Some 35,000 petroglyphs located in Pakistan's Indus River area will soon be flooded by a giant dam. An archeologist from Heidelberg is trying to save as much as he can before encroaching modernity destroys the remote area's cultural history.[Updated on the 7th of May 2007.]
[That was Part One of a two-part series; Part Two was "a fight against time and the water level".]
This is particularly interesting to me as it appears very different to the situation in Kurdistan/Turkey, where international archaeologists are boycotting the rescue work to avoid contributing to, cooperating with or condoning the gross human rights violations the dam projects there impose.
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I have worked in several "salvage" or "rescue" archaeology projects. There is always a good and bad side. Unfortunately, archaeologists do not really have much political clout in terms of stopping or even slowing down construction projects. Some of them do get too close to developers and corrupt politicians, however. Pakistan and India do both have very active archaeological communities and strong laws protecting most cultural property. Perhaps Buddhist works are being under-protected here because Pakistan is an Islamic country?
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