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Untitled Document
Media Advisory

Lecture on looting of Iraqi antiquities
 

03 February 2005

ATTENTION: News desks

Contact: By Janet Gilmore, Media Relations
(510) 642-5685 jangilmore@berkeley.edu


WHAT
"Mesopotamia Endangered: Witnessing the Loss of History," a lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, by Lebanese archaeologist-journalist Joanne Farchakh about the on-going looting of Iraqi archaeological sites and antiquities.

WHEN
Monday, Feb. 7, 5:30 p.m.

WHERE
Dwinelle Hall, Room 370

WHO
Joanne Farchakh made reporting trips to Iraq in 2002, 2003 and 2004. She holds a bachelor's degree in art and archaeology and a master's degree in journalism from the Lebanese University in Beirut.  She has excavated in Lebanon (Beirut, 1993-1996) and in Syria (Um el-Tellal, 1997). Farchakh is Mideast correspondent for Archeologia magazine, and her reports have appeared in Archaeology Magazine and in publications in Beirut and Paris.

She has presented papers on her work in Iraq at the World Archaeological Congress (Washington D.C., 2003) and at the Global Heritage Fund Workshop on Iraqi Heritage, (Petra, Jordan, June 2004).

DETAILS
In March 2003, the world turned its attention to the tragic looting of Iraqi museums and other cultural institutions. Since then, persistent looting and destruction have occurred at Iraq's archaeological sites. Whole cities that lay buried in the Iraqi countryside have been systematically plundered of their marketable artifacts, such as inscribed tablets, small sculptures and pottery. Farchakh's investigative reporting in Iraq documents this large-scale devastation of history in graphic images.

 

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