Attacking the Kaimsthorn Bogeyman

We may observe that the pro-collecting lobby have a tendency to prefer simplistic arguments and create straw man arguments which they demolish with glibness and glee. They are happiest picking on a participant in the debate about collecting, demonising them and pouring scorn and hatred on them in the manner the Two Minute Hate of Orwell's distopian '1984.

One of the bogeymen of US collectors for some reason is Lord Professor Colin Renfrew, humanist, scholar, pioneering theoretician, one time Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge. This means little to collectors. Renfrew is reviled among them for the forthright way he has since the early 1970s and particularly from the 1990s onwards spoken out against (among other things) the illicit trade in portable antiquities, the thought-provoking texts he has written on the subject and his activities to promote the development of legislation to regulate this problem. What for the conservation conscious among us would be laudable clearly makes collectors uncomfortable.

A few days ago what was meant (I think) to be a critique of Renfrew's ideas (entitled "Problems with Renfrew") was going the rounds of collectors' forums and was even cross-posted on two archaeology forums. It was signed by Professor T.V. Buttrey from the Coin Department of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It concentrates on a very narrow (coin-centred) interpretation of the context of Renfrew's position and that of the conservation lobby he represents. Although some collectors enthusiastically received it, the text was largely disregarded, mainly one suspects because of its character. A colleague has characterised it as "most offensive and unnecessary too, and possibly libellous". I agree. One gets the impression that this text reflects some Cambridge infighting and academic cattiness and personal jealousies rather than being a fair discussion of the views which Renfrew espouses. Certainly it contains a number of factual errors.

Only "digging by children..."?

In a thought-provoking post in his blog Larry Rothfield provides several good reasons why he thinks that Martin Bailey’s latest story about Iraqi looting seized on with such alacrity by the dealers in and collectors of portable antiquities and their supporters should be treated with some reserve. He too is sceptical about the level of investigative journalism employed:

“Given all this, and given the outrage that greeted his first article on the subject, Bailey should have at the very least asked around to find out whether there was any actual statistical evidence, in the form of satellite imagery, to corroborate Dr Abbas' happy news that looting is over. Had he done so, he might have learned that the Oriental Institute has purchased satellite images that offer incontrovertible evidence to the contrary”.

One phone call really is not sufficient to free collectors of this spectre. Rothfield goes on:

“we do not know for certain what the degree or rate of looting has been for the entirety of the country. To determine that we would need to be able to compare, year by year, the satellite or aerial imagery for at least a representative sample of sites. Unfortunately, purchasing these images on the market would be prohibitively expensive; for just two sets of imagery for the single small site analyzed by Hritz, the cost was over $7000. As I have noted elsewhere, the US military undoubtedly possesses these images and could share them with researchers. Why the images are not being shared is a question that an enterprising reporter should be asking Pentagon or State Department officials.”

Perhaps not just journalists. Let us remember that the US military promised the scholarly community to work with them to help prevent damage to Iraq's heritage during the US-led operations. Perhaps this is a time for it to realise those assurances. Rothfield I think speaks for us all when he ends:

We all wish that the looting was over, just as we wish it were true that the looting of Iraq's sites had been limited to a brief period back in 2003-4, just as we wish the losses to the Iraq Museum had been insignificant. But wishing does not make it so.

An account of the survey by Carrie Hritz in Washington University, St Louis that Rothfield mentioned can be found here.

UNESCO Cultural Heritage Laws Database

Soon there will be no excuse for collectors and dealers of portable antiquities to claim ignorance of the details of the various national laws and regulations related to importation, exportation and ownership of cultural goods. The UNESCO Cultural Heritage Laws Database which was launched in 2005 is becoming a useful online database which can be used by law-makers, lawyers, police and customs officers, art and antiquities dealers, students and researchers as well as private individuals. It offers free access to the relevant cultural heritage laws from UNESCO Member States. To date some 1150 pieces of legislation from 126 countries are made available online and can be consulted in their original language and in official English translations. The creation of this database recently receieved grant support from the USA.

"Fifteen minutes of fame": or fifteen years or more of vigilance

In response to the Art Newspaper story which proclaims "the end" of the looting in Iraq, Peter Tompa feigns surprise: "One would think this news would be cheered and not jeered as it has been on both the "Safe Corner" blog and on the Iraq Crisis List". He goes on to speculate: "A cynic might suspect that those most interested in arguing that looting in Iraq continues on a large scale fear that good news will mean that their "15 minutes of fame" is fast drawing to a close".

Now I am not sure who he thinks is "interested"(sic) in "arguing that the looting continues on a large scale". It is not clear if that is addressed to McGuire Gibson whose post on the IraqCrisis list he highlights, or the author of the Safe Corner post or somebody else. Personally I would like it to have stopped back in the 1990s, or never have started.* Back then there was only moderate public attention paid to it, but with the political opposition to the US-led invasion, it became hot news. There cannot now be many readers of the serious newspapers across the western hemisphere that have not heard about this and realised its connection with the illicit trade in antiquities and those who collect them. I expect that makes those collectors and those who represent them feel more than a little uncomfortable. It casts them in the role of the 'bad guys'. Of course they strive so hard to present themselves as the good guys who are busily collecting away for the greater good of mankind (sic).

I am sure that there are a lot of people therefore who will find comfort that there is an arts newspaper telling people first that the looting "never happened", and then when the evidence shows the story was not true, that "it has now stopped". I expect a lot of dealers and collectors are now counting on the fuss blowing over in the coming weeks and months, that once again undocumented and unprovenanced Mespotamian antiquities can be sold and bought as openly as in the carefree days before the invasion.

I personally suspect that especially after the post-2003 looting there is by now such a stashed-away backlog of so many of these collectables around that it will be more than any "fifteen minutes" of vigilance to make sure that as few people profit from this heinous culture crime as possible. Mr Tompa should be aware that even if the story of Art Newspaper journalist Mr Bailey is right (which actually I personally sincerely doubt), this is by no means the "end". This is only the beginning of a long period when the circulation in the trade in Mesoptamian "pieces of the past" will need to be under close public scrutiny.

[And how interesting that if one compares the original title of the article and that of Culture Property Observer's blog post, it can be seen he has inserted the word "most". Could it be that Mr Tompa has doubts whether the Art Newspaper story as written is indeed true?]

* I think, as the author of the SAFECorner post to which Peter Tompa so scathingly refers, to avoid any misunderstandings it is worth stressing that I write on SAFECorner (as here) expressing my own personal opinions and of course not necessarily those of SAFE itself. I am at a loss to see where he perceives "jeering".

Iraq Looting said to be "over"...

Well, I wondered how long it would be after the publication two days ago of the latest Martin Bailey Art Newspaper story before the collectors' forums start buzzing with the news that "the looting in Iraq is over"... Well, just now a whole bunch of them just threw the joyous news into my inbox simultaneously. I would like to believe its true. Sadly though in the opinion of some of us, there are grounds for treating this as sceptically as the same journalist's premature announcing a month earlier than an Iraqi-British mission of experts to southern Iraq had shown there had been NO looting. The publication of the actual report a few days later showed the actual results of the mission to have been entirely different. So Mr Bailey has tried again. Time will tell, but perhaps real investigative journalism requires more than just a single international telephone call?

Illustration: Irreparable damage caused by illicit digging at Isin, Southern Iraq, the state in July 2003. Photo: M.Bouchenaki, UNESCO.

REFERENCES
Bailey, Martin 'Archaeological sites in south Iraq have not been looted, say experts" Art Newspaper Issue 193, 01.07.08.

Bailey, Martin 'Iraq’s top archaeologist says looting of sites is over'
Art Newspaper Issue 194, 28.8.08.

Curtis, J., Hussein Raheed, Clark, H. Al Hamdani, A.M. Stone, E. van Es, M, Collins, P. and Ali, M. 2008, An Assessment of Archaeological Sites in June 2008: an Iraqi-British Project ’ (British Museum webpage)

Collecting for today to collect for tomorrow?

“Say YES to Sustainable Seafood” the leaflet handed out a few years ago by a pretty girl in the town center said. As I chatted with her I glanced at it, and then started reading it. On my way to a meeting, I put it in my pocket to read later, a bit further along I picked up another one a thoughtless pedestrian had discarded so I could give one to a friend. The leaflet contained a list of fish that the World Wildlife Fund says were currently being fished in a sustainable manner, and those that were not. It gave links to other organizations part of the same Sustainable Seafood campaign, but more importantly gave a list of things to look for and ask about when buying fish to ensure that we were buying only a commodity which had been ethically and responsibly produced. That means not only in accord with current international and national marine and trade legislation, but also conservation and ecological guidelines.

One of the key questions is where the goods on sale actually come from, that the population of a species may be sustainable in one region of the seas, but the population of the same species is declining off another country’s coasts.

I've been consuming fish for a good part of my life, after reading the WWF leaflet I wonder why I really had not given much thought to the environmental impact of what I bought at the fish counter. It was inexplicable (as I was brought up to be conservation conscious and regularly avoid products I do not believe have been produced in the manner I as a customer would approve). The fish leaflet though gave me something else to think about. Now I know, and now I ask. Usually in the shops which I use the source of the fish is given on the label. If not and the seller cannot (or will not) tell me where the fish comes from, I now do not buy it on principle. Probably a lot of people in my city have not yet met the pretty girls with their leaflets or seen the media campaign, and don’t even think yet about where their Friday dinner comes from. I hope they do soon.

Surely is it not the same with antiquities? Can collectors collecting for today collect for tomorrow? Can they help retain the sustainability of the historic environment by buying and curating portable antiquities responsibly? The PAS advice which says in effect “ask where its from and how it got there, and if in doubt, don’t buy” seems generally applicable. The PAS is above all a sizable public information campaign, wouldn't it be great if this aspect of its work encouraging only responsible collecting and that of volunteer groups like SAFE were copied elsewhere?

Logo from the Marine Stewardship Council, a sort of a marine wildlfe SAFE

More on the new discussion list

I see Ed Snible, a frequent commentator here, has been invited as a contributor on the new UNESCO-L list and suggested that the name is perhaps confusing. I also wonder if its use was cleared beforehand with UNESCO itself:

Authorizing the use of the name, acronym and/or logo of UNESCO is the prerogative of the General Conference and the Executive Board. In specific cases as set out by the Directives, the governing bodies empower, by delegation, the Director-General and the National Commissions for UNESCO to authorize such use to other bodies. The power to authorize the use of the name, acronym, logo and/or Internet domain names of UNESCO may not be granted to other bodies. Any decision authorizing the use of the name, acronym, logo and/or domain names of UNESCO shall be based on the following criteria: 1. relevance of the proposed association to the Organization’s strategic objectives and programme; 2. compliance with the values, principles and constitutional aims of UNESCO. The use of the name, acronym, logo and/or domain name must be expressly authorized in advance and in writing, and must comply with the specified conditions and procedures, in particular with respect to its visual presentation, duration and scope.

Yet Another Discussion List for Portable Antiquity Dealers and Collectors

Portable antiquity collectors interested in questioning the need for further legal regulation of the antiquities trade already have their increasingly monologous Unidroit-L discussion list devoted to “ the Unidroit Convention and related legislation […] anything to do with the law as it applies to trading in and collecting stamps, coins and ancient artifacts”. Now a group of nine of them (mainly one suspects living in the US) have deemed it necessary to create another discussion list. This new one, the UNESCO-L Discussion List has been set up to examine the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. An introductory text (very similar to that of the Unidroit-L discussion list) proclaims the aim is to provide a “forum for discussion of the 1970 UNESCO Convention, and related legislation”. Personally I cannot see the difference, where one set of 'related legislation' differs from the other. But this discussion list, we are assured will be different.

The organizers of this initiative assert:

The UNESCO Convention (1970) […] includes among the items defined as "cultural objects:" (e) antiquities more than one hundred years old, such as inscriptions, coins and engraved seals (i) postage, revenue and similar stamps, singly or in collections […] The definitions of stamps, coins and antiquities are so broadly stated that any collector or institution acquiring a stamp, coin or minor antiquity (such as a scarab or oil lamp) more than one hundred years old, originating in another country than that in which the collection resides, could be prevented from importing it to his nation of residence, and may be required to return it to the country of origin in the absence of documentary proof that the object was legally exported.

Ah, here's the rub. They obviously expect the collector of so-called "minor" pieces of somebody-else's-archaeological-heritage such as coins, scarabs or oil lamps to be worried by that latter phrase. Simply “acquiring” an item is not enough to fall foul of the legislation which this convention requires the international community to honour (clue: “export licences”).

The authors of this text are misleading the reader about what the convention defines as cultural objects. They neglect to draw the reader’s attention to the most important element of Article 1, which reads: “the term "cultural property" means property which, on religious or secular grounds, is specifically designated by each State as being of importance for archaeology, prehistory, history, literature, art or science and which belongs to the following categories…”. So for example as we saw in the case of Great Britain the other day, the category of “postage stamps and other articles of philatelic interest” is specifically excluded by state legislation (The Export of Objects of Cultural interest (Control) Order 2003, Schedule 1 Article 1 [a]) as objects of cultural interest. My guess this omission is deliberate, as is the selective presentation of categorises that might be included seems to be a cynical attempt to make stamp collectors feel threatened in an attempt to gain their support in the questioning of this Convention (they tried it in the case of Unidroit-L too). I think we can safely assume philatelists outnumber the 50 000 collectors of ancient coins in the US. One presumes however that most stamp collectors can read the Convention themselves and probably will conclude that an attempt is being made to manipulate them.

In fact, if one examines with attention the FAQ of this list, it becomes abundantly clear that its author(s) completely misunderstand (that is more charitable than misrepresent) the nature of the Convention, its scope and purpose, as well as completely ignoring its relationship to the national laws of sovereign countries that the US of America.

A second objective of the list will be discussion of whether:

in view of the […] now well established, rapidly growing and
serious extent of controversy and social conflict that have resulted from its implementation, continuation of this Convention is beneficial to mankind.

Let us get this straight, a bunch of US collectors is questioning whether international co-operation in the field of fighting the trade in illicit antiquities is “beneficial to mankind”. I wonder if equally under discussion will be whether the unregulated continuation of illicit trade particularly beneficial to mankind, or just North American collectors of portable antiquities which are not found in the soil of the USA?

Let us also bear in mind who it is that threatens "turmoil" until the archaeologists cave in and agree to forget about archaeological context when talking with collectors of archaeological material taken from archaeological sites. Precisely who is stirring up social conflict over a comparatively simple issue of morality and responsibility towards the use of a finite and fragile resource?

These collectors presumably want to discuss on the new list whether disregarding Article 2 (opposing illicit trade) of the Convention is “beneficial to mankind”, and likewise Articles 5 and 14 (heritage protection). From past experience, we may be sure that in their discussions they will be dead against Articles 6 and 8 (clue: export licences), what about Article 7 (museums)? I am sure they will say “Nine (international co-operation) – nine is right out”, (that’s what the Cyprus MOU bru-ha-ha is about). Article 10 (education), well, that must be real uncomfortable for some collectors. I’d like to see what US collectors make of Articles 11 and 12 (military occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan etc.). We can see from their introductory texts, the members of this list also intend to usurp for themselves the duties alluded to in Article 16 and part of 17 (reporting).

One of the stated agendas of the discussion list is:

To define the impact of the 1970 UNESCO convention on collectors of coins, stamps and antiquities […]and whether it may create uncertain or unfavorable market conditions that would impact collectors and the sale of collections.

How about favourable conditions for the prohibition and prevention of the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property? In what way would (we presume continued) complying as the Convention requires with legal export requirements "impact" the current market, one wonders?

The Convention as befits an agreement of significance to the international community (Article 18) was published simultaneously in four languages (English, French, Russian and Spanish) “The language used in all posts [to the UNESCO-L list] shall be English” as befits what seems to be little more than a unilateral attempt by a minority group of Americans to exert what they see as their "rights" at the expense of the cultural heritage of members of the international community.

Let us hope that the international community pays very close attention to what these US collectors want, understand and have to say about their relationship to the ideals that the Convention is intended to uphold.

Happy Birthday Ben and Jamie

Time waits for no man, and your Uncle Paul did not manage (again) to get to the post office “quite” on time in between everything else, but something is winging its way to you as we speak. Hope you have a good day anyway.

While you are here, as young numismatists yourselves, you might like to look around, as there is a lot here about coin collecting and what some coin collectors say.... Probably not up your street though, those guys collect an entirely different type of coin, from entirely different sources.

"Collectors' Responsibilities" as seen in Ohio

The Portable Antiquities Scheme exists to promote a responsible attitude towards collecting of portable antiquities in England and Wales. It helps ensure that collected items and those offered for sale come from a known and licit sources and have been recorded. This aims to curb the market in illicit goods without unduly hampering legitimate collecting. The US portable antiquity collecting lobby has until now openly expressed admiration for this scheme. It has been one of the kingpins of its lobbying ‘program’ that creation of similar systems of dealing with collecting would greatly benefit collectors.

In the past few weeks, ACCG officer Dave Welsh has recently been regaling members the Council for British Archaeology’s Britarch discussion forum with his assorted thoughts on collecting and how bad it is that certain “extremists’ have unreasonable ideas that responsible collectors should stop buying artefacts of undocumented origin. In his opinion, indicating that the responsible collection of artefacts would be to stick to those that are properly provenanced and have a documented licit history is “an extreme, completely impractical and unreasonable approach."

