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.

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