"It needs to be available for research, to be put on display."
It seems like this artifact studying Dr. Jones is really trying to avoid saying "It belongs in a museum!"
It seems like this artifact studying Dr. Jones is really trying to avoid saying "It belongs in a museum!"
>>“History doesn’t belong to one person,” said Brice C. Jones, a papyrus expert who tracks online sales, and who wrote about the eBay listing on his blog the same day Dr. Smith noticed it, inadvertently sending bids shooting up.
>>“Collectively, globally, it’s ours,” continued Dr. Jones, who also communicated with the seller, who wishes to remain anonymous. “It needs to be available for research, to be put on display.”
Here is the more famous Dr. Jones saying just that - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-abUtRbUS_U (no sound at the moment, I trust it's the right one.)
Because yes, it belongs to a museum, but right now it's private property. On sale. So, if you want to take it to the museum, you just have to pay the price.
The reasons things got complex here was that the private party was selling an antiquity through an odd venue (a lot of antiquities are sold on eBay, but it's mostly common items of less historic interest). These sort of things would usually be sold through Sothebys, or Christie's, or some other auction house where they'd catalog the item, and make sure researchers and interested parties would be aware. This one slipped under the radar until the researcher at UT spotted it because of the fact that it was on eBay. This item turned out to be a highly historically significant find discovered by researchers too late for an institutional purchase (which is a slow process), and sold in a way that doesn't fit typical institutional purchase models.
There's also tension between academic researchers and antiquities collectors that this helped exacerbate. Antiquities collectors are seen by researchers as encouraging looting of archaeological sites and of buying historically significant items and harming the public at large by preventing the possibility of research. Many antiquities collectors, and especially dealers have their own low opinions of academics as well.