Interview with Dr. Laurie Rush, Cultural Resource Manager at Fort Drum, New York

October 7, 2025

Interview conducted by Kate Harrell

MEET DR. LAURIE RUSH

Dr. Laurie W. Rush is the key pioneer and advocate for Cultural Property Protection or “CPP” in military affairs, and her work has been transformative for the field. She is an Anthropologist and Archaeologist. She holds a BA from Indiana University Bloomington, an MA and PhD from Northwestern University, and is a Fellow of the National Science Foundation and of the American Academy in Rome. Dr. Rush’s research specialty is Native Americans of northeastern North America, and she serves as Native American Affairs Liaison for the 10th Mountain Division and Fort Drum.

She has served as a US Army civilian for sixteen years, managing Cultural Resources at Fort Drum, NY. and has co-directed the NATO Science for Peace and Security project on cultural property protection for NATO (NATO SPS CPP).

Dr. Rush was military liaison for return of the Mesopotamian City of Ur to the Iraqi People in 2009, represented US Central Command at Environmental Shuras in Kabul in 2010, and analyzed cultural property protection lessons learned from the Iraq and Afghan conflicts for the US Central Command Environmental Program. On behalf of CENTCOM, she participated in key leader engagements across the Middle East including Jordanian partnership programs, Eagle Resolve and Bright Star exercises.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

• Rush, Laurie, The Importance of Training Cultural Property Protection-An Example from the U.S. Army, pp. 80-92.
• Rush, Laurie and Luisa Benedettini Millington, The Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Property: Saving the World’s Heritage (2019), available HERE.
• Rush, Laurie, “Military Protection of Cultural Property,” In: Countering Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods: The Global Challenge of Protecting the World’s Heritage, Paris: ICOM.
• — “Off Course? A Career in Archaeology Outside of the Academy,” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies; Forum: Investing in the Future. (State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 2015)
• — “Protecting Cultural Property in Crisis Areas.” Predella, Art Journal of Pisa. (2013) available at http://www.predella.it/index.php/component/content/article.html?id=47:32…
• — “Cultural Property Protection: The Critical Role of Partnership Between Academia and the Military,” In: Serenella Ensoli, ed., For the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage in Libya; a dialogue among institutions, Proceedings of Conference 1-2 July 2011, monumental complex of Belvedere, San Leucio, Caserta. Rome, Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore.
• —  “Working with the Military to Protect Archaeological Sites and other Forms of Cultural Property.” Journal of World Archaeology (2012). 44:3, 359-377.
• — “Training for In Theater Cultural Resources Protection: Training Assets- Construction Specifications” Department of Defense: Legal Resource Management Program, 2006. available HERE

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of Dr. Laurie Rush and do not represent the U.S. Government, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, or any other governmental or international organization.

---

The Interview:

Do you want to start by telling us about your education and how you became a cultural resource manager with the United States Army?

Sure. My academic degrees are in anthropology, and I have a bachelor’s from Indiana University, Bloomington, and my master’s and Ph.D. are in medical anthropology from Northwestern University. (My master’s is my archaeology credential because it was based on analysis of archaeological collections.)

I came to be a U.S. Army Cultural Resource Manager purely by accident. We moved to Northern New York near Fort Drum, a U.S. Army installation. In the early 1980s, Fort Drum expanded to host the 10th Mountain Division and also, NAGPRA came on the scene right around the same time, and Fort Drum had archaeological collections from the expansion. They needed someone to inventory the collection, so I did a contract for them for a couple of years. I was also doing freelance archaeology and museum consulting in the area, and then in 1998, the manager position opened, and I said I would fill in for 6 weeks, and that was 27 years ago.

Tell us the kind of activities and duties that you are responsible for at Fort Drum.

As a Cultural Resource Manager, I’m responsible for compliance archaeology for over 108,000 acres on an active military training installation, so any time there’s ground disturbing activity, in order to keep the garrison commander in compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act, we have to make sure that we don’t disturb a potentially eligible archaeological site.

Fort Drum is at a major portage for Indigenous people in the northeast. We connect the river systems of the Hudson and Mohawk, and the eastern seaboard, with the river systems of the St. Lawrence, Great Lakes, and Maritimes. Our teams have found over 200 Indigenous sites over the past 20 years. We also have managed compliance archaeology for a billion dollars worth of construction projects. We host all the National Guard and Reserve units in the northeast for training too.

