The idea the rest of the system is built on

58 is worse than 28

The Bura askos scores 58. The Getty Bronze scores 28. Any tool that ranks them by score has just told a buyer that the looted terracotta is the safer purchase. It is not. The scores are not on the same scale, because the registers behind them were not looking at the same world.

archaeological

Bura askos (zoomorphic funerary vessel)

Score

58/100

Coverage class

structurally-uncovered

0 of 9 registers can name this object

What the number means here. No register in this set can systematically name an object of this kind and origin. A quiet result here carries essentially no information about the object — it reflects where the registers look, not what happened. The strongest evidence for material like this is usually physical or archaeological, and this tool cannot see it.

Can identify this object — 0

None.

In scope but not identifying — 2

ICOM Red Lists — Lists object categories at risk, never individual objects — a due-diligence trigger, not an identification.
Wikidata — Coverage follows scholarly and press attention rather than rule, so its silence carries little information.

Structurally blind to it — 7

INTERPOL Stolen Works of Art — This object was never recorded before it was removed, so no loss could be reported. The register requires a theft reported to and recorded by a member-country police force, and that report cannot exist. Its silence is structural, not evidential.
INTERPOL ID-Art — This object was never recorded before it was removed, so no loss could be reported. The register requires the same police report as the Stolen Works of Art database, and that report cannot exist. Its silence is structural, not evidential.
FBI National Stolen Art File — Holds market-theft losses; requires a law-enforcement submission and a value threshold.
Carabinieri TPC — Geographically out of scope for niger — requires an Italian nexus — the archive is national.
Lost Art Database — Holds nazi-era losses; requires a loss connected to Nazi persecution, 1933–45.
Getty Provenance Index — Holds market, market-theft, nazi-era losses; requires passage through the European or American art market.
Art Loss Register — Holds market-theft, nazi-era losses; requires a registered loss, usually by an owner or insurer.

market-theft

Victorious Youth (Athlete of Fano)

Score

28/100

Coverage class

well-covered

6 of 9 registers can name this object

What the number means here. 6 of 9 registers could systematically name this object. Silence here is comparatively informative: records would be expected to exist.

Can identify this object — 6

INTERPOL Stolen Works of Art —
INTERPOL ID-Art —
FBI National Stolen Art File —
Carabinieri TPC —
Getty Provenance Index —
Art Loss Register —

In scope but not identifying — 1

Wikidata — Coverage follows scholarly and press attention rather than rule, so its silence carries little information.

Structurally blind to it — 2

Lost Art Database — Holds nazi-era losses; requires a loss connected to Nazi persecution, 1933–45.
ICOM Red Lists — Holds archaeological, colonial losses; requires membership of an at-risk object category from a listed region.

The rule

Coverage is never folded into the score

The obvious move is to penalise low coverage — subtract points when the registers cannot see the object. Every version of this project that tried it produced the same failure: a single number that quietly conflated “we looked and found a problem” with “we could never have looked”. Those are different findings and a buyer needs to act differently on each, so they are reported as two values that must be read together.

A score is only comparable within its coverage class. The system says so explicitly on every passport:

This score is comparable only to other structurally uncovered objects. It must not be read against a well-covered Western-market object: the same number means 'nothing was reachable' here and 'a documented gap was found' there.

Why the Bura askos has zero identifying registers

INTERPOL’s Stolen Works of Art database holds archaeological material — but only material somebody reported stolen. A report has to name an object, and naming it requires that somebody recorded it before it left the ground. Bura sites were known to local communities and never systematically excavated or inventoried by any authority. There is no inventory from which this vessel could be reported missing.

So INTERPOL’s silence about this object is not evidence. It is a structural property of the register. Counting it as coverage would manufacture reassurance for exactly the material that has none — which is why the model tracks requiresPriorRecord per register and marks those registers blind rather than quiet.

The same logic is why ICOM Red Lists appear as in scope but not identifying. A Red List names categories of object at risk. It is a reason to look harder, never a match.

Score build-up — Bura askos (zoomorphic funerary vessel)

The scorer accumulates from a floor of 30, the honest position for “nothing is known”. An object with no published history scores near 30, not near 100. Absence of evidence never becomes evidence of clean provenance.

Δ	Total	Reason
+30	30	base score — 'nothing is known' starting position (ADR-002)
+18	48	authority record: "ICOM Red List for West African Cultural Objects (2003, updated 2015) identifies terracotta funerary vessels from the Bura region (Niger) as a category at high risk of illicit trafficking. The listing applies to object TYPES, not individual pieces; no individual Bura askos is registered in any criminal database."
+18	66	authority record: "Niger ratified the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property on 6 December 1997. Any Bura object removed after that date is in breach of Niger law and the Convention. However, the Convention requires a pre-existing inventory — which Bura sites lack."
+8	74	press report: "Archaeological context: Bura-Asinda-Sikka complex, Tillabéri region, Niger. Terracotta zoomorphic and anthropomorphic funerary vessels (askoi) are a characteristic product of the Bura cultural tradition, dating approximately 3rd–11th century CE. Sites were known to local communities but not systematically excavated or inventoried by state authorities."
+8	82	press report: "Intensive looting of Bura sites reported through the 1990s and 2000s. Local informants and field archaeologists documented large-scale mechanical extraction. Objects entered the international market primarily through Mali and then European dealers, with no documentation of origin."
+8	90	press report: "TRAFFIC and UNESCO have documented that West African terracotta objects from Niger and Mali are among the most heavily trafficked categories of cultural property. Major auction house sales of Bura objects in Paris and Brussels during the 1990s–2010s typically carried provenance described only as 'European private collection, acquired before 1970' — a formulation that the 1970 cutoff was specifically intended to make meaningful, but which cannot be verified for unrecorded sites."
-12	78	provenance gap (3 undated event(s); no complete chain before earliest record)
-20	58	register hit: "ICOM Red List West Africa identifies terracotta funerary vessels from Niger (Bura region) as a high-risk trafficking category"

All four cases

Object	Mode	Score	Coverage	Identifying	Routing
Bura askos (zoomorphic funerary vessel)	archaeological	58	structurally-uncovered	0/9	human-review
Benin Bronze commemorative head	colonial	48	structurally-uncovered	0/9	human-review
Victorious Youth (Athlete of Fano)	market-theft	28	well-covered	6/9	human-review
Portrait of Wally Neuzil	nazi-era	28	well-covered	3/9	human-review

Every case routes to human review, and that is the correct result. Auto-issue requires a score of 75 or above and a well-covered class and no similarity flag. A structurally uncovered object can never auto-issue at any score, because the score is not measuring the object.