Penh.
When that happened, like the city’s reservoirs, its wealth and economic energy also dried up.
As our truck rambled into the site, we turned onto a pathway that crossed over that same reservoir. Two giant Buddha heads made our welcome at the entrance.
I was amazed they were still there. Two minutes later we were in the main part of the city. Now I was shocked. To me, it felt like re-entering a city that had been evacuated during a bombing raid. Sanday led us around, pointing out why this gate was important, why rulers had created that massive bas relief to show their power, and how this structure had been felled by the roots of a tree. Everywhere you looked were piles of rubble. It went on for hundreds of meters in every direction.
There were large courtyards where only pillars remained. Huge rooms that opened to the sky and jungle canopy. Intricately carved doorways stood, upright and exposed, while the wall that had encased it lay in a heap. Each time you rounded a corner, or even turned your head, there was something new and breath-taking to look at and take a picture of.
My favorite part of the city, though, were faces of the Buddha, carved seamlessly into the towers of the temples, looking out over all of it. A precursor to the architecture you see on the Bayon Temple at Angkor Wat, the entire time we were there they seemed to be looking down at us, smiling knowingly, as we explored their city and pointed our cameras up to take their picture.
We spent two days there, bounding over the ruins, looking at the incredible art and architecture, taking pictures and discussing what led to the collapse of this once-powerful civilization.
When it was time to leave, and we crawled through to the old corridor made dark by dusk’s fading light, I thought about the people who passed through these hallways so many centuries ago. I thought how interesting that, thanks to the potential tourism industry, their hard work then, might now bring about a new dawn in the lives of their descendents.
And as we packed into pick-up for our long ride back to Siem Reap, I was struck by another thought and smiled.
This was definitely worth the trip.
GHF Mirador Featured on BBC News:
Maya Treasure in Danger
November 2009
Little time is left to save El Mirador, the largest city of the maya, in Petén, Guatemala, according to an NGO based in the United States.
Global Heritage Fund says that there are only five years at most, to prevent the destruction of this archeological site from to looting and burning.
And the solution must involve the local community, says the organization.
See pictures of this archaeological treasure, where is the tallest pyramid in America is found, and what can be done to save it, in this video from Alexandra Martins, BBC World.
Spanish Text:
Noviembre 12, 2009
Tesoro maya en peligro
Queda poco tiempo para salvar El Mirador, la mayor ciudad de los mayas, en Petén, Guatemala, según una ONG con sede en Estados Unidos.
El Global Heritage Fund afirma que sólo quedan cinco años como máximo, para evitar que el sitio arqueológico sea destruido por incendios y saqueos.
Y la solución debe involucrar a toda la comunidad local, asegura la organización.
Vea imágenes de este tesoro arqueológico, donde se encuentra la pirámide más alta de América, y qué puede hacerse para salvarlo, en este video de Alejandra Martins, de BBC Mundo.
Watch the video / Vea el video.
GHF Featured in CNN Impact Your World:
Saving the Past
November 2009
CNN’s Brooke baldwin shows us one organization that’s trying to help the world’s poor by preserving the past.
Watch the video:
GHF Mirador Featured on CNN’s Wolf Blitzer’s The Situation Room:
Lost City of Mirador: The "Cradle of Mayan Civilization"
November 2009
GHF Mirador Featured on CNN’s Wolf Blitzer
We’re taking you deep into the jungle of Guatemala in a CNN exclusive challenge of protecting this area, so rich in history from drug traffickers and other threats, that’s next.
BLITZER: Guatemalan archaeologists are making an fascinating discovery. Let’s go to CNN’s Brooke Baldwin. She traveled to Mirador and came back with an amazing story.
Brooke, tell our viewers what’s going on.
BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, I think I’m officially an archaeology geek. Our CNN crew were the first TV camera in the world to shoot the face of what may be the world’s largest pyramid by volume. This pyramid is covered by the canopy of the jungle. It is currently facing several threats.
