The looting of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad became one of the defining moments of the second Iraq War. Christopher Woods, the director of the Oriental Institute, one of the world’s foremost research centers on the ancient Near East, says that in moments like these when archaeology and politics intersect, archaeology becomes a kind of statecraft.

Since the Gulf Wars, archaeologists have been unable to work in Iraq. But, under Woods leadership, the Oriental Institute is returning to excavations in the region. If the looting of the Baghdad museum is on one end of the archaeology as statecraft spectrum, this historic return to Iraq is on the other.

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