It seems to me that even though archeology and historians are trying that the number of artifacts in private collections (both legal and illegal) grossly surpass the number artifacts in museums.
I mean we've kind of had this "civilized system" for the last what, 50-70 years. Everything before that was more chaotic than we like to believe.
If we look at it like that it seems to me that we have access and have "processed" a very small part of the world heritage.
Would I be correct?
We don’t even know the number of artifacts that are in museums and other storage facilities and a very large proportion of artifacts are simply thrown away before they even get to museums.
The issue changes country by country so I’ll use the UK as an example because it, very sadly, has more progress in this aspect than most other countries.
The first thing is that the material that actually makes it out of the ground is a small portion that exists but that material is aggressively categorized and separated. Depending on the excavation, usually 90-95% of material is just discarded.
I know archaeologists with half a monastery roof in their back yard because the material would otherwise have been tossed in a quarry. Not sure how familiar you are with archaeology but I can go into papsing/diagnostics etc. if you’re interested.
The next issue is that storage is poorly thought out. In places like the UK and the US where there are for-profit CRM or Development-led archaeology units, this issue only gets worse. Material is separated into various museums, universities, excavation units, local governments, state/county governments, national governments, and archives.
Part of the problem here, aside from how obviously fragmented the storage is, is the lack of digitization. In the UK a lot of groups still use paper records. When artifacts are stored they’ll usually be stored (depending on the facility) in bulk in a cardboard box and with it, a box of equal size for the paper records.
Those paper records often aren’t digitized and the only record you have of those artifacts is something like 3 boxes of record from site XX, 3 boxes of artifacts from site XX and 3 bulk boxes of artifacts from site XX.
It’s a really poorly thought out, poorly managed part of archaeology.
So that loops back around to your question. It’s difficult to know what private collections actually have because we don’t know what is actually out there to begin with.
That doesn’t even take into account looting and other illegal trading that has never been documented.
This probably isn’t a good answer, but fundamentally we have no idea. Historically, there’s been a ton of pushback (at least in the US) about engaging collector communities, in addition to a lot of distrust on both sides. Recently, there was a series of papers published in Advances in Archaeological Practice about best practices in engaging collectors and how folks dealt with crazy scenarios. If you’re interested (or anyone stumbling upon this comment), II can send abstracts your way and would be happy to chat more about it.