BALDWIN: From the air, it looks like just jungle. But these forests in Guatemala hide an ancient secret, the city of Mirador, often referred to as the cradle of Mayan civilization, the size of a modern day metropolis. This is no mountain. It’s a pyramid and according to the Mirador base and project, it may be the largest pyramid by volume in the world. CNN is traveling with the project’s director and lead archaeologist Richard Hansen and the founder of the Global Heritage Fund Jeff Morgan.
RICHARD HANSEN, DIR., MIRADOR BASIN PROJECT: The pyramid is a structure the world should know because it represents an investment of labor unprecedented in the world history. Every single stone in that building, from the bottom to the top, was carried by human labor.
BALDWIN: And the work to save this pyramid is delicate, done by hand. Guatemalan archaeologists painstakingly help uncover pieces of history built by their ancestors and the view from the top is spectacular.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is some of the Maya world.
BALDWIN: Here on the top, we’re 72 meters or 224 feet from the forest floor and when we talk about sheer size of this area that is el Mirador, just one single Mayan city, archaeologist Dr. Richard Hansen says its size is larger than all of downtown Los Angeles and he says there are still thousands of pyramids yet to be uncovered.
Then Dr. Hansen shows us something few people have ever seen, a relic that is the Mayan story of creation. Oh, my gosh. CNN cameras are the first to capture this fresh discovery which Hansen says will rewrite Mayan history.
This is the creation story of the Mayan people.
HANSEN: This is the creation story and it goes back to at least 300, 200 B.C.
BALDWIN: For decades, historians believe the pyramid was tainted by the Catholic views of Spanish conquistadors. Finding this freeze changes everything because it predates the Spanish arrival by more than a millennium. The challenge now is preserving this area, a jungle, constantly under threat by narco traffickers, loggers and cattle ranchers. Hansen’s guards are on constant standby to keep looters out.
HANSEN: We have had guards in cities throughout the basin, where we haven’t had the resources for that, we have lost 100 percent.
BALDWIN: Hansen has made Mirador his life’s work and hopes to share these Mayan secrets with Guatemala and the world.
HANSEN: The science for the sake of science is sterile (inaudible) blessing the lives of people. And by conserving this, we’re blessing the lives of an entire nation.
BALDWIN: Gorgeous, isn’t it? The Global Heritage Fund is a nonprofit organization also working to preserve Mirador. They have several sites like this around the world, Laos, Cambodia, Turkey—the goal, to conserve the history of these sites and develop a sustainable tourist industry, Wolf, so that the people closest to the site, including the native Guatemalans in this case, are the ones who will benefit the most.
BLITZER: Amazing stuff, Brooke. Thanks for bringing it to us.
GHF Mirador Featured on CNNi World’s Untold Stories:
The Cradle of Maya Civilization
October 2009
CNN International’s “World’s Untold Stories” takes you on another remarkable journey, this time deep into the jungles of Guatemala. 50 kilometers from where the last road ends, near the Mexican border, we find the ruins of the incredible Mayan city of Mirador. At its height, the ancient city was home to a vast population and one of the largest pyramids in the world.
Travel with CNN International as we become the first to show you the summit face of the great La Danta pyramid, explore the inside of a Mayan temple, and record the amazing discovery of a giant piece of civic art that may rewrite the history of the Mayan civilization.
The forgotten city of Mirador
Dr. Richard Hansen, Director, Mirador Basin Project shows CNN’s Brooke Baldwin the cradle of the Mayan civilization.
Early Mayan art and color
Dr. Richard Hansen, Director, Mirador Basin Project shows CNN’s Brooke Baldwin preserved Mayan art and color.
The Popol Vuh shown
Dr. Richard Hansen, Director, Mirador Basin Project shows CNN’s Brooke Baldwin an artefact that shows Mayan ideology.
