British Museum Seeks Real-World Treasure Hunter

More than two years after the British Museum revealed that hundreds of objects had gone missing from its Greek and Roman collections, the losses are still coming into focus. Thieves stole, damaged, or left unaccounted for an estimated 1,500 artifacts, including gems, glass, and jewelry spanning more than three millennia. Only 650 items are believed to have been recovered so far.

But the biggest problem is that it’s not even clear what artifacts went missing.

“The fact is that we, outside the museum, don’t know what’s lost,” Martin Bailey, a reporter for The Art Newspaper, said in a 2023 interview on NPR. “And I suspect that even within the museum, it’s not quite clear what has gone missing or has been stolen.”

The museum’s new hire—a specialist tasked with tracking down missing artifacts—will join a small recovery team that has been juggling this search alongside their regular duties. The goal is simple to state and hard to achieve: find what is still missing before it disappears forever.

Paper Trail Hunt

Popular culture still casts archaeologists as globe-trotting adventurers. In reality, the job is much more mundane, and so is this ‘treasure hunter’ role.

“Think more librarian than Indiana Jones,” host Sacha Pfeiffer said, describing the role.

The treasure hunter will spend much of their time combing through archival records and old catalogs. They will also work the phones, contacting auction houses, dealers, and collectors around the world.

“We want to get as much staffing as we can to try and push ahead,” Thomas Harrison, head of the museum’s Greek and Roman collections, told The Times. “We want to make progress fast in terms of getting things back.”

Some of that progress has come from unlikely places. Several stolen objects surfaced on eBay, including a piece of Roman jewelry valued at $60,000 that sold online for just $48. Alert art dealers flagged other items, while auction houses identified some in the middle of sales.

One of the largest recoveries—268 objects—came from the United States, after authorities and dealers flagged suspicious listings.

Museum officials worry that dealers may have already melted down many of the missing gold items, wiping out their histories in minutes.

What the Theft Exposed

The scandal of the missing artifacts erupted in 2023 after whistleblower Ittai Gradel’s warnings. With its reputation sorely bruised, the museum showed poor capacity to react. An independent review commissioned after the thefts found serious weaknesses in the museum’s record-keeping. They had poorly documented some objects while never formally registering others at all.

The review urged the museum to clearly define what belongs in its collection and to fully catalog items that had slipped through the cracks. The new treasure hunter will help with that internal audit, working to ensure that no more absences go unnoticed.

The museum has now listed all known missing artifacts on the Art Loss Register, an international database used by law enforcement and the art trade.

The case has already claimed careers. The museum fired longtime curator Peter Higgs after accusing him of stealing artifacts, an allegation he has denied. The museum’s director at the time resigned days after the thefts became public.

“Our priority is now threefold,” George Osborne, the museum’s chair, told The Associated Press in 2023. “First, to recover the stolen items; second, to find out what, if anything, could have been done to stop this; and third, to do whatever it takes…to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”