David W. J. Gill

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• BA DPhil FRSA FSA SFHEA
• Honorary Professor at University of Kent

William Francis Grimes (1905–1988) was Director of the Institute of Archaeology, London, from 1956 to 1973. His career included membership of the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff where he was responsible for the excavation of prehistoric and Roman sites in Wales. In 1938 he joined the archaeology team of the Ordnance Survey and took part in the...

Artwashing the Past: Context Matters contributes to the wider discussion about the appropriate due diligence process that should be conducted prior to the acquisition of cultural objects. The chapters were written as museums in Europe and North America were facing a series of claims on recently acquired objects in their collections in the light of...

In May 2021 a group of 96 classical antiquities was seized from Fordham University where they had formed part of their museum collection. The seizure was directly linked to the investigation by US authorities of objects that had been handled by the dealer Edoardo Almagià. The Fordham material was dominated by objects derived from Italy: Apulian, Ca...

In 1952 Mohammed Zakaria Goneim, chief inspector of antiquities, excavated an Egyptian mummy and mask at Saqqara. This mummy mask was acquired by the St Louis Art Museum (SLAM) in 1998 from Phoenix Ancient Art. The purchase led to a legal claim by the Egyptian authorities: The outcome was that the court confirmed the ownership with the museum. The...

In 2022, an Athenian red‐figured cup attributed to Makron was returned to Italy by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The cup had been acquired in fragments, through purchase and gift, from multiple sources over several years, starting with two fragments from the restorer Fritz Bürki in 1978. A second cup, also attributed to Makron, was acquire...

Newton’s time at the British Museum coincided with a new approach to acquiring classical sculpture that was derived from specific sites rather than old collections. His work in Anatolia and the Aegean islands enabled the British Museum to acquire key pieces of sculpture for its growing collection: among them fragments of the Mausoleum of Halikarnas...

Newton was an active member of the Archaeological Institute following its split with the British Archaeological Association in 1845. The choice of the designation ‘Institute’ was influenced by the Institut de Paris, and brought with it the educational values of its French counterpart. Newton served as the Institute’s secretary alongside other colle...

Many of the known Cycladic figures – the late prehistoric human-shaped sculptures from the Aegean archipelago – came from twentieth-century illicit excavations, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also known that figures were being faked at the time and perhaps also earlier: a few fakes have been identified, whilst other figures are under susp...

This report reviews the contribution of heritage to the region defined by the counties of Kent, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk. It identifies four key themes that link the heritage in the region: coastal defence; Christian heritage; historic houses; and historic landscapes and natural heritage. The region contains one UNESCO World Heritage Site at Cant...

The report builds on the data brought together in the RSA Heritage Index (2020). It identifies four key heritage themes in Kent: coastal heritage; Christian heritage; historic houses; and natural heritage and historic landscapes. These themes embrace elements such as the Roman forts of the Saxon Shore; Dover Castle; the artillery forts of Henry VII...

State of the Historic Environment 2021: North Norfolk Summary Report

State of the Historic Environment 2021: Norwich Summary Report

Analysis of the RSA Heritage Index for Essex including Southend-on-Sea and Thurrock.

Analysis of the RSA Heritage Index data for Shropshire.

Analysis of the RSA Heritage Index for Sussex.

Analysis of the RSA Heritage Index data for Cheshire, the Wirral and North-east Wales.

An analysis of the RSA Heritage Index data for Norfolk and Suffolk.

Dr John Disney (1779-1857) was the benefactor of the first chair in archaeology at a British university. He also donated his major collection of sculpture to the University of Cambridge that continues to be displayed in the Fitzwilliam Museum. The Disney family traced its origins back to the Norman invasion of England, and the family home was at N...

In the early 1980s four Roman bronzes, probably originally displayed on a monumental chariot, surfaced on the London antiquities market. Two were purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984, one by the Cleveland Museum of Art in the same year, and the fourth was sold to a North American private collector (and then sold to the Getty in 1985). All...

Winifred Lamb (1894–1963) was a pioneering archaeologist conducting fieldwork in Greece and Turkey. She read classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, where Dorothy Garrod was her contemporary, before joining Room 40 at the Admiralty in the later stages of the First World War. She was admitted as a student of the British School at Athens in the autum...

Context Matters is a volume of essays on the illicit trade in antiquities, the ownership of cultural heritage and issues in archaeology. It is based on the twenty essays contributed to the Journal of Art Crime over its first ten years of publication. The contributions are supplemented by articles and review articles that were published alongside th...