The Chairman of Heritage Action, Nigel Swift asked him recently about his attitude as a dealer to the PAS "Advice for people buying archaeological objects from the UK”, pointing out that they propagate a similar approach to provenance as those who Welsh labeled as “extremists”. The self-appointed spokesman for US collectors stressed his "support" for the PAS and made his position clear "I regard a "full provenance" as essential insofar as that term applies to acquiring objects which British law requires to be reported". One presumes he has in mind the Treasure Act. This completely ignores the fact that the PAS and their advice are independent of the Treasure laws, but are to do with encouraging voluntary responsible behaviour in accordance with best practice. Ignoring the fact that this is the primary aim of the PAS really does not qualify one as a “supporter of PAS”.

Pressed for an answer, Mr Welsh then said "I do support PAS and its advice. However, there is an essential difference between that which applies to British subjects governed by the Treasure Act and PAS, and that which applies to all buyers in other nations". That is simply not the case. The PAS is entirely a voluntary scheme for responsible collectors and does not "govern" anyone. It asks collectors them to act in a particular way as a matter of personal responsibility - nothing to do with the law. The text of the “Advice” was however addressed to buyers abroad too requesting the same degree of personal responsibility as British citizens.

In the course of this discussion, Welsh revealed that as a US antiquities dealer he regards himself exempt from any compunction to follow PAS advice for responsible buyers of portable antiquities on the entirely spurious grounds that he is not British and therefore postulating that the advice wasn't meant to refer to him and his fellow collectors abroad. According to this view, Britain cannot possibly have any opinion on or wishes about what others should do when acquiring ancient objects of cultural interest from its soil. Surely this is something that Britons do have a right to decide themselves and not, Mr Swift correctly argued, a subject of negotiation over the other side of the Atlantic. There is no question of the foreigners having a different relationship to portable antiquities coming from British soil than Britons. Either buyers agree with PAS's advice about responsible purchasing of portable antiquities and conform, or they don't.

Referring this discussion over the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the "Advice for people buying archaeological objects from the UK” on the Unidroit-L list, Welsh was greeted by fellow antiquities dealer Eftis Paraskevaides with the words “Congratulations for exposing this verbal excrement”. Iranian chemical engineer Farhad Assar asked “Who is this "Mr. Swift"? Is he part of human race?”. John Rieske a collector who hails from Ohio (calling himself ‘Lysimachos’) however was more forthcoming about his attitude to PAS urging to collect British artefacts responsibly:

Mr. Swift (via Unidroit-L) So you think that everybody, no matter where they live should abide by your laws (British, I presume) even though I live in different country from yours. Oh! how wonderful! Now I guess we must abide by your traffic laws (driving on the left? How reprehensible!) and your court
system (which sucks BTW, [not that ours is great.]) It is the job of the citizens of a country to enforce their own laws through the establishment of responsible law enforcement, rather than shifting the onus upon citizens of other countries. You are in violation of many of my countries laws, possibly including libel and certainly in driving left of center. Do I have the right to demand that you cease and desist because I and my nation disagree with your laws? Of course not. So keep you laws to yourself and place your blame where it truly lies: with the criminals.

So there we have it, according to the Ohio collector addressing Nigel Swift's remarks, there is no reason for the PAS to try to encourage good practice among buyers of portable antiquities. He says if the British cannot stop sales of illicitly obtained artefacts through responsible (sic) law enforcement, the US collector is entirely justified in buying any of it they want because it is the fault of the British for not looking after it properly. This collector too seems unaware that the PAS is not a "law".

Does the blame for irresponsible collecting lie as Mr Rieske asserts “with the criminals” or those that aid and abet the criminals by buying illicit property from them without asking any questions?

The PAS advice seems quite straightforward to me:
“Five things to ASK :
Have you legal title to sell? Where was the object found? When was the object found? Was there a legal obligation to report the find? Has the object been recorded?If a seller cannot satisfactorily answer all or any of these questions or if you have doubts whether an object is illicit or not, then our advice is do not buy it”.
Oh and they remind foreign buyers they need an export licence to legally export archaeological finds from the UK.

What actually is so unreasonable about that when seen from Ohio?

Pssst... wanna buy this, Guv?

The Codes of Ethics/Conduct of dealers and collectors of portable antiquities speak in comforting but very woolly terms about not buying illicit or stolen goods. When one examines them closely however it can be seen that they do not restrict collectors overly since they have a very narrow definition of what falls into those categories and do not require the collector to actually ask penetrating questions of the seller like the "Advice for people buying archaeological objects from the UK” of the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

Any good citizen who receives an offer to buy illicit goods would of course refuse to take part in the transaction no matter how superficially tempting it is. They would also in many cases report the incident to the appropriate authorities so the culprit can be prevented from engaging in illegal activity and perhaps in some way harming the interests of others. Not so in the portable antiquities collecting world. Many dealers say they will not buy illicit items if offered, but how many warn those that would attempt this would be reported to the relevant authorities if they tried? A few years ago I was writing up old excavations on a site and contacted a major museum about finds from old excavations they had from it, “oh we’ve got some new finds of coins from there in our database!” they said. They had, information on finds which doubled the known finds of coins of that period from the site as a whole, but ripped out of context (no information on what part of this large and complex site they had come from) and now scattered in at least two private coin collections. The problem is that the remote site had been scheduled for several decades before it was visited by the metal detectorists whose finds I was now hearing about. The names of the miscreants? Oh, that’s secret says the museum numismatist, covering up for the criminals, so as not to scare off others bringing dodgy finds so they can be included in some coin typological database. No matter that they had trashed part of the site I was working on and no doubt as we spoke could well be doing the same to many more. But the numismatist got to hold briefly a few nice coins in his hand and ponder their typology. Ellis (1995, 223) notes that dealers also do not report dodgy offers to the police, in order not to jeopardise a potential 'source'.

Surely Codes of Ethics for dealers and collectors should include not only an obligation not to benefit from criminal activity but to actively fight it.

Ellis, R. 1995, 'The Antiquities Trade: a Police perspective', pp 222-5 in: K.W. Tubb (ed.) 1995, Antiquities: Trade or Betrayed, legal, ethical and conservation issues, London.

A Threat of Turmoil unless...

Californian coin dealer Dave Welsh's latest "contribution" to international dialogue on portable antiquities collecting:

I really do not think that all of British archaeological thought has yet fully grasped the ethical implications of [the] demand that all antiquities must be fully provenanced before they may ethically be traded or collected. This is a very fundamental point, and it would be a serious error for British archaeologists to promulgate a "code of ethics" for collectors in which that demand is included as an ethical requirement, before the serious differences that presently exist have been fully discussed and resolved.
[...] When Barford and his fellow thinkers leave collectors in peace, you will be left in peace. Until that happens there will be turmoil. If you find that disagreeable, then I suggest that you give some thought to whether Mr. Barford is accomplishing anything constructive, or whether he is simply alienating and irritating collectors to the point that they are ready to take
concrete action to assert their rights.

Sounds to me like ACCG officer Mr Welsh is angling for British archaeologists, under threat of him and his fellow portable antquity collectors creating "turmoil" in their midst, to place a gag order on critics of portable antiquity collecting 'a la ACCG'.
What "rights" does the US collector actually have over the objects of cultural interest from other countries, such as Great Britain? Do these people imagine that their own personal rights completely override those of the citizens and state administration of those other countries? By what right does Mr Welsh think he can dictate to the British archaeological community what they should think, and threaten them if they don't change their minds about the ethics of collecting artefacts taken from their archaeological contexts? Let us see how well he has judged them and the depth of their obsession with "context". Of course they could just ignore his threats and treat the ill mannered transatlantic interloper with a polite but sardonic grin.

Dura lex sed lex

Wisconsin coin collector and dealer Jim McGarigle (“Polymath numismatics”) says he is “shocked” to learn from this blog what British law defines as Objects of Cultural Interest and in a post on his 'Ancient & World Coin Geek' blog called “Scholarly Pedantics - More Extreme Archaeology” proceeds to poke fun at what he calls “extreme archaeologists” who (as the ACCG-style numismophilic conspiracy theory goes) allegedly must be behind all this. He says “I think documenting any coin 50 years old or older, regardless of value qualifies as a demonstration of pedantry or pedantic behavior”. He then goes on to define the word, presumably worried that some coin collectors may not know what it means. Frankly I do not see any evidence of "scholarly pedantry" has been presented by Mr McGarigle, rather the opposite.

In his disdainful treatment of what the law of the UK says, Mr McGarigle ignores the fact that there might be other types of objects of cultural interest that the British might wish to control the export of. As a foreign collector eager to get his hands on cultural property from other countries, he may not accept that Britain has the right to do this, but fortunately it does. The fifty year watershed is for all types of cultural property, not only that which is the direct product of excavations, and the legislation sets out exemptions (for example postage stamps).

McGarigle ignores this, and pokes fun at the British showing examples of recent UK coins on sale on eBay which have obviously never been in the ground and pretending that British law (personified for some reason by an Indiana Jones icon) is saying “that belongs in a museum!” I invite Mr McGarigle to read the Reports of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and related literature and discover how many coins have had export licences refused and on what grounds. I do not think he will find many 1958 shillings among them.

As I said here earlier, it is essential for collectors of portable antiquities to make an effort to determine what legislation applies in the various source countries to the material they collect. Surely responsible collectors and dealers could easily put together a resource containing this information. It is disturbing that people like Jim McGarigle should be learning about it - apparently for the first time - from sources like this blog.

Californian coin dealing: the British Connection

Earlier here I posted some perfectly reasonable queries that arose when reading what pro-collecting activist Dave Welsh was saying about his own business practices which he was holding up as an exemplar of ethical trading. He seems however not to have appreciated his firm, ‘Classical Coins’ of Goleta California being examined in this way. In a post entitled “Barford Attacks Unidroit-L Listowner's Ethics” he complains
I should add that the tone of Mr. Barford's blog post is gratuitously insulting, and that not only in my opinion, but also in that of an attorney experienced in cultural property law, his remarks are skating on the very edge of defamation.

Anyone who has followed these discussions will be aware that Mr Welsh and his fellow ACCG officers are no strangers to the use of insulting language referring to conservationists in the archaeological milieu. There is of course nothing “gratuitously insulting” in pointing out contradictory statements in information Mr Welsh disseminates about his own firm in presenting it as an exemplar how other similar businesses should be operating. In response to his answer and its somewhat aggressive tone therefore, I would like to expand on why I am still puzzled by what Mr Welsh asserts, and invite him to avail himself of the ability to post a comment here to clarify the situation. There are three main matters involved and for clarity I want to treat them in three separate and successive posts.

The first issue concerns three conflicting statements about purchase of artefacts in Britain. Mr Welsh has at many times expressed the opinion that Britain has the wisest and most fair antiquities legislation in the world. It is therefore perfectly valid to ask what experience Mr Welsh actually has with this system. In his reply to the questions I raised here, he now asserts:

The only items I have acquired that are known to have originated in Britain are antiquarian books and antique furniture, which if more than 100 years old are subject to export control under the provisions of UNESCO 1970. These however did not fall under
that classification

I suspect that Mr Welsh is becoming confused; the 1970 UNESCO Convention has NOTHING to do with this. What is important is UK and EU export licencing requirements.

Let us have a look at the wider context of the first quote I cited the other day. It was (as the reader can check for themselves) part of an ongoing discussion about export licences for antiquities in general:

"The question is, whether once British subjects or concerns get
title to an ancient coin, are they then free to sell it to me without having to get an export license? I believe that they are. I have never received an export license with any of the items shipped to me from the UK. Can you help to clarify this, seeing that there is apparently some confusion?" [my emphasis]

The context indicates that the word “items” here clearly does not refer to “antiquarian books and antique furniture”. In the second quote I cited here, the topic of discussion was “doing the right thing” (and the context in the thread was a discussion of following the advice of the Portable Antiquities Scheme about the purchase of artefacts. In answering an earlier point Welsh wrote:

Conducting my business is also "doing the right thing." I'm an
ethical dealer, and have never acquired an antiquity from the UK that was not provenanced.

Again, “antiquity” and not “antiquarian books and antique furniture” and they are all provenanced (how do you provenance second hand books and old chairs?). But then a day later he said:

I have never acquired an artifact in Britain, and do not ever expect to do so.

There is nothing “gratuitously insulting” in pointing out that these three statements as written are in total conflict with each other. It does not seem unduly churlish to ask the reason why this should be when Mr Welsh has been setting his own business practice out as an exemplar.

On his own Unidroit-L site Mr Welsh comments “I believe I have every right to defend myself and the collectors I serve on archaeology lists.” Perhaps the collectors Mr Welsh “serves” and archaeologists will note that instead of an explanation of the first three mutually exclusive, only a fourth was proffered which conflicts with them even more.

I ask again, Do any of the coins Classical Coins has had in stock come from provenanced British finds or not?. (Mr Welsh is perfectly welcome to post a comment here explaining these discrepancies if he can manage to stay on topic and not use abusive and insulting language).

Californian coin dealing and the Bulgarian connection

In an earlier post here I discussed the accumulations of Roman provincial bronze coins from Thrace and lower Moesia which a Californian coin dealer is offering. I asked where they came from and how they got to California. In reply, the proprietor of the firm, coin dealer and pro-collecting activist Dave Welsh tells readers of his Unidroit-L list:

They were acquired from a long established, reputable dealer in Canada. Canada is a signatory to UNESCO 1970, and I had observed that Revenue Canada was very scrupulous in enforcing Canadian import regulations. I did not doubt that these coins were licitly imported.

So once again we have the employment of a variant of the “Customs officers had no objections” argument which I have earlier discussed here as a totally dubious justification which sometimes used by dealers who cannot be bothered to comply with the export regulations of the countries which are the source of the exported archaeological material. I am sure though that Mr Welsh meant to say that the (unnamed) Canadian dealer was able to show his customer (Classical Coins) a copy of the export papers which were required to get them through the rigours of Canadian customs.

I am however a bit puzzled by the fact that earlier Mr Welsh talking of these same coins wrote:

"I had, and still have, no idea of where or when the coins were discovered. They were acquired licitly in the USA and Canada. […] I make all reasonable efforts to avoid acquiring anything that may have been stolen or that I think has been smuggled into the USA. It would, however, be absolutely unreasonable to require me to prove beyond all doubt the actual origin of everything I buy". [my emphasis]

To judge from a juxtaposition of these two statements talking about the same process, one might conclude that these “all reasonable efforts” consists of little more than buying from a dealer whose suppliers for one reason or another have not been stopped by US and Canadian customs of sending archaeological material abroad. The admission that some of these coins were purchased in the USA however takes on a new irony in the light of the fact that Mr Welsh is very visible as an ardent campaigner aiming to get the lifting of existing US import restrictions on certain types of archaeological material, including coins. Mr Welsh apparently sees no ambiguity in relying on the existence of import restrictions to justify his claims of the legitimacy of his own business practices as an artefact dealer while at the same time being an active campaigner for their lifting.

Surely due diligence in cases like these does indeed require the buyer to “prove beyond all doubt the actual origin of everything” they buy when the commodity is notoriously known to be one which includes a substantial admixture of material of completely illicit origin. Such as precisely ancient coins of the types found in the Balkans and Bulgaria, in other words precisely the type of material under discussion here. It is not “unreasonable” at all for a responsible and ethic dealer to take every possible step to identify the origin of material like this, and if that is impossible, not to touch it. This is not a case for "innocent until proven guilty" but simple good practice.

There is nothing “gratuitously insulting” in pointing out the ambiguity of the situation concerning these job lots of provincial Roman coins offered to its customers by Classical Coins, held up by its proprietor as a paragon of virtue, but in fact no different from several hundred sellers engaged in the selling of bulk lots of objects some of which may reasonably be suspected by its purchasers in the light of evidence to the contrary as having come from the illegal metal detecting of archaeological sites in central southeastern Europe which we know is occurring on a massive scale. On his own Unidroit-L site, Mr Welsh comments “I believe I have every right to defend myself and the collectors I serve on archaeology lists.” Perhaps the collectors Mr Welsh “serves” and archaeologists will note that instead of a meaningful assurance that these coins can be documented as being of legitimate provenance, all that seems to be being offered is a weak argument that “Canadian customs had no objections to their import”, but that some of them were in any case bought in the USA.

I ask again, to what degree do the measures applied by the proprietors of US firms like Classical Coins prevent their stock containing items from illegal metal detecting in the Balkans and how is the client to know from the information presented in its sales offer? That is surely a perfectly valid question in the circumstances and one that should not be dismissed.

Classical coin dealing and the Parthian connection

In a discussion here, I raised a number of questions about a newly-listed group of 17 Parthian coins of Orodes II on offer by a Californian coin dealer. Since no provenance is cited in the sales offer, I asked how the dealer and more importantly his clients can know these do not come from recent looting of archaeological sites in Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan? The same dealer has many other similar coins, again no hint of where they came from and how they got into his shop. This is a straightforward question, no “insult" there. How is the concerned client to know? The dealer has himself offered an answer.

These were received from a Spanish dealer who is among my trusted sources. Spain is not a path through which illicit coins are known to flow to the market, and there was considerable commerce in antiquity between Spain and areas where Parthian coins circulated.

