British Museum & eBay accord on antiquities

The British Museum is joining forces with the online auctioneer Ebay to prevent valuable antiquities being sold illegally on the internet.

The London-based museum, one of the world’s pre-eminent cultural institutions, has set up a team to monitor all antiquities sold on Ebay, and to make sure their sellers have a right to trade them.

From the Financial Times (subscription only, alas). The BM has taken an interest in online trading of antiquities for some time; per the abstract of a NY Times article from two years ago:

British Museum's head of treasure Roger Bland, during news conference in London, calls on eBay to agree to halt auctioning of artifacts when British authorities identify them as potential national treasures; tens of thousands of items from Roman Britain to medieval and Elizabethan times are being recovered by Britons scouring country with metal detectors, hundreds of which are auctioned on eBay, perhaps at fraction of their worth, undermining museum's chances of acquiring or cataloging them

ADDENDUM: Clarification here. Note that the plan will cover only eBay UK, and that the governmental partner agency will be the already-existing Portable Antiquities Scheme:

Members of the public who sell archaeological items on the internet auction site eBay.co.uk could soon find themselves on the wrong side of the law after a scheme to stem the flow of internet sales of antiquities was launched by the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS).

Working in partnership with eBay.co.uk a team from PAS, which is the government funded scheme that records archaeological objects found by the public, will be monitoring sales of antiquities on the auction website to ensure that sellers have the right to trade them . . .

Every year thousands of objects are discovered in England, Wales and Northern Ireland - mostly by metal detector users. PAS, which is managed by the British Museum on behalf of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, offers the only proactive method for systematically logging and recording them for the public benefit.

Posted by David on October 2, 2006 3:01 PM