I’m sure he could easily have gotten much more. The guy doesn’t seem very bright. Here he has a piece of pottery with animals hand painted on it and he doesn’t bother to have it checked out by a pro? And he actually works in the field.
From that other source I linked to above...
“I liked it straight away,” he told the BBC. “I suspected it might be very old but forgot all about it.” Martin even admits that he may have gotten some toothpaste stains on the antiquity while it was pressed into service in his bathroom.
“I specialize in British history rather than world history so I wasn’t an expert in this field and was none the wiser,” Martin told Metro.
It was Hansons’ antiquities expert, James Brenchley, who identified the piece as the work of the Bronze Age Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley, a region of modern Afghanistan known as a cradle of early civilization. “It was probably brought back to the UK years ago by wealthy travelers,” he told the Daily Mail.
Once he knew what he had on his hands, Martin offered the pot at Hansons’ November antiquities auction. The auction house described the piece as “a well painted bubous [sic] shaped pottery jar with painted decoration depicting an antelope and motifs,” dating it to 1,900 BC.”
Yeah, it doesn’t sound like he’s too bright and must have really needed the eighty quid. Of course he probably paid the auctioneer a commission which would have been in the 20% range (what we used to charge for inexpensive personal property when I was working in that trade). Like most other collectibles that follow the value flow based on the Greater Fool Theory, he should have kept it and in ten years maybe gotten a grand or more. Not a lot of manufactured things from almost 4,000 years ago survived.
That’s his field. No, something isn’t right.