It would seem from this reply to my question that in effect "due diligence" here is merely an assumption that Spaniards cannot possibly take part in any illicit trade of antiquities. So where did this mysterious unnamed Spanish portable antiquities dealer get this group of coins from? Mr Welsh offers the information that in antiquity there was “considerable commerce between Spain and areas where Parthian coins circulated”, and we understand that this is offered as an explanation how a Spanish dealer legitimately obtained these coins. I am unclear whether Mr Welsh is perhaps claiming that these 17 Parthian coins were found in Spain at the end of some cross-continental trade route from one end of the Roman Republic and Empire to another (otherwise why mention it?). If so, maybe he could explain how the story of how these coins reached California tallies with Spain’s very complex and relatively strictly enforced (vide the "Black Swan saga unfolding) antiquity protection legislation. I wonder whether he would like to show his clients any export licence he was issued together with the export of these coins if they came from Spanish soil (I understand that among collectors Spain has a notoriously complex export licencing procedure for archaeological finds).
An interesting sidelight on all this is provided by Farhad Assar (expatriate Iranian chemical engineer living in Oxford and amateur numismatist specializing in Parthian coinage). He writes on Welsh’s Unidroit-L forum (and cross-posted on Britarch) reassuring Mr Welsh:

Having browsed through your website, I found no Parthian tetradrachms of Orodes II that might have been originated in Iraq. So, if Barford is talking about those silver drachms of Orodes II (Nos. S0240/3442 - S0263/3448) some of which have a reddish patina, his remarks prove that he is numismatically illiterate. Please refer him to the publications by McDowell and Le Rider on coins from Seleucia on the Tigris to see for himself the improbability of your drachms having been found in Iraq. Parthian drachms hardly ever circulated in Mesopotamia.

Well, of course I made no mention whatsoever of “Parthian tetradrachms of Orodes II” and Dr Assar seems to confuse place of minting and findspot. Being “numismatically illiterate” (sic) I am at a loss why Dr Assar can state that (whatever the denomination) Parthian coins "hardly ever circulated" in Mesopotamia. In fact I cannot see on what basis such comments can be made when so few of the relevant coins on the market come from known findspots. A quick search reveals that several hoards with coins of Orodes II have been found in recent years but no mention is made of information on where they were found. For example this one discussed by Californian collector Thomas K. Mallon-McCorgray:

"a new hoard of Orodes II coins I looked through in early May, 2002. Although there were several hundred coins, I was able to document only 121 of them, as follows....” (no details of where these coins were found, seen, who they were shown by and what happened to them afterwards).

Another, the so-called:

"90-50 BC hoard" 2004 - reports began surfacing in August-September 2004 of this hoard which reportedly contained well over 4000 drachms issued from
Mithradates II (Sellwood 28) to Orodes II (Sellwood 43) in different grades
and a good number of unrecorded varieties.

This phrase "surfacing" of course refers to these items appearing on sale. (The same website does not list any hoards containing Parthian coins from Spain). Looking through various online sources certainly suggests that many if not most Parthian coins on the market have lost any provenance details (Dave Welsh estimated somewhere that this is the case for 98% of ancient coins generally), so I find it it odd that Dr Assar can assert with any confidence based on two old excavation reports (1935 and 1965) what can be and is being found in Mesopotamia. Provenence details are of course also information of value to numismatists, even though most collectors pay no attention to them.

Dave Welsh replies to Dr Assar on both Unidroit and Britarch lists:

Dear Farhad, Your observations are of course absolutely correct, however in my experience it is useless to point out such relevant numismatic facts to Mr. Barford. He appears only to be interested in incessantly chanting his mantra, i.e. provenance ueber alles.

These “relevant numismatic facts” however tend to be used by coin collectors rather unevenly. Just a few days before Dr Assar’s message on Britarch, John Hooker was expounding once again on the Cyprus coin import restrictions and stressing how even if a Ptolemaic coin was minted in Cyprus it can be found in different parts of the Ptolemaic realms and beyond. Likewise therefore whatever denominations were minted at Seleucia on the Tigris in the reign of Orodes II, that is no guarantee that Parthian coins of other denominations could not have been deposited in the region of modern Iraq within the Parthian hegemony at the time, and in any case surely the probability of that happening is greater than Mr Welsh’s proffered explanation that they could have been found in Spain as a result of cross-continental trade!

Despite the ironic tone with which Mr Welsh attempts to link the position I represent with the ideology of Hitlerite fascism (and who is being “insulting” now? - Cf here and here), provenance IS indeed important.

Mr Welsh comments “I believe I have every right to defend myself and the collectors I serve on archaeology lists.” This would be very interesting, perhaps the collectors Mr Welsh “serves” by various means and archaeologists will note the way due diligence appears from Mr Welsh's own words to have been applied in the case of this purchase of antiquities taken from the region where Parthian coins circulated. All that is offered is a weak argument that “Spain is not a path through which illicit coins are known to flow to the market”. I ask again, to what degree do the measures applied by its proprietor prevent the stock of firms like the Californian coin shop Classical Coins containing items from looting of archaeological sites the region where Parthian coins circulated and how is the client to know from the information presented in its sales offer? That is a perfectly valid question in the circumstances.

Mr Welsh does not have to annoy members of outside forums to present his case. He is perfectly at liberty to post a comment here as long as he keeps to the topic, avoids abusive language and facile insults referring to the ideology of Hitlerite fascism. I remind him that he himself asserted “It is not necessary to insult one's opponent to argue one's case”.

REFERENCES
Mr Welsh neglected to supply me with the references to the two works to which Dr Assar alluded. I assume they are:
Le Rider, Georges. 1965, 'Suse Sous les Seleucides et les Parthes. (Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner)
McDowell.R. H. 1935 Coins from Seleucia on the Tigris, Univ. of Michigan Press (Humanistic Series, vol. 37). Ann Arbor.

Ethics codes and their application by dealers

The Ancient Coin Collectors Guild has postulated that the codes of conduct of museum professionals and archaeologists “ought to include certain issues like conservation, publishing responsibilities, respect for private ownership and public access”, and they announce that they will be communicating these concerns “to the appropriate organizations or associations in the form of an ACCG petition for consideration”. They seem to be unaware of the fact that the codes of conduct/practice/ethics of a number of archaeological bodies already include these elements.

More interesting from our point of view is that this body, a self-appointed spokesman for the entire international http://www.accg.us/ (it would seem) milieu of ancient coin collectors has proposed its own Code of Ethics for Collectors and Sellers of ancient coins.

It is interesting to note that this was adopted, not as a result of wide consultation in the collecting and cultural heritage protection world, but as the result of a “formal meeting of the Board of Directors at New York, NY on January 15, 2005”. The majority of the officers of the ACCG are dealers, so it is not surprising that this uniform “Code of Ethics for Collectors and Sellers of ancient coins” concentrates mainly on the selling of coins.

Somewhat conventionally the second principle states “Coin Collectors and Sellers will protect, preserve and share knowledge about coins in their collections”, though it would seem it was not thought advisable to add to this Code that information on provenance is an extremely important element of the “knowledge” about archaeological finds (as ancient coins are) which also should be preserved by sellers and collectors of this type of material.

The last three of the five principles refer to the ethics of selling coins “Coin Sellers will not knowingly sell modern forgeries of ancient coins, and all ancient counterfeits or Renaissance type copies will be clearly identified as such”, “Coin Sellers will disclose all known defects, including tooling, re-engraving or reconstruction of coins they sell.”, “Coin Sellers will not misrepresent the value of coins they buy or sell.”

From our point of view however the first principle of this code of ethics is completely inadequate, as has previously pointed out by David Gill. It states

“Coin Collectors and Sellers will not knowingly purchase
coins illegally removed from scheduled archaeological sites or stolen from museum or personal collections, and will comply with all cultural property laws of their own country.”

In the same vein the ACCG advises collectors that the way to help protect archaeological sites from looting is for collectors “refusing to purchase any coin known to be removed from a scheduled archaeological site or stolen from a private or public collection and by complying with all cultural property laws in their own country.” It is not however stated how this is to be achieved, it is unlikely that any dealer selling such items or in contravention of domestic would be openly advertising that fact.
We note the wording “knowingly purchase”, this is a far different matter from “will take steps to ensure” (which actually involves asking the vendor to demonstrate the licit origin of the portable antiquities on offer). The same goes for the manner in which the ethical collector will ensure that a coin has come from an old collection because its owner has passed it on willingly or whether it was stolen. As for where the coins ultimately come from, the problem is not whether any archaeological site which has been riddled with holes to extract collectables for foreign markets is scheduled or not (or even known to the authorities), it is whether the irreversible extraction of archaeological evidence from it was recorded or not. Obviously most collectors will feel they are helping to prevent culture-crime by buying coins but not asking where they came from, that way they are not "knowingly" buying looted or stolen material.

The clause “will comply with all cultural property laws of their own country” would be laughable if we did not know that this is actually the self-justification some portable antiquity collectors actually do apply to what they do. “No law was broken in my country” they say and the antiquities protection laws of the countries where this stuff comes from are "unwise” and “unjust” and therefore there is not only no legal obligation to respect them, but (these people claim) neither is there any sort of ethical conflict in not doing so, nor in financing those who deliberately break the law of their own country because there are foreign buyers greedy for the products. This rather reduces the value of the ACCG document as a code of “ethics”. This is merely the “its legal innit?” argument taken to extremes.

More important however than what the wording of a code of ethics says, is how its principles are reflected in action. In particular by dealers who at the same time set themselves up as authorities speaking for the whole collecting community. Californian coin dealer Dave Welsh, an ACCG officer and pro-collecting activist has obligingly supplied some information on this in reply to my queries about the manner of determination of the actual origins of some of the unprovenanced items on offer by his own firm (Classical coins) Yesterday he was assuring British archaeologists that in his own business practices

I take all available measures to avoid anything illicit. No one could possibly carry on my business with more attention paid to ensuring that only trustworthy sources are dealt with.

Mr Welsh therefore holds out Classical Coins as a real paragon of virtue. So it is with great interest that we learn of the methods applied to prevent illicitly obtained archaeological material being among that offered by this firm. In one case he tells us that a group of Parthian coins:

were received from a Spanish dealer who is among my trusted sources. Spain is not a path through which illicit coins are known to flow to the market, and there was considerable commerce in antiquity between Spain and areas where Parthian coins circulated.

Is this unnamed dealer trusted mainly because he is Spanish and “Spain is not a path through which illicit coins are known to flow to the market”? Is that enough to make this dealer a “trusted source"or was any other verification of what he has on offer applied? Especially important when (as in this case) the coins concerned were not of Spanish but of Parthian origin, and so of types in circulation in the region of modern Iran, Azerbaijan, Iraq and Afghanistan and neighbouring countries, countries where looting of archaeological sites is rife.

My questions in another case which I discussed, coins apparently coming from the Balkans and adjacent areas (another region where archaeological sites are notoriously targeted by looters on a massive scale), was dismissed with the words:

They were acquired from a long established, reputable dealer in Canada. Canada is a signatory to UNESCO 1970, and I had observed that Revenue Canada was very scrupulous in enforcing Canadian import regulations. I did not doubt that these coins were licitly imported.

The unnamed dealer from which these were bought has been in operation over a longish period, has a “good reputation” (for what?) and furthermore operates in a country where Mr Welsh believes the customs service rigorously enforces the export restrictions of other countries (really?)

In neither of these cases is it stated to which of the several numismatic trade codes of ethics/conduct these unnamed dealers subscribe, nor what assurances had been sought and received in addition to the (rather weak) justifications for “trusting’ these sources offered in the pro-collector advocate's description of his own business practices .

Is this typical of what is happening? Mr Welsh claims that nobody else could carry out this business with more attention paid to the sources of the objects he deals in, and yet what he describes seems to me to be barely sufficient - in fact, insufficient. This raises very real questions about how dealers in portable antiquities actually do ascertain that the goods they buy and sell have not come from the looting of archaeological sites in the source countries and illicitly exported from that country. If they cannot actually show - even when they are trying so hard as Mr Welsh seems to be - that they are able to ascertain that, how can they claim that they uphold any sort of ethics at all? There is a difference between legality and ethics.

Export of portable antiquities from UK

The Reports of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art are reassuring looking documents with colour photos of the objects saved for the nation, and lots of tables. If one turns to the appendices it turns out that annually there are about 27 000 export licence applications processed. Of these, as many as 23 000 will be for British (and European) archaeological material. This high proportion is because archaeological material is not covered by the same conditions as antiques (where items below a certain value are not subject to such restraints).

If this export has been going on at that sort of rate for the last decade it means that in an HMCR archive somewhere there are records referring to some 230 000 exported items. In the same period the Portable Antiquities Scheme managed to gather information about only slightly more items found by metal detectorists (some 300 000 in the same period). There is no way of knowing to what degree these two records overlap, but this is an interesting comment on the scale of the activity. It would be very useful if the two were integrated, or even better the forbidding of export of archaeological material without it first having been recorded by the appropriate body, not only in Scotland and Northern Ireland (which is currently the case), but the PAS for finds from England and Wales. Perhaps PAS could in some way be more fully integrated into the export licensing procedure.

Another interesting fact that emerges from these reports concerns the licenced export of coins. Celtic, Roman and medieval coins are archaeological artefacts and are certainly being removed from the ground by metal detectorists in large numbers and a certain proportion of them exported from the United Kingdom. Despite this, it is interesting to note that the number of UK export licences issued for coins annually is usually only around the 400 mark. This gives the impression that coin dealers are simply ignoring UK export regulations, while sellers of other types of portable antiquities are abiding by them to a greater extent. It is odd that licences are applied for in the case of metal detected regimental buttons or Georgian buckles being sent to the States, but it the object of export is a Roman coin, or a bulk lot of them, it would appear that seldom is a licence being applied for. If we allow that the number of coins alone going across the UK’s borders is probably going to be something like that of other collectables (or maybe there is an even greater demand for them from foreign buyers), that is a pretty substantial drain on our archaeological record, passing away under our very noses without any record and without anyone looking over what is being lost to the national heritage. Is it too much to ask that numismatic dealers conform to these regulations to the extent that, it would appear, many other sellers do?

Ethical dealing: The cock crowed thrice

One of the potential dangers in being a vociferous opponent of cultural preservation measures and at the same time running a business selling antiquities must be that it increases scrutiny of the business practices of one’s firm. Californian “professional numismatist” and vociferous pro-collecting activist Dave Welsh, the proprietor of Classical Coins for example seems unclear where some of his goods actually come from.

For example he is cagey about what he has bought in Great Britain. He candidly admitted in November 2007 on his own Unidroit-L discussion list:

I have never received an export license with any of the items shipped to me from the UK.

and subsequent discussion on that list indicated that he was not the only US portable antiquities dealer that was unaware of the circumstances under which a UK export licence was needed for coins and other antiquities. This incident was discussed in Heritage Action’s online journal.

A few days ago when discussing what the recommendations of Britain’s Portable Antiquities Scheme on buying antiquities would mean for a collector of portable antiquities, Mr Welsh expounded:

I'm an ethical dealer, and have never acquired an antiquity from the UK that was not provenanced

So no export licenses, but the proprietor of Classical Coins assures archaeologists that the only portable antiquities from the UK which he handles are provenanced. In the light of these, at first sight, unambiguous statements, it is curious to learn just a day later:

I do not make artifact purchases in Britain. I have never acquired an artifact in Britain, and do not ever expect to do so

I think all past, present and potential clients would be interested to learn the relationship between these three apparently conflicting statements and the assurances of the proprietor of Classical Coins about the origins of his stock in general. Do any of the coins he has had in stock come from provenanced British finds or not?

Professor Elizabeth Stone’s analysis (published in Antiquity with a summary here) of of satellite imagery of the holes dug in Iraqi archaeological sites since the weakening of controls due to political instability introduced by UN sanctions in the 1990s has shown that some sites there were being targeted in all probability for Parthian and later coins. In the light of this it is interesting to note that Classical Coins has among its "new listings" a group of 17 coins of the relatively short reign of Orodes II (57 to 38 BC) they are all in a similar state of preservation, have the same reddish brown surface deposits which suggests that they might have been found together – but where and when? Although Welsh states where he got his other “new listings” from ("ex Dr A. W. Potts collection”, presumably that sold by Freeman and Sear Feb 2007), the origins, neither general nor specific, of these new Parthian items is not even hinted at. Since no provenance is cited, how does Mr Welsh and more importantly the clients of Classical Coins, know these do not come from recent looting of archaeological sites in Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan? Mr Welsh has many other similar coins here, again no hint of where they came from and how they got into his shop.

The same goes for Classical Coins’ "specials", job lots of Roman provincial “coins that we were able to acquire in quantity and can offer to the collector at particularly attractive prices”. From whom were they “acquired in quantity”, and where did they originate? They seem not to be metal detector finds from legitimate searching in Great Britain, some of them are stated to be “Roman provincial bronze coins from Thrace and lower Moesia” (ie the area of modern Bulgaria), some are specifically noted as having been struck at Thessalonica and Siscia. Many different dates and coin types in various states are involved, and these coins have the appearance of being the pickings of accumulations from metal detector use on many different archaeological sites and findspots across a region. The looting of archaeological sites in the Balkans and along the limes to produce relics and coins which are then sold on illegal domestic markets and smuggled out to foreign ones is a severe problem. Here organized crime is known to be deeply involved in this trade (for example, see the fifth chapter of a recent report on Organized Crime in Bulgaria which Nathan Elkins draws attention to). Again in offering these artefacts for sale, the Classical Coins website gives no indication of where these coins came from and how they reached California. How is the client to know what they are buying and into whose pockets Mr Welsh's dollars were ultimately ending up to get them?

These are of course questions that could be posed to other dealers selling this kind of material. There are many dealerships like Classical Coins (over 200 in the US alone) and serving 50 000 US collectors of ancient coins who seem could not care less where the coins are coming from as long - it would seem - as they have a ready supply of them at prices they can afford. But what price is the archaeological record of the 'source countries' paying?

