Palmyra is a trickier battlefield for cultural heritage protectors, however, as the invading ISIS troops took the city and then reconquered it in December 2016 in a matter of days. Sandbagging is useless once the militants have control of the site, forcing Al-Azm and his colleagues to impose a different strategy.

From his office in the U.S., he meticulously tracks photos and locations of items that have gone missing. While subsistence looting became increasingly popular throughout the country as the conflict intensified in 2012, Al-Azm insists that the pillaging taking place at Palmyra is not a hand-to-mouth activity but rather an organized operation overseen by ISIS.

“They see cultural heritage as a resource to be exploited,” he said. “They loot what they can sell; they destroy for propaganda purposes what they cannot…It has nothing to do with culture, or iconoclasm, or religion.”

Satellite imagery of the Baalshamin temple in Palmyra, Syria collected on June 2nd, 2015 (BEFORE and then AFTER) on September 2nd, 2015 — it was destroyed by ISIS.

DigitalGlobe/Getty Images

ISIS even rented out plots to locals so they could search for buried artifacts, according to rumors among archeologists.

Al-Azm hopes that if these ancient pieces of art and history reappear on the black market or even in a respected auction house, he and others like him will be able to quickly identify them and return them to their original homes.

Mentioning his two daughters who have never been able to see the site for themselves, Al-Azm spoke wistfully of a time when tourists will eventually be able to return to Palmyra, even if that day isn’t for several decades.

“This conflict will end one day,” he said.

Archeologists warn of a Middle Eastern Disneyland

If Syrian forces retake the archeological ruins, the dangers of rebuilding improperly carry a high risk to the integrity of the site. With most of the main structures in Palmyra having been completed before the end of the third century A.D., restorers are faced with the problem of rebuilding a structure they might have never seen, built with materials that no longer exist.

“Premature reconstruction can lead to kind of ‘Disney-fication’ of ancient sites. And that would certainly be a risk,” Eckart Frahm, a cultural preservation expert from Yale said, adding, “There has been uncertainty about whether one should really rebuild these things or not.”

Frahm is no stranger to the integrity of ancient sites. As an Assyriologist who specializes in early Babylonian and Mesopotamian history, safeguarding the authenticity of some of the most extraordinary ancient sites in the world is a fundamental part of his life’s work.

Valery Sharifulin/TASS via Getty Images

ISIS used multiple explosives, as well as bulldozers, to topple the Temple of Bel and the Temple of Baalshamin, ensuring that the remnants would be damaged beyond reparation.

Hope remains for the Arch of Triumph, which fell in large enough chunks to perhaps be put back together, Rössler of UNESCO noted. With many other sculptures, structures, and artifacts in hundreds of pieces, a good deal of treasures of the neighboring museum are lost.

Botched restoration efforts have served as a cause of embarrassment in preservation communities for decades. Moreover, these mishaps can make it impossible for future generations to see anything resembling the original object.

From the use of epoxy glue to reattach Tutankhamen’s beard in 2015, to the amateurish quick-fix of a 19th century Spanish fresco in 2012, sloppy or inaccurate restorations brought derision from art professionals and museum-goers alike.

ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty Images

Recent efforts from an Italian team can provide some reason to celebrate. With the help of laser scans and 3-D printing, a team of experts built prosthetics for funerary busts that militants had smashed with hammers. Even 20 years ago, the idea of restoring a shattered 2,000-year-old piece of sculpture would have been a gargantuan, if not impossible, task.

For the sites that cannot — or according to some, should not — be rebuilt, other options to preserve their memory are available, thanks in great part to the development of new technologies.

An ancient world preserved with data

One of the leaders at the forefront of new methods of cultural preservation is Brian Pope, founder of Arc/k, an organization devoted to reconstructing historical sites through virtual reality.

Pope, 51, who is Apache-Cherokee, explained how his Native American roots gave him an early appreciation both for the loss of cultural memory and the importance of fighting to preserve it.

“All of us live on stolen land,” Pope told T+L. By ensuring that the memories of that land are not destroyed, “you lose the ability to be ignorant.”

