Iraq has become a looter's paradise, and history's worst nightmare. The ancient sites of Mesopotamia, the very cradle of civilisation, are subjected to daily plunder. Friezes from the walls of the Assyrian city of Hatra are sawn off using stonecutters. Entire Sumerian cities have been erased from history by organised looters armed with guns and diggers, hacking down to bedrock and extracting everything of value: pottery, sculptures, bottles, anything that can make a buck on the international market. From the air, the ancient sites look like the surface of the moon, pitted and cratered.

The robbery of the Iraqi National Museum in the aftermath of invasion in 2003 provoked worldwide outrage, but as the security situation has deteriorated, so the pillage has accelerated. Only one fifth of the country's 10,000 archaeological sites have been professionally excavated, but most of the rest have already been robbed. Iraq is being stripped of its past; world history is disappearing into immoral private hands.

The ransacking is breathtaking in scale, but by no means unique, for sales of looted antiquities are booming. The market in stolen artefacts has never been hotter: ancient Buddhist treasures from Sri Lanka, ivories from Afghanistan, Cambodian artworks from the Angkor temples, smuggled out and sold on through unscrupulous traders.

Numerous attempts have been made to stamp out the trade in stolen artefacts, and a number of prominent curators and dealers have recently been prosecuted for handling stolen goods. But still the market for looted antiquities expands, fed by a growing demand from the Middle East, Japan and China. Where once a rich man might adorn his palace with tiger skins and the heads of rare rhino, collectors now bag shards of Sumerian pottery and Buddhist carvings, trophy art to demonstrate wealth and sophistication.

The comparison between big game hunting and the hunt for smuggled artefacts is apt, for archaeologists are turning to the lessons of wildlife conservation in their efforts to protect the world's most threatened sites. The answer to the plague of looting may lie with the endangered elephant.

Looters of ancient sites are operating in precisely the same way as poachers hunting elephant, rhino or apes: ivory, rhino horn and bush meat attain their value by a combination of illegality and rarity. One solution may be to treat ancient sites as, in effect, protected wildlife preserves, which visitors pay to visit just as they pay to see rare animals in their natural surroundings.

Our attitudes towards rare animals have altered radically. Rather than capture them for zoos, or kill and mount them on our walls, we prefer to see them in game reserves, preserved as nearly as possible in a state of nature. The same should apply to the relics of history. Where once ancient relics were the preserve of museums, today we also want to see them, with others of their kind, in context.

A single elephant in a pen is a spectacle, but a herd of elephants crossing an African plain is an experience of a different magnitude. The terracotta warriors on display at the British Museum are astoundingly beautiful, but still more remarkable are the ranks of warriors in battle array in the great exhibition park at Xian.

For the past two centuries, archaeology has too often involved digging a hole, extracting a precious object, and taking it away for exhibition elsewhere. Increasingly, however, the emphasis is turning toward cultural heritage tourism, and the preservation of ancient relics in situ. One of the best examples is Butrint National Park in Albania, a settlement occupied in succession by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Venetians. Many of Albania's archaeological sites are prey to looting, but under the protection of the British Butrint Foundation, the ancient town has become a sort of game park for antiquities: some 70,000 visitors come every year to take a safari through ancient history.

Since the 1980s, wildlife experts have worked consistently to persuade local communities of the economic value of conservation, in terms of new jobs and tourist revenue. Precisely the same model can be applied to archaeological sites. Much of the looting in Iraq and other vulnerable areas is carried out by locals seizing the opportunity to profit in the chaos of war. But these looters see only a tiny fraction of what the object will eventually be sold for. Their future prosperity depends on preserving such things, not removing and flogging them.

Archaeological sites will be the wildlife parks of the future, but for Iraq's ancient places it may be too late. The last traces of Isin, a city that flourished 20 centuries before Christ, have reportedly vanished into the looters' hands. The great city of Ur, birthplace of Abraham, is a US army base, its walls crumbling under the pressure of occupation.

The occupiers' failure to protect these ancient sites is one of the quieter tragedies of the Iraq war, but with consequences that will be felt long after the troops depart. In other parts of the world, looters may be defeated by employing the techniques of wildlife preservation. But for Iraq's great treasures -- easily as fragile as the world's most endangered species -- extinction looms.

By Ben Macintyre
www.timesonline.co.uk