SAVE MOHENJODARO!

Mohenjodaro was discovered and excavated by the Indian archaeologist R. D. Banerjee in 1922 under the watchful eye of British archaeologist Sir John Marshall, then Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India. Later, in the 1940s, Marshall’s successor, Mortimer Wheeler, continued excavations and, in his own flamboyant style, described how the prosperous city succumbed to Indo-Aryan invaders.^{Footnote 4} The site had a colonial pedigree dating back to pre-Partition times. In 1964, the excavations were taken over by George Dales, at which time impending threats to Mohenjodaro’s long-term preservation were identified. UNESCO was the obvious organization to which to turn, and, with the visibility of the Abu Simbel rescue still underway, the organization’s expertise in saving archaeological and architectural heritage was successfully showcased on a grand scale.

The archaeological excavations revealed a vast city constructed in brick, with major buildings and streets laid out on a grid, drainage systems, and evidence of craft specialization and a transnational trade network. It is estimated that only one-third of the site has so far been uncovered. Running parallel with the story of Abu Simbel and the Aswan Dam, the fate of Mohenjodaro was tied to crafting new national histories, state projects of development, and desires for modernity stretching over many decades. In 1932, the Sukkur barrage and its vast network of canals opened in the province of Sindh. Built under the British raj, it was the largest single irrigation network of its kind in the world, and it supplied water from the Indus River for rice cultivation, resulting in a dramatic rise in the ground water level. High rates of soil capillarity drew salts to the ground surface and into the remains at Mohenjodaro, causing the baked clay and mud structures to disintegrate.^{Footnote 5} Media coverage warned that the site was “facing extinction” and would crumble in a matter of years. It was threatened by exposure to harsh climatic conditions, including flooding, deterioration from the rising salts, and waterlogging. During Wheeler’s excavations in 1950, attempts to reach the lowest occupational levels were hampered by “subsoil water oozing from the trenches,” as Qudrat Ullah Shabab, secretary in the Ministry for Education, told an international audience two decades later.^{Footnote 6} It remained a perennial problem for Pakistan that necessitated expert solutions on an international scale.

In 1964, Harold Plenderleith, founding director of the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property and a major figure in the Nubian Monuments Campaign, was sent by UNESCO to examine Mohenjodaro and compile a conservation report on the archaeological remains. But the problem was soon deemed to be less one of research and conservation and more that of engineering and hydrology. By 1966, UNESCO had engaged NEDECO, a Dutch engineering consultancy specializing in water management that had also worked previously in Nubia, to conduct another expert mission.^{Footnote 7} The results of those missions spelled high financial costs for Pakistan. In 1967, the director of archaeology for Pakistan, F. A. Khan, a long-time friend and associate of Wheeler, wrote candidly that “the huge expenditure of several million Rupees as pointed out by Dr Plenderleith I am afraid, is beyond our financial resources and we must consider ways and means to raise the requisite funds internationally through UNESCO.”^{Footnote 8}

It was not only that the technical work recommended would prove exorbitant, but it was also the international expertise that accompanied the various proposals. For example, during the 1970s, consultants working abroad for UNESCO were typically paid US $2,000 per month, which is equivalent to more than US $13,000 today. Before assigning an expert, one sardonic entry in the UNESCO archives explains that

Wheeler himself may have been no stranger to the capricious nature of foreign expertise, himself being appointed as director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India without prior experience and expertise in South Asian archaeology or history. As Himanshu Ray has illustrated, many qualified Indian nationals with the requisite field experience and seniority were simply passed over for the position.^{Footnote 10}

UNESCO’s participation in Mohenjodaro inched forward slowly over the coming years, hampered by a burgeoning bureaucracy and restricted resources. An international team of archaeologists was dispatched to Mohenjodaro for a grand total of two days in October 1968 and another two days in February 1969. The team included some of the same experts who had worked on the Monuments Campaign: John Otis Brew, Louis Christoph, Kazimierz Michałowski, and Sir Mortimer Wheeler. Their mission report took issue with UNESCO’s technocratic approach to Mohenjodaro, which they felt was too heavily reliant on “technological science and engineering” rather than on research and excavation. They proposed “an equal concern with the demands of archaeology,” arguing that the methods of conservation for Mohenjodaro could “only be adequately appraised if applied through a considered phase of excavation.”^{Footnote 11} The 1968 interim report spelled out that the

