The scale of the market

One of the issues that needs to be addressed is the scale of the market. Some have suggested that the annual  turnover of antiquities could be as high as $4.5 billion. But how do you define antiquities? Do you take the cultural range that is represented by the "mainstream" sales of antiquities in London and New York: Classical (Greek and Roman); Egyptian; Near Eastern. But what about material from the Far East or Central America?

Is it possible to extrapolate a figure from the stock of a single dealer that was found in a series of London warehouses? If a single dealer could have stock worth a quarter of a billion dollars, what about the range of other dealers in North America, Switzerland, and the Middle East?

One New York dealer has suggested that the annual value was closer to $200 / $300 million per year. Yet one New York auction house alone sold $112 million worth of antiquities in a single year (2007). But that was not a typical year.

I suspect I am at the more conservative end of the scale, hovering around the $100 million mark but willing to go a little higher. Yet this is probably based on public sales rather than the movement of objects through more secret transactions.

What do readers of Looting Matters think?