Iraq's treasures still being looted

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"What's going on here is worse than what happened with the Baghdad museum," says Professor Elizabeth Stone of Stonybrook University in New York. "What happened at the museum shouldn't have happened. But in terms of what was taken, we knew where it came from. We have photographs. What's coming out of here, we haven't the faintest idea what it is." Professor Stone has been studying new satellite images which show hundreds of neatly-arranged holes where sites have been dug up. "We can tell the difference between the areas they're really targeting and the areas they're probing," she says. "We can really make a distinction between different types of looting." ..."Archaeological sites are being destroyed in order to find these objects," says Dr John Curtis, head of the Ancient Near East department at the British Museum in London. "In the process of that looting, very important archaeological evidence gets lost. And it's this evidence that can tell us a great deal about the civilisation."