Abstract: Numismatic evidence collected from the lower extension of Euesperides had suggested that there was a gradual withdrawal from the site to the new location of Berenice. However, a stratified coin from the penultimate phase of occupation in a house on the east side of the Sidi Abeid provides a terminus post quem of 261–258 BC (‘Magas reconci...

Winifred Lamb was a pioneering archaeologist in the Aegean and Anatolia. She studied classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and subsequently served in naval intelligence alongside J. D. Beazley during the final stages of the First World War. As war drew to a close, Sydney Cockerell, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, invited Lamb to...

The first formal guidebooks for historic sites placed in state guardianship in the United Kingdom appeared in 1917. There was an expansion of the series in the 1930s and 1950s. However, from the late 1950s the Ministry of Works, and later the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, started to produce an additional series of illustrated souvenir gui...

It has been more than 20 years since the raids on the premises at the Geneva Freeport were linked to Giacomo Medici. The seizure of photographic records led to a major investigation of acquisitions by museums and private collectors. This was expanded following the confiscation of archives from Robin Symes and Gianfranco Becchina. Over 350 items hav...

Thinking About Collecting Histories: A Response to Marlowe - Volume 23 Issue 3 - David W. J. Gill

The 1995 raids on the Geneva Freeport premises of Giacomo Medici have had a profound impact on the collecting of and dealing in antiquities.1 The set of Polaroids seized during the raids (“the Medici Dossier”) has allowed objects that had passed through the hands of Medici to be identified. Fractured, salt-encrusted and mud-covered objects were sho...

In February 2013 Christos Tsirogiannis linked a fragmentary Athenian red-figured cup from the collection formed by Dietrich von Bothmer, former chairman of Greek and Roman Art at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, to a tondo in the Villa Giulia, Rome. The Rome fragment was attributed to the Euaion painter. Bothmer had acquired several fragments...

There was a time when the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford was prosperous enough to support a venture which called itself the Ashmolean Expedition to Cyrenaica. The form this exercise took was the excavation over three seasons between 1952 and 1954 of parts of the site of the Greek city of Euesperides situated on the outs...

In September 2008 I watched the global financial crisis develop on television in Athens. Custodians at archaeological sites were already nervous and shared quite openly their fears about the economic impact on their personal situations. Little did we realize how severe the situation would become, especially for Greece. These events coincided with t...

The Fitzwilliam Museum holds material brought back to England by some of the early nineteenth-century travellers to Greece, including Edward Daniel Clarke and William Martin Leake. However, it was not until the later nineteenth century, with the founding of such organizations as the British School at Athens and the Cyprus Exploration Fund, that the...

HayesJ. W., Greek and Italian Black-gloss Wares and Related Wares in the Royal Ontario Museum: a Catalogue. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1984. Pp. xi + 204, 295 illus (incl. pls, text figs), ISBN 0-88854-302-6. - Volume 76 - David W. J. Gill

Harry Pirie-Gordon (1883–1969) was responsible for the preparation of a series of guidebooks published by the Palestine News immediately after the First World War. The information had been prepared for the British attack on Palestine. Pirie-Gordon first went to Syria in 1908 ostensibly to study Crusader castles. He took part in the survey of the Sy...

Hippodamos came from Miletos, a city that had been destroyed during the Ionian revolt. Its reconstruction in the decades after the termination of the Persian wars may have inspired Hippodamos, though there is no evidence that he was in any way involved.Keywords:archaeology;arts and architecture;Greek history;maritime history

The Gallipoli campaign in 1915 revealed remains of the cemeteries of the Greek settlement of Elaious. French troops from the Corps expéditionnaire d'Orient were assigned to investigate the site, often under Turkish gunfire. This work was supervised by former students of the École française d'Athènes. Detailed plans were made, the finds catalogued,...

Forty years have passed since the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. In spite of this there have been major scandals relating to the acquisition of recently-surfaced antiquities by public museums and private individuals. The Italian government...

Trademarks on Greek Vases - Johnston(A.W.)Trademarks on Greek Vases. Addenda. Pp. xiv + 242, pls. Oxford: Aris and Phillips, 2006. Cased, £60. ISBN: 978-0-85668-747-1. - Volume 59 Issue 1 - David W. J. Gill

Through the use of case examples and careful examination, this book presents the first interdisciplinary essay collection on the study of art crime, and its effect on all aspects of the art world. Contributors discuss art crime subcategories, including vandalism, iconoclasm, forgery, fraud, peace-time theft, war looting, archaeological looting, smu...