The true heroes of Mirador
Dr. Richard Hansen, Director, Mirador Basin Project, tells CNN about how the Guatemalan’s are helping preserve their history.
GHF Featured in Fox Business: Preserving History Through Cultural Tourism
September 2009
Global Heritage Fund’s Jeff Morgan was interviewed on Fox Business with Brian Sullivan on the potential for cultural tourism to help developing countries. GHF was invited onto the show as part of their G20 Meeting coverage.
FOX Business with Brian Sullivan
Show Transcript:
BS: Well the ol’ saying goes that ‘you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are from’.
Our next guest has put a unique twist on that theory and his business by preserving historical sites and trying to boost the economies of developing countries through cultural tourism.
Jeff Morgan is the founder of the Global Heritage Fund. We join him now - thank you very much for coming on the program. You are a guy who was working in Silicon Valley very successful….and took your knowledge of business putting it use by trying to save. Historical sites.—not doing it purely for altruistic—I mean this is about helping these economy - how do you do it?
JM: Well, it’s also about helping people that live in very poor countries. So, you have a billion dollar site sitting there that can bring in hundreds of millions of dollars to a developing country like Guatemala that is devastated and has an economy in ruins and the big bright spot is these heritage sites like Tikal which brings in 400 million dollars a year. So this is the way that they can build their national pride and help the people in the country. And it doesn’t destroy the environment like mining and you know a lot of these other - logging – etc.
BS: Bagets and Bordeaux aside, I mean you and I before talked during the commercial break we were talking about France and now so many Americans go to France…..You’re trying to make sort of – More Paris around the world by making these places not only known but also more accessible I presume, and well a little safer as some people might feel nervous going to Tikal in a Guatemalan jungle.
JM: That’s right, the key is capacity building - of the governments and the local communities so that the they get it. A lot of times they don’t understand that these sites are very fragile that they can disappear if you put three million tourists on a 3000 year old city. It will disappear very quickly and we’re in this global crisis now where you have tourism exploding looting out of control. In these sites you’ve got uncontrolled development pressures so they’re basically bulldozing a lot of these ancient sites and it’s all happening on our watch, while we’re here.
BS: When you’re looking to raise money for your organization, you know people want to see retur. They want to say, okay Jeff, what have you done? So he worked in China and you’ve done some work in Vietnam. What types of changes have you seen at those locations that the Global Heritage Fund has invested in?
JM: Well, we’ve been working for seven years so we’re just getting off the block. So far, we put in about fifteen million dollars. More importantly is we’ve gotten the local people and the business people in these countries to match us. So in Guatemala, three million dollars—a group of ten companies came together. Wal-Mart, Citibank….. all these guys….. to help save their most important site. We hope we can turn this on and set a model.
For a dynamic private sector, foundations and corporations, and NGOs like us must be working together to solve this crisis.
BS: Does GHF work at any domestic locations? Obviously, they’re not nearly as old as some of the projects that you worked on but- are there any in the States that you might be looking at.?
JM: No - that’s the National Park Service, and we got a great one here. There are a lot of places [with major sites] that are two dollar a day places. The goal of our fund is working in economies where growing rice is their only option. And where it’s desperate. A lot of these places they’re taking the stones off the sites to build houses and the sites are being looted or they’re being bulldozed over for agriculture. So it is those economies where we work.
BS: What are a couple of your dream projects right now around the world?
JM: One of our newest nomination that’s in Colombia stabilized under Uribe is a site called Ciudad Perdida, or Lost City. In Guatemala is our biggest project and that’s got the largest pyramid in the world. In China, the remote heritage is China’s richest places. We can help the remote provinces especially with a new model.
BS: And if you can figure out what happened the Mayans let us know - one of the world’s greatest mysteries. Right—thanks so much, you do great work. I appreciate it.”
