Deals and trinkets can be found in your neighbourhood thrift shop. Read More
Jewelry that was donated to the Chilliwack Hospice Society store will now form the basis of an archeology course at SFU in 2026
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Jewelry that was donated to the Chilliwack Hospice Society store will now form the basis of an archeology course at SFU in 2026
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Deals and trinkets can be found in your neighbourhood thrift shop.
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Real treasure can, too.
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Last spring, a keen-eyed customer at the Thrifty Boutique in Chilliwack spotted jewelry that appeared to date to Roman times. Eleven rings and two medallions were on sale for $30, but the anonymous shopper, who had a background in archeology, knew they were worth far more than that.
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The discovery started a journey that led to the artifacts being donated to Simon Fraser University in May and becoming both the basis for a new archeology course and future display at the school’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
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“It’s going to be the best class I’ve ever taught,” said Sabrina Higgins, associate professor of global humanities and archeology, who will teach the class with Cara Tremain, an assistant professor in the department of archeology. “It’s nice to be able to teach something brand new, and to have students be brought on this journey of discovery with us.”
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The authenticity of the artifacts hasn’t been determined. That will form the basis of the class.
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“It’s very rare for a museum to get a donation like this, for us to have no background materials on these objects at all,” Tremain said. “So to really get into the science and the detective work behind archeology is going to be really exciting.”
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The thrift store gets thousands of anonymously donated items daily, so has no way to find the previous owners. This includes a diamond ring found in a sock, and an urn containing the cremated ashes of a loved one.
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Desmond Devnich of the Chilliwack Hospice Society, which operates the Thrifty Boutique, said they often get estate donations and children of the deceased often have no idea what they are donating.
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“Our volunteers, they work really hard to research the items. We use Google photo to identify them and try to price them, and sometimes things slip through the cracks, like this one did.”
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The unnamed customer brought the items to the attention of a store volunteer, who happened to have a son who went through the SFU archeology program and knew whom to contact. The university was wary, but when it became clear the hospice society wanted to donate the items and weren’t seeking a financial valuation, it arranged to assess the objects.
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A 30-minute meeting was enough, and left the scholars excited.
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Higgins used a microscope to spot what appeared to be a Chi Rho (pronounced Ky-Ro), a symbol that’s an ancient abbreviation for Jesus Christ, on one of the medallions. It allowed her to tentatively place it as Roman, from somewhere in the western part of the ancient empire. The rings have various floral designs, but it’s unlikely all the artifacts are from the same original hoard, and likely date across different periods.
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The history, relevance and type of material they are made from will be something that the students will aim to figure out during the course, which will run in fall of 2026.
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Tremain, who specializes in the legal aspects of antiquities, including fakes, forgeries and provenance of museum collections, says ethics will be central to the course.
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“Students will get the chance to directly confront some of the ethical questions that the museum faced in accepting this collection under these circumstances,” she said. “What if they were looted from their original archeological site? Looting leads to the loss of cultural and scientific knowledge.
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The course will cover the process of how a museum would go about accepting artifacts into their collection.
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“Integrating the ethical considerations alongside the hands-on study of this collection is going to be really valuable for students.”
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“If they’re forgeries,” said Higgins, “we have an opportunity then to talk about the role forgeries play in the markets and the underlying actors that benefit from both the forgeries and or the looting market.”
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If the items prove to be authentic, the next step would be trying to match their ancient origins to modern-day borders, so they can be offered back to the country that occupies that part of the former Roman Empire. Canada is part of the UNESCO convention to prevent illegal trafficking of looted artifacts, and has returned many to their origin countries in the past.
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But it’s not as simple as taking a metallurgical sample and narrowing its geographic origins, especially with a group of artifacts that appear to be of different eras and designs.
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“We would feel definitely, either legally or ethically obligated, to try and find out if a country of origin basically wants this donation back,” said Tremaine. “I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to get that far with it, but that’s something that we’ll find out when we start doing research into.
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“We don’t have any magic wands that can tell us, ‘Oh, it came from Italy in the 5th century.’ Unfortunately, even if we can trace exactly where materials came from, it doesn’t mean that they were made in that country or used in that country, because things got moved and traded all of the time.”
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The objects are under the care of SFU’s museum. It typically doesn’t accept items without documentation because of the possibility they could have been looted or faked.
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“The fact that these items continue to exist is quite extraordinary,” said museum director Barbara Hilden. “If they are hundreds or thousands of years old, then at any point along the way they could have been lost, broken or discarded.”
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If authenticated, it would be the first set of Roman artifacts in the museum’s collection.
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Higgins has gone on digs in Egypt and Macedonia, but never expected to discover treasure in line with her professional focus so close to home.
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“This is the first time that I’ve really come across something from the ancient world in the thrift shop,” she said, laughing.
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