This is always a tricky issue.  Possibly the first question to ask is
why are you insuring them? The aim of insurance is to mitigate against
risk and enable you to continue to carry out your business (in this case
of archaeological research).  There are essentially two main risks that
object insurance covers "loss" and "damage". 

So what do you want to be able to do if you loose the artefacts?  In the
case of most archaeological research collections the answer is probably
nothing.   The value was in their record of a particular excavation and
site.   You would probably just build up a new collection by carrying
out your normal programme of excavations (or receiving collections from
other peoples programmes).   Unstratified objects will generally have no
value to you (although they may have a financial, market value).
However is you have an exhibition display of (say) the development of
the form of the flint arrow head you might want to replace lost objects
by purchasing similar replacements.

What do you want to do if your artefacts are damaged?  In this case you
may well want to repair/conserve items, or recover artefacts from a
fire/flood damaged building.  This may well cost more than the market
value of the objects.  

So, personally, I would prefer to insure and archaeological research
collection for the costs of repairing damage together with some business
continuity cover based on the costs of recovering objects from a
disaster.  However not all insurance companies will do this.

In your case as part of a large University wide policy one approach
would be to ask the insurance company to recognise that part of the
collection that you don't want covered as excluded from the policy this
avoids them later saying that you deliberately under insured. 

Trevor Reynolds
Collections Registrar
English Heritage 3 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8YZ
postal address English Heritage 1 Waterhouse Square, 138 Holborn, London
EC1N 2ST
Telephone +44 (0) 207 973 3482

-----Original Message-----
From: Museum discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Laura Nightengale
Sent: 20 April 2007 16:20
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Valuation

Good morning.

We are a large repository for archeological collections. We have been 
asked by the University's insurer to submit to them a valuation for 
the entire collection. I would like to hear from others who hold 
archeological materials how they went about determining such a 
figure. While it would be a fairly easy thing to assign an E-bay 
value of X to one dart point, what to do about all of the potsherds, 
debitage, mussel shell and soil samples, etc. that have no commercial 
value, but are priceless nonetheless from a research standpoint? 
Assigning value based on 2007 costs to excavate all of the 
materials/generate all the records would result in a prohibitive
valuation.

Any advice is appreciated.
Laura

Laura Hiilier Nightengale
Head of Collections
Texas Archeological Research Laboratory
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station R7500
Austin, TX 78712-0714
512-475-6853 

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