Moreover, the team did “not find itself able to support the costly proposal to construct and maintain a drainage canal as envisaged in the 1964 and 1968 Reports.” Instead, the archaeologists sought “local and temporary reductions in the level of the water table” as a means of enabling “adequate archaeological sondages to be made to the lower levels of occupation, which have not hitherto been examined.”^{Footnote 13}

It was not that the archaeological experts denied the urgency of the conservation measures; rather, that the team made informed distinctions between the preservation of buried versus exposed remains and that they supported local solutions that were directed toward mobilizing labor instead of importing experimental and expensive technologies. They noted that, while the ancient brickwork did not suffer below ground, when it was exposed after excavation to varying temperatures, humidity, air, and salt, there was rapid deterioration. And since Mohenjodaro’s buried brick structures were deemed relatively intact, their proposed solution for the exposed walls was to implement damp-proof courses (particularly, of bitumen) to deter the action of water and salt in the lower sections of the walls, preferably one course above ground and one below. For the collapsing structures, their suggestion was to underpin them with new bricks made from clay that was washed free of salt. The mission recommended the use of traditional mud plaster and mud capping for standing walls to mitigate the effects of the rain water, a problem that was not addressed in any of NEDECO’s various canal, drain, or tube well schemes. While all of these more archaeological measures were subject to trial and error, they drew on local expertise and materials and were thus locally reproducible, involved training schemes, and enhanced the local capacity of the Pakistanis themselves. The real solution, they underlined, lay in the provision of adequate funds and trained personnel on a considerable scale: “[N]othing in the Mohenjodaro problem is more desperately urgent than this.”^{Footnote 14}

Finally, the expert mission was not focused simply on furthering future archaeological research but also was concerned with long-term conservation and the precarity of site presentation. Encountering Mohenjodaro in the 1960s left the visitor “simultaneously impressed and depressed” they concluded: not only impressed by the size of the ancient city, its civic well-being, and discipline, but also depressed by the spectacle of so much decaying mud brick and excessive restoration work. For the archaeological specialists, site solutions lay not in an overly technocratic, engineering enterprise but, rather, in one that could be locally implemented, managed, and sustained over the long term. This too would seem to have been in keeping with UNESCO’s own goals to build capacity, enhance development and training in the region, and foster local initiatives that were sustainable long term. Richard Hoggart, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for social sciences, humanities, and culture had judiciously warned the director-general that Mohenjodaro was “not likely to be a great tourist attraction but is rather a scholarly and scientific site, part of which should certainly be preserved.”^{Footnote 15} Unfortunately, like the archaeological committee, Hoggart’s perspective was not fully heeded.

Wheeler and the Pakistani authorities continued over the following years to stress that archaeological excavation was a vital component of any future Mohenjodaro project, digging deeper into existing excavations and opening up new areas of the site for exploration. Wheeler and his colleagues had recommended that nothing short of five consecutive excavation seasons would be satisfactory. It would cost around US $95,000 per season. As with the invitations to conduct salvage work in Egypt and Sudan, the report suggested that Pakistan consider a system of partage, offering foreign teams a share of the finds if they assisted by sending teams to join the excavation effort. Advocating for archaeology was not simply a disciplinary bias, but it also fulfilled UNESCO’s own commitment in cultural programs to harness the global goodwill that accompanied international teams working together for the heritage of humanity. Nubia had set the example in the same decade, where rescue work in tandem with archaeological research had created a dense network of international expeditions and institutions, scholarly exchanges and training, touring exhibits, museum collections, and new discoveries.^{Footnote 16} Archaeological findings facilitated these networks in a way that conservation alone could never achieve. It was the discovery, not simply the recovery, that mattered.

