London —

In recent years, museums and cultural institutions have been taking steps to reckon with their legacies while they grapple with the colonial histories of items within their collections.

Headlines have been made of artworks repatriated to their countries of origin, but meanwhile the issue of illicit antiquities continues to largely go under the radar.

One man determined to change this is Christos Tsirogiannis, a Greek forensic archaeologist lecturing at Cambridge University. The 52-year-old has spent almost two decades trawling through inventories of museums, auction houses and other collections for illegally trafficked antiquities.

Most recently, Tsirogiannis alerted CNN to two items listed for sale by a leading auction house that had passed through the hands of a notorious

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