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Thank you all for coming out this evening.
It really is an honor and pleasure to be here
talking about National Geographic,
and in somewhat of a light that maybe some of you
know about and maybe some of you don't know about.
I mean everybody knows about the golden rectangle
and about the
Most of you know about our channel
and the fact that through our media
we reach almost four hundred million souls
around the world.
It's incredible, it's an honor to represent
National Geographic but it's also equally
important to remember that we are a funder
of research and that we are a player, we're proactive.
Fredrik Hiebert: If we want to tell the stories of people,
places, cultures, ecology, whales and lions
and other things that I don't deal with,
we have to preserve that!
We have to be able to take care of our world
so that future generations, our kids and their kids
will be able to turn to National Geographic
and have the same stories to be told.
You know, we have a very special
thing with history and culture.
It's very actually different from you know
biological world or oceans and things like that.
It's, the difference is the culture, the past,
the remains of our history is nonrenewable.
Like once a giant Buddha is destroyed
it can't come back.
It's gone!
Once a site is destroyed that little piece of history
that piece of peoples' identity is gone.
You can't replace that
And so, we become really sort of focused on
what can we do as a group,
as a bunch of you know, drummers in a band
to get people so that we can say,
yeah, we can actually do something.
That's what this evening is all about.
Fredrik: When we look at the world and certainly that's
something that's interesting about Geographic
is that we do have as our research arena
all the continents of the world
even Antarctica, we don't have that.
These circles here, these ovals
are centers of civilization,
centers of dense archaeological finds.
As you can see, you know we're looking at
something not on just one continent or another.
We're not gonna talk about all of these.
Tonight we're gonna look at a few case examples.
But when we look at the whole issue of you know,
how to keep cultures and keep identities
and artifacts where they belong.
How is it that these different cultures
can become proud of their role in part
of human history in defining humanity?
It's huge, it's almost unbelievable.
When I work with customs agents about
what's coming through the airports
and what's coming through our ports,
its, you know I show them this picture
and I say, you have a huge issue on your hands.
You could have you know, artifacts from the Andes
just as easily as you can have artifacts from Mali
just as easily as you can have artifacts from Afghanistan
in a box being transported away from its home.
How are you gonna deal with that?
That's something which is we're gonna talk
about those kind of interesting topics tonight.
And we're gonna look at a few of these areas.
I call these archaeological hot spots.
And I'm happy to tell you more about
those archaeological hot spots in discussion.
But I'm gonna give you a few examples.
I'll give two, Afghanistan and Peru just to tell you
a little bit about approaches that we can have.
Very positive approaches that we can help
to inspire these artifacts and these cultures
to remain alive in the countries where they are.
These are archaeologically rich countries, right?
All of them, all of them have so many
sites it's hard to count them.
Afghanistan is famous for its role on the Silk road,
and we have artifacts all over the place.
I think this was the first country where we
had sort of an international recognition
for a country's cultural heritage
for something that we wish really didn't happen.
This is a giant Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley.
Huge, over a hundred feet tall,
incredible built in the sixth,
or seventh, or eighth century A.D.
It's been famous.
It was a tourist attraction.
And many of you remember when it was destroyed.
Fredrik: That sort of culture destruction cannot be replaced.
And it, for the first time focused
international attention on you know,
the center of the Silk road and say,
oh my goodness we didn't really realize
that culture was a big factor in this.
And I think when it was on the
front pages of the
when it was on the pages of the
when you saw this on CNN you realize,
oh, this is important.
At the same time people have to realize
that fragility of culture wasn't just at Pompeion.
This is two thousand and three when I
first saw the National Museum of Afghanistan.
This is the museum.
No roof, no windows and inside, no artifacts.
I went there on behalf of
magazine to sort of write a post script
about what I thought was a tragedy,
something that people should know about.
But something else happened, okay.
I went to the museum, all the way to Afghanistan.
I had never actually been to Afghanistan before
even though I had written about it.
I had written reports in archaeology magazines.
I wrote my dissertation on it.
It was sort of like, I never thought
I was going to Afghanistan.
And I went and I talked to the
museum director, this man Omara Khan Massoudi.
He's one of my cultural heroes this evening is about.
And I said, "What do I say about
the treasures of Afghanistan?"
And he said, well you know the treasures
of the National Museum meant a lot to us
and you know before the museum
was destroyed we hid them away.
