On the occasion of the International Archaeology Day, and in cooperation with the Italian embassy in Baghdad, the American Space at the American University of Iraq-Baghdad (AUIB) organized a seminar under the title, “Heritage under Water: The ReLand Project and the Archaeology of the Mosul Dam Basin,” where Associate Professor of Archaeology of Western Asia at the University of Palermo, Dr. Paola Sconzo, delivered a presentation on the “ReLand Project”, launched in 2023, that studies archeological sites that have resurfaced as a result of the declining water level of the Tigris river.
The seminar was attended by a host of students, a delegation from the Italian embassy, and members of AUIB faculty and administrative cadre. Dr. Sconzo_ who is the director of the archaeological mission “ReLand – Resurfacing Landscapes,” on which the University of Palermo collaborates with the Duhok Directorate of Antiquities_ first spoke on the general conception of dam projects in the early nineteen-thirties and decades onwards as “national necessities” and “symbols of (socioeconomic) recovery and progress,” admitting their value in controlling floods and generating economic growth. She then proceeded to illustrate the “dark side” of dam projects that result in “erasing entire cultural and political landscapes and displacing people” formerly living within the artificial lake basin and also further downstream, as well as submerging sizable areas of fertile land.
