Privately-owned Cunie on Aussie Campus

Phys.org™ (formerly Physorg.com) says it is a leading web-based science, research and technology news service which covers a full range of topics. "These include physics, earth science, medicine, nanotechnology, electronics, space, biology, chemistry, computer sciences, engineering, mathematics and other sciences and technologies". So it's not clear why this is there, then: ["from Monash University", 'Ancient artefact gets a good bake', Aug 15, 2013). It is allegedly about how "An information technology academic’s love of ancient languages and cultures has resulted in the preservation of a 4000 year-old artefact". Really?  This loving academic - Dr Larry Stillman -  is based in the  Caulfield School of Information Technology at IT department of Melbourne's Monash University and "usually spends his time researching the social effects of IT in community organisations". But:

His passion and original training however, is for the languages and cultures of ancient Mesopotamia which he studied for many years in Jerusalem and at Harvard University. Through his work in this area, Dr Stillman has come to own a tablet written in the ancient Sumerian language in cuneiform, a wedge shaped writing that was done with a stylus on soft clay. "I have deciphered the tablet, and it is one of the tens of thousands of receipts that were produced for the issue and delivery of goods to the great temples of what is known as the Third Dynasty of Ur," Dr Stillman said. Unfortunately the tablet is too fragmentary to know what the delivery was for, but the names of the people involved are on the tablet. It was most likely for goods such as reeds."

"Come to own" could cover a multitude of processes. It could of course be because the Archangel Moroni brought it down to him while he slept in a golden box. Or it might mean that when he was studying "the languages and cultures of ancient Mesopotamia" he picked it up on an Iraqi tell during some fieldwork and pocketed it, or it might mean he bought it from the no-questions-asked antiquities market - some of these tablets were being sold in Australia a few years back, without any documentation of licit origins offered upfront. So how did Dr Stillman "come to own" it and what documentation of licit origins accompanies that "ownership"? When did this object surface (from 'underground') on the market, and why does the article not explicitly state that in a period when there is concern about recent looting precisely in this region? This is of no small importance, as it seems  Dr Stillman brought this artefact from home onto the University campus.

Dr Stillman's tablet was not left in the sun to dry, as was often the case, and had become very fragile over the years. "The only way to preserve it was to bake it. And to do this I enlisted the help of Brent King, from the Monash Caulfield glass workshop," Dr Stillman said. With instructions from the British Museum, which has the world's largest collection of tablets, Mr King put the tablet through its paces in the glass workshop kiln over several days. "It was a successful bake, and while the tablet is still delicate, it is now likely to last another 4000 years," Dr Stillman said. "It's certainly the oldest thing Mr King has ever handled, and is quite possibly the oldest document to ever grace the Caulfield campus."

Which is where it becomes important to know how a  Ur Third Dynasty tablet "surfaced" (from underground) and got to Australia. You cannot have staff members bringing illicit property to work, can you? Did the University even ask how he "came to own" such an item? Is it so that the "preservation of the object" in any way mitigates the destruction of the site and the context of discovery (probably in a discrete archive) inherent in the supplying of the market with freshly-surfaced objects? 

Dr Stillman is currently involved in work with a colleague at Hebrew University on cataloguing all the tablets in Australia and New Zealand. Dr Stillman would be very interested to hear from members of the community who might know of tablets in private or other collections which could become part of a scholarly contribution to knowledge about ancient Mesopotamia.

Note not a word here on whether the ones in private collections are of licit provenance and papered or not. If they are not, is it at all ethical to be handling them?

Should not what is apparently based on a press release from a university be paying attention to such questions, not leaving it all completely up in the air what is going on?