GHF Banteay Chhmar Featured in The New York Times: Coaxing a Khmer Temple From the Jungle’s Embrace
June 2009
By ROBERT TURNBULL
Published: June 2, 2009
To reach the temple of Banteay Chhmar from the Cambodian town of Sisophon in the dry season involves a two-hour drive through parched forests coated with brown dust. The temple is breathtaking. Bas-reliefs depict naval battles between ancient Khmers and their Cham rivals in remarkable detail. Giant sandstone faces loom over thick vegetation strewn with collapsed lintels and broken naga heads.
Visitors to Angkor Wat will have seen something like this. But the glory of Banteay Chhmar is its raw, unadulterated state. Sitting 100 kilometers, or about 60 miles, northwest of Siem Reap, this is Cambodia’s “forgotten” temple. You will probably find yourself alone, able to rekindle the experience of colonial French explorers as they first stumbled upon Khmer antiquity.
But the same isolation was not lost on those who vandalized Banteay Chhmar in the late 1990s. The Cambodian military not only mined the complex but made off with large sections of bas-relief destined for private homes in Bangkok and beyond. Local guides like Seng Samnang remembers the oxcarts loaded with artifacts being wheeled out of the temple. “There was nothing we could do,” he said. “If we had challenged these men we would have been killed.”
About 115 pieces, a truckload, have been recovered and they are sitting in the National Museum in Phnom Penh. Of the rest — there is allegedly much more — reports of Buddha heads appearing in Thai generals’ gardens have done little to ease longstanding tensions over Thai claims to Cambodia’s patrimony, an issue that resurfaced last year, and remains unresolved, at the northern temple of Preah Vihear.
Banteay Chhmar is returning to the spotlight, but now the news is good. In 2008 the Culture Ministry handed control of the temple to Global Heritage Fund, an organization in California that tries to safeguard the world’s most endangered sites. Established in 2002, the fund has a budget of $6 million and 44 employees to rehabilitate the temple, the eventual aim being its inclusion on Unesco’s World Heritage List.
John Sanday is leading the project. He is a British architect who first set foot in Cambodia in 1992 to work on the 12th-century Preah Khan, a temple famous for its outer wall of garudas, the mythic birds of Hindu legend. To help attract financing, the savvy Mr. Sanday, a former employee of the World Monument Fund, managed to persuade a number of private individuals to “adopt” a garuda for $30,000.
Like Preah Khan, Banteay Chhmar was built as a monastic complex by Jayavarman VII, the king who converted Cambodia to Buddhism. But the paucity of surviving inscriptions make it unclear exactly when and why. Writing in 1949, the historian Lawrence Palmer Briggs claimed the temple “rivaled Angkor Wat in size and magnificence.” It has four enclosures surrounded by a moat, a vast artificial lake, or baray, and could sustain a population of at least 100,000.
Romantic it may be, but much of Banteay Chhmar today consists of piles of lichen-stained rubble. Of 400 meters (1,300 feet) of bas-relief wall, only 25 percent still stands. Faced with collapsed or collapsing structure, Mr. Sanday and his team must decide what should be rebuilt or merely stabilized. Whether to replace the missing stones with newly quarried or recycled stone is another question.
A simple paradox lies at the heart of the restoration process: The less you notice, the better the job. Mr. Sanday sees overzealous rebuilding as compromising of a monument’s natural history, and much of its beauty. On the other hand, donors to projects such as these usually want to see tangible results, if not the revelation of some architectural marvel.
Mr. Sanday’s solution is to opt for a “presentation” of key areas of the temple, which in the future can serve as a model. Visitors will enter — as did the ancients — past the eastern gopura, along a causeway largely destroyed by 600 hundreds years of monsoons. Once that is rebuilt, they will advance toward the southeastern gallery of bas-reliefs and access the temple’s central areas along suspended wooden boards.
Under Predrag Gavrilovich, a Macedonian architect and colleague of Mr. Sanday’s, the fund is working on the southeastern gallery. Mr. Gavrilovich was responsible for rebuilding Preah Khan’s beautiful Dharamsala and Hall of Dancers almost entirely from scratch. His achievement was to completely disguise that fact by presenting something that seems utterly natural in its decay.
