The artefacts for the study were on loan from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Only a few brave "stalkers" risk their lives to enter the zones to gather alien artefacts for sale.
In an inner courtyard, a team of archaeologists are cataloguing, photographing and packing artefacts for secure storage.
We study ancient cultures by examining their material remains - buildings, graves, tools and other artefacts, for example - and we usually dig them up.
After last week's meeting, Mr Garcia opted for magnanimity, recognising the university's role in preserving the artefacts for the best part of a century.
This explains why, in 2009, only two thefts – of sandstone statues of the Buddha – were reported to Interpol, which keeps track of stolen artefacts for its 188 members, including Cambodia.
It's Ravel Day all next Friday on Radio 3, and by way of a preview, I've been to see one of the British Library's Ravelian artefacts for this week's Music Matters.
It hosts temporary exhibitions, making full use of its location in Cambridge to source suitable artefacts for displays, which so far have included the Great War, Sherlock and a history of medicine.
"We have been keeping this ivory for nine years and we're hoping this moratorium will be lifted so that we are able to sell this ivory or to produce jewellery, artefacts for the benefit of our people," Muchinguri said.
Once I started wandering the streets of Istanbul in preparation for the novel and the museum, raiding flea markets, secondhand bookstores, and the homes of friends and family for old pillboxes, ashtrays, framed pictures of mosques, identity cards and passport photos, I realised that collecting artefacts for a museum is not very different from collecting stories and facts for a novel.
Sanhareb Barsom, an official with the Syriac Union party across the border in Syria's Hassakeh province, where the Assyrian community has also come under assault by Isis, told the Guardian: "These are not Assyrian artefacts, these are artefacts for all of humanity".
