Iraq's Yazidis rediscover lost history through photos found in a museum archive

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Archeologists studying ancient civilizations in northern Iraq during the 1930s also befriended the nearby Yazidi community, documenting their daily lives in photographs that were rediscovered after the Islamic State militant group devastated the tiny religious minority.

The black-and-white images ended up scattered among the 2,000 or so photographs from the excavation kept at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which led the ambitious dig.

One photo — a Yazidi shrine — caught the eye of Penn doctoral student Marc Marin Webb in 2022, nearly a decade after it was destroyed by IS extremists plundering the region. Webb and others began scouring museum files and gathered almost 300 photos to create a visual archive of the Yazidi people,