Can he do the same with Banteay Chhmar? His team has already reassembled the gallery’s square pillars and corbel vaulting. But the foundations need reinforcing before those parts can be lifted to their original position. “The building was not well constructed,” Mr. Gavrilovich said. “Maybe it was built in a hurry.”
For the “face towers,” Mr. Gavrilovich will have the benefit of new software developed by Hans Georg Bock at Heidelberg University in Germany. By scanning all the rubble and carefully analyzing each stone, it is possible to create a 3-D database for a virtual reconstruction of the entire monument.
The temple is only one part of Mr. Sanday’s project. His greater challenge is to turn a heavily mined former war zone with “finite” water supplies and massive scars on the landscape into a fertile and “zoned” area for responsible development as well as tourism.
So water has to come from somewhere. The reservoir the ancient Khmers built just north of the temple is heavily silted. Damming by villagers of the temple’s ornamental moat has resulted in flooding and wastage at monsoon time. With no evidence of an underground water table or any deep interventions, Mr. Sanday has invited James Goodman, a hydrologist in Geneva to research and map the course of the old waterways. Mr. Goodman has been looking both at images taken by the colonial École Française d’Extrême-Orient in 1945 and aerial photos used by the United States during the Indochinese war. The idea would be to rationalize water supplies and to create a well-drilling program.
For the project to work requires the support of the 12,000 or so villagers who might wonder what’s in it for them. Community Based Tourism, a French-inspired organization, aims at rewarding local people with 100 percent of tourist revenue. In 2007 and 2008, 512 visitors showed up. For $7 a night they were offered a tour, a room in a house with hot water and several hours of electricity.
Mr. Sanday is determined to prevent the kind of commercial pressures on temple sites that has dogged Angkor over many years. He said he thinks the authorities are behind him. “The ministry has set out clear zoning rules which dictate the position and size of new building and plans to create a new road that bypasses the temple,” he said.
The Culture Ministry’s heritage police will soon take charge of security. Only then might the return of the original bas-reliefs be possible under an agreement between the culture minister, the Global Heritage Fund and Unesco. That agency’s Teruo Jinnai, for one, welcomed the idea, provided “the security situation meets international requirements.”
It should happen. The return of these priceless bas-reliefs would demonstrate a new spirit of cooperation among those concerned with safeguarding Cambodian heritage. It could also send a clear message to those of ill intent to keep their hands off Banteay Chhmar.
On The Brink
April 2009
By Peter Hughes
UNESCO World Heritage is the most famous brand in conservation. Inclusion on the World Heritage List is supposed to be a talisman protecting the most precious places on the planet. For travellers, it’s taken as a hallmark, distinguishing the best the world has to offer, man-made or natural, up there with the Taj Mahal, the centre of Florence and the Grand Canyon National Park.
At least that’s the perception. But, now In its 37th year, this international order of excellence is looking severely tarnished. World Heritage is no longer the flag waved to warn that our treasures are threatened but a self-serving decoy to delude us into believing the very opposite.
What is its point? The World Heritage List now looks like little more than another grandiose collection of Wonders of the World, of Things to See Before the Icecaps Melt. Its greatest value is as a tool for advertising tourist attractions. Otherwise, it has all the dubious credibility of an organic label slapped on a muddy carrot.
To understand the philosophy of World Heritage, you need to go back to its utopian origins and the adoption, in 1972, of the World Heritage Convention. This is an international treaty that, in effect, says there are places on the planet so transcendently important that mankind as a whole should be responsible for looking after them, and not just the countries in which they happen to be.
What gave the convention a final romantic shove into being was the success of the campaign, mounted in 1959, to save the ancient Egyptian temples in the kingdom of Nubia Abu Simbel among them. At the instigation of UNESCO, 50 countries between them rescued more than a score of monuments from the rising waters of the Nile before the High Dam was built at Aswan.
