ROUNDTABLE: PERSPECTIVES ON RESEARCHING IRAQ TODAY

Scholarship on Iraq in this period relied chiefly on British colonial archives and top-down political analysis. [...]in April 2003, arsonists, thieves, saboteurs, and military operatives devastated national collections of archives, objects, and buildings in Baghdad. [...]the INLA lost one quarter of its library holdings and sixty percent of its archival collections, including rare books, photographs, and maps.4 Myriads of artifacts and sites spanning ten thousand years of archaeological and architectural history have been irretrievably lost, damaged, or even destroyed, while large quantities of looted modern artwork have disappeared from Iraq altogether.5 The loss of these historical sources, as well as the devastating toll of decades of dictatorship, sanctions, occupation, and war, has influenced critical studies of Iraq.