Creating the Iraqi Cultural Heritage Destruction Database: Calculating a Heritage Destruction Index | Benjamin Isakhan - Academia.edu
abernard102@gmail.com 2014-09-08
Summary:
Use the link to access the full text article posted to academia.edu and published in the International Journal of Heritage Studies. "Over the past decade there have been constant reports of damage to signi
cant cultural property in several complex (post-)con
ict and (post-)revolutionary states. Recent events in Syria, Mali, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Afghanistan andIraq
–
as devastating as they have been for people
–
have also had dramaticconsequences for a number of important cultural heritage sites. Despite theseverity of these events and global concern, the
eld of heritage studies has not developed a methodology for cataloguing such heritage destruction in adatabase. Addressing this paucity in the literature, this article details themethodology developed to produce the Iraq Cultural Property Destructiondatabase, the world
’
s
rst database to document the destruction of cultural property in Iraq. This article also documents the calculation of the HeritageDestruction Index
–
a scale for measuring both the heritage
‘
signi
cance
’
of asite and the overall level of destruction. Finally, this article also demonstrates the manifold uses of such a database in measuring and monitoring heritagedestruction in Iraq. This study therefore sets a signi
cant precedent in heritagestudies by providing methods that can be applied to other contexts (past, present and future) to document the destruction of cultural property in complex contexts."