Since 2021, Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) has used satellite technology and other forensic techniques to document past and ongoing abuses of cultural heritage in the South Caucasus region, where Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought for decades over territory. Even with a 2020 ceasefire in place, the damage and destruction of cultural sites – churches, mosques, monasteries, cemeteries and other monuments spanning centuries – continues.
In “Heritage Forensics: Culture on the Front Lines of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict,” CHW researchers including Lori Khatchadourian, professor of Near Eastern studies and anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and Adam T. Smith, the Henry Scarborough Professor of Social Science in anthropology (A&S), describe their new framework for studying cultural heritage in war zones, drawing on the investigative reports of the Nagorno-Karabakh wars CHW released between 2021 and 2025.
“Humanists don’t typically write investigative reports, but this genre of writing can do something that academic books cannot: create an authoritative record of what is known at a particular moment,” Khatchadourian said. “This is especially important where conditions are changing rapidly, like in conflict zones.”
At the same time, a scholarly book can do something a report cannot, the authors said, pointing out that “Heritage Forensics” develops new methods and theories for addressing cultural heritage in war that can be extended to other contexts where culture is threatened by war, bigotry and secrecy.
“The ethical considerations that emerge from the use of surveillance technologies in heritage forensics is also a major concern of the book,” Khatchadourian said.
“We ask why cultural heritage has become a target in modern conflict,” Smith said.
The book is co-authored with Ian Lindsay, associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University, and political geographer Husik Ghulyan, research associate with the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (A&S).
The College of Arts and Sciences spoke with Khatchadourian and Smith about the book.
What cultural heritage has been erased from regions disputed between Armenia and Azerbaijan?
In our investigation of Armenian cultural heritage during the interwar years (1994-2020) in Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, we documented a state-sponsored program of “silent erasure.” Over 100 medieval monasteries, churches and cemeteries had been completely erased, their very existence scrubbed from the landscape, and with them the historic memory of medieval and modern Armenian cultural life in this region.
We also documented grave abuses to Azerbaijani cultural heritage in the territories controlled by Armenian authorities of the de facto Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) during this same period. Through a process we term “heritage mining,” numerous mosques were severely looted, and 16 mosques and mausolea were destroyed. While the evidence does not suggest an equivalent state-sponsored plan to erase Azerbaijani heritage, it does show that NKR failed to prevent widespread abuse and several instances of destruction. Once again, the historic memory of Azerbaijani life in the region was sorely diminished.
Armenian and Azerbaijani cultural heritage sites had long stood side by side across the South Caucasus as a testament to the coexistence of these groups. One of the greatest tragedies of their damage and destruction is the erasure of this memory.
Following the capitulation of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and the forced expulsion of the region’s entire Armenian population, there have been legitimate concerns that Karabakh’s roughly 600 Armenian cultural heritage sites, now in Azerbaijan, are threatened by the same policy of zero-tolerance that we documented in Nakhchivan. Through a method known as “satellite tasking,” we monitor these endangered churches, monasteries, cemeteries and other sites. Thus far, we have documented seventeen cases of destruction, including four churches, four historic cemeteries and a memorial to the 1915 Armenian Genocide.
Why does the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan provide a compelling case for understanding threats to cultural heritage?
Although the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is not well-known, it has a great deal in common with a range of other conflicts where heritage constitutes a cultural front, an arena where violence is exerted through historical revisionism, appropriation, damage and destruction. It has much in common with historical cases from the Nazi assaults on Europe’s synagogues to Turkey’s century-long elimination of Armenian churches.
Other important comparative contexts that we discuss in the book include the destruction of Palestinian cultural heritage in 1948, cultural abuses in Cyprus since the Turkish occupation of 1974, and the Bosnian Wars of the 1990s. It also has much in common with well-documented contemporary cases such as Russian destruction of Ukrainian sites, Israeli destruction of Palestinian cultural heritage today and China’s elimination of Uyghur heritage. The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan shows us the enormous cost of wars conducted at the cultural front when repressive governments seek to reshape the future by rewriting the past using dynamite and bulldozers.
What are your hopes for the techniques and technologies detailed in the book?
The hope of any archaeologist grappling with a barrage of attacks on cultural remains, whether by a state, like the Taliban demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, or a non-state actor, such as the ransacking of Syria and Iraq’s heritage by ISIS, is a stop to the destruction.
This is not an argument that stones and buildings are more important than the human lives at risk in these places. Quite the opposite; attacks on cultural sites are often either the harbinger or the postscript to genocide and mass violence. So, violence against cultural remains and violence against people cannot be dissociated.
CHW has been called upon to share our work with international courts, governing bodies in the US and Europe, legislators and policy makers, journalists and advocacy groups, and scientists and satellite companies. Heritage forensics combines archaeology, law, cultural aerospace, and politics into a vital new field that seeks to both document losses to cultural remains and intervene to help establish new approaches to protection.
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