REFERENCES
Shentov, O., Todorov, B. and Stoyanov, A. 2007, 'Organized Crime in Bulgaria: Markets and Trends', Sofia, Center for the Study of Democracy (this thought-provoking report figures the antiquities trade alongside trade in drugs, prostitution and human trafficking, and vehicle thefts).

Elizabeth C. Stone 2008, "Patterns of looting in southern Iraq", Antiquity, Vol. 82, No. 315, 125–38.

Who needs Export Licences?

In his comments on an earlier post here Ed Snible suggests that it would be helpful if this blog could explain the rules about UK and EU export licences. It is not the purpose of this blog to provide legal advice, but perhaps a few points might be made about the UK system, which by no means exhaust the topic.

The regulations on this are indeed very involved and complicated by the fact that the UK follows the EU in most areas, but not in the case of (for example) archaeological material.

I think we should keep in mind the purpose of export licences. Portable antiquity collectors see it from their own point of view as something which is “restrictive” (in other words restricts their “freedoms”), fortunately not all collectors on the British art market see it that way, US portable antiquity collectors (and coin collectors in particular) seem to be a breed alone in this regard. In effect, the purpose of the British export licencing system (like any other of course) is that the British authorities would like to see what is being removed from the country before it goes. This is to make sure nothing is going out that the British people might feel should in fact be in the national collections. If something is regarded as required for the national collections, import is temporarily halted (by non-issue of the required licence) while the object is offered to national collections which can attempt to raise the money to purchase it. This is not always possible even despite the inevitable media campaigns, and the item ends up being exported anyway. Surely it is not too much to ask of exporters that they ask politely if the British do not mind this or that piece of cultural property being exported instead of being made available in British collections? The number of items refused permission is actually very slight in comparison to the immense scale of the movement of cultural property (both ways) across the borders of the UK.

Ed is a coin collector and asks in his comments to the earlier post,

If I buy a Roman coin minted in Rome found in Britain is it a "UK object"?

and

The flow chart doesn't mention coins

As we have seen, there is a curious opinion in the coin-collecting world in the US (where ancient coins do not as a general rule come out of the ground) that “ancient coins are not archaeological finds”. In the UK (one of the countries where ancient coins do indeed form part of the archaeological record) there is no such opinion. In the eyes of British law and public opinion and of course the professional view is that coins are archaeological finds and need an export licence to the same degree and under the same conditions as other archaeological finds.

Basically any archaeological material found in UK soil or UK territorial waters, more than 50 years old and regardless of monetary value, requires an individual export licence to leave the UK. That's what the law says. So regardless of whether the coin was “minted in Rome” or not, and whether coins were generally "originally made to to be exchanged between regions", if it formed part of the archaeological record in the UK and was dug from it, it needs an export licence. In fact of the many thousands (yes) of export licence applications made in the UK each year for archaeological finds, only a handful of objects are refused export permission. They are published in a series of nicely written and illustrated ("look how well we are doing") reports. I must say that on looking through them, the archaeological objects retained on the basis of the criteria applied in making the decision are rather a motley bunch of items.

So basically in the majority of cases, getting the required documentation is a matter of filling in the forms properly and waiting. Some exporters though (perhaps at the instigation of impatient clients) obviously cannot be bothered to do this, they put the item in a padded envelope and clandestinely send it across the UK’s (and EU’s) borders in that way, counting on the fact that Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue only open and inspect the contents of a random selection of the many millions of postal packages sent abroad daily. It would seem that most times these exporters get away with it (that says a lot about HM Customs, because it must mean that far worse cases than a few ancient coins or brooches are also getting through the “net”). It is worth noting that many sellers of ancient and historic objects in the EU (for example metal detectorists) write clearly in their sales offer that they “do not send items abroad”. In other words, they are aware of the export regulations, and feel obliged to comply with them, but don’t want the bother of filling in the paperwork, so rather than export artefacts illegally they sell only within the borders of their own country.

A few weeks ago, I had a frustrating discussion on the Yahoo ‘Ancient Artifacts’ forum with a dealer who thought that by the seller putting metal detected archaeological artefacts in a padded envelope and writing on the outside “old coins” the customs formalities had been “satisfied” because, his argument ran, if customs had “had any objections” to their export they would have stopped the package. If they did not, these items were in his opinion legally exported.

Probably the person who carries a few old coins mixed with other coins in a purse and walks through customs with them can say the same thing "they could have stopped and searched me but they did not, so what I did is obviously OK with them".

This "Customs Had No Objections" Argument is a very dubious self-justification indeed. Firstly it ignores the fact that customs only enforce (or not) the requirements, while decisions on what is and is not to be exported (ie the issue of an export licence) in most countries are the domain of a specialist service set up for the purpose. Secondly, there are a number of reasons why archaeological items might pass through customs undetected, and none of them is connected with the legality of the activity.
Objects exported by these means without an export licencew where one is required have unquestionably been illegally exported. They have been “sneaked through the system” in other words – lets call a spade a spade – smuggled out. The purchaser who surely knows there are export restrictions on such items and cannot produce a valid individual export licence for them should surely be accountable for it. The dealer who buys these objects is buying illegally exported items and in doing so is dealing with a criminal. The collector buying from the dealer should have access to the documentation that shows the offered artefact was not originally purchased from a criminal, the "reputation" of the dealer must be grounded in their ability to demonstrate this.

I have been unable to find out whether there are any international postal agreements which cover the use of the postal service for the transfer of cultural property like this. If not, there should be.

There are also complications in that most of the legislation covering this concerns illegal export, while a serious loophole is that import into many countries is not restricted, even when the object is illegally exported at the other end of its journey a few hours earlier (unless certain conditions exist, like the US import restrictions on archaeological material of Cypriot or Iraqi etc. origin – but it should be stressed that these are exceptions). While I am sure there are many good reasons (and a few less salubrious maybe) why this should be so, it places the struggle against illegal transfer of cultural property at a disadvantage.

Mr Snible asked:

What if I purchase a Greek coin that wasn't found in the UK? If an object receives an Export license can it be re-used if I want to carry the object around with me while visiting the UK or is a new one needed each time?

Here we are getting into the more complicated areas, Greece is in the EU and the questioner lives outside the EU and here all sorts of other things come into interplay, and really it would take a lot of words and time to set out the various options (I've got a book coming out soon, and in its current draft it has a long and boring appendix which sets all this out with a bit of help from colleagues). There are situations when Britain is required to issue an export licence, there are situations when it is not.

It seems to me that if somebody sets out to be a collector of, or even dealer in, in a commodity which is by its nature controversial and often subject to various restrictions, they are honour-bound (if nothing else) to investigate the various regulations that govern its use and transfer. It would be at the least irresponsible to take a car on the road without knowing the rules and regulations which govern not only your own behaviour, but that of other road users. If you drive in several countries, you need to know how the movement of traffic is regulated in these different countries. I do not see where collecting antiquities or any other type of item should be different. I have suggested on collectors’ forums that creating a database of these national and international laws and regulations would be a useful task. It should not take much work, as no doubt the ethical and responsible dealers will already have determined them for their own use. Maybe Mr Snible and other collectors will join me in requesting that responsible dealers in portable antiquities set up a resource for the benefit of their clients setting out the laws which they have already researched and which govern the acquisition, export and import of archaeological finds in the various ‘source countries’.

The UK law at the basis of the rather complex series of export regulations is SI 2003 No. 2759, The Export of Objects of Cultural Interest (Control) Order 2003.

A new aim for the Portable Antiquities Scheme?

A while ago the Portable Antiquities Scheme produced a concise and helpful text called Advice for people buying archaeological objects from the UK addressed to collectors in the UK and beyond its borders. It reminds them of the legal and moral issues involved in purchasing archaeological collectables of UK origin. Topics covered include establishing legal title of the seller to sell, determining where and when the object was found and whether all laws had been followed; in particular whether its discovery had been reported or hidden. It also informs foreign buyers of the need to obtain an export licence to allow it to be taken out of the country legally. I am sure many collectors will find it useful in picking their way through the antiquities trade minefield and in sorting out who is offering items for sale which are legitimate, and who is a 'dodgy dealer' best avoided.

What is interesting however is a comparison of this text with the aims of the PAS as set out here. It becomes clear that, while the initiative is extremely laudable, in reality the writing and publication of this text on the PAS website (as well as on eBay) is not actually related to any of them. This suggests that the Portable Antiquities Scheme in reality has (or should have) a sixth aim:

To encourage responsible collecting of portable antiquities

Is it not interesting that in its current form, the PAS depicts itself as dealing with "finders" and "metal detectorists", but not "collectors" of portable antiquities. Is it not time that this apparent anomaly was dealt with?

Antiquities, coins, shells, butterflies and stamps

Apparently in the case of ancient collectables taken for entertainment or profit from archaeological sites:

In the opinion of most collectors, requiring a full provenance […] is an extreme, completely impractical and unreasonable approach.

Yet these same portable antiquity collectors try very hard to present to the outside world a picture of themselves as scholars who “study” and “preserve” these artefacts.


I wonder whether they would accept that from a scientific point of view there is a difference between a Victorian herbarium or lepidopteric collection where each specimen is precisely labelled with origin, habitat and date of collection and an album of “pressed flowers/butterflies from Wales 1882”? One can serves as a scientific resource (informing about habitats or even varieties now no longer in existence for example), the other is a mere curiosity. The same goes for old collections of fossils and minerals where the old labels can give information about outcrops no longer accessible. Serious conchologists document as precisely as they can the origin of the specimens they acquire and only acquire items that can be so documented, how different that is from a collection of pretty shells from various sources. Many other serious collectors compile catalogues of their acquisitions and keep a record of where they come from and when and how they were acquired. That is what gives their collections any scientific value, gives them fuller value as a source of information. Failing to record this information merely makes them into accumulations of geegaws and curios.

There are many stamp collectors who tries to ‘make up a series’ or collect all those that come to hand with pictures of buses, or aeroplanes, or Olympic sportsmen. No doubt they can learn something by reading about the countries from which those stamps came, or the events/objects depicted on them, or how many perforation variations there are in a certain issue. Those who collect stamps call this “philately”. Postal history however is an area of philatelic study and one of the sources of its knowledge is the relationship between the stamp, its canceling (postmark) and the cover it is on. The philatelist who soaks the stamp off the cover to get something to put in their album may be ‘preserving’ the stamp and displaying it nicely, but destroying individual pieces of evidence for postal historians. While one would hope that even the most ignorant stamp-seeker would recognize a scorched envelope from the last flight of the LZ 129 Hindenburg for what it is, postal historians delve into many less obvious areas. This seems to be an analogy for what happens when archaeological finds are ripped from their context and become mere curios which have been stripped by dealers and collectors of a whole layer of their historical value without any information on provenance.

So are the majority of personal portable antiquity collections a fully valid resource for the multi-aspectual study of the past either now or in the future, or are they merely selfish accumulations of curios?

Mything the point about the PAS

Attempting to explain why collectors of portable antiquities are so opposed to preserving information about the provenance of their “preciouses”, Dave Welsh has stated:

In the opinion of most collectors, requiring a full provenance extending back to a find site for every antiquity, no matter how common it may be or how low its value (late Roman bronze coins, for instance) is an extreme, completely impractical and unreasonable approach.

He repeatedly terms such an approach “extremist”.

The Chairman of Britain’s Heritage Action pointed out that both Mr Welsh himself as well as the organization which he represents advocate the Portable Antiquities Scheme as a model that should be adopted in other source countries. The PAS of course promotes the archaeological concept of the need to determine and record the provenance of all finds of archaeological material, especially with regard the purchase of antiquities for collection. The PAS of course makes no differentiation on grounds of commercial value or commonness of different types of archaeological artefact.

Welsh’s response is astounding and seems to suggest he simply did not understand (or was avoiding) the point made. He wrote:

I regard a "full provenance" as essential insofar as that term applies to acquiring objects which British law requires to be reported. That (as I understand it) does exempt many objects including coins, for various reasons such as date of discovery, sparsity of a find, etc.

(he is referring to the Treasure Act, not the PAS – and forgets Scotland and Northern Ireland)

Eight million pounds have been spent trying to convince portable antiquity collectors in the UK of the importance of depositing information about the provenance of all recordable finds in the PAS database. The ACCG sent a letter to the British Minister of Culture expressing full support of the PAS… and yet it would seem that the vision the chair of the International Affairs Committee (presumably Welsh would have been one of the authors of that letter) is now expressing the candid opinion that this only refers to “objects which British law requires to be reported”. Mr Welsh seems unaware that the PAS was set up however to deal with NON-Treasure finds.

So, what does this alternative view of what the PAS is about tell us about the support of portable antiquity collectors? It suggests that in their advocacy of what they portray as "the British way" as a model that other source countries "should' apply to the treatment of their own heritage, there is very little understanding about what it actually consists of. For these collecting advocates, the existence of a PAS serves only as the basis of an utopian myth. Secondly, one may suggest that such attitudes about provenance data suggest that if museum stores were emptied of the more collectable "redundant" (sic) artefacts into the personal collections of the likes of Mr Welsh and his ACCG fellows, they would very soon lose all provenance data ("not required by law") - see my posting about "un-curation" earlier.

Is it actually "extreme", "completely impractical" and "unreasonable" to suggest that in a properly curated collection of artefacts taken from archaeological sites, whether public or private, there should be documentation about where they come from? Especially when in the English-speaking world organizations like the PAS and SAFE exist to ask collectors - ever so politely - to do this?

A Point of Law

An Ancient Coin Collectors' Guild officer said on the Britarch forum this morning:

Archaeologists such as Paul Barford tend to interpret "stolen" as
also meaning illegally excavated or illegally exported. That
is not the case under present law either in the UK or in the USA.

Wrong.

In the United Kingdom, excavation is illegal primarily when it takes place when it is done without the permission of the landowners who own the artefacts in their land. It is theft. There is a summary (not very well laid out, but reasonably comprehensive) of the British law related to this on the Nighthawks Survey homepage. Perhaps Californinan “professional numismatists” would do well to check out British law referring to the retrieval of archaeological material before venturing to tell British archaeologists what-is-what; they know. (The less Mr Welsh says about British export licences in present company perhaps the better.)

Collectors' un-stewardship

In the opinion of most collectors, requiring a full provenance extending back to a find site for every antiquity, no matter how common it may be or how low its value (late Roman bronze coins, for instance) is an extreme, completely impractical and unreasonable approach. If such a requirement were actually imposed, it would effectively strangle ethical collecting in a vast morass of paperwork required by impossibly complicated, unreasonable and onerous regulations

yet the notion of curation, of stewardship, requires precisely retaining all the values of the retained item without which it is merely an evocative geegaw. Collectors are currently advocating the emptying of museums of what they see as "redundant" objects for their benefit, without bearing in mind that in museums the provenance of the acquisitions is usually fully documented, and seems likely to be increasingly so in the future. In proper museums this information is retained and retrievable. Just what kind of curation, what kind of stewardship are these collectors offering? They are willing to take into their posession all manner of interesting "cultural material" but only as disembodied objects, without taking the responsibility for documenting their pedigree. What these collectors are proposing is not a "good home", it is not stewardship, it is un-stewardship; it is not curation but antiquitist anti-curation.

Findspots are important even to antiquitist artefactology. In numismatics, die links of things like barbarous radiates, and various forms of official and semi-official provincial copies of ancient coins take on a new significance (in fact can only take on a fuller significance) if they can be placed in a spatial and chonological context. The same goes for the findspots of issues such as celtic coins, sceattas etc. Things like shabtis make more sense linked to the associated assemblages, the distribution of distinctive oil lamps, pottery decoration, glassware, bone and antler combs, whetstones can only be interpreted in terms of social, economic and cultural context if we know where they come from. Of course if artefact hunters, dealers and collectors are taking most of the best stuff and simply ignoring their responsibility of preserving any record of provenance as part of their un-curation, then great - but entirely preventable - losses to our knowledge will ensue. By taking away what could otherwise have been recorded if recovered under different circumstances,
unethical collecting of portable antiquities is not only not curating information of the past properly, it is also contributing to its destruction. I submit that it is not the archaeologist who has to overcome the "practical problems and difficulties" involved in preserving provenance details of privately un-curated portable antiquities, but the antiquities market and collecting milieu. Such a notion should be at the basis of collecting having any pretence to the title ethical.

Illustration: (1) distribution of jew's harps, from Gjermund Kolltveit's site Musark., (2) Claudian coin finds in Wales, Peter Guest, Iron Age and roman coins from Wales: a case study

US collectors to adopt British recording methods?

An announcement on the Britarch discussion list caught my eye. Gary Brun one of the organizers of the United Kingdom Detector Finds Database (UKDFD) announced yesterday that “a few American archaeologists (sic) and one other country will be using our data model. So here's to the USDFD”. Indeed it is good news that portable artefact collectors on the other side of the Atlantic are beginning to see the need and find the means to record the provenance of items in their collections and make the information available to researchers as archaeologists have been advocating for a long time. What a shame however it is that it is the rather sketchy (but through that perhaps more user-friendly) UKDFD data model they have adopted rather than the more detailed Portable Antiquities Scheme one. After all Roger Bland of the PAS gave three ACCG-sponsored talks over there in the past year apparently promoting the PAS as a model which could be followed elsewhere.

