CHW Special Reports

Between September 2022 and April 2023, Caucasus Heritage Watch released two special forensic reports on cultural heritage caught up in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Special Report #1 Silent Erasure: A Satellite Investigation of the Destruction of Armenian Cultural Heritage in Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan documents the erasure of almost the entire Armenian heritage landscape in Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan province by the Aliyev regime.

CHW Special Report #2 Between the Wars: A Satellite Investigation of the Treatment of Azerbaijani Cultural Heritage in the Unrecognized Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, 1994-2020 details the varied treatment of Azerbaijani cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh during the decades of Armenian administration.

Together, these reports paint a complete picture of the fate of cultural heritage caught up in the most enduring conflict of the post-Soviet era.

Introducing Caucasus Heritage Watch

Nagorno-Karabakh
Can the technologies of the global panopticon be used to deter states from programs of cultural genocide? Caucasus Heritage Watch, a new research program led by Lori Khatchadourian and myself (Cornell University) alongside Ian Lindsay (Purdue University), is posing this question in the aftermath of the 2020 renewal of hostilities in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the South Caucasus. Here I hope to document some of the issues that arise in the course of a long term civil society based monitoring program. CHW’s website will provide regular reports as well as an up to date dashboard on heritage destruction. Moreover, The Aragats Foundation is developing a social media based effort to track examples of heritage appropriation in the region.

Preventing the Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh

Here is an opinion piece that Lori Khatchadourian and I just posted on Cornell’s Medium blog entitled “The US can help prevent the destruction of cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh. Here’s how.” In it, we set out three ways that the incoming Biden administration can help head off an impending cultural heritage calamity in the South Caucasus.

The Fate of Civilization

This semester I return to full time teaching at Cornell and am reviving my course on The Rise and Fall of “Civilization'”. The idea of the course is still as it has been in the past: to interrogate the idea of civilization, how it gets constructed and refracted through the ancient past and then rebuilt as a foundation for modernity…as well as modernity’s undoing. But this time around I plan to use a number of active learning approaches to enhance student learning and also train their archaeological eyes.

Using TimelineJS, a tool from the Knight Lab, I’ve made a timeline for the intersecting and overlapping frameworks of the course. Students will be using the same tool for timelines of their own.

Students will also be using StoryMapJS for exercises centered on the material landscape of the Cornell Campus.

The StoryMap above is a demonstration version that I use for showing students how to navigate the various tools available.

The Fate of Walls

From a recent op-ed: For five millennia, politicians have proposed walls like Trump’s. They don’t work.  From The Washington Post, Sunday July 29, 2016.

The opening:

Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico to block the flow of migrants has been justly criticized on moral, economic and political grounds. But while the Trump Wall (as he has called it) is the most provocative proposal of the election season, it is not particularly original. Over the past five millennia, politicians have repeatedly turned to large walls to solve problems. We should look carefully at the track record of this ancient technology before we invest what some estimates suggest could be $25 billion in construction costs for a 2,000-mile-long wall, plus millions more in annual maintenance.

And the conclusion:

What is most captivating about barrier walls, like the Trump Wall, is neither the scope of their construction nor the resoluteness of their strategic vision. Rather, they are powerful symbols of a particular kind of hubris, the conceit that the translation of mania into masonry can alter the decisions, fortunes and futures of countless others through architectural intimidation. Here, the Berlin Wall should still live in all of our memories as a potent symbol of how walls and totalitarian politics often find common cause. Barrier walls are not simply clumsy, imprecise solutions to problems of population movement, past and present; they also represent a catastrophic failure of political imagination endemic to totalitarian thinking.

Click on the link above for the full op-ed.

Skill and the Liberal Arts

A rising chorus of voices, mostly emanating from the Republican congress, has been stridently attacking research and teaching in the liberal arts. The assault on research has been led most persistently by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, led by Rep. Lamar Smith. On February 10, the Committee released a press release decrying the use of taxpayer money to support projects ranging from archaeology and anthropology (my disciplines) to literary studies and history. The problem, they suggest, was that such research does not help create jobs or new technologies. Not surprisingly then, the attack on teaching has tried to pit the liberal arts against the so-called STEM fields, suggesting that only the latter foster the skills students need to get jobs and benefit society. As presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio put it last November “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers” (NYT 11/11/15). One thing is clear, Rubio’s campaign could use a grammarian or two.

The Republican case for less of the liberal arts and more technical training seems to arise from a profound misunderstanding of “skills”, those abilities that we cultivate through education and deploy in the course of a lifetime. Smith, Rubio, and others possess a surprisingly narrow understanding of skill, limited solely to a single job. Skill in welding is an excellent thing and can secure a job. But a successful welder might well decide to start a small business, for which very different skills are needed. Education in welding would not be enough. What if that business had international aspirations? That would require still other skills. And after not just a job, but a career, perhaps our welder might enter politics to serve the public good. Does that not require still more skills beyond welding?

Two things are surprising about the blinkered sense of skill embodied in Republican attacks on the liberal arts. The first is that they value job preparation over career training. The latter requires a far more diverse array of skills than any single technical aptitude. The second is that the jobs they want to prepare citizens for do not include preparation to lead the country as citizens or public servants. In other words, many of our leaders want students to be prepared for a job, just not their job.

It is a fundamental tenet of modern democratic politics that all citizens must be prepared not only for a job, but for careers that will demand a lifetime of many different skills. We must train our students how to understand the human condition (anthropology), to assess the importance of the past in contemporary problems (history, archaeology), to think about the relationship between general solutions and particular problems (philosophy), and to encounter humanity with empathy for others (literature, arts, etc.). In doing so, we also prepare them for a lifetime of citizenship, arming them with the tools to assess the claims of those in power, evaluate the programs of those who seek it, and reflect upon their own ability to contribute to the common good. It would be quite fitting then if one day a student of the liberal arts took Mr. Smith’s or Mr. Rubio’s job, since neither of them appears to understand the preparation required.

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