We also have diplomatic relations with the Onondaga Mohawk and Oneida Indian Nations. I’m the liaison between the Division for Fort Drum Garrison and those nations. Part of my role is to be a steward of the buried remains we have on Fort Drum. We also enable access to at least three Indigenous sacred sites that are located on Fort Drum, at which Indian Nations still hold ceremonies. That’s a super rewarding aspect of my job.

We manage the LeRay Mansion Historic District, which is the remains of the estate of the original European landowner for our region. My office is actually in a historic mansion. We’ve managed to renovate all five historic buildings, so we’re proud of that as well.

Tell us about how you got into international cultural heritage preservation and working with international stakeholders.

In 2003 or 2004, the news hit the global media that members of the U.S. military–as it turns out, it was the U.S. Marines–had been assigned a mission to protect the archaeological remains of Babylon, but because they had no idea how to protect an archaeological site, they damaged it. When this bad news hit the airwaves, we realized that as the home of the Army’s most deployed division, we had an obligation to make sure that our deploying soldiers never made that same mistake. So Fort Drum and our archaeology team began our own training program for 10th Mountain Division personnel.

And because they had so much deployment experience already, 10th Mountain Division already had a pretty good appreciation of the importance of cultural property protection for mission success. 10th Mountain were the ones that really taught us that the adversaries were using cultural heritage, for example, cemetery markers, as firing points. We realized we needed to prepare our soldiers for working in this kind of operational environment. So, we started out by building fake sites, fake ruins, even fake cemeteries, so that our soldiers would train in similar conditions and would learn to anticipate adversarial behavior. We have archaeological districts on Fort Drum that are the remains of five villages where local residents lost their homes in 1940 when Fort Drum expanded during World War II. These villages are listed on the National Register, but we reopened them for military training, so all the soldiers that train on Fort Drum have an opportunity to practice occupying an archaeological site or historic environment without damaging it.

How did you begin working with NATO?

In conjunction with Jim Zeidler and Tracy Wager and their team at Colorado State University’s Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands, we developed archaeology awareness playing cards. And these decks received global press coverage, so that was really exciting.

So, in 2010, I applied for a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, without realizing that the Academy had a tradition of producing Monuments Officers. Most of the Monuments Officers who served in Italy in World War II were fellows of the American Academy in Rome. My application was very graciously received and accepted.

I had an opportunity to live and work in Rome for a year, which enabled me to begin networking with our European colleagues. Ultimately, as a fellow, I gave over 30 lectures in 6 countries, so it was a really excellent opportunity to begin working together at an international level on issues of cultural property protection, and that eventually led to NATO developing funding and developing a series of advanced research workshops for moving toward cultural property protection policy for the Alliance. These workshops resulted in another series of international meetings.

We also had a wonderful environmental engineer at U.S. Central Command between 2007 and 2011, LTC Dan Brewer, and Dan was a huge advocate for cultural property. He began to incorporate cultural heritage protection into various Central Command exercises and war games, so we were able to add cultural property protection into Eagle Resolve, Bright Star, as well as various partnership exercises in Jordan.

All of these events and trainings helped spread the word a little further. In 2009, I was sent to Iraq to assist with the return of the site of Ur to the stewardship of the Iraqi people. I subsequently went with LTC Brewer to Kabul for a series of environmental and civil-military meetings that included cultural property, so there were lots of opportunities for working on the ground.

While working with ally and partner countries, where have you seen cultural differences in how other countries are handling cultural heritage protection, and what can we learn from them?

This is another reason why being a fellow at the American Academy in Rome was such a privilege, because the Italian Carabinieri per la Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale, their heritage police, really are the world leaders in cultural property protection in conflict zones. They have over 300 officers that are extremely well-trained. Many of the Carabinieri have advanced degrees in either law or various specialties in archaeology or heritage. They also have deployment capabilities. So I’d initially become interested in their Iraq deployment, including looting interdiction in Nasiriyah Province and serving with the Baghdad Museum after it was looted. They played a key role in its recovery. The U.S. has a lot to learn from the Italians.

The Italians also are continuing to emerge as world leaders in disaster response. Of course, they have a lot of experience in earthquakes, and thanks to the American University in Rome and ICCROM first aid courses, I had an opportunity to visit L’Aquila after the 2009 earthquake, and then I had an opportunity to visit Norcia 10 years later. And it was so exciting to see the way the Italians had applied all the lessons learned in L’Aquila for a better response in Norcia. It was just remarkable. So I would say the Italians are the model. I was at a conference at the National Museum of Hungary in November, where an officer from Italian Civil Protection gave a talk. Several of the follow-on talks were essentially other European representatives discussing how they were applying the Italian model, which I thought was pretty interesting. If I get a chance to write another book, I would write about the Italian civil protection, disaster recovery, and cultural property and conflict models, so that their procedures can be adopted further and wider.

