Visocica is immportant site, and people will listen. The fact is, nobody ever contacted them. In normal and nice way. Spitting on threads is not proper way to communicate with fellows scientists. There is a way to do it.
Are you sure of this? Didn't the Bosnian experts complain from the start using proper channels? They knew who to contact after all. I have read that under the current situation there that there is not a single archaeologist on the board that approves permits.
An article in the print edition of Archaeology magazine voices the frustration of Enver Imamovic and Dubravko Lourenovic regarding the agency there that is supposed to protect national monuments. I would be shocked to discover that neither of them, or any of the other Bosnian archaeologists didn't contact someone attempting to get the work done in a more professional manner.
Unemployment is even higher, about 40%. But that's not the issue.
In a way it is, I understand there are elections upcoming and Osmanagic is quite popular in Bosnia ... what politician wants to be seen closing down the digs or replacing Osmanagic? People are making money off the tourist trade and any politician who stops that is going to find himself suffering for a lack of voters.
Issue is that Visochica Hill region is settled from neolithic times. That region must be researched archeologically. And obviously, they need help. Proffessional help. But not silly out cries to stop excavations.
Again we come to money .... with what funding should the archaeologists of Bosnia work? Osmanagic has been getting funding due to the claims he's making in the media.
“Maybe a miracle is important for people after a war.” Sighs Zilka Kujundzic, one of the Sarajevo archaeologists who signed the protest letter. She’s the last remaining prehistory specialist at Sarajevo’s National Museum, the 103 year old Austro-Hungarian complex that’s seen its funding dwindle since the war’s end. On a recent drizzly April afternoon at the unheated, deserted museum, metal scaffolding rods were piled next to Roman floor mosaics from the first and second century A.D. The prehistory wing was empty, its ceiling paintings flaking away, its walls flecked with wartime bullet holes. Two winters ago the museum closed to the public for lack of money. It was only reopened after Bosnia’s so-called high representative—one of a succession of UN-approved diplomats overseeing the 1995 peace agreement—twisted the arms of local politicians to find some extra money.
There’s still no money to heat the complex through Bosnia’s bitter winters, or to repair the empty prehistory wing. “When it’s very cold we work from home,” Kujundzic says. The Bosnian state government does not fund the museum at all; two lower levels of government chip in for meager salaries but nothing else. Kujundzic makes about $440 a month. Without money, she says, forget about extensive excavations or the kind of media blitz that Osmanagic has managed to pull off. “We don’t excavate something if we don’t have money to preserve it,” she says.
Archaeology magazine July/August 2006 page 26
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