Summary: The looting of the National Museum of Iraq became one of the defining moments of the second Iraq War. Christopher Woods, the director of the Oriental Institute says that when archaeology and politics intersect, archaeology becomes a kind of statecraft. Since the Gulf Wars, archaeologists have been unable to work in Iraq. But Woods is returning the OI too excavations. 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.