What are your thoughts on the protection of intangible heritage?

That’s a tough one. In terms of the military, the very first step for protecting intangible heritage is taking the religious and local ceremonial calendars into consideration when planning military operations.

ICCROM has done a wonderful job in terms of determining peace indicators as a way of understanding the conditions in which a local community feels safe. What progress are they making on returning to civil society? This question really overlaps with military intelligence in terms of determining which neighborhoods are at risk for sectarian violence. One of the indicators for answering this question is whether residents feel free to practice their religion, including going on pilgrimages. Do people feel free to practice their local celebrations, their parades, their public gatherings?

So I think we could very easily start our intangible heritage protection there, because answering this question also has the military benefits. You can’t go on patrol if the streets are filled with people, or if there’s a parade coming in the opposite direction, or a pilgrimage of thousands of Shia pilgrims moving across Iraq. Familiarity with local calendars is an important aspect of military intelligence and should be built into operational planning. Implementing local calendars is something that the Defense Intelligence Agency really needed to take for action yesterday.

Moving on from local patterns of life, it gets much trickier. So, for example, many times when we talk about intangible heritage, we talk about the knowledge keepers. So, in a hostile situation, should knowledge keepers be prioritized first over other members of a community? This is where ethical issues get much harder. So my advice is: for now, let’s start with documenting and planning around local festivals, because we already know we need to work on this, and then we can worry about the rest.

How are you working with international heritage organizations now?

UNESCO is in the process of establishing what they’re calling their Civil-Military Alliance Forum for the Protection of Cultural Property. They had their first meeting in Paris in May 2025, and so that is a glimmer of hope for the future.

The Carabinieri Stability Police center in Vicenza, Italy, has been very proactive in the cultural property protection realm. They’ve had several international conferences, so they’re doing a nice job of bringing people together to discuss emerging topics and moving forward. They’ve made a free computer-based training that’s readily available too.

The U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield is in a rebuilding phase. Actually, years ago, the Committee produced an edition of the heritage playing cards for U.S. Southern Command, which were more regionally based. So that was one of the bigger projects. Recently, we had a wonderful initiative to help a local community in Sudan. There was a pyramid that the local community needed to climb in order to get cell phone service. And so we voted to fund the creation of a cell phone tower, which, to me, is just such a perfect example of how you can save heritage for a reasonably priced and creative way. Working with stakeholders at the very local level, they were able to identify a problem and we could help implement a solution. They didn’t want to damage the pyramid, but they also needed cell service.

Recently I’ve been working with the Hungarians on developing their Blue Shield Committee. I realized that our U.S. Committee could benefit from the advice I was offering the Hungarians. So I put together some documents on trying to help heritage professionals understand how to work with the military better in a more productive way. I am presenting the military and the heritage community as partners in a dance. When people are learning to dance, they step all over each other’s toes. We know that heritage professionals probably would not appreciate military personnel, who have no understanding of how a museum or a library or an archives works, to come and tell them how to run their organization. By the same token, we need our heritage professionals who want to help to have a better understanding of how the military works, so that their contributions can be genuinely productive and meaningful. The more I think about it, the more I think learning to dance with a partner is the perfect analogy for how we can develop more productive Blue Shield Committee relationships.

What are the most pressing threats to heritage?

Ongoing conflict and climate change. Our coastline archaeology is literally washing away. We really need to be thinking about both conflict and climate change and doing what we can to prevent conflict and rescue the planet.

Is heritage a problem in conflict, or is it a solution?

I think it’s a solution, because when we take it into consideration, we’re able to de-escalate. We also are able to increase the potential for safety of folks that find themselves in cross-cultural situations. The more they understand about the landscape and people where they’re operating, I think, the more likely that they’ll achieve stability much faster.

---

About the interviewer

Kate Harrell interned with the Center for Art Law in the Summer of 2025. She is an open source investigator of crimes against cultural heritage and is the Director of the CURIA Lab, Conflict Observatory. Kate holds a Ph.D. in archaeology and is a 2L at the University of Virginia School of Law. She can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-harrell-06bbb8222/