British Museum gems for sale on eBay – how a theft was exposed
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Currently there is no apprenticeship route in archaeology. Simultaneously there is something like millions of objects uncatalogued at the British museum (note cataloging is not simply recording, it is more like expert annotation). So you could literally keep an army of apprentices occupied and rigorously trained for at least three generations by just maintaining the British museum catalog.
What is annoying is that the main imaginative policy that will come out of it is a politician giving a full newspaper spread on how they intend to use AI to solve the cataloging issue and, to rub salt on the wound, by outsourcing the AI system to Microsoft/Accenture.
Who will solve 80% of the problem by hiring archaeologist apprentices in America. (Source: friend is in an archaeology programme in Arizona. They're managing a dig in Turkey for a European museum that outsourced the task to an American consultant, which makes no sense.)
That's 5 years if one person worked on it nonstop without sleeping and each item took 60 seconds.
I would assume they probably sit in a secure location and items on display or items leaving/transferred are catalogued first so there's bit of a triage and backlog.
Museums probably don't want to turn down valuable item donations even if they don't have the resources to catalogue if right away.
Maybe than can hire a couple people. [edit] removed inflammatory last sentence.
https://www.britishmuseum.org/sites/default/files/2023-07/br...
Or... 2 people doing regular working hours for 3 years taking 10 seconds per item.
Each item can literally be 'photo' + drawer/cabinet number. All other details can be crowdsourced or done later.
How long does it take to take a photo?
I would assume they issue a receipt and itemize donations nowadays. I think part of it could be reluctance because not everything they have in their possession is rightfully theirs[0].
I don't know all the attributes required to properly catalog an artifact, but I imagine that advances in computer vision and translation could help tremendously.
https://www.businessinsider.com/british-empire-stole-cultura...
The required time depends on a lot of things, such as on the target quality of the data record, the complexity and fragility of the item, etc. The primary purpose of a catalogue is not to prevent theft, but to provide a tool for research. Therefore you typically want high quality photos, ideally from different sides, angels and lighting (or even a 3D scan), a description of the item, its provenance, its treatment, keywords from a normalised vocabulary, a bibliography, etc.
Here is a random example from the British Museum catalogue: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1896-0201-... -- Just think yourself how long it would take you to compile all this information. I would estimate several hours, if not days.
Following the theft, the British Museum announced a plan for a quick inventory of 2,400,000 items in 5 years for £10m.[1] This means £4.17 per item. If we use the UK adult minimum wage of £11.44 as a lower bound, this yields an upper bound of 2.74 items per hour -- in other words: not more than aprox. 22 minutes per record (but probably a lot less, depending on the wages of the people involved). Such a tight budget does not seem like it would allow for anything useful to be compiled for research. It sounds more like a big waste of money.
[1] https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/10/19/british-museum-to...
The collection has survived new buildings being built (a time when stuff easily gets misplaced) and of course the ebbing and flowing of funding.
I would say that keeping that large of a collection of such a long time completely in order is a hard problem.
It isn’t just a record “one Roman gold looking brooch”, a badly catalogued museum item is just as bad as a non catalogued item.
The British Musem only has 1025 full-time staff (Page #9 in this document https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c0c2a40f0b...), and I imagine only a small fraction of that number are experts who are qualified to perform cataloging operations. The number of people-hours required to go through 2.4 million pieces of artefacts likely exceeds any realistic projections.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3gqq7xy5xdo
> The British Museum says of 1,500 items it estimates are stolen or missing, 626 have so far been recovered and 100 more have been found but not yet brought back.
Or perhaps he really was a moron and was just breaking the stones out, selling the gold for melt value, and selling the stones for whatever worthless sum he assumed they were/just rocks?
He typically removes the gold casings and sells that to dealers directly.
There is even an article published by the Times in 2002 about artifacts being stolen from the British Museum and how Dr Higgs was in charge of that investigation [0]
[0] - https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/breakages-and-bungling-at...
> Curators with years of experience get as little as £12,000 a year and many complain they cannot afford to live in London.
Curious if that statement came from Higgs.
And possibly this incident inspired him to do later do the same.
Note the original article said this as well:
> He had been described by the UK government as “a world-renowned curator” in 2015 after helping to return a stolen 2,000-year-old statue to Libya. Dr Higgs later appeared on BBC’s Crimewatch to describe his work.
> One big donor threatened to withdraw her funding from the museum when she was told that she could not drink red wine in one of the galleries during a party. At another function, a catering trolley rammed into a glass case and damaged a valuable artefact. Although the incident happened five years ago, the artefact is still being repaired.
I think this is what Dr. Higgs used to rationalize his thieving - the donors clearly didn't care about the works but collectors did, and it I'm getting paid it's a win-win.
I guess it's another vaunted institution that has turned rotten, like much of the UK.
But tbf, £12,000 in London in the early 2000s was not great but livable (equivalent to $18k in 2002)
You can't really convert currency and/or then apply inflation or try to compare to 2002 US living costs.
London back then still cost a fortune to live in, 12k definitely wouldn't have been comfortable.
Yes, the pound was stronger against the dollar back then, but that's little comfort for someone trying to live in London!
I guess I was assuming almost $20k a year back then would have been livable back then, like it was for much of the US excluding a handful of cities like NYC or SF at the time.
I think minimum wage was around £9k/yr back then so I assumed 25% above minimum wage was acceptable (not great, but acceptable)
Clearly not though.
It’s substantially higher than the rest of the UK, and minimum wage in London has generally been higher than the rest of the UK (either in law, or as a de-facto standard, with companies paying a “London bonus”)
More like Chicago in my limited experience, but the pre-tax salaries are way lower in London than for similar roles in the US.