Archaeology is inherently generative of new information, new sites, objects, interpretations, and controversies, which, in turn, generate a plethora of public and scientific interest, scientific funding, philanthropy, new museum and exhibits, enhanced collections, and tourism.^{Footnote 17} However, the Dutch engineers argued that ongoing excavations might be considered “extremely important from an archaeological point of view, but have no bearing on the preservation of the existing ruins.”^{Footnote 18} This narrow view of Mohenjodaro as simply a ruin in need of saving prevailed and was accepted by UNESCO’s officials, even after commissioning the very same archaeological experts that had been instrumental in Nubia. Archaeologists have long claimed that we cannot conserve what we do not understand. Indeed, Gavin Lucas has shown that by prioritizing preservation as the primary imperative, the sheer existence of archaeological remains is deemed more important than their actual significance.^{Footnote 19} Ultimately, no funds were allocated to archaeological survey, excavation, or research at Mohenjodaro, and only a portion was designated for site conservation.

After an appeal from the Pakistani government in 1974, UNESCO launched its official International Safeguarding Campaign for Moenjodaro (1974–97). In this appeal, Director-General René Maheu explained that only the upper site of Mohenjodaro had been exposed over the last 50 years, revealing an “archaeological site of unusual importance.”^{Footnote 20} Hinting at its significant potential for establishing multicultural dialogue and co-operation in his appeal, he added that the site’s influence once extended across India, Iran, and Pakistan. But, instead of cultural co-operation, it was primarily technical and financial assistance that was now being sought and that would have consequences. Likening it to the salvage campaign of Nubia, Maheu stated: “[W]e have called upon modern technology to supply the means of remedying the disturbances that its own action in the service of hurrying progress has produced in particularly delicate states of harmony or balance.”^{Footnote 21} However, unlike Nubia, Mohenjodaro focused tightly on hydrological, engineering, and conservation techniques rather than on a broader raft of cultural projects and, in doing so, attenuated the possibilities not only for understanding its history and significance but also, more broadly, for international participation and scholarly development. By seeing the site as a ruin rather than as an archaeological site, unsuccessful preservation programs had been instigated over many decades and cost millions of dollars, only to ultimately fail. And in the wake of that failure, the possibilities for furthering our knowledge about one of the world’s oldest and most impressive civilizations were also diminished.

The formula of an international campaign, an appeal, committees of experts, and the developing world context followed the same trajectory as Nubia, yet without the concomitant archaeological fieldwork or the collaborative research that took place in Egypt and Sudan. Significantly, Mohenjodaro’s illustrious past and the achievements of its inhabitants were only to be resurrected in public speeches and pleas for funds, while being ignored in much of the project planning and documentation. Conserving the ruin became the monumental challenge. And it was initially UNESCO, rather than Pakistan, that decided to pursue a singularly technical solution, following the lead of consultant engineers. NEDECO had proposed digging a vast canal and removing 475,000 cubic meters of soil, whereas the archaeologists understandably were aghast at the destructive potential that this scheme might have upon the ancient remains.^{Footnote 22}

Under UNESCO, the auspices safeguarding Mohenjodaro would be comprised of three phases: diverting the River Indus from the site at a cost of US $3.15 million; lowering the water through tube wells, which was estimated at US $1.78 million; and completing the desalinization and consolidation of the site, which would cost some US $2.07 million. There would be neither funding nor a systematic plan for archaeological excavation and further research. Irrespective of this decision, UNESCO touted Mohenjodaro as “one of the human race’s pioneer cities,” which “should provide a fascinating attraction for culturally interested tourists from around the world.”^{Footnote 23} To pursue this goal, Director-General Maheu included a landscaping component to the proposed project in order to develop the site as a tourist attraction. By the 1970s, the project cost was an estimated US $7.5 million, and its completion was expected in five years.^{Footnote 24} A new consultative committee of experts was subsequently formed of hydrologists, engineers, archaeologists, and landscapers. The one “archaeologist” put forward was Paul Perrot from the Smithsonian Museum; with a lifelong career in art history and museum development, he was neither a field archaeologist nor an expert on Pakistan.

