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A 2021 satellite image (left) of an archaeological site in the Balkh province of Afghanistan shows evidence that bulldozers have scraped the left side of the site. By late 2022 (right), it appears looters have dug numerous pits in the cleared area.MAXAR/DIGITAL GLOBE/PREPARED BY CHICAGO CENTER FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE PRESERVATION
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Looting of archaeological sites in Afghanistan is continuing, despite vows by the Taliban government to protect the nation’s cultural treasures, a recent analysis finds.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) to help comb through a trove of satellite images, researchers at the University of Chicago’s (UC’s) Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation found that looters are still actively pillaging at least 3 dozen sites that had been targeted before the Taliban came to power in August 2021. Researchers say the finding suggests the Taliban government, like its predecessor, is having difficulty cracking down on local leaders who profit from selling artifacts.
“Since coming to power, the Taliban has taken some steps” to protect archaeological sites and prevent smuggling, says Noor Agha Noori, former director of the Archaeology Institute of Afghanistan who is now a Ph.D. student at the Free University of Berlin. But, “The borders remain porous, and there are no clear policies or laws and regulations to punish those violating Afghanistan’s cultural heritage,” he says.
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The recent analysis of looting in Afghanistan grew out of the Afghan Heritage Mapping Partnership, a U.S. government–funded effort to identify archaeological sites across the nation. When the project began in 2015, previous efforts had documented some 5000 sites, including settlements dating back to the Achaemenid Empire some 2500 years ago and later occupations along the Silk Road trade route. But researchers suspected that was “just a fraction of what is really there,” says archaeologist Gil Stein, director of the UC center.
Stein’s team trained and collaborated with Afghan archaeologists to create a database of satellite images of Afghanistan. They also worked with computer scientists to develop an AI that could recognize archaeological sites, training it on nearly 2000 images of known sites. By 2021, such tools had enabled teams in Chicago and Kabul to identify more than 29,000 archaeological sites—the largest ever data set gathered for Afghanistan. The AI “even spott[ed] sites that our human analysts had not been able to identify,” Stein says. Some, he added, “any looter would be irresistibly drawn to.”
The researchers soon discovered the tools could also “identify which sites were looted,” Stein says. At some sites, the imagery shows pits dug with picks and shovels. Damage done by bulldozers begins to show up in images taken after 2017, when conflict with the resurgent Taliban was ramping up. Looters “would essentially bulldoze an already looted site … exposing a completely new undisturbed area,” Stein says. When the researchers examined 162 sites known to have been looted between 2018 and 2021, they found 37 that showed signs of continued looting since the Taliban came to power. Diggers appear to have remained active, for example, near a historic Buddhist monastery.
It is unclear whether Taliban officials are directly involved in the looting, researchers say. But artifact smugglers are known to pay local Taliban commanders a “commission” for antiquities acquired from areas they control, says an Afghan archaeologist who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue. The artifacts often show up in new structures, he says, including “pillars used in hotels [and] ceramics in baths and jacuzzis.”
Taliban officials did not respond to a request for comment. But the government has in the past publicly condemned the looting of archaeological sites, and since coming to power has moved to reopen the National Museum of Afghanistan and protect or restore some monuments and cultural sites. It has also said it would welcome collaborating with foreign donors on archaeological projects. But with the Taliban mostly ostracized from the international community, few donors have been willing to step forward.
