In the line of fire

Palmyra, Nimrud, the Bamiyan Buddhas – the list of antiquities felled in recent years goes on. But at one site in Afghanistan, insurgents aren’t the greatest threat, finds Andrew Lawler

THE rocket attack began around 10 pm, after the western sky behind the rugged mountains of Afghanistan’s Logar province had faded to black. In the remote camp, a 90-minute drive south-east of Kabul, explosions and gunfire startled archaeologists out of their beds.

The Taliban attack, in May 2013, was an attempt to overrun the heavily guarded compound that is home to one of Central Asia’s largest Buddhist ruins, an international team of archaeologists – and a group of Chinese miners. It failed, but resistance came at a cost. “Five soldiers died defending us,” recalls Roberta Marziani, an Italian researcher.

Excavating ancient sites is typically dirty and backbreaking work. But at Mes Aynak, 2500 metres up in the Hindu Kush mountains, archaeologists must also cope with the threat of violence and stray landmines planted long ago by Soviet forces. The site was once a key stop on the ancient Silk Road connecting Europe, India and China. It was occupied for at least a millennium by monks, artisans, traders and soldiers. They left behind a dazzling array of stupas, walled monasteries, workshops and homes filled with thousands of Buddhist statues, paintings, manuscripts, coins and gem-encrusted jewellery.

These treasures are in an area where the Taliban and the Afghan government vie for control, and repeated attacks have succeeded in all but shutting down excavations. Marziani and most Western experts left in March 2014. But the real threat to the site doesn’t come from the Taliban, who infamously destroyed the giant Bamiyan Buddhas to the north-west of Kabul in 2001. Instead, bulldozers and dynamite operated by a Chinese state-owned mining company are to turn the area into a vast open-pit mine.

The attraction is one of the planet’s richest copper deposits – right beneath the ancient ruins. It is the reason this region once thrived: “Mes Aynak” means “little copper well” in Dari. Afghan, US and World Bank officials hope the mine will pump much needed revenue into Kabul’s empty coffers by producing up to 343,000 tonnes of metal each year.

Afghanistan’s per capita income is less than $700 a year, making it one of the world’s poorest nations, but the CIA estimates that well over $1 trillion in minerals are waiting to be extracted within its borders. Mes Aynak is the centrepiece of that push. It could contain more than 5.5 million tonnes of copper and provide hundreds of millions of dollars annually along with more than 4000 jobs. So in 2008, the Afghan government leased the mining rights to the Metallurgical Corporation of China (MCC) for 30 years, in a deal worth $3.5 billion.

Wahidullah Shahrani, Afghanistan’s minister of mines until earlier this year, insists that conservation work can coexist with mine preparations and says no mining will take place before the archaeological work is
done. But the majority of the ancient site’s 50 hectares – roughly the size of Pompeii – sits directly on top of the copper deposits. The vast open-pit mine would inevitably destroy the heady mix of Hellenistic, Persian and Indian architecture at the surface – not to mention the older layers that are thought to reach back to the Bronze Age. No site on Earth places cultural heritage more at odds with economic development.

It’s no accident that generations of monks lived in sumptuous monasteries above this vein of ore in a hardscrabble region of bleak and barren hills. Nor will the Chinese be the first to reap its riches. Beneath the stupas is
a maze of shafts and tunnels. Radiocarbon dating of organic material found at the site suggests it was mined for at least a 1000 years, from the 2nd century BC until the arrival of Arab armies during the 8th century AD.

Zemaryalai Tarzi, former head of the Archaeology Institute of Kabul, was among the first archaeologists to explore the site in 1973, before the invasion by the Soviet Union shut down research. “Everywhere, traces of metallurgy are visible on the surface,” he says. The ancient miners left behind workshops, blast furnaces and 10-metre-high mounds of blue-black slag. Such huge quantities of slag mean the copper ore was both mined and smelted on-site. Underground, Tarzi found a bewildering network of galleries and tunnels, some so small that they point to frequent use of child labour.

