At a photo call for The Odyssey, Zendaya wore earrings made from Persian gold discs about 3,000 years old. Gorgeous? Absolutely. Simple? Plenty of archaeologists don’t think so. Emma Baysal, an archaeologist who specializes in jewelry, was in Turkey digging up stone and shell beads when her field suddenly made headlines. Many of her colleagues reacted online with disapproval. Her summary of artifact jewelry: “It is a can of worms.”
Beautiful, and a Bit Gray
Artifact jewelry is often made with archaeological pieces bought at auctions, fairs or trade shows. Shoppers now ask where gems and precious metals come from, Baysal says, but artifacts haven’t faced that scrutiny yet. The antiquities trade has often profited from looting in war zones. Even legally bought, a piece isn’t in the clear, since wearing it can look like fetishizing ancient cultures.
The law doesn’t settle it, either; it’s a patchwork. In Scotland, finds must be reported to the National Museum of Scotland’s Treasure Trove Unit, which can claim them for institutions. In the U.S., artifacts in most cases belong to whoever owns the land. Turkey’s culture and tourism ministry has the right to buy cultural property found there.
Makers aren’t buying the criticism. Jacob Sedgwick, a collector who started the Scottish brand Kapistree with goldsmith Natalie Williams, calls it conservation of another kind. He seeks pieces like Mesopotamian seal-stones that, he says, might otherwise sit unseen in museum storerooms. New York jeweler Rebecca Rau, whose family founded the M.S. Rau gallery, sources some items at the Tefaf Maastricht fair. Its expert committees vet provenance — an object’s documented history of where it came from. Even so, she concedes those ethical lines aren’t easy to draw.
Price Tags and Paperwork
None of this is costume jewelry. Kapistree’s Ebu necklace is $43,000, and Rau’s Curtain of Lombard necklace is $29,500. Revival makers offer history without the debate. Athens-based Lalaounis has designed pieces based on museum artifacts since the 1960s; its large Helen of Troy disc earrings are $3,600. Loren Nicole, whose founder works almost exclusively in ancient methods, sells Viking Trove beads from $2,200.
Scottish jeweler Ellis Mhairi Cameron sometimes unearths artifacts on her family’s farm near Oban, reports them as the law requires, and lets them shape her gold designs. A pendant based on a locket from the farm is about $13,070.
Here’s the unglamorous part. A standard homeowners or renters policy may not fully cover pieces like these. That’s the job of a scheduled-items rider — an add-on that lists a specific valuable at a stated value.