Nearly 2,000 items including coins, ceramic tiles, medals and more have gone missing from Welsh museums. The 1,921 lost objects were revealed by freedom of information requests by BBC Wales.
Museum Wales (Amgueddfa Cymru), an association that oversees a group of Welsh museums, said no objects of high financial value have been identified as lost or missing.
Amgueddfa Cymru also said it has already spent 30 years documenting the missing items on its digital database from paper records. It expects the project to take another 20 years to complete.
More than half of the missing items from St Fagans
Among the missing items are a Mesolithic flint microlith dating from as far back as 7,000 BC, and a bracelet, finger ring and bow brooch dating back to around the 2nd century.
Additionally, a Roman coin of emperor Caracalla and a 16th century Henry VIII silver coin are missing. Museum Wales said “a significant proportion of these are duplicate items and there are better quality examples within our collection”.
Other items missing from the collection are a medieval iron key, 17th and 18th century clay pipe heads, and medals from Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and the coronation of Edward VII in 1902.
Museum Wales consists of seven national museums, including National Museum Cardiff and St Fagans National Museum of History. It looks after 5.3 million items in the collection.
Of the 1,921 missing items, 1,153 have been lost from St Fagans dating back to its public opening in the late 1940s.
News of the missing items from Welsh museums comes after the recent alleged theft of around 2,000 artefacts from London’s British Museum.
Last month, the institution asked the public to help it identify and recover its lost treasures. Prior to that, Mark Jones was confirmed as the interim director of the British Museum, replacing Hartwig Fischer.
In response, Plaid Cymru said Welsh items held at the British Museum should be returned to Wales.
Images courtesy of Amgueddfa Cymru
