UK has now
abolished sales of antiquities on its platform. This means that this obscures the volume of UK-metal detected antiquities passing daily through the site. There used to be a subsection section in "antiques" that was called "antiquities" and within that were categories such as "Roman", Greek", "Egyptian" but also "British" (among others). Which makes sense if you are a British collector looking for objects from your country. If you applied the filter "UK dealers only", you got a measure of the volume of the material passing through eBay straight from the ground (very few people listing these items reported that they had been recorded by the PAS).
The listings and filters have been reorganised and it seems you cannot now access these figures (eBay is deliberately constructed in such a way as to hinder any kind of information collecting). So the old blog posts here where I have done that may be one of the few records of that, I should try to archive them.
2 comments:
Did I dream it or did PAS monitor eBay sales a while back? Aren't those numbers just as important as the number of items reported to them which are presented to the public as proof of success without an indication of the context?
How many are reported versus how many are flogged?
Brian, I have two texts coming out soon in which the latter question is addressed... the answer is shocking. While I am glad pressure is being put on the sellers, it's a shame that eBay will now be obscuring those figures
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