More (and more) "Radical Archaeology"

The end of the ACCG „benefit Auction” (more about this later) was trumpeted today as „ ACCG Raises $45,000 to fund the Struggle Against Radical Archaeologists” which is no doubt news to all those people whose collecting activities are an expression of an "interest in the past” and who thought they were bidding to raise money to fight the US government’s restrictions on import of undocumented archaeological artefacts from heavily-looted Cyprus. The ACCG have even gone so far as to post this “good news” on the CBA’s Britarch archaeology discussion forum, perhaps seeking approval, perhaps hoping to stir controversy, who knows?

There may however be a communication problem unforeseen by these non-archaeological transatlantic pieces-of-the-past consumers. In Great Britain, we already have a Radical Archaeology, and it's not an archaeology which is (as the portable antiquity collecting lobby loudly accuse) the so-called “Culture Property Nationalist” or “Retentionist” type (see David Gill’s Looting Matters post on their use of the term). The REAL Radical archaeology in quite the opposite.

I am sure we all wish that portable antiquity collectors would do a little research and thinking before they make their wild claims and try to attach labels to what they quite clearly have no understanding.


Illustration: From Archaeology Channel's Radical Archaeology Television Parody (yet another meaning of the term "radical archaeology")

“Major” and “minor” antiquities?

Portable antiquity dealers insist that “it is essential to distinguish between major antiquities and minor antiquities for practical reasons”. For example “in the case of objects such as coins, of which 95% of those entering the market are unprovenanced, it is simply unreasonable to insist that all acquisitions must be fully provenanced”. One dealer has recently surmised that “a majority even of archaeologists would agree that a "best effort" inquiry should be made, and if the preponderance of evidence supports licit origin, that should be acceptable for objects of such low individual value”.

Is that true would “most archaeologists” believe that there are artefacts which are 'more equal than others' and this assessment would be based on their financial worth on the commercial market? This seems to be a typically antiquitist object-oriented attitude, rather than one in any way derivative of an intention to help preserve archaeological evidence in situ in the archaeological record. The only reason I can imagine an archaeologist would acquiesce to such a view would be indolence.

The problem is that (as every archaeologist will know) an artefact which in commercial terms would be considered “minor” can prove to be of crucial importance as archaeological evidence when found and properly documented in situ and interpreted in the light of surrounding observed facts. I gave an example of one of these earlier in this blog. Even artefact types quite common on the antiquities market rarely have enough information recorded about the contexts in which they are normally found for any archaeological inference to be drawn. In fact whole classes of artefacts are known almost entirely from their appearance on the antiquities market, and very few have come from properly observed contexts in controlled excavations.

The problem is that in all cases the artefact hunter is digging ‘blind’ into sites to get the finds they will sell to a dealer or add to their own collection. Those with spades tend to just dig down, throw the earth up and sift through it, or pull things from the bottom or sides of the hole. In other cases (Iraq for instance) it has been reported that that for speed (to get artefacts out of the ground before site guards or police turn up), mechanical excavators may have on occasion been used, the material loaded onto lorries which are then driven to another location and tipped out so the spoil can be searched at leisure. Metal detector using artefact hunters locate a signal and dig down through whatever intervenes until they find the metal object that was its source. In these processes any kind of observation of where an object was found and in what kind of associations is totally impossible, even if the artefact hunter had the knowledge and training reliably to interpret and document them.

Artefact hunters have however their own criteria of major and minor portable antiquities. For the subsistence digger, the former are the pieces which a dealer will buy from them for a few dollars or maybe more, the rest are items that the dealer will not want to offer them enough to warrant collecting them up and carrying away. The collector also will also sort through the day’s haul from searching a site and only take away those things which might be worth keeping. Thus it is that if one looks around many Native American sites, somewhere near it there will be one or more arrowhead collectors’ “throwdown pile” of damaged and unwanted artefacts showing the site has been “done over” by artefact hunters. In some cases what is left behind may be very indicative of what the artefact hunter was targeting.

In terms of the archaeological evidence destroyed when even a single coin, or even scrap of metal (for example a chopped-up piece of copper alloy scrap of absolutely no interest to the majority of portable antiquity collectors) is dug out of its archaeological context, there is no “major” and “minor” loss to the archaeological record. Or, to be more accurate, this cannot be determined beforehand, before the destruction is done. There is no way an artefact hunter (or archaeologist for that matter) can determine before digging a hole in one place instead of another will produce major damage to a crucial piece of archaeological evidence (the stratification of a site or the pattern of artefacts across it) or whether the damage will be less significant archaeologically.

In particular the phrase “in the case of objects such as coins, of which 95% of those entering the market are unprovenanced” seems to be indicative of this attitude. These coins “entering the market” have all come from somewhere, either from pre-existing collections, or freshly dug from the ground and exported from “source countries”, either legally or illegally. All of these ancient objects had a provenance not long before they “entered the market”, and it would have required little effort for this to be documented by the seller.

To try and convince public opinion community that in reality there are major and minor artefacts which can be measured in terms of commercial value on the market seems to me to be just collector-dealer doublespeak for “I can’t be bothered”.


Picture, Artefacts scattered by looters' holes in Iraq, source: National Geographic

Discussing the International Antiquities Trade, the British Way

This is a follow up to an earlier post here about discussions or rather the attempted avoidance of discussions about collection of potable antiquities on the Council for British Archaeology’s discussion forum, Britarch .

Ten days on, Dave Welsh is still trying to persuade British archaeologists there of what is what. They are mostly ignoring both him and sidekick (antiquity collector from Canada) John Hooker, from time to time interjecting with carefully-worded brief comments or reproaches. Welsh is noticeably attempting to play to the gallery by singling out for criticism one participant in the debate over portable antiquities collecting and trade in every second of a long series of posts, usually preceded by words such as “extremist”. Emboldened by the fact that nobody objected, and one “metal detectorist” agreed to the use of the term, he has now issued them a direct challenge:

I would like to invite listreaders other than extremists such as Paul Barford, to present reasons why his remarks and those of similar extremists should be taken seriously.

These "remarks" of course refer to things like:
1) the international trade of portable antiquities,
2) the effects of wholesale unregulated digging on a near global scale of the archaeological record as a source of collectables for entertainment and profit,
3) the movement of illegally excavated and exported material (and the efforts of the pro-collecting lobby to justify ignoring such “bothersome” formalities as documenting the origin of the items which are traded in this lucrative and ambiguous market).

The conservation-minded reader can decide for themselves whether it is indeed “extremist” to express concern about and desire to see a change in the current situation.

Welsh has made the job of starting (or avoiding) such a discussion easier for them by issuing statements in the same challenge such as:

Arguments which in effect assert that site specific contextual information is all important frequently tend to conflict with modern views of the importance of learning from the past

and that such attitudes lead to disastrous results:

Perhaps the preventable (and in many cases horrible) deaths of many millions of people should receive at least some weight in current archaeological opinion.” (sic).

Well, let us see what the inherently portable antiquity collector-friendly British archaeological community on the CBA's discussion forum make of this. Will they stand up to the challenges of the portable antiquity dealer and argue in support the notion of the conservation of the archaeological resource in the face of widespread commercial exploitation for the collectables market? Or perhaps they will collapse in the face of the enthusiasm with which he expounds the collectors’ point-of-view that to question the status quo from conservation grounds is in some way not only "non politically correct " or "elitist" but actually "extremist" and refuse to be seen to be associated with such ideals? Will they settle for further “compromise” with commercial exploitation (on the grounds that artefact collecting of the type advocated by Mr Welsh is in some way really “archaeology for all”)? Or will they turn a deaf ear and pretend they did not hear the question and ignore him in discrete (or embarrassed) silence?

Watch this space.

The Antiquities Collector and the Elephant

In an earlier post here I made reference to a collector’s idea that since a lot of antiquities were already on the market, there was obviously a lot of them, and so (it seems to have been argued) one could take more; this author seemed to be of the opinion that a few million more or less is a sustainable loss.

I would argue this is manifestly not so. I originally intended to discuss this aspect further there but got sidetracked when I spotted a fallacy in the mathematics. I’d like to return to the original idea here.

Although it’s a much used (some would argue over-used) analogy, I see the antiquities trade as a very close parallel to the trade in elephant ivory in several ways. There is one clear difference, elephants breed and have baby elephants; archaeological sites from all periods of history (except our own) are a finite and non-renewable resource. This, however, makes the parallel even more telling. We are all of us aware that there is a limit to the number of elephants that can be killed before the depletion of even a renewable resource becomes unsustainable. In the case of elephants at least, we know that we reached that stage many decades ago. In the late 1970s for example, there were still 1.2 million elephants alive in Africa, now the number is half that (5-600 000). This number is still dropping, almost entirely due to illegal slaughter for their tusks which are made into valued ‘art objects’.

The international community recognized the danger this created for the natural environment and elephant populations in particular and introduced legislation to help combat the problem. In 1989, most international ivory trade was banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which regulates trade in threatened and endangered species. The restrictions banned ivory trade except for ivory from elephants that nations legally culled from their herds or those that died naturally (or if the ivory was old, from official stockpiles of previously seized ivory or of fossil origin). For a while things quietened down, only China and Taiwan continued to trade in ivory, though the Japanese market (chiefly for hanko seals) also continued to flourish.

In recent years however according to wildlife conservation groups, poachers in Africa are now killing more elephants than they have at anytime in the past 20 years. An estimated 23,000 elephants were illegally slaughtered in 2006 to serve the ivory trade. Between October 2004 and March 2007 customs officials seized 41 tons of ivory, thought to be only about one-tenth of the illegal ivory trade in that period.

Ivory poaching is now said to have reached critical levels with predictions that if nothing is done, the depletion of the population may reach such levels that the African elephant may be on the path to extinction by 2020. Thousands of elephants are dying a cruel and needless death to obtain their tusks. Much of the trade is in the hands of organized crime, some of the ivory going through Sudanese markets seems to be being used to raise money for partisan armies engaged in the civil wars in countries further south.

In May 2007 a study published in May by Care for the Wild International indicated that the United States is now the second largest market for illegal ivory after China, traders here are failing to comply with both CITES regulations and the domestic laws of their own country. Much of this ivory is used to make decorative items such as knife handles and gun grips.

So what is the source of this problem? Firstly the trade is very profitable. In China, high quality ivory currently sells for $750 (U.S.) a kilogram but contraband raw ivory is currently available in Africa for less than $25 (U.S.) a kilogram. Secondly there are not the resources to police the remaining herds and individuals in the source countries. The initial success of CITIES (which was widely quoted as having led to the “collapse of the ivory market”) led within five years to the lessening of controls and western financial aid to help fight the poachers. Thirdly the media has tended to keep the public unaware of the escalation of the problem. The fourth problem is that there is still a demand among buyers in the countries with stronger economies for ivory products. In part, it is argued by some that this is fuelled by the occasional controlled release of ivory from stockpiles and culling onto the markets, which seems to have lulled consumers into thinking “it’s all right” to buy ivory, but who do not enquire too carefully into its origin. In addition, the illegal ivory trade is given relatively low priority by prosecutors, and new agreements sanctioning limited trade have created a policing nightmare. Ivory poaching and smuggling are high-profit, low-risk activities.

This morning a search on the US internet auction site eBay found 253 objects, most of which were described conventionally as “pre-ban”, but it seems odd that in the second biggest ivory market in the world that among them are quite a few obviously new objects and (more importantly) raw material which have allegedly been lying around unused since 1989. This looks rather like the “old dealers stock found in a cupboard” story which seems quite popular among those trading Mesopotamian antiquities recently.

The parallels with the antiquities trade are striking. Most dealers in portable antiquities will assure us all that the market is almost entirely legitimate, does not constitute a threat to any resource, there is no need for any controls. Secondly the market can be incredibly profitable (Brodie 1998). As in the case of ivory poaching, the media concentrate on isolated instances of archaeological looting, rather than the problem as a whole, despite the best efforts of conservationists, the public still seems unaware of and unconcerned by the escalation of the problem. A further problem is that there is still a demand among buyers in the countries with stronger economies for antiquities, the assurances of the traders has lulled consumers into thinking “it’s all right” to buy portable antiquities without enquiring too carefully into its origin. The illegal antiquities trade is given relatively low priority by prosecutors, and the lack of a coherent set of laws hindering unregulated global movement are a policing nightmare. Antiquity digging, smuggling and trading, like ivory poaching, are high-profit, low-risk endeavours. [We may note calls from collectors to make available a controlled release of so-called ‘redundant’ antiquities from stockpiles onto the market which should be seen in the same way as arguments over the ivory trade, it may only increase demand].

Most conservationists concerned about the fate of the elephant agree that while resources in the source countries are over-stretched it would be facile to merely insist that "the only solution to the problem of the illegal ivory trade is better policing in the countries where the poaching is happening". The problem is not purely one of supply, it is also driven by demand, mainly from countries whose citizens should know better. The way conservationists in the market countries can help to stop the slaughter is to work to influence cultural attitudes about the ivory trade. Consumers need to be informed about the effects of their financial support of the ivory trade and persuaded that they really do not need an elephant ivory walking stick knob or toilet roll holder to make their lives complete. The way to stop the killing of elephants is not to change the law, for we already have very strong laws. In order for them to work to preserve the surviving elephant population, consumers all over the world have to unite and say 'no' and simply refuse to buy anything that can have come from the illegal trade. Glib assurances of the dealers are not enough, if a thinking consumer is to have any ivory at all around them, then let it be only that about which there is 100% certainty, which can be DOCUMENTED as being in that form pre-1989 or from officially-sanctioned sources. Anyone who is a bit concerned and has a sense of responsibility surely must be able to see that this is a conservation issue, not one of "ownership rights".

Ivory is not something that should be desired as a thing of beauty. Carved ivory should not be valued or displayed as works of art. Nearly all ivory products are derived from elephants that were specifically killed so that their tusks could be carved. We should not see it as a thing of beauty. It is not art. It is the carved body part of a killed elephant.

The same, I would argue, goes for archaeological artefacts. From the perspective of resource conservation, portable antiquities should not be desired merely as mysterious things of beauty to serve largely as classy geegaws enhancing interior decoration, investment, or to enhance self-esteem or raise social prestige. Archaeological evidence should not be ripped from its context by commercial artefact hunters, from sites which are deliberately and specifically targeted to produce collectables for profit. A contextless archaeological find is not art. It is the dismembered part of a trashed archaeological site, it is a piece hacked out of an unwritten history. Anyone who is a bit concerned and has even a modicum of interest in and any intention of taking responsibility for the care of the historic environment surely can see that this is a conservation issue, not one of "ownership rights".

Picture: One of the few hundred thousand African elephants which (we hope) is still alive (source: Elephantcountryweb.com)

Reference:Brodie Neil 1998, 'Pity the poor middlemen' Culture Without Context, Issue 3, Autumn 1998.

Is Looting of archaeological sites the 'fault of archaeologists'?

In a famous reply to comments by Ricardo Elia, Colin Renfrew (1993) formulated the notion that “Collectors are the real looters” . By this he means that the international trade in illicitly obtained and illegally exported archeological artifacts is supported and maintained by demand from collectors that purchase such artifacts without regard for, or even enquiring into, the manner in which they were acquired and reached the market. Collectors of course deny strenuously that this is the case. I have to admit that the logic of their arguments totally escapes me. A piece of a Nok terracotta only becomes worth digging up under the hot Nigerian sun if there is somebody in the region eager to pay the “subsistence digger” money to pass it on to the international market. A cuneiform tablet is just a lump of clay to a middle eastern peasant, but can be turned into cash if they can find a purchaser. It only becomes worth venturing into the Cambodian jungle with a hammer and chisel and a big bag to visit the overgrown temple if there is a man who will buy all the little heads of smiling Buddha which have been ‘harvested’ to end up in western galleries at extortionate prices (Brodie 1998).

In retaliation for conservationists pointing out this obvious and uncomfortable truth, collectors are trying to reapportion the blame. Three of the most commonly used ploys have been rehearsed recently on archaeological forums in the English-speaking world.

1) “If you give us the stuff we want we’ll stop buying dodgy items”. In this model, the portable antiquity collector asserts that the dog-in-a-manger archaeological “elitists” trying to spoil their fun have hidden away plenty of “redundant” collectables which they should release on the market to create a regulated market.

Doing that requires more than collectors and the trade can do by
themselves. A cooperative effort involving archaeologists, academics and governments is needed. […] Why won't archaeologists take an interest in establishing a regulated licit numismatic market? That would do more to eliminate looting than you could imagine.” (Dave Welsh

In an earlier post we are told:

If it were feasible to establish internationally controlled antiquities auctions, in which objects (whether surplus to museums, or recently found by archaeologists and others) would be sold with provenance after they had been duly examined and recorded, that the illegal trade in unprovenanced antiquities would be greatly diminished.” (Dave Welsh)

And:

There are many millions of redundant, unstudied antiquities in storerooms that no one has any real interest in, nor seems to have any idea what to do with. […]The motive for archaeologists to agree to such cooperation is to understand human social dynamics clearly enough to realize that this is the ONLY possible approach that can actually bring looting of archaeological sites under control. Provenance/provenience will command a sufficient economic premium in a regulated licit market to make cooperating with the authorities the only economically rational choice for those who discover antiquities. That motive will even cause those who presently loot sites to start policing them so that they can be reserved for cooperative licit excavation, if something like the Treasure Act/PAS scheme can be adopted in source states such as Iraq. (Dave Welsh)

The basic message then is that “archaeologists must agree to this, there is no alternative”. [The rather odd idea for a PAS-clone in Iraq is worthy of discussion in its own right....].

