History
Heritage Watch was established following the rampant looting of Phum Snay, an immense Iron Age burial ground in Cambodia’s northwest. After its discovery in 1999, Phum Snay was destroyed by looters seeking its rich grave offerings—beautiful ceramics, iron weapons and gold and bronze jewelry. Rescue excavations were conducted at the site, but 90% of it was already lost. Realizing that an entire chapter of Cambodia’s history was disappearing, a group of archaeologists made it their mission to promote the protection of the country’s heritage. To better achieve this goal, Heritage Watch was founded.
Heritage Watch’s Board of Directors includes international leaders in the field of Southeast Asian studies. The organization has frequently been featured in both the national and the international media, including The Times, The Associated Press, The BBC, and in a documentary on the U.S. Public Broadcasting Station. It has twice been the recipient of the U.S. Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Heritage, and has also received awards from UNESCO, Friends of Khmer Culture, Lonely Planet Publications, and number private organizations and donors.
In its first few years of operations, Heritage Watch has accomplished a great deal. With generous funding from the U.S. Department of State, it launched a national public awareness campaign targeting both those who loot and buy antiquities. Heritage Watch attacked the supply end of the trade through informative radio and television commercials, educational comic books, and community workshops for villagers in heavily looted areas and the establishment of a telephone hot-line. Tourists were informed about the negative consequences of buying looted art through public exhibits, airport kiosks, and public lectures.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)