The importance of documenting cultural heritage

In 1957 the British archaeologist John S.V. Bradford – a pioneer in the use of aerial photography for the documentation of archaeological landscape - published the map of the impressive walls surrounding the ancient city of Arpi, the most important centre of the pre-Roman Daunian culture flourished in the Italian region of Apulia between VIII and IV centuries B.C. At that time the archaeological site, including the necropolis, was still unexcavated, but the Daunian material culture was already internationally known, and highly demanded, for its striking pottery with geometric patterning and crude depiction of humans, plants, and birds. When many years later the local office of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage started some field excavation in Arpi, the savage looting of the site started as well.

The looting, and the intentional destruction of archaeological artifacts considered “non-marketable” continued for years, paralleling the growing demand for any Apulian artifacts, without exception, by the international antiquities market, both legal and illegal: it has been calculated that during the last twenty years about 200.000 archaeological artifacts have been looted from the area surrounding the ancient site of Arpi.

Infamous is the case of the vandalization of the Tomb of Medusa, probably one of the most remarkable underground burial chamber, first cleaned out of the funerary objects, and then excavated with a digger that knocked down the columns decorating the entrance, in order to remove the capitals and tympanum (gable) with the relief of Medusa’s head.

Luckily, the looters were stopped by the police, and so the artifacts recovered and transferred in a museum. After such an event, the archaeologists immediately started a systematic exploration and documentation of the site, in order to gather as much information as possible from what had survived of the site’s mutilated original context.

Documenting cultural objects, and especially archaeological artifact, means gathering and recording all pertinent data and information, both in written and visual forms, accumulated during the examination and treatment of a cultural property. Documentation enables us to physically preserve a cultural object, and more importantly enables us to understand and preserve the history, and so the memory, of the cultural environment, the context, that produced and used that object, especially when the object, for whatever reasons, becomes no longer physically available. Also, the information acquired can be presented to the general public in order to promote understanding and appreciation for the ancient culture to which the artifacts belong.

As the international news from Egypt remind us these very days, we live in a contemporary world where the cultural heritage (whether a museum artifact, a monument, an archaeological site, or a cultural landscape) is more than ever threatened by an array of dangers mostly due, apart from natural disasters, to human negligence and insanity, a systematic documentation represents a crucial aspect of its understanding, protection and preservation on a global scale.

Photo: The entrance of the looted “Medusa’s Tomb” in the ancient Daunian site of Arpi (Apulia Region, Italy) ©Associazione ONLUS MeteoNetwork

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