For UNESCO and its senior officials, selling Pakistan on this plan was an altogether different proposition from its experience in Egypt. Director-General Maheu regarded the appeal for international financial aid as “a question of conscience.” However, with Mohenjodaro, the international community was less forthcoming, perhaps lacking the pharaonic charisma of the Nubian Monuments Campaign or possibly as a result of the “assistance fatigue” that accompanied it. Participation by foreign universities and museums was not on offer either as it had been with Egypt and Sudan, largely because of the decision to omit the archaeological research component. In its 1969 report, the archaeological mission posed the difficult question: “in the present climate of world-opinion,” could the “sociological importance of Mohenjodaro in the protohistory of mankind present a comparable international appeal?”^{Footnote 25} Certainly, without new findings and field programs—in comparison to the strategy being implemented in Nubia—one might argue that this was less likely. By 1976, there were serious concerns about the lack of funding, and the United States had not offered financial support. There was also an economic recession in the West. A different suite of donors stepped up, including Australia, Bahrain, India, Nigeria, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The Federal Republic of Germany and Japan were the largest contributors, while other Western European nations, the United States, and the United Kingdom were initially absent.^{Footnote 26} By the end of 1980, it was decided that the figure needed for the project, given inflation, was more likely to be US $13 million.

The United States made financial contributions to a new phase of the project in the early 1980s. As with the Nubian Monuments Campaign, there were geopolitical dimensions to funding Mohenjodaro. During the 1980s, US relations with Pakistan deepened as a response to Soviet expansion into South Asia, and their mission to block Russian influence was code named Operation Cyclone. In light of the late involvement of the United States, UNESCO officials had previously argued that Mohenjodaro was a project that the Chinese might undertake since they had the expertise, equipment, and materials as well as the ability to supervise the work. There was also the question of an unspent balance of US $5,783,273 in non-convertible currency in 1977 from the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations Development Programme Fund. The Chinese government expected that their funds would be allocated to Chinese teams and sub-contractors, thereby paying themselves in their own coin. Just as Cold War tensions in the shadow of the Soviet-funded Aswan Dam fueled national participation in Nubia,^{Footnote 27} so too did geopolitics shape the donor economies in Pakistan.

Lasting until 1997, UNESCO’s large-scale measures to save Mohenjodaro involved US $23 million. Yet the ultimate failure of UNESCO’s salvage mission was compounded by the fragility of the ancient remains, the hostile environmental conditions, rivalry between government authorities, and an inappropriate technical approach. To give one example, the annual electricity costs for running the tube wells rose to US $400,000 and absorbed most of the budget for Mohenjodaro, constraining any real conservation efforts.^{Footnote 28} One internal World Heritage Center memo conveys the situation with unusual candor. In the final analysis, after more than 20 years of support and “despite large sums of funds (national/international) used for this campaign it was poorly managed without sufficient national capacity building and a mistaken strategy focused on trying to lower the water table (pumping etc.) which amounted to nothing.”

Moreover, in late 1997, the head of the Pakistani delegation to UNESCO had requested that a site management authority be established, something UNESCO believed it had already implemented. In disbelief, Bernd von Droste, the director of the World Heritage Centre, retorted: “We were very surprised to learn that one of the recommendations was the establishment of a site management authority. … If this is the case, there is need for serious strategic planning before UNESCO brings any additional assistance to the site.”^{Footnote 29} Another memo rails that, despite “UNESCO’s involvement in the campaign and some US $24 million investment, the most essential aspect of UNESCO’s work, which is national capacity building has not been achieved.” The project lacked overarching scientific control, the site interpretation program was insufficient, the inventory was inadequate, and the archaeological remains still faced major conservation problems.^{Footnote 30}