With a background in technology and visual effects, Pope started the Perpetuity Palmyra project in this same spirit of bringing history to life. He also plans to share his 3-D archive with scholars so that they can use his virtual reconstruction for future research.

By using a process called photogrammetry, Pope’s team has used thousands of photos, many taken by amateur photographers and tourists, to recreate Palmyra in virtual reality. The digital archives and videos of this project are available through the organization’s site, and they regularly conduct demonstrations so that more people can be exposed to the beauty of this location.

Putting on the VR headset has the power to transport. The site is reconstructed to scale, and anyone wearing the headset can sense Palmyra’s grandeur and the reverence that its imposing buildings once evoked. Arc/k has spared no detail, stitching together at least 90 photos for each small section of a building. The team checked the location and veracity of these images via their meta-data.

“One of the things that all restorers are concerned with is: What is the legitimate version of an object?” Pope said. Even before ISIS arrived in Palmyra, reconstructions took place several times in the middle of the 20th century, altering the appearance of the site.

“There is no single version of these things that is the correct version, so what digital technology is allowing [us] to do is to sidestep that question completely. It makes it pointless and moot,” he said.

Travelers have been indispensable to Pope’s VR efforts in Palmyra. Little could they have known that the vacation snapshot they took of their visit to the site 10 years ago could now be used to preserve extinct temples. The data of tourists’ digital photographs allowed for a collage of the imagery, creating a more complete picture of each structure.

“It’s the tourists that are becoming basically collectors of scientific information — crowd-sourced science,” he said.

May 2010: Tourists visit the ruins of old temple complex of Palmyra in Syria.

gertvansanten/Getty Images

From tourist magnet to war zone

While many people in 2017 might not view Syria, and Palmyra in particular, as a tourist destination, it drew visitors from all over the world for hundreds of years.

Records of explorers traveling thousands of miles to stand in front of its temples, tombs, and colonnades date as far back as the 1600s. One Englishwoman in the early 19th century spent a fortune to travel with a caravan to Palmyra, just to glimpse the sight that she had read so much about.

Lady Hester Stanhope, an infamous widow and adventurer, made the journey in 1813 after becoming obsessed with the history of the similarly headstrong Queen Zenobia, who once reigned over Palmyra. Despite warnings and diplomatic obstacles, Stanhope spent 150 pounds sterling — the equivalent of $12,000 — to make the trek across the desert on horseback, according to historian Browning.

Archival images [photographed between 1867 and 1899] of remains of the Temple of Diocletian, statues, and L’Arc de Triomphe found in Palmyra, Syria.

Library of Congress

British explorers who traveled to Palmyra to make sketches of it inadvertently triggered a boom in Oriental decorating, according to Browning in his book, “Palmyra.” The influence that the Greco-Roman style of Palmyrene architecture exerted over the neoclassical revival in the 17th and 18th centuries is one of the reasons cited by UNESCO for naming Palmyra a “world heritage site” in the first place.

Throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, Palmyra remained a hub for tourists from across the globe, and Europe in particular. For Pope and other Palmyra enthusiasts, the idea that tourists could one day return to the city is not an impossible dream, with VR only emboldening people to explore.

“This is not just for the wealthy. This is not only for those who can travel, who can afford to travel,” he said. “These technologies make it possible to understand the world and experience the world without necessarily needing to go to these places. And yet we found over and over again that having experienced them, people are more willing to travel to those places. So it’s an odd kind of synergistic effect.”

Picture released in the 1930s of a desert caravan in Palmyra, ancient city in central Syria, located in an oasis northeast of Damascus.

STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images

Buried treasures hidden in the sand

What still remains for visitors to see when civilians finally return to Palmyra will depend largely on the outcome of the next several years. As ISIS remains in control of Palmyra, the site risks further destruction at the hands of its captors.

Part of what always made Palmyra remarkable was the size of the historical site — an entire city preserved inside an expansive desert oasis. And its size may be one of its saving attributes, according to Syrian antiquities expert Al-Azm.

“The site is huge, and most of it is still unexcavated,” he said. “There’s still plenty more underneath the ground. Yes, we’ve lost very important parts of the site, but I think there are also very important parts of the site that are buried and safe.”