I never understood how people can afford to live in London by the late 2010s/early 2020s.
> It’s substantially higher than the rest of the UK, and minimum wage in London has generally been higher than the rest of the UK (either in law, or as a de-facto standard, with companies paying a “London bonus”)
Ofc, I'm just assuming London used to be relatively cheaper 20+ years ago and the cost of living ratio was not as bad then compared to today.
Like Tower Hamlets seemed to have only started gentrifying in the early 2000s.
20k USD was not livable for either of those cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Wage_Act_1998...
You're excluding the reasonable comparables. London is the UK's equivalent of NYC or SF.
https://bmrecruit.ciphr-irecruit.com//templates/CIPHR/jobdet...
A Thief that stoles from a Thief has 100 years of forgiveness.
Ownership is when you convince the right people that you should possess something.
Side tangent: there is an interesting Vox story about a Greenland meteorite. It illustrates the real human cost of these expeditions that filled museums. Therefore I find it hard to disentangle “ownership” from “violence”. In this story, the change of ownership is a violent and traumatic event.
Stealing through force is very different to stealing through deception alone. History is made by the first, and ruined by the last.
Ownership is when you buy a movie and then can watch it as many times as you want... until the streaming service goes out of business.
Oh, sorry, I meant "book" and "read".
No, sorry, wrong again... geez...
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%94%D7%92%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%91...
Wouldn't surprise me if there was some sort of link to the Spanish but if there is I can't find it...
The guardians are the thieves.
Force isn't a precursor to theft. It's a precursor to possession.
If someone with a bigger stick used it to take possession of the museum, we would have to say that they own the items now.
If you're being sarcastic, it's not coming through over the internet. It sounds like either a variant of "might makes right", or irrelevant linguistic pedantry.
Dunno. Probably just think with my brain and not my heart in most situations I can? This is a fairly simple situation where logic wins over extreme emotions.
No sarcasm here. Just the truth my friend. If it's pedantic to be right rather than be wrong and emotional then sure, I am being pedantic.
I’m not sure how this all works going forward. There were some plausible arguments about protecting artifacts, the uk was pretty stable in comparison.
This article seems to make it clear, that’s no longer the case. If you have some money, seems like you can bribe out whatever artifacts you want.
And frankly it's fine to care about survival of (otherwise publicly accessible) pieces of art and culture first and foremost. There's not going to be more of them.
The fact that these aren't handed back really shows the true colours though. The one that personally disgusts me is the Irish Giant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Byrne_(giant)
A man who's only wish in life was not to end up a museum and the British stole his bones and put him on display.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20231127211244/https://www.thegu...
As far as survival of arts and culture, the whole problem is that they aren’t the steward of historical treasures that threy claim to be. It’s insane that the British Museum, one of the preeminent museums in the world, is having stuff stolen from them, and can’t even identify what is stolen because they haven’t catalogued everything. If they want to claim that antiquities will be kept up for future generations, then they at least need to take that role seriously.
ok, but the problem this article is discussing is that the British museum doesn’t have that ability either.
if you don’t know what objects you even have, how could you possibly be ensuring the proper storage conditions?
Absolutely wild logic that gets thrown around when it comes time to defend looting and pillaging that in many cases occurred during living memory or not far removed.
Proclaiming that because they didn't make it, they aren't the owners is hilarious and wrong. Even if they became owners through force.
[0] - https://www.sothebysinstitute.com/news-and-events/news/the-b...
In historical terms it is a recent, deliberate, judicially-supported, documented theft. Not some undocumented invasion in hazy pre-history. Acts of Congress were passed to do it.
The British Museum (along with the V&A) has some stuff (well looked-after) that people want back. Currently the law literally prevents it being returned, and these organisations are in many cases trying to find ways to work around that law so that it is long-loaned back forever, until the law is changed. There's no simple intransigence; there is dialogue and politics.
The British Empire did some amazing things, and many, many ugly things. You won't find a person in the UK who doesn't understand that now, and there are all sorts of reparation campaigns, restitution campaigns, history projects, etc. etc.; nationally we rub our own noses in it so often that there's a right-wing backlash.
So it's tedious in the extreme the way Americans keep prattling on about British museums as if there is only stonewalling, and as if there is no appropriation from native culture in its post-independence history. It's literally on paper.
Feel free to donate your land back to the tribe it was “stolen from”.
Okay. Where do you live, who was it stolen from, and what are you going to do about it?
The point is that commenters arguing a museum should give stuff back from where they took it are often arguing from a country that has documentary records in its current legislative body that it faux-legalistically stole the very land it is on.
In many cases, the USA stole that land well after the British Museum (which is older than the USA) acquired some of its objects. It's astonishingly well-documented.
If the argument is that all land has changed hands at some point in history and that excuses the documented way the USA murdered people, used biological warfare, and walked them to their deaths off their own land, then I'm not sure what all the po-faced American social media fuss is about the Elgin Marbles.
(Personally I think the Marbles should go home)
It's about, if you have a piece in your museum, and you know in its chain of ownership, it was looted from, say, France during, say, the German occupation in WWII. Even if all the parties involved are now dead, there's a case to be made to transfer the artifact from a German museum to a French museum.
And this argument holds some weight and can be extrapolated to many other scenarios.
In your case if items exist in the museum looted from a nation that no longer exists (and isn't like Czechoslovakia which was split up into currently existing nations) and the nations in that same land aren't culturally connected or caring to have the artifacts, fine. Nothing else can be done