Time Team Specials

Somewhere in the Roman empire at the end of the 4th century lived a very rich man. The man's name was Sevso. How he got his wealth and what he did during his life are lost in the mists of time. But his name endures. Why? Because he left behind one of the greatest treasures the world has ever known.

The Sevso Treasure comprises 14 huge pieces of intricately decorated silver. In scale and workmanship, they are quite unlike anything else in the world from that period. It has been valued unofficially at more than £100 million and were it ever to be put on public display people would travel the world to see it.

But it's not on display, and for the past few years it has been locked away from public view in the basement of the Bonhams auction house in London, its past and future the subject of hot debate.

The silver is currently in the possession of a British aristocrat, the Marquess of Northampton. But many people, including some very senior figures in the cultural world, claim the treasure is an iconic example of a dirty international trade that is destroying the world's cultural heritage. They believe the treasure must have been looted from an archaeological site and that the Marquess is in possession of stolen property.

To find out why the treasure has aroused these suspicions, Tony Robinson went on a journey that took him far off the normal Time Team path into a shadowy world of dealers, collectors, middlemen and an international trade in antiquities that operates outside the ambit of archaeologists, historians and other scholars - and often outside the law itself.

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