How the Relics of War Price Guide Works

Last reviewed 2026-08-15

The price guide answers one question honestly: what have pieces like this actually sold for? Here is precisely how.

Where the data comes from

Every figure is computed from the recorded sold archive on ArtifactSearch.com — results published by auction houses (hammer prices and realized totals) and recorded dealer sales. Private sales are excluded. Asking prices are never used: a dealer's asking price is an opinion; a realized price is a fact.

Each recorded sale carries its date, the seller, and a link to the original record, and every price-guide page lists the individual sales behind its numbers so you can check them yourself.

What is calculated

For each war/era and category with enough data:

• Median realized price — the middle sale. We use the median rather than the average because a single exceptional piece should not drag the "typical" figure with it.
• Middle half — the 25th to 75th percentile band, showing where most sales land.
• Full range — the lowest and highest recorded sale.
• By year — the same figures per calendar year, shown only for years with at least three recorded sales.
• Sample size — always. A figure without its sample size is a guess wearing a suit.

"Realized" means the total price reported by the seller. Where an auction house reports both a hammer price and a total with buyer's premium, the total is used; where only the hammer price is published, that is used and the guide says so in the seller's own record.

Thresholds — when we will not show a number

• Fewer than 5 recorded sales for an era and category: no price-guide page exists at all.
• Fewer than 10 recorded sales, or all sales from a single seller: the page exists so you can see the individual results, but it is deliberately kept out of search-engine indexes and labeled as a small sample.
• Years with fewer than 3 sales are left out of the by-year table.

These thresholds are published in the site's configuration and can be tightened; they will not be loosened to make thin pages look busier.

What the numbers cannot tell you

A category median is not an appraisal of your piece. Within a single category, condition, maker, markings, unit or soldier attribution, provenance, and completeness routinely move a realized price far outside the median band — often by a multiple, not a percentage. Auction results also carry their own context: estimates, competing bidders on a given day, and premiums differ from house to house.

Use the guide to understand a market. Use a qualified specialist, with the object in hand, to value an object.

Freshness

The guide is rebuilt every night from the current sold archive. Figures change when new sales are recorded — never because the site was rebuilt.

Comparability caveats

Category assignments follow ArtifactSearch's taxonomy. A record filed under a category by its seller may sit alongside pieces you would not personally consider comparable; the individual sales table on every page is there so you can judge comparability yourself.

Questions about a specific figure? Contact us and we will look at the underlying records.