Decades on, the cultural and research aspects have remained sidelined. As one heritage expert noted, an “archaeological site of such universal significance as Mohenjodaro should be the focus of various forms of international scientific co-operation.”^{Footnote 31} As an exercise in repetitive failure and redundancy, the World Heritage Centre developed a post-campaign strategy in 2004 to address, once more, the problems of conservation and stabilization and the deficiencies in management structure, training, site, and tourism development.^{Footnote 32} Unlike their acclaimed victory in Nubia, Mohenjodaro signaled a technological defeat for the organization and a lapse into futility. According to some individuals, the millions of dollars spent on pumps in an effort to lower the groundwater level were redundant since the effect of the damp winter air on the exposed bricks was the real culprit.^{Footnote 33} Fifty years after UNESCO’s first forays at the site, continued flooding, poor conservation work, and further deterioration, coupled with the lack of a comprehensive management system, all indicate that the site’s future remains parlous.^{Footnote 34} Discussions continue to determine whether the site should be reburied so as to preserve what remains for the future.

The slow pace of change documented for Mohenjodaro in tandem with the repetitive failures conjures up other spectacular catastrophes of postwar development. Here, too, international companies and consultants would be the main beneficiaries—a trend that has only intensified in the arena of world heritage.^{Footnote 35} Wheeler wrote to his colleagues in exasperation that UNESCO was “a slow working organization,” having “the most inefficient staff in the world.”^{Footnote 36} Scientific missions had been dispatched in 1964 and 1968 without archaeological consultation, he complained, the result being that all time and energy were wasted. Complaining to Harvard archaeologist J. O. Brew about the lack of progress on Mohenjodaro, he retorted: “I do wish someone would inject a strong chemical under the tail of UNESCO.”^{Footnote 37}

FROM ARCHAEOLOGY TO MONUMENT

The promise of incorporating an archaeological or field research component into a safeguarding effort never came to fruition for Pakistan because of institutional choices to prioritize preservation and technocratic solutions. Albeit not originally planned for Nubia in the 1960s and not of UNESCO’s own making, archaeological survey and excavation conducted there would yield remarkable findings that international teams were quick to capitalize upon. The lure of pharaonic culture and, to a lesser degree, classical and Christian sites for various Western nations and their representative teams (as well as Indian and Pakistani archaeologists) proved irresistible. Wheeler and Brew proposed the same expansive strategies of excavation and salvage for Pakistan, yet this was inevitably conceived of by others on a much more modest scale. For UNESCO, the appeal to save Mohenjodaro focused on one large, comparatively understudied world civilization, which centered on one major urban site, with fewer possibilities for partage. Selling Pakistan, as argued above, was thus considered a less certain proposition and supported in circumscribed and unimaginative ways. The recommendations of renowned archaeologists like Wheeler, Brew, and Claude Schaeffer quickly lost ground to the technocrats, eclipsed as they were by the technical conservation challenges of preserving the site. In sum, Mohenjodaro would not be promoted by the organization as offering opportunities for future archaeological expeditions; the donor landscape was substantially different and so too was the geopolitical context. The donor fatigue that followed Nubia, for the member states and UNESCO’s officials alike, inevitably impacted the trajectory that saving Mohenjodaro would take.

In attempting to explain the prevailing attitudes that directed institutional decision-making, one might posit that the known conservation and environmental challenges took precedence over the uncertainty of the archaeological endeavor. As time quickly revealed, however, the former proved to be both unknowable and unfixable, no matter how much money UNESCO poured into the project. Purely technocratic approaches to archaeological salvage proved not to be the answer, as Henrich Lenzen, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Baghdad, remarked: “[O]ne must be conscious that there is something fleeting in the ruins.”^{Footnote 38} Indeed, part of the problem was that the site had been transformed from an active archaeological excavation into a static ruin that necessitated preservation. Lenzen, like Wheeler and Brew, remained committed to a new program of excavation. In a moment of utter frustration, however, Wheeler noted that even

Archaeological challenges were effectively transposed into technical problems requiring corporate solutions. Wheeler felt impelled to remind his Dutch colleague, M. J. Zeper from NEDECO that

