Relief as Bombs Avoid Baghdad Historical Sites : Art: Archeologists find hope in Gen. Colin Powell’s comment that the U.S. is trying to spare Iraqi artifacts.

Archeologists and art historians who specialize in the cultural history of Iraq tuned to television news reports of the bombing of Baghdad on Thursday with a strange mixture of concern and relief.

The concern came from fears that the unprecedented, massive bombing of Baghdad and other Iraqi locales might inflict irreparable damage on museums and archeological sites that contain some of the richest--and most irreplaceable--treasures relating to Mideast history and culture.

At the same time, however, these scholars--usually more conversant with the academic environment than that of the battlefield--responded with relief to remarks early Thursday by Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Powell told reporters at the Pentagon briefing that U.S. commanders have tried to avoid wholesale destruction of historic materials throughout Iraq in selecting targets for at least the first round of attacks by the combined air forces of the United States and its allies.

“We were very sensitive,” Powell said in reviewing bomb-damage assessment reports from massive overnight raids by manned aircraft and guided missiles, “to the cultural and religious sites in the area.”

Baghdad is the home of the Iraq Museum, which houses a unique collection of artifacts dating from the earliest flowering of civilization in Mesopotamia--when the city itself was called Babylon. Occupying the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, Baghdad is in the middle of an area known to every schoolchild as the cradle of civilization.

Some scholars said they had been told the museum had evacuated most of its collection to underground bomb shelters--a technique the museum perfected during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, said Elizabeth Stone, an associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Stone, who in May left a dig at Mashkan-Shapir, about 80 miles southeast of Baghdad, said Thursday that she is uncertain when her team will be able to resume work at the site, where excavation continued without interruption during the final two years of Iraq’s earlier conflict with Iran, which ended in August, 1988.

Stone said that while archeological treasures in Baghdad survived a series of missile attacks by the Iranians, scholars remain concerned about the potential for catastrophic damage to artifacts or digging sites because the hostilities that broke out Wednesday involve far more potent technological weapons than have ever been seen in the history of warfare.

In fact, while Stone and other scholars voiced extreme concerns about the fate of antiquities and artifacts, they emphasized that those emotions are tempered by fears for the human toll of the war.

“I heard (what Powell said) and that was certainly encouraging,” Stone said. “The greatest concern (in terms of bomb damage to artifacts) is the Iraq Museum. The damage that seems to be being inflicted on Baghdad is infinitely greater than anything Baghdad has suffered before. My greatest concern, frankly, is the people at this point. All of these archeological things tend to become irrelevant. We have a lot of friends in Baghdad.”

Stone said that though the Iraq Museum was evacuated six times during the Iran-Iraq conflict--and presumably has been emptied again of everything portable--the museum’s collection includes a number of crucial, large pieces that have been structurally incorporated into the museum building and cannot be removed.

Baghdad itself and much of the rest of Iraq, said Stone and other scholars, is literally a maze of archeological sites, only some of which have been excavated.

“This is one time that my greatest concern is for the present (rather) than for the past,” said Eric Meyers, president of the Baltimore-based American Schools of Oriental Research and an expert on Mideast cultural history. “The fact that Gen. Powell is aware of the historic sites expresses to me a tremendous sensitivity on the part of the U.S. armed forces.

“At the same time, it would be an irreplaceable loss to the cultural history of humankind should some of the major sites, like Babylon, be lost.”

Meyers said that earlier wars in the Mideast--particularly military action in Israel, Syria and Lebanon--have already taken a devastating toll on archeological sites, especially in the Golan Heights, where tank battles in 1967 inflicted devastating damage on artifacts that were still in the ground.

He said Powell’s remark about cultural and religious sites appeared to signal a new sensitivity on the part of military commanders. “You could have expressed these same concerns in Lebanon in 1967,” he said. “At that time, nobody took much note of it. Sites have been carved up by bombs and tanks and are gone forever. Hundreds of them. The new sensitivity is wonderful, but whatever it takes to spare life, that’s what should be done, even if it means destruction (of a crucial) site.”

Other scholars suggested that the technological sophistication of the arsenal being used by the United States may actually offer greater protection for cultural sites than they received in earlier conflicts, even though the amounts of explosives being employed almost defy the imagination--an irony pointed out by Hershel Shanks, editor of the Washington-based Biblical Archaelogy Review.

“I think that the American precision bombing and detailed planning is extraordinary, in its consideration for the safety of our own men and women and Iraqi and Kuwaiti civilians, and also for the religious and cultural sites,” he said. “It is certainly in the highest traditions of our country and our faiths.”

In all, said David Stronach, a UC Berkeley professor of Near Eastern studies, “I suppose one has greater grounds for optimism that this aspect of the ancient heritage of (Iraq) is likely to come out of the war all right. Nevertheless, the power of the weapons that are being used is very alarming. Certain mistakes are bound to be made.

“I would expect there will be losses on the cultural side that we will all much, much regret.”