Shows you the total lack of imagination in public policy that is the 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.
> 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.)
I don’t understand how the museums collection can go un-cataloged for decades, it seems to be a pretty fundamental element of running a museum (knowing what you have in your collection)
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.
British Museum seems to have about 439 employees who work on "care, research, and conservation", of a total of around a thousand employees. Seems like they have enough budget and staff to get such a high-priority task done.
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.
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.
This seems like a reasonable use of resources and time? I'm assuming the British Museum has been around a bit longer than 5 years and hopefully plans on being around longer than 5 years.
Maybe than can hire a couple people. [edit] removed inflammatory last sentence.
That's not cataloguing, that's recording, and as far as I understand this is long ago done - cataloguing is those "all other details" which require expertise and time; all the things like figuring out that this coin is a roman coin from 1st century, and that other coin from the same find is from another location.
How much time does it take to move a specific piece of artefact in/out of storage? What are the dimensions of the artefact? Are they sensitive to light? Are special equipments required to handle them? Every piece is different, not to mention the mandatory planning involved before moving every item. It's not the same as a retail store photographing their merchandise.
It's one-quarter of their collection, and they've had 271 years to accumulate and catalog all this material. As others have mentioned, they have enough staff.
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.
Uncatalogued doesn’t necessarily mean unrecorded, just it hasn’t been investigated enough to record its history, condition, and significance etc. The items could need cleaning, they could be a box of fragments of pottery that might make a vase, or a large collection of scrolls that haven’t been interpreted.
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 Museum have somewhere on the order of 8 million objects. Having been collected since 1759 (and indeed before) in various state of being catalogued correctly at the time of collection.
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's the same thing as clutter but on a professional level. Eventually the collection becomes large enough that it is infeasible to catalogue every single item. Any museum only has a small fraction of its collections on display at any given time, so things that are low prio on the display rotation will also be low prio on the catalogue shortlist.
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.
Donations. I expect until recently the museum accepted donations of thousands of items at once. Some old private "cabinet of curiosities" or hobby collector's hoarde would be transfered - and nobody would particularly care for any but a few select items at that time. So quickly a backlog builds up, which nobody particularly cares to clear, even now.
> 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.
Isn't the most surprising thing is that a curator would sell a $15,000 item for $40??? Was he addicted to meth and just really needed an easy $40 or what?
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?
Dr Higgs seems to have been doing this for decades.
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]
> 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.
Based on the original article, it sounds like the British Museum was heavily politicized with well heeled donors strongarming museum staff to do their bidding.
> 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)
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)
London is the UKs capital city, and largest most wealthy city. It’s cost of living in more-or-less on par with cities like New York and San Francisco.
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”)
> It’s cost of living in more-or-less on par with cities like New York and San Francisco
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.
> 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.
You're excluding the reasonable comparables. London is the UK's equivalent of NYC or SF.
In Hebrew there is a saying that goes roughly like "He who steals from a thief is exempt". This is commonly interpreted as you're not liable but goes to a Mishna (circa 100AD) that says you're exempt from the normal fines that apply to stolen property.
Not taking a side in this debate, but what is ownership? As far as I can tell it is an invented concept and has no objective truth, only a "truth that we all agree on".
Would you philosophize about ownership if someone stole your laptop or phone?
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.
If someone held a gun to your head and stole your laptop or phone, yes, I'm sure the OP won't try to claim they own the laptop anymore and go to the owners house asking for it back.
Stealing through force is very different to stealing through deception alone. History is made by the first, and ruined by the last.
I like the word "possession" for this. Either actual possession, when you physically control and can use something, and constructive possesion, where you might not have physical contact with something but still control it.
Ownership is when you convince the right people that you should possess something.
What are these mental gymnastics, and why are you bothering with them?
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.
Mental gymnastics? You mean the mental exercises I use to remain cognitively neutral and not succumb to emotion?
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.
There are clear cut cases like with Pantheon, but for many artefacts there are no real owners left. Their cultures have been wiped out, and the people who wiped them out were wiped out too.
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.
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.
Naturally it's a good point in a thread about stealing from said museum (and yes I butchered the name). However its track record has been comparatively good, even if more due to geographic isolation of Britain and stability of its political system than anything else.
I don’t think they’ve been horrible stewards. And the British Museum is delightful to visit. I’m just pointing out that it’s a bit rich to loudly proclaim that you are the best stewards of antiquities (that other countries might otherwise have better claims to) and then not do simple things like properly catalogue your collections.
Yes, it was indeed unethical and there are many moral and legal arguments that the skeleton should receive a burial, but the stealing was arranged by a Scottish surgeon and not the British government. It was removed from display last year. There seems to be some additional legal issues too, at least for the board of the museum: "since 1799 its trustees had been legally bound to preserve the collection of John Hunter – the pioneering Scottish surgeon and anatomist who the museum is named after – in its entirety" [1]
it’s not possible to be legally bound to commit a crime, so if those “legal issues” (nice euphemism) are great enough then it doesn’t matter what some dead dudes agreed to. the contract is toilet paper from 400 years ago, even if you really like the dudes and the current state of affairs.
Most of the countries these artifacts come from don’t have the ability to properly store and protect them. Not to mention mass looting and stealing that would/could occur in the more politically unstable countries.
> Most of the countries these artifacts come from don’t have the ability to properly store and protect them.
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.
Can't understand how they brainwash people to accept theft, murder, and plundering other countries. What did they do to you to justify that? It would be an interesting field of research. Or are you just a poorly educated evil bloodthirsty sociopath?
You obviously don't understand what the word realist mean, imagine being that poorly educated while thinking you are superior. That's not being a realist it is just being propagandized and brainwashed, western exceptionalism is a mental illness like all delusional supremacist ideologies.
Because he needs a way to sell them and it's a niche enough item that it'd be hard to sell elsewhere unless you have a good connection - who would likely get suspicious if all of the stuff was going through them.
I think since these are cultural artifacts, many times looted in war or conquest, there's an argument to be made they could be returned to the cultural institutions or museums of the place they were taken from.
What if the culture requesting it has artifacts of their own that they can’t give back, because they themselves genocided those cultures. No one is innocent.
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
Small beer when it's also built in very large part on stolen land, eh? If giving stuff back is important (and I think it is), I'd love it if the knee-jerk thinkers of HN would start by looking at where they live and which tribe it was stolen from by force and murder.
> If giving stuff back is important (and I think it is), I'd love it if the knee-jerk thinkers of HN would start by looking at where they live and which tribe it was stolen from by force and murder.
Okay. Where do you live, who was it stolen from, and what are you going to do about it?
In the south east of England. It's not really clear it was stolen by anyone. The only people in even slightly recorded history to really steal it buggered off a few hundred years later because they missed olive oil and hated the climate. Everyone else pretty much just turned up to run it better, like slightly violent management consultants.
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.
In many cases, the USA knows the names and families of the people it stole land from. Knows their lineage. Even has photographs of some of them!
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.
Well, the USA was completely stolen, every single square inch, and the natives genocided. Whereas the Basques for example, if they stole their land, did it in deep prehistory.
The natives weren’t one political group of people. They were hundred or thousands of tribes. And at some point each tribe “stole” it from some other tribe and territory. Some tribes (example: the Iroquois) were genociding other tribes.
American museums also seem to have a stronger financial muscle [0] as they tend to be overwhelmingly funded by self sustaining endowments and more open to monetization strategies like IP Licensing (eg. MoMA+Uniqlo's partnership)
There's a difference between museums and galleries where pieces were purchased and have a good chain of ownership and pieces where the museum knows one of the owners in the chain looted the piece
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.