It was in this spirit of international solidarity, and the imperative to defend places of “outstanding universal value” from increasing threats of destruction, that led to the creation of the World Heritage Fund. The idea was to alert the world to the menaces to its inheritance and mobilise public opinion to the conservation cause. But it doesn’t take much to turn ideals into deals.
There have been successes. The restorations of Angkor and Dubrovnik, the prevention of a highway near the Pyramids and of an aluminium plant on the doorstep of Delphi are just four of many. But the task is immense and grows more daunting by the year. Currently there are 878 places on the list, distributed among 145 countries. More sites are added every summer—27 in 2008. And to administer this programme, U ESCO gives the World Heritage Fund around $4 million a year. There are other funds at its disposal, but most of them are committed to specific areas of spending.
World Heritage is pitifully under-resourced. The World Monuments Fund (WMF), a New York-based non-governmental organisation founded in 1965, disburses around $13 million a year to protect endangered cultural sites. It contributed more than $10 million to the restoration of a single 18th-century church in London-St George’s, Bloomsbury, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The Global Heritage Fund, another NGO, with headquarters in California, has revenue of around $5 million a year, but was only founded in 2002 and is working on just ten sites, all in the developing world. UNESCO has admitted that its list has traditionally been weighted in favour of Europe, Christianity and “elitist” architecture, as opposed to vernacular.
THE VALUE OF A RESPECTED
AGENCY OF THE UNITED NATIONS
BESTOWING ITS IMPRIMATUR ON YOUR CHOSEN ATTRACTIONS IS INCALCULABLE
Unlike independent NGOs, World Heritage doesn’t pick the candidates for consideration for its list. They are submitted by the 185 countries signed up to the convention. Here lies its weakness. World Heritage is a paradigm of the United Nations itself, the ultimate committee, permanently up to its axles in procedure. This, you will recall, was the organisation that managed to vacillate even when faced with the moral absolute of getting relief to the 2008 cyclone victims in Burma. Thus do the values of World Heritage rest in the solipsistic mitts of countries that see it as a means to their own ends, never mind any highflown notion of international solidarity.
Final selection, after a rigorous technical assessment, is down to the 21 members of the World Heritage Committee. For a site then to make it onto the list is a beguiling prospect. The value of having a respected agency of the UN bestowing its imprimatur on your chosen attractions, ostensibly for free, is incalculable. Tourist offices must think they have struck the marketing mother lode. It is not, however, necessarily an incentive for nominating the most vulnerable sites. There must be a temptation to recommend places that need promoting as much as protecting.
Chauvinism comes into it too. World Heritage celebrates man’s achievements and nature’s riches, so countries compete keenly to have their own treasures recognised. Each, however small, feels entitled to at least one site on the list. As a leading figure in international conservation, who asked not to be named, told me: “This has led in recent years to a politicisation of the process and horse-trading that reaches absurd levels; also to the listing of sites that in 1972 would never have been envisaged as being universally significant.” Another informant asked, “Why on earth did an ironworks in Germany go on the list?” A source within the World Heritage Centre’s headquarters in Paris confessed, “The fact that the process is flawed is quite obvious. It’s as flawed as our international politics. The list does what member states want it to do, not what T MDRB N thinks.”
Politicisation cuts two ways. The United States, the principal architect of the World Heritage Fund and the first to ratify the convention, has recently shunned the organisation. For whatever reason—possibly a general disenchantment with the UN—it has not had a site listed since l995. Now opinion has shifted and there are 14 US contenders for future consideration. In publicising their change of heart, the Americans assured sceptics that sovereignty is not an issue. World Heritage has no legal power over the owners of listed sites, nor does the UN have any authority to manage them. Which then raises the question: what influence does UNESCO have, once a site is listed? A spokesman for World Heritage explained that by ratifying the convention, a country promises to preserve its heritage as a principle and implicitly undertakes to look after any site it submits for listing. “It has to say in some detail how it is going to manage that property,” he said. Listed sites are checked every six years. If there are problems, it is up to the states concerned to follow UNESCO’s advice to resolve them.
