The British Museum is on a high-stakes hunt for hundreds of stolen artifacts, and it plans to hire a specialist to help track them down before they vanish for good.
In 2023, the museum revealed that thousands of items had gone missing from its Greek and Roman collections. Professor Tom Harrison, who was recently promoted to lead the department, has been leading the painstaking recovery of the treasures spanning gold jewellery, semi-precious stones, and glass dating back to the 15th century BC. Harrison told the Times that he hopes to reclaim the gold before it’s melted down, acknowledging that the search will likely continue “until I’m retired or under the ground.”
Currently, a small team of five, already stretched with other museum duties, is tasked with the recovery. Harrison plans to recruit someone dedicated to “writing letters to dealers, auction houses, and collectors worldwide” once funding is secured. “We want to make progress fast,” he said.
A museum spokesperson told ARTnews that the new role, which has not yet been advertised, will involve a good deal of archival research.
The scandal erupted when former curator Peter Higgs was sacked amid allegations of stealing, selling, and melting down artefacts over more than a decade. He denies the charges amid an ongoing civil case against him. The museum has so far recovered 654 of an estimated 1,500 missing items.
Recovery is painstaking. Leads have been coming in from the public, but mostly the team’s own research into private sales, catalogues, and historical archives. Harrison noted that the quality of tips “varies enormously,” and increasingly the returns are modest, one or two objects at a time, though occasional windfalls, like 268 gems shipped from the US, offer hope.
Technology is playing a growing role in the search. Open-source investigations and AI-assisted image matching have helped track long-lost artifacts, while the museum ordered a full audit of the Greek and Roman collections to ensure that nothing else goes missing.
Despite bureaucratic hurdles and the long wait for export licences, each recovered object has sparked flurries of joy, Harrison said. He recalled a moment of exhilaration when an item which has been sold multiple times, even on eBay, since it went missing finally returns: “It’s good… a sense of real satisfaction, like bringing them home.”
Wins like that ensure that the team remains optimistic, especially for the gold. “It’s always assumed gold is stolen to be melted down. That is depressing, but there are little glimmers of hope we might find more of it,” Harrison said.