2) “If you don’t guard the sites properly, stuff will be stolen”. In this model, the portable antiquity collector asserts that archaeologists and conservationists are simply not doing enough to keep illegal diggers off sites in most of the source countries. It is this lack of site guards (presumably like the Antiquities Police of Egypt or the guards which were present in Iraq prior to 1990) which is the cause of the looting.

The looting of sites should be treated not through laws, but through proper security measures. Would you leave money lying around unattended and rely on laws to prevent it being stolen? It is irresponsible to expose a site without providing a guard and/or security systems to protect it. If money is not dedicated to that, or volunteers employed, then it should remain undug. There is the technology to provide proper protection for even very large sites”. (John Hooker)

And:

The only solution to the looting problem is better methods in the countries where this is happening, and that can never be a total solution. All it can possibly do is to lessen the instances of it back to pre 1970 levels, or perhaps a little better than that”. (John Hooker)

Or:

I simply do not know how many times I must repeat myself that unless the governments of the source countries take some harsh measures to guard every one of their archaeological sites, the illegal digging will go on forever and you and people like you CANNOT do anything about it”. (Farhad Assar)

It is a good job that we have not reached such a desperate situation as to need to post armed guards to defend every environmental resource we value, in the bluebell woods, nature reserves and wild places. We only need them to keep poachers out of game reserves. What does that say about the antiquities market?

3) “Archaeologists must sort out foreign social problems to curb looting”. Then we have those who say looting will take place as long as there is poverty in the world. If the portable antiquity collectors do not buy these things and give them a good home, they will be “sold for scrap” and “turned into tourist trinkets”. [While this argument may apply to metal (uncorroded copper alloys, lead, silver and gold) it does not apply to Nok terracottas, Southeast Asian Buddha heads and sculpture fragments, or cuneiform tablets]. Anyhow, the adherents of this line of argument are clear, the archaeologist concerned with the circulation of illicitly excavated archaeological material in the markets of the developed countries must deal with all the other scocial problems in the region.

If you genuinely care about the ancient heritage of people in poor and/or developing countries […], then please begin educating those people properly, not by dumping on them your unwanted rubbish, but through the opportunities you create for them to get the same level of education you, yourself, received. Then, and only then, they may begin to think that there is some sense in saving their ancient dog- or cat-bones, coins, vases, jewellery, bronze sculptures, palaces, etc. In other words, find the root causes of the irreversible damage to the archaeological sites all over the world, including the effects of illicit and clandestine digging, and do not put the blame for what is going on in this respect at the doors of coin collectors and dealers alone. (Farhad Assar)

And:

If the advocates of protecting the historical assets of all nations are sincere about their good intentions, they must begin by educating the poor and providing for the needy in those countries in order to encourage them to appreciate and protect their cultural heritage. Then, private collecting and dealing will begin to slow down, become unprofitable, and eventually die out. (Farhad Assar)

I suspect these collectors pride themselves that by buying artefacts dug out of foreign sites they are doing their little bit to solve the problems of world poverty (but see Brodie 1998), as well as giving the displaced artefacts a "good home". Nevertheless I agree that an important approach is education of local populations persuading them that their cultural heritage has a value and is worthy of their attention and care. Mind you, what in that situation they will then think of all those that took advantage of them now and took lots of it away for their own foreign collections may only be imagined.

These three arguments have a common theme, its not the collectors’ fault that there is a market for antiquities, they claim that there is nothing they or anyone except the archaeologist or governments can do to stop it. If the archaeologist or foreign government will not adopt what collectors like the ones cited above insist is the “obvious” solution, then it is not the fault of the collector that no progress can be made with the destruction of the archaeological heritage by exploitation as a source of collectables for various people's entertainment and profit. It seems to me however that there is some rather obvious special pleading going on here.

References
Brodie Neil 1998, 'Pity the poor middlemen' Culture Without Context, Issue 3, Autumn 1998.

Renfrew, Colin 1993 Collectors are the real looters. Archaeology 46(3):16-17

Why US coin collectors are opposing the Cyprus MOU

A few days ago Dave Welshthe Chairman of the International Affairs Committee and Officer of the Ancient Coin Collectors’ Guild, posted on the Britarch forum a summary of what the fuss over the State Department’s ruling over import restrictions on archaeological artefacts is all about. I found this a useful sstatement of the ACCG position and reproduce it here for those getting a bit lost in the twists and turns of the conspracy theories being developed in various blog posts:

1) The ACCG is actually arguing that it is improper to consider every coin type claimed by Cyprus as "cultural property" because there is no evidence that every such coin was probably discovered in Cyprus. Coins of the claimed types have in demonstrable fact been discovered in large numbers in numerous locations outside Cyprus. Furthermore, it is relevant to observe that the legal origin of coins is their find spot, not the place of manufacture, so the argument that coins struck in Cyprus are thereby "of Cypriot origin" rests on very dubious foundations. Ancient coins travelled widely.

2) US coin dealers and collectors (who are also affected) importing coins of Cypriot types do not have to get an export license, since they are not the exporters. To receive their shipments, which may be arbitrarily detained by Customs at the importer's risk and expense, they may instead be required to present documentation obtained from the party exporting the coins, which may or may not include an export license (there are other ways to establish "licit origin" - which here does not mean the same thing as Barford's interpretation).

3) The actual reason collectors and the trade object to this requirement is that it is viewed as unreasonably burdensome. The major concern is that many shipments will be detained and perhaps confiscated whose coins did not originate in Cyprus, due to ignorance on the part of those charged with enforcement. Contesting a detention appears to be so expensive that many importers, such as collectors, could not afford to do so. There is also concern that getting the required documentation may be difficult for reasons not involving illicit export.

4) The CPAC (the President's advisors) was not charged with determiningwhether these coins were archaeological artifacts.

5) Members of the CPAC are chosen to provide a representative cross section of experts from the community interested in trade in cultural property. That includes archaeologists, museum staff, academics and experts in the trade.

6) The sole responsibility of the CPAC is to determine whether complying with a request for import restrictions is in the best interests of the United States.

7) The ACCG has reason to believe that serious improprieties, including what apparently amounted to "back room deals" with the archaeology lobby and with Cypriot interests, were committed by responsible State Department staff during consideration of the Cypriot request. There appears to be reason to suspect that State Department secretiveness is motivated by an effort to cover up what may have amounted to a scandal.

8) The ACCG also has reason to believe that the CPAC actually voted against including coins in the Restricted List.

9) The ACCG also has reason to believe that State Department staffadministereing the US response to UNESCO 1970 are ideologically aligned with the archaeology lobby, and are not dealing with cultural property issues in an even-handed manner making fairness to all Americans and the best interests of American citizens their highest priority.

10) The ACCG has filed a lawsuit against the State Department demanding fair, open disclosure of all documents and other records related to the Cyprus request and several other requests for import restrictions involving coins, including that of China where there is reason to think that the Chinese government actually did not include coins in their request, and that coins were added by the State Department as an "administrative measure." Thus far the State Department has not made such a disclosure, and the case is headed toward a trial.

11) The ACCG has reason to believe that State Department staff may intend to add coins (and perhaps other artifacts) to existing import restrictions "as an administrative matter" decided solely by presumably biased staff members, without any further review, public input, findings by the CPAC etc.

The issue in fact boils down to the fact that dealers and collectors think documenting the origin of objects of a type known to be being looted is a "bothersome" and meaningless formality (though see point number two). The key though to their challenge of the US State Department seems to be whether, if a foreign nation asks the US to honour international agreements and impose temporary import restrictions on "archaeological finds", ancient coins should be included among them.

I am an archaeologist who has worked in several countries where ancient coins turn up as archaeological finds all over the place. To me it never occurred that I should not be treating them as archaeological finds, and I am at a loss why anyone should begin. They are for example among the archaeological finds which the Portable Antiquities Scheme asks members of the public who come across them to report to them. Also one of the arguments coin collectors invariably offer in support of their hobby is that coins are a material source of information about the past - in other words they are treating coins as archaeological evidence.

Instead of needing an "administrative decision" to include coins on a list alongside other types of archaeological material, I would say it would need an administrative decision - which (from archaeological and resource conservation grounds) can only be seen as one of very dubious justification to exclude them. Now maybe President Bush's CPAC did that or not, I could not say, I know what I any educated person who is neither a coin collector or dealer ought to think about the CPAC if it did. There is nothing at all "biased" in treating ancient coins as archaeological finds, they simply are.

No matter how hard the culprits try to deny it, the current pseudo-discussion in the States on "where ancient coins come from" and their "not really being archaeological finds at all" clearly has an entirely political and commercial motivation and has absolutely nothing to do with real scholarship and their proponents are kidding themselves if they think they have.I'd like to see these polemecists try to publish their ideas in peer-reviewed and reputable numismatic journals.

Anyway, this court case should be an interesting, but probably not very edifying, spectacle. The collecting community may well find out that they've shot themselves in both feet.

A leaky CPAC?

"The ACCG also has reason to believe that the CPAC actually voted against including coins in the Restricted List".

For the past few months phrases like this have emanated from the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild and its officers concerning their ongoing struggle with their own government over import restrictions on Cypriote antiquities into the US. This was even before they got their hands on an edited version of the CPAC recommendations.

Not "the ACCG cannot [or refuses to] believe that the CPAC voted for including coins in the Restricted List", not "the ACCG would be disappointed to learn that CPAC voted for including coins..." nor "the ACCG believes it would have been wrong-thinking for the CPAC to vote for including coins...". But "has reason to believe that the CPAC actually voted against including coins in the Restricted List".

The terminology used seems to be intended to suggest that the ACCG has received inside information on what the CPAC thought it had resolved in this matter, but is cagey enough to conceal the precise source of the information. Where would the ACCG obtain such information? To whom have they been talking in order to obtain such a statement?

This single element seems a key point in their conspiracy theory about an alleged "government cover-up" around the Cyprus MOU. The ACCG are alleging that although they "have reason to believe" that the CPAC vote was in fact favourable to coin dealers wishing to import Cypriot artefacts (just the coins) without the need to document legal export from Cyprus, the State Department ignored that recommendation. Their further speculations (and let us remember that they are only that) concern "why" that opinion was ignored. But if that is what all this huff and puff is about, we might be forgiven for asking, how do the ACCG know that the CPAC in fact does NOT consider coins to be archaeological artefacts? I think in the circumstances a little "Freedom of Information" is owed by the ACCG too.
Personally, I cannot see any reason whatsoever that the CPAC doing its job properly would agree to US import restriction on archaeological finds without export licences to help prevent looting of the worlds's archaeological heritage but determine that ancient coins are "not however archaeological finds". That would be supremely illogical in the circumstances.

More codes of ethical collecting?

The idea of ethics codes for portable antiquities collecting [rather than “dealing” which seems a lost cause] seems to be catching on. On the Britarch forum (British archaeology – run by the CBA), Heritage Action Chairman Nigel Swift proposed one, Director of the CBA Mike Heyworth endorsed the idea and in reply US coin dealer and anti-archaeological activist Dave Welsh currently on that forum trying to tell British archaeologists what-is-what wrote: “I enthusiastically endorse everything said in this message. The idea of a Code for Responsible Collecting is worthwhile, and I will be glad to cooperate with all who are interested in drafting it. I regret the gulf that has opened between archaeology and collecting, and desire to do everything possible to bring our disciplines together again, as they were in happier times.”
Thus encouraged, Raimund Karl (Bangor University) then produced a draft of a 'Code of Responsible Collecting of Archaeological Remains' (CoRCoAR) which is accessible here (open archive of posts): It seems however that despite his earlier enthusiasm, coin-dealer Welsh has changed his mind about discussing ethics with British archaeologists now he’s seen what has been placed on the table for discussion. Was that a pin I heard drop?

A few days earlier (August 4th) back on the Moneta-L discussion list Paul McSweeney a coin collector in Ireland addressed some of the anti-conservation naysayers on the list hitting the nail on the head. he wrote:

“as collectors, we cannot dissociate ourselves completely from the fact that the existence of a market for ancient coins in the West (i.e., us) can help drive unscrupulous practices in source countries and so I think we should do our best to collect ethically”.

He asks would it be possible for "collectors to develop a code of (more) ethical collecting?” He then makes a suggestion how it might look, “just to start the ball rolling”, (quoted here with the author’s permission, though I have added the numbering):

1) We only buy coins that could plausibly have come from existing collections and avoid those which are very clearly recently dug up (e.g., those bulk lots of "uncleaned coins fresh from Eastern Europe" we see on eBay!).
2) Give our custom to dealers who appear to stock the above types of coins and who appear to deal ethically.
3) Avoid dealers in source countries without sensible
antiquities laws (as in the UK) and so who are probably exporting coins illegally.
4) Try to encourage dealers to record the provenance of coins,
where possible. I have bought a few coins that came with the previous owner's tag which gives me the great feeling of just being steward of that coin until it is passed on to another collection, probably long after I am gone. I know it is
easier to forge a provenance than a coin, but at least it would send a signal to dealers that provenance is something to be valued and recorded.
5) Avoid collecting antiquities other than coins, without a clear provenance. Coins can plausibly be found in a ploughed field with a metal detector without harm to an archaeological context, but non-metallic antiquities cannot be found other than
by destructive excavation. Likewise, hoards of coins were presumably hidden well away from habitation whereas other antiquities are much more likely to have been found in an archaeological context.

These are just some of my thoughts; I'm sure that others will agree with some points and not with others. However,
would it be possible by consensus to develop such a "code of ethical collecting"? It may not solve the problems of the market for ancient coins helping to drive unscrupulous and destructive
practices, but it might help (and give us more ammunition to defend our hobby!)”

Well, Mr McSweeney threw the ball onto the pitch in front of the players, none of them however have picked it up and run with it, in fact they seem to be pretending not to have noticed it. He tells me that a similar attempt about a year ago met with a similar response.

So at the moment portable antiquity collectors and dealers seem to be playing lip-service to the idea of a code of ethics, but it seems to be beyond them at the moment to actually compose one that suits the needs of the responsible collector as well as contributes substantially to clearing up the ambiguities and the utter mess the trade in portable antiquities currently is in . Still, its good that the idea is floating about the milieu.

I personally think Raimund Karl’s proposed code is too long, and tries too hard to fill in the gaps left by the way the Code for Responsible Metal Detecting in England and Wales was drafted (it should not have been just about metal detecting but all kinds of collecting, pays too little attention to collecting as collecting, and is only applicable to the situation in two of the four regions of the UK – this is not ignoring the fact that getting such an agreement with British "detectorists" in current circumstances WAS indeed a major achievement). I’d like to see a code just on the collecting of artefacts once they have been found and are on the international market, its not a code for Mustafa with a spade digging up the Afghan mountain pastures looking for coins, but it should be aimed more at getting Tony Balony the ancient history buff in Wisconsin buying with discrimination and putting money only into the pockets of ethical dealers' and their suppliers.

Mr McSweeney’s version is interesting. As an archaeologist I would query the “avoid collecting antiquities other than coins, without a clear provenance”. Coins (whether ACCG dealers like it or not, and whether they were produced in thousands and “meant for circulation”), ARE archaeological finds, and if we agree that the archaeological layer of information of a portable artefact is best preserved by having detailed information of provenance, then so much more so is that the case with coins. Off-list correspondence with Mr McSweeney was a heartening experience, he obviously thinks more deeply about the effects of his hobby on the archaeological resource than the majority of his collectors on that discussion list seem to be capable of (to judge by their on-list responses). It is good to learn that there are such people in the hobby alongside the vociferous naysayers who tend to attract more attention. Let's have a code to sort out the sheep from the goats.

Buying Treasure

An aside to Phil Davis' suggestion of introducing England-clone-antiquities-protection-legislation to other countries from which US collectors buy portable antiquities. I'd like to raise the question about purchasing this 'Treasure' category of finds (I hate the term, but we are stuck with it) from treasure hunters busy digging up things which really need not be dug out of the surrounding archaeological record at all unless there is a real threat. These collectors insist that states - some of them perhaps among the poorest in the region - be forced to compete with the purchasing power of greedy and wealthy foreign collectors in meeting the international market price. If these things are by law national property (and that in effect is what even England's Treasure Act implies), why is the nation being forced by Mr Davis to pay treasure hunters for turning the archaeological heritage into money when in the process archaeological evidence (the actual evidence allowing the fuller history of the region to be written) is trashed in the process?

How would these collectors propose reducing, at least, the costs of this for the poorer nations on which they would impose such a system? It is all very well them saying they are supporting "free enterprise", but they ignore that what they call free enterprise is (whether or not the objects taken from their original context end up in museums) the despoilation for profit of part of the cultural heritage. Dressing it up in fine words does not change this.

As far as I know, the annual costs of the rewards given to finders of Treasure for the different areas of the United Kingdom are not available (and one might ask why that is), it certainly is a substantial amount of money which has to come from somewhere. Probably Britain can afford it. that does not mean that every state in the world should be forced by the current needs of the antiquities market to follow suit.

Collector's idea to "stop the looting"

Phil Davis (volodya2_99) wrote on a coin collectors’ forum what he calls an Open Letter to Nathan Elkins, Paul Barford et. al. and invites a response. He makes two main points, this is a response to the first.

Mr Davis writes:

I understand your dismay at what you see as "looting;" to a great extent, I share it. As a serious collector/part-time dealer with a lifelong (well, since 4th grade anyway) fascination with antiquity, I also mourn the loss of knowledge when unrecorded hoards appear on the market, although I won't pretend that
prevents me from cataloguing or purchasing such coins.