That same day, however, he wrote to his French colleague on the expert committee, archaeologist Claude Schaeffer to say that “Zeper has been a little difficult about our Report, largely for quite imaginary reasons—he thinks that our differences of opinion imply some sort of disparagement of NEDECO. I have done my best to placate him.”^{Footnote 41} Further correspondence to Schaeffer alludes to Wheeler’s frustration with other members of the committee—namely, the engineers. And, finally, in a letter to UNESCO Director-General Mahue, Wheeler indicates that the only member of the mission to pose a problem was Zeper. Without his dissent, there would have been unanimous support for continued archaeological excavation and research at Mohenjodaro: “It is perhaps a pity that Mr. Zeper, given his NEDECO connections and his natural inclination therefore to support his NEDECO colleagues, was actually a member of this Mission. … All the Archaeologists are of one mind.”^{Footnote 42}

The Polish archaeologist and veteran of the Nubian Monuments Campaign, Kazimierz Michaołwski was more forthright, blaming UNESCO itself for including an engineer in what was ostensibly an expert archaeological mission. Michaołwski asserted that “he should be not one of our group of experts, but technical adviser to the group only. He was and is personally interested that NEDECO has a profit.”^{Footnote 43} Wheeler could only concur, responding a week later that Zeper had no understanding of archaeological problems and should not have been a full member of the mission. While he had relayed this to the UNESCO Director-General, Wheeler conceded that there was nothing to be done about it now. What the archaeologists objected to was not simply that an archaeological site had been transformed into an engineering and hydrological project but, rather, that it was also being capitalized with the rise of the now familiar consultancy culture that was rife throughout UNESCO, especially within World Heritage.^{Footnote 44}

It should not be entirely surprising that the engineers and archaeologists took different positions. With Mohenjodaro, both groups vied for the same limited resources and the attention of UNESCO’s bureaucrats. Indeed, the lack of coordination under UNESCO’s auspices in Nubia possibly worked to archaeological advantage, whereas the converse was true in Pakistan. Moreover, the goals of different experts were portrayed as diametrically opposed, and each group—whether archaeologists or hydrologists—was advancing its own discrete, and often competing, site alternatives. The archives reveal that, on various occasions, consultants were played off against each other to propose solutions, develop different plans, and formulate committees and budgets for their own specializations. For example, the engineers argued that “true archaeologists will not be satisfied.” They contended that the very object of research and practice of excavation caused new sets of problems:

In sum, by turning Mohenjodaro into a ruinous problem of water logging and salinity, rather than a site of ongoing interdisciplinary research including conservation science, hydrology, and consultancy culture, both trumped and undermined research and education.

Undermining the past would have serious repercussions. The archaeologists from the 1968 mission had argued that UNESCO’s “splendid tradition of research in lands such as Greece, Egypt, Syria and Iraq” meant that they were the right entity to embrace this kind of international co-operation. Moreover, Mohenjodaro was entirely deserving: “[A] site large enough and important enough to focus international effort of this kind, without conflict.”^{Footnote 46} But their expert recommendations went unheeded. Knowledge was, in effect, being sacrificed to prop up a ruin, and, instead, the agency focused on the fabric and presentation of a monument rather than on attempts to understand the ancient city. What was said 50 years ago remains largely true to this day that “[a]lmost everything about Mohenjodaro—its origins, its cultural and sociological development, its ending, its short chronology and significance—remains to be determined. The future of the investigation of the site and its international setting is full of potentiality.”^{Footnote 47} And given his long-standing commitments to public archaeology in Britain, it was surely Wheeler who penned that, if “Mohenjodaro is to be meaningful, whether to the general public or to the increasing numbers of those with a specialist or semi-specialist interest in the human achievement, something more than conservation of the decaying vestiges already exposed in essential.”^{Footnote 48}

