Azerbaijan to appeal to UNESCO over illegal archaeological activity in occupied lands

Archeologists are so very fond of throwing out accusations about collectors supporting looting, but never mention that they themselves have looters among their numbers!

Azerbaijan will once again raise at UNESCO the issue of illegal archaeological activity in its occupied territories, reporting that Dr. Yolanda Fernandez-Jalvo (National Museum of Natural History of Spain), Dr. Tania King (Blandford Town Museum, UK) and Dr. Peter Andrews (Natural History Museum, UK) have for some time been conducting illegal archaeological excavations in the Azykh Cave, located in the Armenia-occupied Khojavand district of Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hikmat Hajiyev said in a statement to APA on Friday. He noted that these individuals have illegally crossed the state border of Azerbaijan, without a license of the country’s relevant authorities and been conducting illegal excavations at the site of the Azykh Cave. They have in a covert manner transported away the archeological findings by evading from Azerbaijan’s customs control. [...] Their activities can be compared to the archaeological looting conducted in late 19th and early 20th centuries in colonial territories and in Iraq in 2003,” said Hajiyev, noting that those calling themselves scientific figures should not be engaged in plundering, theft and falsification of material-cultural monuments. 

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