It seems to me that comment is superfluous. It does not even need an analogy to point out that there is a difference between cheap words of disapproval and deeds. Typical of the milieu Mr Davis also expresses the view that:

the only solution with a chance of actually succeeding is a change in the laws of the so-called "source countries" to more closely reflect those of the UK, and a policy to de-acquire redundant artifacts and coins.

The second of these is the old argument about stuff “rotting in museum basements”. In principle, if there really are truly redundant items in museum collections which are not needed by any other public collections for research, handling collections and educational material etc., then I personally would have no problem with them disposing of unwanted material in this way. I do however think such arguments from the portable antiquity collecting milieu are based to a considerable extent on misconceptions (and perhaps even misrepresentations) about what museum stores hold, and why this material is held there. There is in addition a further point, there is no guarantee in the current state of portable antiquity collecting (see the first comment to the ethical collecting post here) that if well provenienced objects like this were released onto the market, that after passing through two or more personal collections, this information would not be irretrievably lost. In such conditions such items are probably best kept where they are until collectors get their act more together in terms of preserving provenance information as a matter of course.

Now we come to the idea that "source countries" must change their antiquities protection legislation. Again, this is one of those traditional and repetetive mantras of the portable antiquity collecting community. Althogh he is not very precise here, we are led to assume that Phil Davis is suggesting creating new laws that are clones of English and Welsh legislation (and not legislation of Scotland or Northern Ireland ). I am not at all clear to what Mr Davis thinks this is actually a solution. What would it mean? In such countries, individuals or groups of people armed with shovels and maybe metal detectors would now openly go out into the countryside to known but unprotected sites, dig them over ("it's legal innit?") to obtain artefacts. They would be under no obligation to show anybody what they’ve taken. By this clone-of-English law though they would have to show the state the shiny bits of gold and silver, and the state if it wants to add them to a museum collection in effect buys these items from the treasure hunters at full market price. The rest the finder together with the landowner can sell to dealers who can then sell them on to Mr Davis and fellow collectors in the USA for crispy green dollars. I would like to ask Mr Davis and those who go along with this idea, how does that actually protect the archaeological heritage of those countries from being dug into indiscriminately in order to produce “collectables” at the expense of losing any associated archaeological information?

Neither have the collectors advocating that foreign states should adopt this England-clone-legislation defined what would be the value for a country introducing such a law in having the most accessible parts of its archaeological heritage completely trashed in order to satisfy the needs of collectors. Unless they think the exporting nation can impose an “antiquities tax” to generate revenue by selling off national assets derived from the willful destruction of the archaeological record in their territory. That is not a very responsible way to treat the archaeological heritage of any country is it? I’ve already discussed some aspects of this a bit here; Holes in History, here and here .

In order "to work constructively together towards at least partial solutions" of problems, it seems to me vital to first actually define the problem being faced. As a means of preventing damage to the archaeological record, I find the England-clone-antiquities-law argument of US (and other) collectors totally illogical and completely unconvincing. Its repeated use by these collectors also suggests to me that basically these people have not even taken the trouble to identify the problem that is being discussed before supplying their own glib “solution”. How actually would these collectors define the notion of the “looting” they say they are opposed to? What is it in fact that they are declaring themselves opposed to? Perhaps again the problem is an inadequacy of terminology. Whatever one wants to call it, what it is that is deplored is the indiscriminate digging of holes into the archaeological record by artefact hunters seeking only “collectables” – most often for sale – with a consequent loss of huge amounts of archaeological information every time a hole is blindly dug or an artefact removed from a site without proper record. Suggesting all nations should adopt the British laws does nothing whatsoever to prevent this happening, the effect though would simply increase the number of antiquities on the market, no doubt to the great delight of collectors but at what cost to the rest of us?

"The Most Enlightened Antiquities Laws in the World"? The UK "Treasure Trove Law" myth

On collectors’ forums, one constantly finds reference to the British system of dealing with archaeological discoveries by members of the public which is held up as a paragon of government right-thinking on heritage which all other governments should emulate. Indeed one dealer has publicly stated

"the UK has the most enlightened antiquities laws in the world and that if other nations were even half as civilized and as wise, there would be no significant looting problems [...] thus, I do not feel any obligation to help enforce what I perceive as unwise and unenforceable restrictive antiquities export laws of source states, always providing that importation of artifacts into the USA is licit under US law [...]."

So in discussions in collectors’ internet forums, one invariably finds comments referring to these civilized and wise laws. Some random examples are given here to show the sort of thing I mean.

“A solution to existing problems is in place and works. That solution is the British Treasure Trove Law, designed to protect the intellectual value of finds while allowing for human nature.” (Richard Pearlman)

“if more people in the archaeological community responded […] we might actually reach some sort of shared goal like the PAS/Treasure Trove.” (Jim McGarigle)

“we would certainly support […] laws crafted by sovereign governments, modeled on the British Portable Antiquity Scheme / Treasure Trove law.” (Jim McGarigle)

“If laws like that existed as they do now with Britain's Portable Antiquity Scheme/Treasure Trove law, there would be little or no black market because the incentives would be removed” (Jim McGarigle).

“In the United Kingdom, archeologists are working to undo Britain's very fair and very free market approach known as the "Treasure Trove" law”. (Jim McGarigle) [really Mr McGarigle? It was created with their participation]

“Cyprus should investigate successful programs like the British Treasure Trove and Portable Antiquities Scheme to ensure that archaeological artifacts found by members of the general public…” (Dave Welsh)

“The kind of treasure trove law which works and benefits all, such as they have in the U.K., could be a model for the U.S. both in the realm of antiquities ...” (Dave Welsh)

“I completely support an enlightened, even-handed approach to the issue such as the UK's Treasure Trove laws”. (Phil Davis)

“England's treasure trove law is the best answer to balancing the needs of archeologists and collectors. Why? Because it is fair!” (John Vander Weit)

“I live in the United States. I could support a legal framework that punished violators of Britain's reasonable 'Treasure Trove' laws. I cannot respect a legal framework that required me to follow the laws of, for example, Afganistan." (Ed Snible)


There is a pattern here, most of the speakers are US coin collectors or dealers. Secondly, they all refer to a law they call “treasure Trove”, though ascribe it variously to Britain, the United Kingdom or England (forgetting Wales), interestingly none of them mention Scotland (see below). Thirdly they all seem agreed that for some reason this “Treasure Trove” law is very “fair” and it should be adopted as a pattern by all other countries in forming new antiquity protection laws, when collectors and dealers would be willing to respect them.

Here however there seems to be some confusion. Treasure Trove is the name of a law which applied to the British Isles as a whole since well before American Independence. In England and Wales it was replaced (1996) by the Treasure Act [which was revised six years later (The Treasure (Designation) Order 2002) to include all prehistoric base metal objects from the same find]. The Treasure Act applies to England and Wales and Northern Ireland. The establishment of the Portable Antiquities Scheme of England and Wales is nothing to do with this legislation, though it currently administers part of the associated process.
Apart from the Treasure Act, there are restrictions in England and Wales concerning where one can legally search for and dig up antiquities, but basically in many places thousands of archaeological sites are open to exploitation in this manner as long as the searcher has the permission of the landowner and there is no legal requirement to obtain any kind of additional permit, or to report what was found.

In Northern Ireland however, the 1996 Treasure Act(as modified in 2002) is in force, but alongside the Historic Monuments and Archaeological Objects (Northern Ireland) Order 1995 which makes it a statutory duty for finders within 14 days to report all archaeological objects, whatever their material composition, to the Department of the Environment, the Ulster Museum or the police. The Order prohibits any archaeological excavation (and any intrusive search for archaeological objects) without a licence from the Department of the Environment. The only archaeological finds that in Northern Ireland can be legally sold and acquired are those with documentation demonstrating they have been reported and disclaimed.

Scotland is the only part of the United Kingdom to actually have a law called Treasure Trove which was not altered by the 1996 Treasure Act. I hardly think though that this is the law to which the above authors are referring, since Scottish Treasure Trove law determines that all newly discovered archaeological objects belong to the Crown under the legal principle of bona vacantia. No-one else, finder or landowner, has the rights to ownerless ancient objects found in the ground in Scotland, whether they are from an archaeological site or not. This means that all finds, whether they are precious metal or not and regardless of whether they were hidden or lost, must be reported to the authorities. Some finds will be claimed under Treasure Trove and will therefore be allocated to public collections (museums) in Scotland to be enjoyed by all, and when this happens the finder receives a discretionary reward. If finds are disclaimed they are returned to the finder, only disclaimed finds can be legally sold and acquired It is not possible to legally collect archaeological finds in Scotland without first reporting them to the Crown.

(There are of course other laws affecting finds and where one can legally dig them up and what one can legally do with them in different parts of the UK, but it is not my purpose here to outline all of them).

Basically therefore when the chorus of US collectors refer to “British Treasure Trove law”, it would seem that they are in fact referring to the situation in just part of the British Isles, to that covered by the post-1996 English and Welsh Treasure Act, which basically means that there is no statutory requirement to report any archaeological finds dug up, whether from an archaeological site or not, unless it falls into a narrowly-defined range of objects defined primarily on the grounds of whether they are of gold or silver. The vast majority of collectables on the market today do not fall under this legal definition, which is why it may be suspected that US collectors anxious to get their hands on a multitude of undocumented antiquities are so keen to have such a system installed in all source countries.

Collectors who say all foreign governments "should" introduce a system of financial compensation for people handing finds in to be added to national collections seem to be missing three things. First of course these items do not come on the market (though those not covered by the law do). Secondly many states who regard antirquities as state property actually already reward finders, and certainly to a degree greater than one would believe looking at pro-collecting propaganda. Thirdly fully awarding the finder the market value for digging up something that in fact in some cases would be better not sought out and dug out is counterproductive. It retrieves shiny objects, but does it lead to better retrieval of information about their context of deposition? In any case, how do these collectors suggest cash-strapped Third World states finance meeting the prices that would be offered for these items on the open market in the west instead of spending the money on education and hospitals? Three guesses..... Personally I wonder by what right these US collectors assume to set themselves up above the rights of sovereign states to determine what is their cultural heritage and how they wish it to be treated?

US portable antiquity collectors label the antiquities protection laws of many of the source countries as "restrictive laws". They do so however in terms which make it clear that both Scottish and Northern Irish law falls within the scope of such a definition. Such a definition is obviously not precise enough to differentiate good laws ("the most enlightened antiquities laws in the world") from what these collectors self-determine as "unwise and unenforceable restrictive antiquities export laws of source states" which they do not feel obliged to respect. Do they imagine the UK has no export laws concerning the archaeological heritage?


Picture: Medieval brooch from Środa Śląska hoard (Silesia, Poland)

The Ethical collector

The hobby of collecting portable antiquities is attracting more and more negative attention in the world's media, as well it might, certain elements within the antiquity trade and those who financially support them by buying matrial no-questions-asked are causing immense erosion of the archaeological record. Those who have the most to lose, including dealers who do not wish their source of supply questioned too deeply, fight vehemently to maintain the status quo. They try by all means to make this a struggle about "ownership rights" rather than conservation. Any attempt to criticise the current situation usually results in the questioner being labelled an "extremist", or "radical" who can only be out (really) "to ban collecting". Hence the aggressive posturing of the collecting lobby that characterises this debate in archaeology to an extent seen in no other.

Are all collectors however oblivious to such criticism as the battle-hardened combatants of what is being increasing portrayed by the diehard nay-sayers as a “war” over personal rights? Are there no collectors who are able to see that there is some, maybe a lot, of justification for the concerns that are expressed by conservationists and others about the current status quo in the portable antiquities trade and the milieu of collecting?

Presumably those ethical and responsible collectors who do their utmost to acquire only legitimately-sourced material and exclude any of unknown or dubious origin from their collections, must feel disgruntled that they are being tarred with the same brush as their less scrupulous fellows all over the world who – nobody can doubt, and whether they admit it or not - are the consumers of increasing quantities of looted and smuggled portable antiquities.

A while ago it became fashionable in collecting circles to persuade the world that the Good Collector has a beneficial influence, an effort still going on in collecting advocacy circles today. There is not a collector of portable antiquities in the world who cannot trot out half a dozen 'reasons' why portable antiquity collecting is a good thing for history, culture, international well-being, clothing the poor, feeding the hungry, bringing relief to the downtrodden. The definition of the type of good collector being referred to by R.J. McIntosh; T. Togola and S.K. McIntosh 1995 seems to have been forgotten. Troubled by the loss of context in the case of many of the items coming onto the market these authors insisted among other things that

the Good Collector casts a jaded eye upon those dealers who insist that their reputation take the place of details of provenance.

This is because dealers are habitually secretive about where the objects they sell actually came from and how they got into their hands. they have, it is true, their codes of practice (sometimes even called codes of ethics), but many of them avoid using wording which actually would restrain the dealer from very much at all. See David Gill's discussion of that of the Ancient Coin Collectors' Guild for an example of the type of problem. The reputation of a dealer in any case in the antiquity buying world is usually built on a dealer's reputation not to sell fakes, rather than ability to obtain legally provenanced artefacts and provide watertight documentation of that fact.

It is therefore the dealers who are most concerned for there to be no move towards an establishment of more a definition of what would constitute ethical collecting (where obviously the provenance and proveninience of the traded items is of paramount concern). As we have seen time and time again, it is often the dealers who set the agenda, define what the collector can and cannot buy, what they can and cannot expect and what they can and cannot believe about their relationship with the archaeological record. To a large extent it is the pressure of the dealers' lobbies which is responsible for the impasse in which we find ourselves today over collecting and its erosive effects on the archaeological record. McIntosh, Togola and McIntosh 1995 therefore add:

the Good Collector will actively demonstrate a willingness to join with like-minded collectors to self police the art market. As a necessary part of this action, they will wrest the dialogue about the ethics of collecting and about relations of source and market nations from the trafficking syndicates and their apologists, where that dialogue about essential ethics is presently lodged

That was thirteen years ago. Where are those Good Collectors now? Why is the non-dialogue still in the hands of the dealers and their supporters? It is interesting to note that ethically-conscious hobbyists have not (38 years after the UNESCO convention) yet created their own code of honour, a code of ethics which sets their part of the collecting milieu apart from the hoi polloi who unquestioningly buy material of unknown origin. Why not?

In May 2008 there was some discussion of these issues on portable artefact collecting forums, and as part of this I put forward as material for discussion some suggestions what an archaeologist might consider such a code would need. The discussion went on for a few weeks, but nothing was formalised. (It is of course symptomatic who on these lists were for and who opposed to the idea of portable antiquity collectors creating such a code of ethics for themselves.) It seems worth setting down here for further reference what I thought at the time such a code should address.

1) Obviously for the archaeologist the important one would be that the responsible collector thinks at all times of the effects of their activity on the finite and fragile archaeological resource. If in any doubt about this, they'd not buy the offered item, no matter how nice it would look in a glass case.

2) From this follows that the responsible collector would not buy objects which have clearly or potentially come from recent/current illegal digging,or illegal export. The responsible collector would not regard the 'good collector' ('offering it a safe home') argument as a sufficient reason to support illegal activity, or to enter such items in their collection. If the dealer cannot provide independently verifiable proof that the object was legitimately obtained, it does not belong in a responsible collector's collection.

3) The responsible collector would recognize their role as a custodian and do their utmost to ensure the well-being of the items in their care.

4) The responsible collector would not split up assemblages of objects belonging together (grave group for example) by buying or selling just one or a few items from a larger associated group. Neither would they dismember and sell separately parts of one complete object.

5) The responsible collector will keep (and add to) in a permanent and ordered form the documentation of individual items, former owners, export papers, conservation reports etc. and pass them on to the next owner. [Obviously it would be ideal to suggest that the responsible collectorwould only dispose of finds to another responsible collector so they know that the carefully curated chain of documentation will be preserved].

6) Each object (or coherent associated group of objects) will be kept separate from others and be identified and catalogued in such a way that itcan be linked with the associated documentation.

7) If the object needs conservation, the responsible collector will have all but the simplest operations carried out by qualified persons and get a full report from them. If they cannot afford this they would avoid buying objects in poor state that need this kind of conservation. The responsible collector would keep photographic records of objects prior to repair and restoration, and be honest and open by describing in writing in their records the amount of repair and restoration undertaken.

8) The responsible collector will liase with the archaeological community where possible about the objects they own. They will endeavour to find out more about the objects they possess (curate) and what they mean. Significant objects (within reason) not be withheld from study. [The codes of ethics ofUS and some European archaeologists hinder this, but only if the objectsare "illicit"]. The responsible collector will endeavour to research their finds and their context and not just pile up some interesting curios.

9) Human remains. For reasons beyond the interest of archaeology and protection of world cultural heritage, collecting these items is clearly un-ethical. The trade in human body parts is subject to different laws indifferent parts of the world and obviously the collector has to respect this.

10) A related point, the responsible collector would respect and display sensitivity towards the nature of certain types of object and religious sanctions of some types belonging to societies still in existence.

11) Fakes, a responsible collector finds out one of the objects they bought is fake. What does he do? Destroy it? Sell it clearly described as a fake? Certainly once this has been ascertained, the object should not be allowed to function as potential historical evidence (The Lie BecameGreat/Muscarella type problems)

12) Disposing of unwanted items. Perhaps things nobody would buy even on eBay. Overcleaned Roman coins for example. Flint knapping waste they acquired once but no longer want in their growing collection. What would a responsible collector do with it? (including preventing it getting into a situation where it contaminates the archaeological record).

