The scenes are haunting. A video camera strapped to the nose of a drone aircraft first shows only a spinning, sunlit horizon in the barrens of southern Jordan.
Then the camera swoops, low and slow, over a hilltop whose surface recalls photographs of the lunar battlefields of World War I Europe. Crater after crater gouge the hill’s stony surface. It looks like the aftermath of a murderous artillery barrage.
But the holes aren’t the result of explosions. Each has been dug, laboriously, one spadeful at a time, by an army of looters. The casualty: a historic site called Fifa, containing more than 10,000 Bronze Age tombs stuffed with pottery, carnelian beads, and shell bracelets, a vast necropolis that some archaeologists associate with Sodom and Gomorrah, the “cities of the plain” destroyed by God in the Bible.