That’s the theory, but according to two sources active in the conservation field, the reality is different. Both work alongside UNESCO on different projects and did not want to be identified. One told me, “In many cases tbere is poor management of listed sites. In poor countries there is even a lack of awareness among local managers as to what WH listing means. And governments don’t seem to appreciate that listing carries with it responsibilities, not only kudos.”
The other was more pointed: “On the poor side of the planet, hundreds of WH sites have little or no budget, no management plan, no map, no legal protection, no technical training, and these are some of the most important sites.” Asked for examples, he reeled off a roll call of countries, rather than specific locations, Algeria, Honduras, Turkmenistan and Mozambique among them.
It’s not only in the third world that problems arise. UNESCO’s ultimate sanction is to remove any wayward sites from its list, something it has done only once. The Arabian Oryx Sanctuary in Oman was delisted in 2007 when the government reduced the size of the reserve by 90 percent in order to explore for oil. (Alas, poor oryx.) But before pulling the expulsion trigger, UNESCO can draw attention to sites that are especially threatened by placing them on its World Heritage In Danger list.
For some, it amounts to probation. There are 30 places presently on the danger list. Many, like sites in Afghanistan, Congo and Jerusalem, come as no surprise. But among them is Dresden, one of Germany’s showpieces, which could be delisted next year if a new bridge is built across the Elbe. The Galapagos Islands, the first place to be given World Heritage status, are also considered to be particularly at risk. Ironically, the threat there comes indirectly from tourism, which many see as an inevitable by-product of World Heritage listing.
PERHAPS THE GREATEST
FAILURE IS THE WAY IN WHICH
THE ORIGINAL ETHOS OF WORLD HERITAGE
HAS BEEN PERVERTED
UNESCO’s is not the only danger list. Every two years the World Monuments Fund publishes its list of the world’s 100 most-endangered sites. The latest came out in 2008. It’s instructive to compare the two. Only three places appear on both. One comprises the Buddhist remains of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, where two monumental statues from the sixth century were blown up by the Taliban in 2001. This site on the Silk Road dating from the first to 13th centuries has been abandoned and looted, but now Japan is paying for its salvage. The other two places on both UNESCO and WMF danger lists are the cultural-heritage sites of Iraq (UNESCO concentrates on the ancient cities of Ashur and Samarra while WMF frets about the country as a whole), and the great Indian Ocean ports at Kilwa in Tanzania through which so much trade passed from the 13th to 16th centuries and which are deteriorating badly.
Yet 18 sites on the main World Heritage List—or key buildings within them—not thought to be in peril by UNESCO, appear among the WMF’s most endangered (see next story). The remaining 79 WMF sites are not registered with World Heritage at all, presumably because their countries don’t think their status warrants it. What makes the comparison more sobering is that on WMF’s long list, from which the 100 are picked, the number of sites under threat runs to more than 400.
The World Heritage spokesman said they made no claims to exclusivity. “UNESCO is not telling countries they should only preserve sites on the list. It’s supposed to encourage an international momentum for heritage preservation. It never pretends to be the only body in charge of that,” he said. The trouble is, that’s not the way the public sees it. Most people think the World Heritage List is definitive and that its sites are all fuIfy funded and scrupulously managed. Many, even some of the most high-profile, are not. UNESCO itself is unhappy with the way the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu are being run. Others worry about the pressure of tourist development at Angkor.
But perhaps the greatest failure is the way in which the original ethos of World Heritage has been perverted. Rather than alerting us to the danger to our precious places, it now makes us complacent; rather than drawing attention to the fragility of our heritage, it is being worn as a badge to market it. God is in His heaven, heritage is on the list and all’s well with the world. It isn’t.