Silk crossroads

To those few who have visited Mes Aynak, it offers a unique glimpse into a sophisticated early mining economy. “You should see the mine shafts we have here,” marvels Agnieszka Dolatowska, a Polish archaeologist still working at the site. Some reach 40 metres in depth. “Nowhere else in the world can you find so many remains of ancient mining and metallurgy.” Tarzi calls it “one of the most intriguing mining sites in Central Asia, if not the world”.

The finds suggest Mes Aynak was probably an industrial site first and a religious one second. Copper ore was a vital part of the early international economy, particularly as copper coins came into widespread use and Europe and Asia were closely linked by the Silk Road for the first time in history. The residents of Mes Aynak were part of the Kushan Empire that united much of India and Central Asia in the 1st century AD and traded for Chinese dishes, Egyptian glassware and Indian ivories.

Tarzi and other archaeologists now suspect that the mine was a key revenue source for the Kushans and the empires that followed. For several centuries, the Mes Aynak’s merchants used its proceeds to fund Buddhist monasteries, construct stupas and pay artisans to produce vast quantities of religious art. Paintings have been found showing what seem to be well-heeled donors in elegant clothes and make-up sitting at the foot of the Buddha.

Excavators have uncovered an astonishing mass of material dating from this heyday. It suggests this was a highly cosmopolitan settlement open to far more than devout Buddhists. A Zoroastrian temple and a statue of Ardokhsho, an Iranian goddess also associated with the Indian deity Lakshmi, testify to a religious mixing and tolerance in the region. Digs at Bamiyan, in contrast, have recovered scant non-Buddhist material.

“The Silk Road was significant because of the movement of religions, ideas, technologies and languages that it enabled,” says Tim Williams of the University College London, in the UK. “That is how it changed the world. Mes Aynak reflects that complexity.”

Dolatowska says there is evidence of strong influences from India and remnants of the Greco-Bactrian culture left after Alexander the Great’s foray into Afghanistan in the
4th century BC. And there are signs that the Sasanian Empire, based in Persia and firmly Zoroastrian in its beliefs, reached deeper into Afghanistan than once thought, controlling Mes Aynak on and off after the 4th century AD. Then, sometime in the 8th century the site was abandoned.

Soviet geologists rediscovered it in the 1960s. In the 1990s, with the Taliban in charge, Al-Qaida used the area as a training camp and way station for some of the 9/11 hijackers, unaware of the heathen idols buried just below. In the 2000s, locals noticed valuable artefacts and began looting. Then, in 2008, the deal was struck with the Beijing-based MCC to once more make Mes Aynak a centre of power and wealth for the struggling nation.

Not long after the deal was signed, archaeologists found evidence of extensive Buddhist ruins at the site of the proposed pit. Omar Sultan at the Ministry of Information and Culture and Philippe Marquis, who headed the French archaeological mission in Kabul, sounded the alarm. The government reluctantly agreed to allow three years of archaeological excavations before demolition began. The World Bank chipped in $8 million to fund the archaeology project, with support from UNESCO, the French mission and the US government. Work began in earnest in 2010.

But today work is slow. Mes Aynak is remote, unwelcoming and downright dangerous. Two concentric rings of fence surround a 4000-hectare area, with the ancient ruins at its centre. Dozens of checkpoints and 1500 guards make this one of Afghanistan’s most fortified compounds outside Kabul. Inside is a camp for Chinese workers (see picture, page 33), located on top of a monastery called Gol Hamid. The Chinese have fled the site several times in the wake of Taliban attacks over the years. At least one of their workers was killed by improvised explosive devices on the Kabul road.

