Emergency care training workshops for Syrian museum collections

Summary

Amidst the atrocities of Syria’s civil war, Syrian curators, heritage professionals, and activists courageously risk their lives to protect the country’s cultural heritage. Working in areas outside of the Assad regime’s control, these individuals have managed to safeguard collections salvaged from damaged museums, religious institutions, and looted sites. This paper discusses a workshop, held in Turkey, which brought together museum curators, heritage professionals, and other members of civil society from the Idlib and Aleppo provinces of northern Syria. The workshop offered training on how to secure museum collections safely during emergencies and provided participants with basic supplies for packing and securing museum collections. Furthermore, one of the outcomes of this workshop is an emergency plan to protect the Ma’arra Museum in the Idlib province. The museum holds a magnificent collection of well-preserved Roman and early Christian mosaics and has suffered collateral damage from aerial barrel bombings and repeated attacks from Jihadi militants. This presentation examines the steps required to undertake the workshop, its reception among the Syrian participants, and its subsequent outcomes.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Intentional destruction of cultural heritage: Evidence and responses in Syria and Iraq

Keywords

Spatial Coverage