The terrible human cost of the invasion of Iraq by coalition forces in 2003 is well documented. Published five years after the invasion, this book is a collection of twenty-eight essays which look back at a less bloody but nonetheless deplorable consequence. Its topic is the affect of the conflict on the country's cultural heritage and the international response that ensued. The victim with the highest profile was the Iraq Museum, which was ransacked as the battle for Baghdad raged around it. Several contributors shed light on how this happened and who was responsible. Also in the limelight was the site of Babylon, fifty miles south of Baghdad, which the coalition forces chose as the location for Camp Alpha and occupied for twenty months until the end of 2004. The consequent damage to the site has been well documented but this volume contains what may be regarded as definitive accounts.

Other museums were pillaged and other sites damaged by military activity, but a much greater loss is less generally appreciated, and that is the large-scale mechanised looting of ancient ruin-mounds (tells) by gangs in search of antiquities for financial gain. The tells of Iraq have always attracted treasure-hunters, and a market for their finds grew up in the 1870s, when local people learned that agents of the British Museum were offering money for cuneiform tablets and other small objects. The market delivered tens of thousand of finds, especially cuneiform tablets, into the possession of European and American museums in the 1880s–1920s. Trade in antiquities was slowly suppressed by the imposition of more stringent laws passed by the nascent state of Iraq in 1922 and 1936, but it was not completely halted. When Robert Adams conducted a survey of the central southern plain in 1968–75 he found at one cluster of tells evidence of recent looting so severe that the site became known as Umm al-Hafriyat “Mother of Excavations”. The Ba'ath regime was notable for its harsh treatment of those who looted archaeological sites, which I recall as a topic of conversation among the expatriate Anglophone community of Baghdad in the late 1980s. At the same time rumours circulated of antiquities smuggled out of the country in diplomatic bags. In the 1990s, when the UN embargo was in place, there was talk of the regime's involvement in illegal trade in antiquities.

Whether or not these stories of illegal dealing by the rich and powerful were true, they contributed to the popular notion among those without education that antiquities are a resource for exploitation. The continuing existence of the market, even during the Ba'ath era, meant that when the state lost control of the interior, people needed little prompting to exploit that resource. After the Iraqi army was expelled from Kuwait in 1991, the Shi'a uprising in the south and its aftermath kept the state security forces and the antiquities service out of the interior for several years. At the same time the UN embargo and state policies combined to impoverish the people who lived there. It was then inevitable that, fuelled by need and incited by agents of the antiquities' market, many turned for income to what became known as “farming antiquities”. Some of these were formerly employed by the antiquities service as archaeological labourers in the pay of the state. It was easy for them to return to the same sites in the pay of others whose approach to excavation was less scientific but, from an uneducated perspective, more efficient. The looting of archaeological sites became widespread, the market revived and, despite trade sanctions, the export of antiquities boomed. People who watch the antiquities' market reported that it was suddenly awash with ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals and other small finds.

In the years following 1991, and again from 2003, tells in the more remote areas of the south of Iraq were especially targeted. Several contributors to the volume comment on the result, which appears to be the wholesale destruction of archaeological sites on a scale never before witnessed in human history. Much of the surface of Larsa, Isin, Umma, Zabalam, Adab and Umm al-Hafriyat is reported to have been turned over to a depth of several metres, and many aerial photographs corroborate eye-witness accounts. It seems that the “heartland of cities”, as Robert Adams called it, where urban civilisation flourished five thousand years ago, has been utterly devastated. As many contributors to the book rightly point out, for cultural heritage this is the most serious consequence of the military actions against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and a dismal episode in the history of barbarism.

What of the future? Several contributors stress the need for more effective legal instruments and law enforcement, on the ground in Iraq, abroad in the international market and at government level, for the education of those who loot and their re-employment elsewhere. These strategies are all necessary to suppress the market; but for scholarship there are other prospective outcomes of this disaster that also need to be explored. Archaeologists will surely develop techniques and methods to decipher the wreckage of evidence, but it may be a long time before they can return to put their ideas into practice. It is perhaps premature to give serious thought to what will then need to be done.

There is another academic problem which is much more pressing. For legal reasons, Mesopotamian antiquities that many suspect of recent export are shunned by museums and most public institutions, and end up in private collections, where they are at the whim of their owners. This makes them very vulnerable. It is probable that very many such antiquities will remain hidden from view for a generation or more. But where they are accessible, they present a problem not much different from an archaeological site threatened with inundation behind a new dam. The situation calls for the same urgent reaction. Academic publication of antiquities that are vulnerable to disappearance is a kind of rescue archaeology.

Unfortunately, academics in the relevant disciplines are split between those who give priority to the production of knowledge and press for publication of all antiquities of whatever provenance, and those who believe that it is unethical to study antiquities that are suspected of illegal export and shun opportunities to increase knowledge in this way. The latter occupy the high moral ground but do nothing to help salvage the wreckage. The lack of consensus prevents a constructive outcome: a combination of pragmatism in dealing with what has already happened and a more idealistic strategy for preventing it happening again. There is no argument, however, about the causes of the mining of Iraq's archaeological sites and the illegal export of its antiquities. These causes become all too clear to the reader of this book: international sanctions and invasion, the state's impoverishment of its people, the people's ignorance and desperation, and the greed and ingenuity of the market, its agents and their clients.