A key question for scholars of the ancient world is when and where miners first began to extract copper. Jonathan Kenoyer, a University of Wisconsin archaeologist who has visited Mes Aynak, suspects they were at work there as early as 2000 BC, when Bronze Age civilisation flourished along the Indus river valley to the south. This possibility, he says, makes the site extremely significant for understanding the role of metals and trade in early urban societies. Marek Lemiesz, who led the international effort until this summer, has said that under normal circumstances it would take at least 20 years to excavate such a site. To get at the older layers archaeologists must first carefully excavate and catalogue materials found above them, a time-consuming and expensive process made nearly impossible by the current security situation. There is no time to extend our knowledge of that period, says Dolatowska.

Fortunately for archaeologists, a precipitous drop in copper prices, contract disputes and delays in building the railroads, power plants and smelters necessary to extract and ship the metal out, have all pushed back the date for construction of the open-pit mine. “There is no way that mining can commence at that location in anything less than three years, probably more,” adds Cheryl Benard, head of the Washington-based Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage.

Dig in disarray

It’s small comfort for the archaeologists. According to interviews with foreign academics and reports from the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, the excavation is in serious disarray. Only half a dozen Western archaeologists remain; the ministry says at least 10 are required to maintain minimum excavation standards.

In June 2014, insurgents executed eight workers who were clearing landmines in the area. Security concerns and a strike by local workers who hadn’t been paid for six months led the government to shut the entire site for most of that summer and into the autumn. It has recently refused to extend Lemiesz’s contract as lead international archaeologist, according to Dolatowski, and he has yet to be replaced. Lemiesz couldn’t be reached for comment, but in his 2014 reports he complained about rocket attacks, roadside  bombs inside the security zone, poor management and clashes with Afghan colleagues over digging methods.

Sultan, who now liaises between the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum and the Ministry of Information and Culture, declined to discuss Lemiesz’s employment. He insists that the site is now safe and that Western archaeologists will soon return. “I just spent two nights there,” he says. “There is no security problem.” He says work continues with the help of 182 labourers overseen by Tajik and Afghan excavators and a skeleton crew of Westerners.

Others say that part of the problem is a turf war between the two ministries. “To put it simply, on the Ministry of Mines side there is too much money and poor management – not to say mismanagement,” says Marquis. And at the Ministry of Information and Culture, which is responsible for the archaeology effort, there is too little money and experience in dealing with a budget, he adds.

“You have to understand that in Afghanistan this is quite normal,” says Marziani. “You don’t always get paid on time.”

In the meantime, the five years of work has amassed an astonishing amount of material, but little has been analysed. More than 1000 statues have been recovered, from massive Buddhas to a small, delicate terra cotta figure of a woman breastfeeding a child. Recently, a fragile manuscript emerged, that some reports claim mentions Alexander the Great.

The sheer scale of the site and huge numbers of artefacts would pose a challenge for even the most well-equipped, trained and funded archaeological team. “They have been digging Pompeii for a century, and there is still more to be found there,” says Marziani.

Smuggled coins

To make matters worse, archaeologists worry about the fate of the material that has already been dug up. Many of the finds have been sent to the already crowded National Museum in Kabul. Sultan says another storage facility will soon be ready. But the World Bank’s Michael Stanley notes that any large cache of Buddhist material could prove a tempting target for the Taliban. Archaeologists are also concerned that the mass of artefacts on site will prove irresistible to looters. Statues such as those found at Mes Aynak can go for tens of thousands of dollars on the international art market. Afghan officials have already accused Tajik specialists of damaging artefacts they tried to smuggle out of the security zone, though it isn’t clear if anyone was prosecuted. Marquis says he has encountered vendors selling Sasanian coins clearly identified as originating at Mes Aynak. “If the people on site aren’t paid,” he adds, “this is going to be more and more frequent.”

Whether archaeologists can take advantage of the grace period offered by the drop in copper prices remains an open question. As the US withdraws from the country, donors tire and the Taliban continues its attacks, ancient sites like Mes Aynak are increasingly in jeopardy. “It’s a big sacrifice to be there,” says Marziani, who worked at the site for two years. “You go to Kabul maybe once a month for a meal so as not to go crazy. It was a good experience, but a hard lifestyle.”