“Artifact War” - Documentary Film Review
Humans are the sum of the people who came before them. We grow from generation to generation and use the tools and experiences of the people who came before us to shape our future. As much as the past is a record of what once was, it’s also a means of connecting to something deeper, more intrinsic. It’s overwhelming and beautiful to know that there are artifacts dating back to some of the earliest humans available to be seen on display in museums. Of course, that’s not without problems of its own. If a hypothetical piece of a Syrian mosaic is on display in a museum in England, how did it get there? Was it donated by Syrian people or was it looted and sold on the black market? Who does that benefit? These are some of the questions at the heart of the documentary Artifact War, which takes viewers on a true, life-or-death, Indiana Jones archaeological mission to save Syrian artifacts.
Indiana Jones is most people’s first introduction to archaeology. The roguish archaeologist played by Harrison Ford has spent five movies romping around the world, punching Nazis, and saving the world’s artifacts. Most actual archaeologists don’t have any whip-snapping or Nazi-punching in their day-to-day jobs. However, Artifact War gives audiences a glimpse of archaeologists whose lives do look a lot like an Indiana Jones movie, except the stakes are extremely real for this crew. The documentary calls them The Professor, The Engineer, The Inside Man, and The Researcher. Together, they work tirelessly to save artifacts in Syria that are being looted by Isis and others to be sold on the black market.
Courtesy of Artifact War
When the civil war broke out in Syria in 2012, heritage sites were targeted and Amr, The Professor, was concerned that art and important artifacts would be lost forever in the warfare. Amr had seen what happened a decade earlier in Iraq, where museums and historical sites were looted. As an archaeologist (with an Indiana Jones action figure in his college office), he knew he wanted to do something to help, but wasn’t sure what that meant. That sentiment is echoed through the rest of the team as well. “We’re just doing it,” one of the team members says toward the end of the film. There was no roadmap, no directions for saving objects of cultural importance, but all these people could not bear the thought of this level of sociological and historical loss.
One might think that museums are the answer to preservation, and they can be, but they have also been longtime contributors to the encouragement of looting. Or, in many instances, flatout theft from colonialism. These museums don’t feel obligated to return objects to the places they were stolen from. Artifact War shows how deeply this impacts the cultures whose histories were stolen out from under them. As The Researcher and The Professor ultimately discover, it’s not only museums who are the culprits, but rather a deep web of the uber-rich who are purchasing objects for their own collections. It’s baffling and jarring to learn that the craft store chain Hobby Lobby is involved in this world of illegal artifact sales.
Courtesy of Artifact War
Artifact War suffers a bit in the beginning by jumping through time to various important moments. It’s a little difficult to follow at first, but it’s clear that the film has so much information that they need to address the greater context of not only the history of looting, but the Syrian civil war. As it progresses, Artifact War narrows its focus to track one particular object from its finding to its eventual sale, as a means of showing all the roles of the team members and synthesizing this massive issue into a bite-sized story.
“You either sat at home and went crazy, or you went out and did something.” Preservation is an act of rebellion, one that the team of Artifact War continues to fight, even after the camera stops rolling. Our collective histories are worth fighting for, preserving, and learning from.
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