Widespread Damage to Syria's Ruins Seen from Space

Before civil war broke out in Syria, Tell Qarqur was home to an archaeological expedition. Now military tanks sit inside bunkers carved into the ancient mound.

(Image credit: Google Earth)

Archaeologist Jesse Casana couldn't have foreseen the violence that would break out in Syria less than a year after he left his dig site in summer 2010.

"No one knew whether it was going to blow over quickly," Casana said. "We were all just waiting to see what happened. Clearly, it started getting worse."

Casana, a professor at the University of Arkansas, was director of an expedition at Tell Qarqur, an artificial mound in northwest Syria built up through 10,000 years' worth of debris left by human occupation. He had to cancel his 2011 field season, and because of the ongoing war in Syria, he hasn't returned since. Violence has besieged the Christian village of Gassanieh, where his team stayed, and he has barely been able to contact his friends and colleagues in the country, let alone get a handle on how Tell Qarqur is faring.

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Activists and archaeology researchers have made ambitious attempts to assess the war's toll on cultural heritage in Syria, which was home to Paleolithic settlements, Roman outposts, and the Assyrian, Persian and Akkadian empires. But many on-the-ground reports of damage at sites in Syria have been unreliable at best, and propaganda-driven at worst, circulated by citizen journalists, amateur photographers and members of the Bashar al-Assad regime, Casana noted.

Casana, who is also chairman of the American Schools of Oriental Research's Damascus Committee, presented the results of a small survey this month at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Chicago. With recent satellite images from the DigitalGlobe, a company that provides high-resolution Earth imagery, Casana analyzed 30 sites across Syria and found moderate to severe war-related damage and looting at 10 of them.

"With the war less than three years old and no resolution in sight, it's not a really good prognosis," Casana said during his presentation. "The data really does suggest there does not seem to be any clear geographic orientation to the damage. It seems to be taking place all across Syria. But we do see a strong trend toward looting at Hellenistic, Roman or early Islamic sites in particular, I suspect, because metal or gold is more common in them."

Satellite imagery shows widespread looting and destruction at some of the country's most iconic ruins, such as Apamea, a once-flourishing Roman city about an hour south of Tell Qarqur. Apamea's long column-lined street is often emblazoned on the cover of Syrian guidebooks, but a military garrison now fortifies a former tourist restaurant at the center of the site, and more than 4,000 holes dug by looters and treasure hunters are visible in the surrounding landscape. [Photos: 7 Stunning Archaeological Sites in Syria]

Just a mile and a half (2.5 kilometers) to the east of Apamea sits a mound called Tell Jifar, which formed over many centuries of occupation, though it is unexcavated and not very well understood by archaeologists, Casana said. The mound is now topped with a military garrison and pockmarked with looting holes. Some of these pits can be spotted in images from as far back as 2007 and 2003, Casana found, suggesting many Syrian sites were hardly secure before the onset of violence.

"I was surprised by the extreme scale of looting that had already taken place prior to the war," Casana told LiveScience. He suspects the same group of looters likely brought their shovels to both Apamea and Tell Jifar because of the sites' proximity and the long history of looting at Tell Jifar. In both cases, the looting seems to have happened "with at least the tacit cooperation of military forces encamped at the sites," Casana said in a recent email.

But the Assad regime's army can't bear sole blame for the destruction at archaeological sites. On other ancient mounds in his survey, Casana said he's spotted what look like bunkers belonging to the Free Syrian Army, the opposition forces seeking to oust Assad. To help fund their insurgency, the rebels told The Washington Post last year that they've been selling looted tablets, vases and other artifacts through illicit antiquities markets in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

Megan has been writing for Live Science and Space.com since 2012. Her interests range from archaeology to space exploration, and she has a bachelor's degree in English and art history from New York University. Megan spent two years as a reporter on the national desk at NewsCore. She has watched dinosaur auctions, witnessed rocket launches, licked ancient pottery sherds in Cyprus and flown in zero gravity. Follow her on Twitter and Google+.