It’s no surprise the British Museum’s Circulating Artefacts project has been greeted with such enthusiasm. It represents a major advance in the battle against the looting and sale of illicit antiquities.

Even before the service went ‘live’ online this month, some 47,000 Egyptian and Sudanese artefacts had been documented by the BM's team, about 10% of which have been identified as ‘problematic’ – in other words, illegally excavated or stolen.

The benefits when a dealer or collector signs up to the platform and submits an artefact for an appraisal (never a valuation) are self-evident.  It helps ethical individuals to steer clear of tainted artefacts and law enforcement agencies to crack down harder on the trafficking of cultural property.

Documenting artefacts outside public collections lies at the core of the project’s mission. But the Museum’s academic team, led by Marcel Marée, Assistant Keeper in the Department of Egypt and Sudan, is aiming much higher. 

Their principal goal, Marée told Returningheritage.com, is to research and reconstruct the provenances of artefacts submitted for their expert advice - whether by dealers, collectors, heritage professionals, law enforcement officers or members of the public. Not just their modern provenance, but also where and when the objects were found.

“There’s a lot of internal evidence contained in artefacts, in terms of style, inscriptions and so forth,” says Marée.   And it’s precisely because so many Egyptian and Sudanese objects can, in principle, be attributed to specific archaeological sites, that this research is so important. Almost no objects in the trade have a documented archaeological provenance. That’s why Marée maintains there’s such a pressing need to recover and preserve this information before it’s lost forever. 

“The longer an artefact has been in circulation," he says, "the less retrievable is any possible knowledge about the contexts from which the object has been torn".

Aren’t the existing art registers providing sufficient protection to sellers and collectors anxious to avoid trading in illicit artefacts? Marée suggests they’re not. 

“Getting a certificate such as those supplied by the Art Loss Register only means that an object doesn’t appear in a database of objects that have been reported stolen,” he says. “Their value is limited in a marketplace where most illicit antiquities were looted straight from the ground”.

“We think in the 21st century it’s time collectors and sellers should have access to a tool that enables a much higher level of due diligence”. After all, as Marée points out, “most of them don’t have the knowledge or indeed the objectivity to assess whether an artefact may be unfit for purchase or sale”. 

As well as providing essential expert advice, free of charge, the CircArt platform also aims to help make the antiquities market a fairer and safer place.  They aren't against the trade, but they do want to do more to address the problems of looting and trafficking, which they feel the trade has failed to tackle to any significant extent. 

For this to happen, they're implementing a ‘multi-pronged’ approach. This entails greater monitoring of the trade, equal involvement of all relevant parties, and training and support to key organisations within the countries affected by looting. 

Vast numbers of illicit artefacts are presently freely circulating in the marketplace and Marée and his team believe there’s a widespread denial and ignorance about the scale of this problem. Some dealers will avoid illicit material when they become aware of it, others will choose to turn a blind eye and pretend they’re acting in good faith. A small number are prepared to go even further, knowingly trading in artefacts with forged documentation. Last October, for example, we reported the return by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art of the Ptolemaic-period coffin of Nedjemankh, after they discovered it had been smuggled out of Egypt in 2011, despite holding documents that appeared to confirm its legal export.

“This platform can rally together everyone who recognises that by sharing knowledge and data, rather than just demonising each other, we can achieve a safer situation,” insists Marée. “Not just to relevant stakeholders, but also in preserving our shared cultural heritage”.

Marée says he' s encouraged by the number of dealers and collectors already supporting the initiative. However, he expects that many others who’ve yet to engage with the platform will also come to recognise its benefits. As well as raising awareness about the financial and reputational risks attached to objects, sellers who consult regularly with CircArt will be listed by the team on its website, a move they hope will encourage peer pressure among sellers. Objects checked will also be assigned a CircArt number.

Drawing on powerful software to help research complex data, the team has already begun to identify suspicious patterns in the types of objects that appear in the trade - in the journeys they make and in their purported provenances.   More often than not, suspicious objects can be traced to archaeological sites where looting is endemic. 

The platform’s data can also show when certain individuals are repeatedly linked to objects from the same site. That’s the point where serious cases are reported to the relevant law enforcement agencies, as well as to the local heritage professionals charged with safeguarding ancient sites. 

Over the two years since the project was launched, the number of sources from which the team gathers its data has grown considerably. Initially, their focus rested on sales published online and in print. But this year, the team is widening its attention to illegal activities on social media. Many looters and traffickers advertise freshly excavated objects; they are also prepared to advertise the monuments they are willing to loot ‘to order’.  CircArt has discovered several videos featuring objects that have since appeared in art galleries and museums.

“The project is still young and the amount of material that’s out there may seem overwhelming,” a confident Marée tells us. “But the success we’ve had already – making reliable determinations, based on a thorough analysis of data – is considerable. This is only the tip of the iceberg. It will get better all the time”.

Circulating Artefacts is a British Museum project funded by a grant from the British Council’s ‘Cultural Protection Fund’. Visit here for more information.

After this was written.....

Amid accusations from one member of the art trade that CircArt "died at birth through a mixture of naivety, tunnel vision and breach of trust", the Circulating Artefacts project came to an end in February 2021. A spokesperson for the British Museum confirmed no formal agreement between the Museum and representatives of the art trade had ever been reached. However, they insist many dealers are continuing to reach out and share information about items in confidence with the Museum. "We keep working to establish a higher benchmark," the spokesperson told ReturningHeritage, "we want to keep building our knowledge-based system".

Banner Photo: Relief of King Seti I, on the London art market in 2014, shortly after illegal excavation at Asyut in Middle Egypt. It has now been returned to Egypt.

Both Courtesy of © The Trustees of the British Museum