This blog post accompanies the authors' History journal article 'State of the (Future) Field: The History of Collecting and Its Institutions'.

On 24 November the Guardian reported that Bonhams, a London auction house, might be selling looted antiquities in a forthcoming sale. The claim was made by Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, an archaeologist affiliated with the University of Cambridge. The two lots in question, both part of a sale taking place on 5 December 2024, are a marble portrait head of the Roman emperor Hadrian and a third-century Roman plate decorated with an illustration of a reclining river god. Dr Tsirogiannis said that ‘Bonhams appears not to have conducted basic provenance research’.

This is not the first time Dr Tsirogiannis has spoken out: he has been investigating looted antiquities for 18 years. Earlier this year, Bonhams offered the same plate for sale — it is only reappearing at the upcoming auction because the original buyer failed to pay up. As reported by the Telegraph before the original sale, Dr Tsirogiannis claimed that the plate, as well as another Roman portrait head offered in the auction, were stolen artefacts. In both instances Bonhams said it had confirmed provenance in accordance with its procedures.

The disagreement, in part, stems from information asymmetry. Years ago, an Italian public prosecutor provided Dr Tsirogiannis with a vast tranche of archival material that police had seized during raids on dozens of traffickers. The privileged access to these files has helped Dr Tsirogiannis become one of the leading figures in efforts to shut down the trade of stolen heritage. Francesca Hickin, Bonhams’ head of antiquities, says that it ‘would be in our shared interest for the contents’ of these archives ‘to be made accessible to auction houses, as this is currently not the case.’

What good might be achieved if auction houses and academia were to work more closely together on provenance research? This is one of the questions explored in our new article, published in the Historical Association’s journal History. The article assesses the state of the field of the history of collecting. This is a field that has sometimes been understood as the history of individual collectors. But, as we write in the article, collecting institutions – such as museums, archives and libraries – are worthy of attention because they profoundly impact why we, as historians, look at some things and not others. Research into institutional collections, then, holds wider relevance to the discipline of history. The field of the history of collecting, as well as the wider discipline of history, would therefore benefit from greater attention being paid to institutional collecting. Paying this attention is the article’s main aim.

Our assessment of the field is led by an analysis of Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships, a funding scheme run by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council that promotes research jointly hosted by universities and cultural institutions. Assessing a decade-long corpus totalling 500 research projects, we evaluate the benefits and pitfalls of this form of collections-based work. We also look further afield to the key avenues of research currently dominating the wider cultural sector. These include colonial collecting, investigations into institutional stakeholders, the quantitative digital ‘turn’, commercial histories of collecting, and provenance research.

The future of this growing field of study looks bright. As we outline, there has recently been a proliferation of publicly funded projects that seek to connect collections data. This will make larger-scale collections-oriented research more viable. The explosion in artificial intelligence (AI) technology will also have an effect. Already used by the commercial sector and by a handful of larger public institutions, it has thus far usually been deployed in very limited contexts. As AI becomes integrated into more areas of everyday life, we shall see an increasing number of institutions deploying the technology to help analyse and make sense of collections data at a scale that was not previously possible. It is a very good time indeed to be a historian of collections.