When the latest images from Iraq include a group of adolescents staring - with an eerie lack of shock or even curiosity - into a reflecting pool of human blood, it might seem quixotic, verging on indecent for an international group of senior academics to be worrying about the country's archaeology.
Yet, deep in the interior, far beyond the gaze of a dwindling pack of international media, sites among the oldest in the world are being trashed on an industrial scale, by gangs with earth moving equipment and freight lorries. The loot turns up within weeks on market stalls and reputable dealers' windows - its cash value intact, but stripped of the information held for millennia about the site it came from and the civilization that made it.
But does this matter, in a country where a baker beside his oven, or a barber by his chair, can be gunned down as valid targets for sectarian hatred?
The biggest guns that international archaeology can muster, nine professors and a flurry of doctors from Europe, Asia and the US, argue that it does matter - not just to Iraq but to the world, and not just to the world but to Iraq.
Their plea, sent to the Iraq government last week, urges that a new organisation, the Antiquities Guards, should be recruited to protect the ancient sites. The letter asks not just that the force remain, that numbers be increased and better equipped, but, pathetically, "that they continue to be paid".
Rumour also suggests that the fabulous collections of the still-closed National Museum in Baghdad may be scattered among the provinces.
Professor Jane Waldbaum, a signatory and the president of the Archaeological Institute of America, believes it is important that the international community speaks out. "What we don't want to see is Iraq going the way of the Taliban, in terms of the destruction of its archaeology," she told The Art Newspaper.
The archaeologists conclude: "Only a strong, national non-political State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, backed fully by the force of the state, can preserve the heritage that is left."
Yet there is no exit strategy for Iraqi archaeology. Sooner or later the allied forces will leave, eventually there will be an exhausted peace, but what is looted, lost, or casually destroyed is gone forever.
In the reconstruction which must come one day, archaeology will be needed as much as sewage pipes and power stations. It is needed to rebuild the infrastructure of the country's sense of itself, not a killing field in the desert but a country with a long, rich, history - a history infinitely more diverse than its current brutal reduction to black, white, and the colour of pooled blood.
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