Hikers in the mountains found a dead body melting out of the ice. They reported it as one tends to do on discovering human remains where they are not normally to be expected... and now want a reward, because what they found was not the remains of a victim of a modern accident but an ancient one, the Oetztal ice body ("Oetzi"). They have now received a larger reward than originally awarded (Italian law offers them 25% of the market value of the find). So what price is a corpse on the antiquities market? What is the market value of an Oetzi or any aging human remains? It may be news to some readers of this blog, but antiquity traders do sell not only items taken FROM bodies, but bits of the bodied themselves when they can get theior hands on them. A Chicago dealer had a mummified foot on offer recently - gone now, it seems qiuckly to have found a buyer. The comments made on the forums at the time were revealing of the mindset of portable antiquity collectors.
Thursday, 16 October 2008
haggling over the price of corpses now
Hikers in the mountains found a dead body melting out of the ice. They reported it as one tends to do on discovering human remains where they are not normally to be expected... and now want a reward, because what they found was not the remains of a victim of a modern accident but an ancient one, the Oetztal ice body ("Oetzi"). They have now received a larger reward than originally awarded (Italian law offers them 25% of the market value of the find). So what price is a corpse on the antiquities market? What is the market value of an Oetzi or any aging human remains? It may be news to some readers of this blog, but antiquity traders do sell not only items taken FROM bodies, but bits of the bodied themselves when they can get theior hands on them. A Chicago dealer had a mummified foot on offer recently - gone now, it seems qiuckly to have found a buyer. The comments made on the forums at the time were revealing of the mindset of portable antiquity collectors.
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