Whoever stole $2,000 worth of the NIU anthropology department’s surveying equipment also might have stolen similar tools from NIU during the past six months.

Two transits, surveying devices used to map archaeological sites, were reported stolen this week from a locked office in the Stevens Building. The equipment was stolen sometime during the past week, University Police said.

On Jan. 18, the physics department told UPs that an antique transit, a sextant, a device used to find latitude and longitude, and a wooden box with unknown contents were stolen sometime in the past six months from instructor Clyde Kimball’s locked office in Faraday Hall.

“The thief’s modus operandi was similar to that in a theft in the physics department,” said anthropology professor Fred Smith.

NIU bought the transit for $501 and the sextant for $250 in 1950, said UP Sgt. Ralph Taylor.

Although anything that isn’t tied down around NIU is fair game for thieves, to steal the equipment “you’d have to have a particular interest in that kind of equipment or a particular place to fence it,” Taylor said.

Smith said he thought the anthropology department’s equipment might have been stolen so that it could be sold to someone in the construction industry.

“Whoever took them had some specific purpose in mind,” he said. However, other more expensive equipment was left behind, Smith said.

Kimball said he thought that parts in the physics department’s equipment might be sold to a collector. “In London, there are shops that sell antique scientific instruments,” Kimball said.

Smith said he was concerned about the “strange things” that have been happening in the Stevens Building during the past six months. Someone tried to break into the Anthropology Museum last semester around Halloween and, later in the semester, someone inexplicably removed a door in an archaeology lab between a stairwell and a hallway.