In UNESCO’s early campaigns like Mohenjodaro, decision-making was ultimately formulated around technical and technocratic goals, often at the expense of collaboration and the co-production of knowledge with researchers, local experts, and other stakeholders. By privileging scientific conservation, with its myriad foreign consultants and training schemes, UNESCO reinforced its own technical assistance and participation programs and its own structural raison d’être. UNESCO was advancing its postwar conservation logic whereby recovery would replace discovery, so neatly demonstrated and consolidated at Mohenjodaro. Director-General Federico Mayor claimed UNESCO had saved “this fabulous work of the creative imagination from the ‘deadly embrace’ of the River Indus.”^{Footnote 49} The trouble was that if, after decades of foreign expert-driven preservationist programs, the recovery itself had failed and there had been no parallel advancement of knowledge or discovery, then UNESCO’s efforts were similarly in ruins. Another problem was that the flow had become too one way. Western preservationist ideologies and methods dominated, as did those same European nations when it came to world heritage sites and their own ambitions. The technical assistance offered to Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, in Hoggart’s words, created a technical cordon sanitaire,^{Footnote 50} but its long-term promise of peace could not prevail.

This turn to technocracy had firmly taken hold at UNESCO already by the 1960s. When the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia was officially launched, UNESCO not only signaled the scope and urgency of the challenge, but it also implied that the entire enterprise was about conserving temples rather than rescuing the past.^{Footnote 51} This was even more dramatically illustrated at Mohenjodaro, where a familiar set of engineers and other experts from the Nubian Monuments Campaign were assembled to face a similar set of problems (salvage, water, hydraulics). Yet now there was a notable absence of support for archaeological investigation. Evocative images of the city and its material culture were marshaled for great visual effect in campaign fundraising, yet those monies were channeled into engineering and conservation strategies rather than actual archaeology. Inscribing it on the World Heritage List as “the Archaeological Ruins at Moenjodaro” in 1980 only served to further fossilize research and future investigation; it became about monumentalizing and conserving a ruin. Moving toward technical assistance entailed a firm focus on preservation, often in tandem with UNESCO’s development agenda to promote cultural tourism, rather than archaeological exploration or support for research.^{Footnote 52} Technical assistance programs inevitably involve some element of cultural assault. And whilst UNESCO’s programs were often charged with “cultural imperialism,” its technical transfers were laden with “development imperialism.”^{Footnote 53}

Back in UNESCO’s own prehistory, Julian Huxley had included field archaeology in his vision of a one-world civilization. He had written extensively about its significance in a book describing his travels to famous sites and excavations in the Middle East, which was entitled From an Antique Land.^{Footnote 54} In those early years of the organization, there was an intellectual vision for research that endowed archaeology with great promise for internationalism.^{Footnote 55} But it was heritage, rather than archaeology, that would become the hallmark of civilization and could bear the burden of the future. Monumental heritage and its preservation offered a symbol, both for the nation and the international community, free from the encumbrances of archaeological research projects with their vast teams, collaborations, scientific and humanistic allegiances, and spiraling costs. The uncertainty of archaeology’s research programs and the long time frames involved stood in stark contrast to the fixity and promise of great sites that brought with them certain developmental and tourist potentials. Both the discipline and UNESCO lost out in this formulation.

Despite coming at the end of the empire, UNESCO potentially offered archaeology an intellectual platform for engagement in real-world issues, whether politics, education, or development. Its inclusion in the United Nations agency could have extended archaeology’s academic reach and standing rather than simply its technical contributions, as it did for history, philosophy, and even anthropology throughout the agency’s history. For UNESCO, the demise of archaeology signaled the loss of an integral discipline that straddled its science and culture sectors and could have benefited both, as Huxley instinctively realized. UNESCO further lost out on the wider contributions to our understandings and modes of researching the past, as archaeology gradually developed to embrace long-term international collaborations, academic networks, indigenous partnerships, ethics, and rights-based approaches. Although an imperfect discipline and by no means offering solutions to the manifold problems confronting the world heritage program today, it may prove instructive to think how UNESCO’s conventions, understandings, programs, and interactions could have been differently conceived and undertaken.