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In this interview, Pascal Butterlin, director of the French Archaeological Mission in Mari, reports how his training led him to take an interest in Mari's excavation site, before he assumed responsibility for it. Using the logbook, mission journal, documentary work, and archaeology contacts in Syria, he tells the story of this mission in Syria and its evolution in the context of the Syrian civil war. Excavating overseas in a society at war makes Western archaeologists, who are confronted with this “oriental” world, question themselves.