eBay UK: flood of illegal antiquities unabated

Roman and Anglo-Saxon jewellery and other artefacts are still being sold illegally on eBay, despite the website’s promise to clamp down on the trade.

The British Museum has told The Times that it is alarmed at the number of sellers offering gold and silver that has apparently been found on British soil but has not been reported. . .

This month the journal British Archaeology reports that between August and September this year almost 3,500 antiquities were offered for sale on the British eBay website, of which 600 were “British”.

In October eBay addressed the problem, signing a memorandum of understanding with the British Museum and The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the Government’s advisory body. The website promised to discourage the illegal trade in antiquities and agreed to allow the British Museum to contact sellers “to ascertain whether there is a reasonable cause for concern”.

Fine words, but something more is clearly needed.

Sellers have found a way round the problem. On being contacted by the British Museum, they simply insist that the objects came from overseas. Miss Costin said: “Frequently we are told that an item was bought abroad or was from an old collection, in which case there is not much that we can do, although in some cases we will inform the seller that they should provide evidence to buyers that the object has been legally exported from its country of origin.”

Among the recent offerings on eBay was an early medieval gold pendant. When contacted by the British Museum, the seller said that it had been bought at an antiquities fair in Germany in the 1980s.

And so on, and so on. eBay's responses were not terribly impressive, either:A spokesman for eBay said: “If people are saying they don’t know where something’s from, then that is the truth, as far as we know”. . .

The eBay spokesman said that if they did not sell the antiquities, people would find a way to sell them “one way or another”. He added: “eBay is the safest place to do so.”

From the Times of London.

Posted by David on December 19, 2006 9:08 PM