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July 30, 2004

BAGHDAD – An artifact of Iraq ’s oppression-plagued past was preserved July 28 when U.S. forces turned over a stone plaque found during the reconstruction of a power plant here.

            Civilians with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found the 18-by-24-inch marble foundation stone June 29 amidst broken bricks, trash and rubble while rehabilitating the Taji Power plant in the capitol city’s impoverished northern region.

            “This is a first,” said Dr. Zainab Bahrani, an antiquities advisor to the U.S. State Department’s Iraq Reconstruction Management Office in Baghdad .  “There have been antiquities returned from other locations, but nothing of this kind.”

            Chris Spidle, a contractor working for the Corps on site, first noticed the Arabic inscribed stone among a pile of broken bricks while working on one of Taji’s seven generators.

            Within minutes, he and Corps’ employee Robert Weakland were on hands and knees sifting through the sand and rubble to get a closer look at Spidle’s find.

            “Chris came in and told me he had found something, so we went together to see what it was,” Weakland said.  “We uncovered the stone and realized it had been broken which made us think more was probably more in the area.”

             A search of the nearby area uncovered four additional pieces, confirming the two’s hunch and completing the stone.

            With stone fragments in hand, the two returned to the site’s management trailer and photographed the stone before setting it aside on an empty table.

              “We knew this was something important that was related to the former regime within minutes of finding it,” Weakland said.  “The Iraqi laborers onsite wanted to destroy it with sledge hammers, so we knew we needed to collect and protect it.”

Clarity came later that afternoon after a contract interpreter onsite translated the stone’s Arabic inscription. 

The stone dedicated the Taji power plant in 1976 to the memory and celebration of the founding of the Iraqi Army and acknowledged one of the 52 most wanted men in Iraq – former Revolution Council Member, Taha ai-Jizrawi. 

Days passed as the stone sat in Weakland’s north Baghdad trailer waiting for someone to provide direction on how to return the artifact to the Iraqi government.

The wait ended July 11 when Bill McFarland, a Corps program manager, visited the site on an inspection tour and saw the stone sitting atop Weakland’s table.

McFarland, who typically serves as an environmental project manager in the U.S. , contacted the Corps’s legal office in Baghdad and coordinated the transfer of the stone to Bahrani, who will transport the stone to the Iraq State Board of Antiquities Museum in Baghdad later this week.

            “This is absolutely the right thing to do,” said Bahrani, who is slated to return to her career as an archeology professor at Columbia University this fall.  “As more and more people begin working on the reconstruction efforts, I think we will run into more of these kinds of things.”       

            While Bahrani said there were no official plans for the stone, she said it would probably go in some kind of a museum commemorating the atrocities of the previous regime.

            “Whether you are working on oil pipelines, electrical systems or building roads, there is a possibility of running into cultural artifacts when you are doing field work in this country,” she said.  “The best thing to do is to ere on the side of caution and assume its something that should be returned to the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage and allow them to judge.”

            The last remains of some of mankind's earliest cities have virtually disappeared through unprecedented looting and destruction in the wake of war. 

            “The precedent this is setting here is really important, because it is possible the next time it will be something from 2000 BC,” Bahrani said.

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