Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Going to History Hunters
As a long-time fan of EXN.ca I've known of the History Hunters event for a while now. It's the Discovery Channel's equivalent of the BBC's Antiques Road Show, where various curators at the Royal Ontario Museum pour over artifacts that the public has brought in for assessing.

I had some family "treasure" I have always been curious about, and in a little box I brought along some small cameos that had come down to me from my GrandFather. He was an air raid warden during WWII, and according to the story I was told, he "salvaged" several of these artifacts from the ruins of some Liverpool museum that had been destroyed in an incendiary bombing raid. The collection is of various cameos and seals that, some of which were still darkened from the fire and a couple of which still had bits of glass that had melted and fused onto them as a result of the fire. I am not so much interested in their worth as simply wanting to find out more about them.

One of them in particular interested me: a cameo featuring a roman scene. Much of the rest was either Wedgewood or something similar, but to me this was the most interesting of the bunch.

I got to the museum at about 10:30am. There was a line-up in the main atrium, but it wasn't as long as I had expected it to be, considering what I've seen in the news when the Antiques Road Show came to Casa Loma about a year or so ago. We were handed legal forms to fill out that released the TV production company from indemnity and allowing them to use any footage of us freely on their show. The fellow in front of me, showed off the ivory carving that came from his GrandFather's cane, which came from Vienna. There was a lot of that in the line-up, as people waiting in line showed off what they had brought to the people waiting with them. Enthusiasm was everywhere.

I was in line for 10 minutes tops, and then went over to a table where the goods received an initial inspection. I told them my story and met with initial approval. I was originally given a red tag which would have taken me to the European artifact expert, but the glance at the roman cameo got me shunted over to the Ancient Greek and Roman expert instead. He was busy at the moment, so I was told to hold onto my ticket and come back in an hour. So I killed time by heading upstairs to the Ancient Greek and Roman sections of the museums, to see if I could find anything similar to the cameo I had. And I did, but with a single exception they were all worked into gemstones, and frankly, a bit cruder than the example I had. This didn't bode well I thought, but I thought I might as well go through with it.

So I returned at the appointed time, and got into another line. The fellow in front of me had some truly interesting stuff: a few bags containing fragments of glass that he said he picked up from the ground at a site in the Nile delta area where he worked for a couple of years, which he thought dated to Roman times. He also brought around a sketchbook that he used to draw his re-creations of how these objects may have looked, as well as a bowl created from various bits of found glass. The fellow behind me had a tile with an auction note on the back saying that it dated from some time B.C. To me it looked like a reproduction, but I didn't want to say that, though he suspected that to be the case (as did I of my stuff for that matter). At one point a line-manager got us to space out our line a bit more, as they were beginning to shoot the hosts of the show and I guess they wanted the line-ups to look bigger than they were.

After a few more minutes I got to see the expert, and I told him the story. He thought they looked interesting, but they were definitely 19th century European copies. The line producer liked the look of them and asked him whether or not it was anything worth putting on the show, and the expert shook his head. Oh well. ;-)

I left a little bit disappointed, as I didn't really end up learning much more than I already knew, but it was a fun excuse to visit the ROM in any event. I also guess that there's little point in tracking down and possibly returning the artifact to some museum in Liverpool.