A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
A thrift shop in Canada called Thrifty Boutique got a collection of medallions and rings and put them up for sale at a thrifty price - about 20 bucks each. Then one savvy customer told the owners the artifacts might be worth a lot more because, well, they looked ancient.
SABRINA HIGGINS: So this thrift shop donation was a bit of an anomaly for me.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The thrift shop owners reached out to Sabrina Higgins, who teaches archaeology at Simon Fraser University. And when they gave her the collection for her team to study, she says she immediately recognized that some of the objects may have originated in the Roman Empire.
HIGGINS: There was a sense of familiarity for me in terms of what I was seeing.
MARTÍNEZ: Higgins says some of the relics could date back as far as the fourth century, more than a thousand years ago.
HIGGINS: Now, I don't think all of these objects - so the 11 rings and the two medallions - are all from the same place or from the same time. I think it (ph) was probably someone's, you know, very eclectic collection.
MARTIN: She also doesn't know how these items ended up in a thrift store.
HIGGINS: If these were taken out of a country illegally or they were looted, we don't know the answer to that.
MARTIN: Higgins says for now, they will be housed in the university's archaeology museum. And if it turns out the antiquities were stolen, they will be returned to their country of origin.
MARTÍNEZ: She and her colleague Cara Tremain will teach a class about the artifacts, and they have enough questions to fill an entire semester.
HIGGINS: How do we do so in a way that honors the history of these objects, the ethical concerns around them? And really bringing our students into that dialogue with us and then ultimately showing them to the public and keeping the Thrifty Boutique that brought them to us in the first place involved along the way.
MARTIN: Higgins calls it a great opportunity for her students and the public to learn more about the ancient world.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACKLEMORE, RYAN LEWIS AND WANZ SONG, "THRIFT SHOP")
MARTIN: Let's pop some tag (ph). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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