Well, he said that's a secret but I'm telling you.
And we ended up doing something that we never
expected to do at National Geographic.
We sponsored an inventory of the
hidden collections of Afghanistan.
This is one of the pieces.
We put all these things on inventory,
computerized, digital images
and we created a passport for these objects.
That meant that now these objects
were visible to the whole world
and could never actually be sold or marketed again.
Kind of squashing a market for these objects.
It also lead to the Bactrian Gold exhibition.
They're feeling of sense of self
about this within Afghanistan.
A sense of great honor and sort of cultural heritage
that they hadn't seen for 30 years.
And that's a really positive thing
that came out of working together on that.
There are other problems and we continue to work
with the Afghans on issues on what happens
during the situation when sites are looted.
This is actually not an excavation.
These are people who are just digging
for treasures in Afghanistan.
And it hurts me to look at this picture.
My friend who excavated the Bactrian Gold,
he took this picture and here's a picture
of where those artifacts ended up.
That's the marketplace in Kabul.
I can't tell you how many four thousand year old
burials this represents 'cause
it's impossible for me to say that.
But each one of those vessels represents
a piece of culture which is out,
and about to be sent abroad for pennies on each piece.
(stutters)
It's tragic from a personal point of view,
from an Afghan point of view
and from a world point of view to see.
That's a whole chapter of history right there.
So we do, do things and I am pleased
to say that work with U.S. Customs.
We work with UNESCO.
We work with culture, with groups around the world.
And one of the things that we do is we help.
For example, this is U.S. Customs.
This is a shipment of illegally transported artifacts
that thanks to collaboration between
the U.S. government and the governments
around the world including Afghanistan
and Peru and quite a few countries.
We're able to say, look these pieces
belong in a home and they can be sent back.
And we're so pleased to be able to say that repatriations
are an important part of what we do here
at National Geographic, here in Washington DC.
And the United States is a really
good partner is doing these things.
And I think it's a fantastic thing
that you should all know about.
Let's turn quickly to my second
example, which is Peru.
So we've moved continents.
This is a Peruvian pyramid.
Sometimes hard to see so I put
a little drawing of a pyramid to say,
hey look, you know this is just like Egypt.
You're gonna see some pictures of pyramids later.
You know you've got pyramids
that are known from the Mayan area from Egypt,
but believe me they're in Peru too.
But pyramids attract the attention of looters.
And things from those pyramids have been
on sale in the market for a long, long time.
This is a piece from the exhibition
that was on the market in Italy.
We were so pleased when the ambassador
from Peru asked the president of Italy,
that's him in the front,
please return this piece of Peruvian culture and they did.
And it was like ancient Rome
returning something to ancient Peru.
I would've thought that,
that's kind of a cool concept right?
We're really pleased but you know it sat
for many years as being kind of like,
okay, that's a large cool mask, right?
What does it mean?
And you know without the context
of knowing what it is, it was a little enigmatic.
Still very cool but having the objects
in a database that can be presented
to anybody as, you know around the world.
This is the Larco Museum in Peru, which is a model.
The director of the Larco Museum was here.
He has a collection of 45 thousand objects.
You can visit every single one of these objects
in high resolution because every single
object in their collection is on the web.
I think that's fantastic!
We don't have museums in the
United States that have that.
And our best example comes from Lima, Peru.
If you look very carefully we have
a piece that was stolen from Peru,
was returned by U.S. Customs.
It was at the Peruvian embassy and they said
would you please put this on display?
And I was like, oh my God, that's huge.
And this piece has been stolen twice from Peru.
'Cause the market is so high for them.
We're trying to reduce that market.
This piece, after the exhibition will
be going back to Peru, to its right home.
Peru is a nice example because this is using drones
to document archaeological sites in Peru.
We really are, you know it's not just archaeologist
as Indiana Jones with a shovel and a whip.
We use drones, we use satellites.
We use best technology available to help us understand
and preserve cultures for the world.
Omara Massoudi: A nation stays alive.
When its culture, stays alive.
Omara: Our people should know what happened.
They should know about their culture
about their history.
That is true for every
culture around the world.
They should know about their culture.
They should know about their history.
It's a win, win situation for everybody.
We need to do the inventory of
the collections and sites.
We need to help with the repatriations.
And we need to get people excited
about visiting these countries
where they come from, like Egypt.
Thank you very much.
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