Old-fashioned detective work and a golden bell: Inside the hunt for British Museum’s missing treasures
D.Deep in the maze of corridors of the British Museum, the occasional school bell can be heard ringing.
Its noise may cause new employees to scurry between offices to find the chaos, but for those accustomed to the oddities within the four walls of the institution, the ritual is a well-known celebration.
Whenever there is a breakthrough in the quest to find hundreds of lost treasures from the museum’s Greek and Roman collections, the intrepid team of six will raise the signal to ring the golden bell in a moment of feverish excitement.
“It became a bit of a strange ritual within the team,” says research leader Professor Tom Harrison, who was persuaded to take up the bell by a former colleague, inspired by television programs in which estate agents ring the bell when selling.
“We didn’t initially create databases to make large numbers of matches [for missing items]So when we can spot a missing object, it’s like we’re looking for a needle in a haystack, ‘God, how did we do that?’ ” you think.
More than two years have passed since the institution broke the news that most of the valuable works in its Greek and Roman collections had been lost, stolen or damaged (later announced to be around 2,000 pieces).
The revelation triggered an ongoing investigation by the Metropolitan Police and internal emergency measures to increase security before an independent review recommended that the museum document its entire collection.
At the time, the museum’s president, George Osborne, declared that finding lost treasures was a top priority; This task fell on the shoulders of Prof Harrison, who had just been appointed head of the department.
Among the valuables, many of which were unregistered, were gold jewelery and classical jewelery dating back to the late Bronze Age.
“About a year after I arrived I took a real holiday because there was so little time and so much pressure,” Professor Harrison says.
Tasked with a recovery team of enthusiastic workers, Prof Harrison set about the painstaking task of not only tracing the objects through recorded transactions and sales catalogues, but also creating a database of all items.
Their methods can be described as old-fashioned police detective work due to the lack of digitally recorded information.
Some members examined handwritten notes on collections purchased by the museum hundreds of years ago to identify missing items, while others compared items in stock to archival catalogs to ensure they were fully intact.
Some searched for items known to be missing, using a growing database of tip-offs as well as known missing artifacts to check for artifacts that were offered for sale or had been sold as far back as more than a decade ago.
“In some cases, we had to track down things that had four or five different owners, and sometimes went on quite long and elaborate journeys that, oddly enough, ended up not far from us,” says Professor Harrison.
“There were things that went all over Europe, to three or four countries, and then we found them when we came back to London. Likewise, we also got items from European countries and North America.”
But finding a suspected lost object is not always the last challenge.
The team must obtain an export license before bringing a product into the UK from abroad, which can sometimes take months to achieve. Law enforcement forces in the country also need to be informed.
Then, most importantly, it is necessary to persuade the owner of the item to give up ownership. The museum, under its guidance, will not pay more than the price the person paid for it.
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But Professor Harrison says most people are cooperative.
“A lot of people were more than happy to return the items to us without paying,” he says. “They get an offer to pay but in the end they don’t accept, which is an incredibly reasonable and great thing to do.
“I can see how sometimes people have to go through a bit of a grieving process because they like an object and they might want proof that we think it belongs to us, but then they actually want to be completely reasonable and be part of the positive story.”
But there are dead ends.
After spending time researching and investigating, the team will receive a report of a missing item that will turn out to be a duplicate.
“That’s why when you get an item back, it feels incredibly liberating and wonderful, because you worked so hard to track it down, whereas there are other items that we only know the final location of.”
Professor Harrison and his team recovered 654 of the estimated 1,500 missing items. But with most of the pieces found so far from large gem groups, progress on the figure has slowed, with the team dealing more with smaller numbers and even individual gems.
There is also a race to track down gold items, which could melt as their price increases.
How many of the items will be saved?
“The melting of gold is a big limitation for us, but we are ambitious about trying to get as much back as we can,” Professor Harrison says. “This will continue. I strongly suspect it will all continue to come back even after I retire or die.”
The golden bell sitting on Professor Harrison’s desk awaits the next breakthrough.
