A group of museum workers and other cultural heritage specialists from Central Asia are currently in the United States to study preservation practices and exchange experiences with counterparts at the Getty Museum and other American institutions.
Experts from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are participating in the tour, which began on October 17 and will end on November 7, according to Turkmenistan’s Ministry of Culture. It said the goal is to learn more about cultural heritage preservation, the planning and designing of exhibitions, and how to ensure the safety of museum facilities.
The trip is occurring under the auspices of a U.S. Department of State program aimed at facilitating exchanges with museum professionals from Central Asia. The program was discussed by Sarah B. Rogers, under secretary for public diplomacy, during a visit to Ashgabat in June.
“These Central Asian countries have some of the world’s greatest cultural heritage, these ancient sites from the Silk Road, and so engaging with their museum professionals on antiquities preservation is a great line of effort for us,” Rogers said at the time.
The visit began in Washington, D.C., where the representatives from Central Asia learned about U.S. policy on countering the illegal trafficking of cultural heritage. The group later traveled to Los Angeles. There, experts discussed the joint project between the Getty Museum and Turkmenistan’s State Museum to restore and conserve an ancient Buddha head that was found in Merv, an ancient Silk Road city in the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan, in 1960.
“It was unearthed in the stupa of a Buddhist monastery within the Gyaur Kala at Merv, an ancient fortress known as the ‘castle of infidels’ because its inhabitants adhered to different faiths—Zoroastrian, Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist—at the time of the Arab conquest,” said Susanne Gänsicke, senior conservator and head of antiquities conservation in the Department of Antiquities at the Getty Museum.
“Dated to the fifth–sixth century CE, this Buddha is the westernmost example of its kind and is crucial for understanding Buddhism’s spread,” Gänsicke said in a commentary posted on the Getty website this year.
The restoration of the Buddha head involves a number of complex processes, including the removal of materials used in previous restoration efforts, the cleaning and stabilization of fragile clay surfaces, and the use of 3D scanning, modeling, and printing to help reconstruct fragments.
