Syria's ancient sites face widespread looting and systematic bulldozing

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Add as preferred source Satellite images of Ain Dara, which was home to an Iron Age temple in what is now northwestern Syria, show changes to the site from looting from, left to right, top row, July 2014, April 2016, bottom row, February 2019, and January 2022. Credit: Google/Maxar Technologies Dozens of archaeological sites were destroyed by looting during Syria's civil war, which began in 2011 and lasted until 2024. Because the last comprehensive analysis was published in 2017, the extent of more recent damage to cultural heritage sites since 2016—including at UNESCO World Heritage sites such as Palmyra, long-running archaeological excavations like Mari, and the ancient Roman city of Apamea, known for its Great Colonnade—has been largely unknown.

A new Dartmouth study finds that many of Syria's archaeological sites were damaged not only by looting but also, in areas occupied by the Turkish military, by systematic bulldozing. The findings are published in the journal Heritage .

Using satellite imagery from Google Earth and the European Space Agency's Pleiades program, researchers analyzed looting and damage at 200 sites throughout Syria.

They classified the damage into four categories: "traditional looting," in which individual holes were excavated at a site; "mechanized looting" by bulldozer; "militarization," in which dugouts and other features were installed; and "construction or encampments," including temporary shelters used by refugees.

The results show that from 2015 to 2025, 59% of the sites were looted, compared with 13% from 2011 to 2016.

"The mechanized looting in Syria and its association with military activities is really disconcerting," says lead author Jesse Casana, the W.J. Bryant 1925 Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology. "The military is supposed to protect the people, not destroy archaeological sites, which is a war crime."

In the Middle East, the military often chooses an archaeological site as a location to establish a base because such sites tend to be tall mounds.

"Topographically, these sites have been formed progressively by occupation in the same place over time," Casana says.

People build a house out of mud brick, and when it collapses, they build a new one on top of that, he says. "This happens for thousands of years, resulting in mounds that can be more than 100 feet tall (30 meters), which are just full of archaeology."

With mechanized looting, bulldozers scrape off the entire surface, people look for artifacts, and then the surface is scraped off again. Looters are typically looking for gold, which Casana refers to as "aspirational looting" by people with limited economic means.

"Looting is a whole lot of work, and a lot of destruction, with very little payoff," he says.

Among the cultural sites that the researchers examined was Ain Dara, famous for its Iron Age temple and large lion statues.

Based on the team's earlier analysis, no war-related damage was evident as of 2014, but the imagery shows that by 2016, a military compound was under construction. In February 2019, mechanized looting was clearly in progress, with bulldozing marks evident in four areas at the site. Ground observations by people living in the area indicated that the Turkish-backed military was likely behind such activities. By January 2022, nearly the entire surface had been combed by a bulldozer except for a stone-built temple complex dating to the 8th–12th centuries BCE.

Casana says the new study provides an important roadmap for mitigation efforts.

"Before archaeologists potentially excavate any of these areas, there needs to be some sort of systematic investigation to check out every one of these sites because there will be ancient architecture and artifacts and all kinds of things just falling out of these sites that have been damaged in this way," he says. "We need to know where to prioritize efforts and what those efforts should look like."

Jesse Casana et al, Remote Sensing-Based Analysis of Archaeological Site Damage in Syria: Revisiting a Post-War Landscape, Heritage (2026). DOI: 10.3390/heritage9060209

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