In the foreword to Catastrophe: The Looting and Destruction of Iraq's Past, Gil J. Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, writes that "when we think of the awful consequences of war, the deaths of the soldiers and civilians always remind us that futures have been destroyed[.]  But war in the third millennium AD has brought us an entirely new and different horror – the destruction of an entire past." In 2003, the world's attention was focused on the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad.  The 15,000 stolen artifacts had, for the most part, been "scientifically excavated and carefully recorded and identified by trained professional archaeologists and museum staff."  Thus, there existed the scientific knowledge of their archaeological context, or a means to reconstruct "how an ancient civilization developed and functioned."  Archaeological context refers to the "immediate material surrounding an...(Read Full Article)