What value can we place on the past? In Britain, a thief took a fancy to a Brionze Age torc in a provinciual museum, and so they took it. Now the museum has responded: Helen Burchell,
Reward offered in search for stolen Bronze Age gold BBC 30.05.2024.
The charity Crimestoppers is offering a £5,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of thieves who stole two Bronze Age treasures from a museum.
A 3,000-year-old gold torc and a bracelet were taken during a break-in at Ely Museum in Cambridgeshire on 7 May.
>It is interesting to compare that to how much the museum paid to have it temporarily on display in a showcase they could not secure: . It was valued at £220,000, split 50:50 between the finder and landowner, but with the total loss of any archaeological context [quite
obviously, this is not a "ploughsoil find"]
Ely Museum buys Bronze Age torc found in field
25 September 2017
The museum has been able to pay for the torc after receiving a grant of £138,600 from National Heritage Memorial Fund, plus grants from the Arts Council, Art Fund, Headley Trust, Museums Association and donations from members of the public. [...]
Ros Kerslake, chief executive of the memorial fund, said without its funding "the torc could have ended up in private hands and been lost from public view".
"Thankfully, this extraordinarily rare, precious and beautiful piece of history will now be on permanent display at Ely Museum, helping to tell the story of Bronze Age civilisation in and around the fens more than 3,000 years ago," she said.
Or not. What actually would "tell the story of Bronze Age civilisation in and around the fens more than 3,000 years ago" better than a loose "ooo-ah!" trophy item with some unfounded dumbdown speculation about "why it is so big" would be full knowledge of the archaeological context that thing (and who knows what else?) had been lying in for those three thousand years. Tell me I am wrong, and why.
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