Reference:
R.J. McIntosh; T. Togola and S.K. McIntosh 1995 ‘The Good Collector and the premise of Mutual respect Among Nations’, African Arts 50, ****

Black Helicopters over the US State Department?

Peter Tompa's latest literary production surmises that the timing of what he calls "the controversial decision to impose [US] import restrictions on coins of Cypriot type" might have been due to Nicholas Burns, then Undersecretary of State, having been awarded by the "National Coordinated Effort of Hellenes" in May 2007, just weeks before the decision was publicised, and he then interfered with the Cyprus ruling as some kind of an odd gesture of gratitude for this. Fellow conspiracy theorists may find evidence supporting such a scenario in that Mr Burns has been seen flying about in a Black Helicopter. After having given the matter some thought and doing some research on the Internet, I have come up with an alternative theory of my own to explain this event. My theory is that maybe it never occurred to the folk in the State Department that ancient coins were not ancient coins and therefore archaeological finds?

See also David Gill here with a cross link to a story on this blog
and Jim McGarigle Polymath Numismatics here

A Question for British Archaeologists

British archaeologists are engaged in a process or "bridge-building" and compromise with all manner of artefact hunters and portable antiquity collectors. I'd like to address a question to those among them that support, advocate and actively pursue such policies, including the Council for British Archaeology and the Portable Antiquities Scheme:

"when is personal collecting of portable antiquities "archaeology for all" and when is it not?"

A straightfoward question; getting an answer to it from British archaeologists seems not so simple, I wonder why? They talk of compromise, but seem unwilling to disclose the limits to the degree to which they will compromise archaeological principles to avoid any form of confrontation with the artefact collecting lobby.

Notes from Britarch: Coins are not archaeological finds because...

For the reason mentioned in my previous post, I did not feel comfortable to reply this afternoon to a post made by Dave Welsh on Britarch, the Council for British Archaeology's academic discussion forum presenting for discussion by British archaeologists of the definition on which the ACCG seems to be basing its curious assertion that ancient coins are not archaeological finds (and which will perhaps in part form the basis of their case against the Cyprus coin restrictions). Dave Welsh writes:

Archaeological finds are objects which have been buried, or concealed in subterranean locations or ancient structures. The origin of nearly all ancient coins being unknown, to classify them as "archaeological finds" is clearly presumptuous.

He adds in explanation that

Large numbers of ancient coins were never buried at all, but were kept in treasures until they eventually found their way into collections, for example the vast store of Byzantine coins [originally paid in as tribute to the Sultan] held by the Ottoman treasury until the twentieth century. Roman coins were still circulating in Europe during the eighteenth century. Finally, there are large numbers of ancient coins in the souks and bazaars of North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, where they havebeen traded by money-changers since time immemorial. These coins are in demand for various uses including being sewn into tribal wedding garments".

Well, there we have it, straight from the expert's mouth, though Mr Welsh admitted that (unlike most members of the forum he was addressing), he had not actually dug up any ancient coins himself and his information on where they come from was largely second-hand. Anyway, according to the coin dealer, coins on the market are "not archaeological finds" because we don't know where they were found once they appear there by mysterious and undocumented means. Also many ancient coins were according to coin dealer Welsh simply never buried at all. Have a look in your pocket change, you might find one. It is a shame that the call for the discussion to be brought to a close prevented British archaeologists from discussing this strange idea.

To suggest that “coins are not archaeological finds” of course implies a denial of the right of the US State Department to include them on lists of restricted goods if a nation requests the US to restrict the import of “archaeological finds” in general. This argument has taken so many strange turns recently that its's not beyond the bounds of possibility to imagine we might see the lawyer for the ACCG case stating in court, "Your Honor, this definition was posted on the Council for British Archaeology's website and most of the 1440 British archaeologists there did not contest it, so it must be a true statement of archaeological opinion". Yeah right.

Let's take a look at this definition. Welsh states that “archaeological finds are objects which have been buried, or concealed in subterranean locations or ancient structures”. He uses the phrase “have been buried” (and not “have become buried”) which would tend to suggest that he thinks the only category of items qualified to be considered the subject of archaeological enquiry are those deliberately hidden (the relationship between this and old Treasure Trove law is obvious).

Indeed, there seems to be a conviction among US coin collectors that the fresh coins they collect come mainly from hoards, though one collector adds grave robbing to this. The lawyer Peter Tompa (1998: 73-75; Tompa and Brose 2005: 205, 207-210) claims that the exploitation of such hoards need not be a matter of concern for they are found in the middle of empty fields, well away from any archaeological sites. There is a piece of collectors' folklore that they were buried by Roman soldiers before battles.

These collectors completely ignore the fact that many hoards and groups of ancient coins are indeed to be found within settlements where they were used, deposited, left and lost. Welsh claims though that coin collectors cannot be held responsible for the destruction of ancient sites by metal detector users and other artefact hunters because collectors would allegedly not even want coins coming from settlement losses because finds from settlements are unsuitable due to their “low denominations and very poor condition” This however does not seem to deter many US collectors who buy uncleaned Roman coins precisely of such a character .

There also seems to be considerable misunderstanding in coin-collecting circles in the US over the “90% of finds” that the records of the Portable Antiquities Scheme show are coming from ploughed fields. Many portable antiquity collectors in the US seem not to understand that archaeological finds come from fields because archaeological material is in those fields because in the past (before they became fields in the modern landscape) they were the site of human activity. It is that activity (whether or not it comes from particular surface patterns of finds that we would label ‘sites’) which is the focus of archaeological enquiry. US collectors claim that Roger Bland told them of this on each of his three ACCG-sponsored trips to the USA presenting the Portable Antiquities Scheme as a model which (apparently) could be with benefit adopted elsewhere.

In reality in the 'source countries' of the classical world, ancient coins are commonly found on archaeological sites of all types, and as casual losses in areas between them. They are as much archaeological finds as potsherds, post-consumption animal remains, roofing tile fragments, glass shards, iron slag, burnt daub, wall plaster and a couple of dozen other categories of object types which are commonly found on ancient sites. From an archaeological point of view, it is utterly pointless for ancient coin collectors and dealers to try to pretend otherwise. Their special pleadings have noting to do with scholarship and actual knowledge of where coins are actually found, but are clearly dictated by entirely commercial motives.

References:
Tompa, P.K. 1998. "Ancient Coins as Cultural Property: A Cause for Concern?" Journal of International Legal Studies 4.1: 69-104.

Tompa, P.K. and A.M. Brose. 2005. "A Modern Challenge to an Age-Old Pursuit: Can Cultural Patrimony Claims and Coin Collecting Coexist?" in K.F. Gibbon, ed., Cultural Policy, Cultural Property, and the Law. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press: 205-216.

Discussing Collecting, the British Way

On the Council for British Archaeology's "Britarch" forum this afternoon, Andrew Holland B.Sc. M.Sc. AIFA (who works for the Council for British Archaeology as Education Project Officer) pleaded for a halt in ongoing discussion in that forum of the remarks of coin dealer and vociferous pro-collecting activist Dave Welsh. Welsh had appeared on this discussion list a few days earlier to enlighten list members on his notions of selling off “surplus” portable artefacts from museum stores discussed here earlier. Discussion however had swung from this to how terrible it is that some source countries have restrictive laws and require licenses for exporting archaeological finds so they can be sold in US markets, to Mr Welsh’s notions of "where ancient coins come from".

It is a shame that Mr Holland tried to halt this discussion on a publicly-accessible archaeology forum at this point as it was quite clear that the tide was going against Mr Welsh and his numismadogmatic generalisations and special pleading. It was no doubt acutely embarrassing for the pro-collecting lobby when Welsh started to explain his doctrine of “where coins really come from” and “what archaeological finds are” to archaeologists who actually had dug the things up. It was at this point that Mr Holland decided to step in and make a personal plea to stop the spectacle. Holland (“Yorkbadger” on the pro-detecting forum BAJR) pleads:

Please enough already! [...] the debate stopped being fun a good long while ago now - time to call a truce, agree to disagree. Lets face it you are not going to agree as you're all from hugely divergent views.

I was not aware that discussing among fellow archaeologists policies for the protection of the archaeological heritage against unregulated exploitation as a source of valuables was supposed to be "fun". It seems like a deadly serious problem to me. But for the CBA's education officer "it's very boring!". Mr Holland wants to debate such topics as "why are (sic) there no fish being eaten in Iron Age Britain?" Or "maybe what will the archaeological technologies of 100 years time be able to do - geophysics that can identify wood & bone [...]?". Well, the rate things are going, the main use to which geophysics might be put on most archaeological sites across a large part of the ancient world will primarily be to try and isolate islands of stratigraphy surviving between the looters' holes.

It is true that Mr Holland stressed afterwards that his position was his own private opinion. It is a matter of recorded fact that messages sent to the Britarch discussion list which his organization hosts and which contain “certain trigger words” are sent for moderation and unsuitable posts are not distributed to list members. The “trigger words” concerned are a closely guarded secret, but seem to include the terms “metal detecting” and probably “artefact hunting” (any interest expressed in determining the rest has led to reprimand). This suggests that the list owners and list members find such topics awkward to discuss openly – the question remains why these topics should be at all controversial discussed among archaeologists on an archaeological discussion list in Britain?

For nearly a decade and a half, England has been pursuing an official policy towards a artefact hunting and personal portable antiquity collecting based on the idea that there is allegedly “common ground” between archaeology (archaeological resource management) and the personal collecting or archaeological artefacts taken from that resource. To what degree is that based on a proper definition and forward-looking projection of what is involved, and to what extent is that an expression of despair and lack of will to combat the problem by any other means than adopting a passive approach of turning the other cheek? To what extent is the existence of a “common ground” with collectors an illusion fostered by an unwillingness robustly to discuss certain issues, but sidestepping them in order to avoid “rocking the boat”?

It is telling that Mr Holland, along with many of his fellow British archaeologists, appears to believe that there is a compromise solution to be found to the issues raised by Mr Welsh’s comments to an archaeological forum. This of course raises the question precisely where British archaeologists believe that archaeological practice, principles and ethics can in fact be compromised to reach such an accord with dealers representing views like those held by Mr Welsh and why.

Mr Holland’s comments seem to me symptomatic of the British approach to artefact hunting and collecting, current attitudes in the British archaeological community as a whole seem to be taking political correctness to the verge of apathy. Turning backs on problems does not make them go away. I really do not understand how any archaeologist can countenance an approach of "Let's just ignore the dealers and traders busy trading the unprovenanced and possibly illicitly dug stuff, perhaps if we ignore them long enough they will stop". London is one of the major international centres of the trans-national trade in antiquities both licit and otherwise, right under the noses of the whole archaeological community and the public it serves. This is therefore a problem British archaeology has to face up to, no matter how much they want to avoid talking about it and regret that no equitable "compromise" can be reached. It is a mystery to me why the CBA’s education officer, whether in a professional or personal capacity, would want to reach a compromise with antiquity dealers not only deeply involved as end users in the international trade of objects of undocumented origin but those actively engaged in trying to justify it to public opinion?

Signing up at long last to the 1970 UNESCO Convention, the United Kingdom undertook to educate the public about “the threat to the cultural heritage created by theft, clandestine excavations and illicit exports". So when are British archaeological organizations like the CBA going to take a part in this, when and how? Certainly not by stifling open discussion on the topic and suggesting that such problems cannot be openly, frankly and freely discussed. One would have thought that it would be in everybody’s interests to encourage Mr Welsh to learn the opinions of British archaeologists on his suggestions so he could take this information back to his fellow collectors in the States

Antiquities Trade – 1 ; British Archaeology - 0....

Tiberias coins and Collectors' Numismadogma

As part of the ideological battle to protect their commercial interest, a group of coin dealers and collectors, for the most part based in the US, are attempting desperately to persuade the public and lawmakers of the truth of a number of dogmas which have been developed as protective mantras, defending the noble and venerable “science” (sic) of amateur numismatics from attacks by those good-for-nothing conservationists and archaeologists. In the course of following the antiquity collecting debate the same ones keep cropping up again and again.

One of them (Numismadogma number one) is that ancient coins are not archaeological objects (and so therefore should not be included in measures intended to protect the archaeological record from erosion by artefact hunting to supply the antiquities market). These pro-collecting activists have armed themselves with a number of specious arguments which aim to prove “coins are not archaeological finds”. Most of them show a woeful disregard (for I suspect its not actually ignorance) of the facts concerning where coins are actually found in the “source countries”. Currently one of the dealer-activists is over on the British archaeological discussion list (Britarch run by the CBA) trying to lecture British archaeologists about how they allegedly “don’t know” where Roman coins are found in the soil of Great Britain, apparently they don’t come from archaeological sites at all, because “90% come from ploughed fields”. Yeah, right.

Another of their strategies is to try their hardest to claim some intellectual (and cultural and sometimes ethical) higher ground over archaeologists when coins are concerned. One of the ploys in which they do this is to belittle the understanding of archaeologists of any matters connected with ancient coins (and their ability to look after them). Archaeologists, allegedly know nothing about ancient coins, only a collector can do that. This seems a rather unfair and intentionally misleading generalization. A typical example of this mythmaking appeared a few days ago on the Moneta-L discussion list. Dawson Lewis a collector from South Dakota writes:

A few years ago there was a find of "Jesus" coins in Northern Israel. The archeologists who reported the finds talked about how rare the coins were and gave new light on Muslim and Christian relations. In reality they were gold Byzantine solidi minted in the early 1000's. That archeologist needed some
collectors to help them.

This seems an odd story, it is incomprehensible how an archaeologist working in Israel could be unable to identify such a coin. Barely believable in fact. So I decided to try to look into these sad allegations of artefactological ignorance. As far as I can find out from colleagues working in the area, there were no “gold Byzantine solidi”(sic) minted in the early 11th century found in northern Israel in the period mentioned. There was however some newspaper coverage of finds made by Byzantine specialist Prof. Yizhar Hirschfeld in Tiberias. It would seem that these are the coins referred to. But these are anonymous folles, struck in copper alloy not "gold". We are clearly dealing with more of the mythmaking endemic in US amateur numismatic circles. I cannot see where there is a problem here in what Hirschfeld said and why he allegedly "needs a coin collector". Hirschfeld was a specialist in Byzantine archaeology and I think we can assume he well knew what these coins were (The predictable comments of a local government official seeing here an opportunity to market the tourist values of the area as a result of these finds should not be ascribed to the archaeologist.)

Lewis seems to think that it is an expression of ignorance that Hirschfeldt said they were “rare”, such coins are pretty common after all in coin dealer’s trays (many of them from illicitly exported metal detected finds from the Balkans). By the end of the tenth century the area where these coins were found had not been in Byzantine hands for a couple of centuries, and Byzantine coins of this date and type are indeed rare there. The presence of a group of 58 folles does indeed raise interesting questions about what they are doing there and the relations between Byzantium and the Islamic world. Mr Lewis seems merely to have had a problem accepting that these coins were found by an archaeologist rather than them entering the antiquities trade. As a result however of his muddled account of what had been found and what was said about them, many US amateur numismophilists will have found confirmation of the “archaeologists know nothing about coins” mantra. How many of them are bolstered by precisely such anecdotal evidence? Probably all of them.

Article 10

In 1970, in the context of protecting world heritage, UNESCO adopted a Convention on the Means of Prohibiting the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Its aim was to reinforce international solidarity in the fight against the traffic of cultural property by setting up a system of co-operation between States, and creating ethical standards which would be applied to the movement of cultural property. By June this year, 116 countries had ratified the UNESCO Convention.

Article 10 states that:

The States Parties to this Convention undertake:
[...] (b) to endeavour by educational means to create and develop in the public mind a realization of the
value of cultural property and the threat to the cultural heritage created by theft, clandestine excavations and illicit exports

I am trying to think what major educational intiative the government of the United Kingdom (became a party only in 2002) has instituted in the last decade or so which actually addresses the latter question. It seems to me that the public information campaigns and British media have tended to concentrate almost solely on the "benefits" (sic) of artefact hunting and collecting as a relatively effortless source of new information about where exciting (but largely contextless) finds come from, very little about the other side of the coin which is the unreported removal of thousands of artefacts from the archaeological record and the unregulated antiquities market. These seem to be topics British archaeological institutions are rather shy of broaching in public discussions. No wonder some continentals are calling artefact hunting with metal detectors "The British Disease".

The Mantras of Collective identities

There is a whole series of protective mantras offered by the collecting advocacy milieu justifying the personal collection of portable antiquities (a euphemism for archaeological evidence ripped blindly out of any archaeological context it may have had in order to function as a collectable). They are loudly propagated nowadays in numerous blogs, discussion groups, publications and websites, most of which strive to present one point of view and discourage dialogue. Many of these belong to dealers in portable antiquities, though one of them is written by a convicted antiquities smuggler. Very few of them however seem to be written by their clients, the ordinary collector in this expanding market. When a collector does venture to give some rationale for what they do and the way they do it, it is notable that these are generally a pale echo of the existing advocacy material produced by the dealers and very few of them exhibit traces of any new thought or deeper reflection on the conventional mantras of portable antiquity collecting.

The function of these justifications is worth exploring. While posing as rational argument for a position, on examination almost all of them turn out to be glib and superficial generalisations. If one begins to attempt to question them, some strong reactions may be expected from the collecting milieu. Why should that be? As a group, they attempt to give the impression that they are erudite gentlefolk engaged in a culturally enlightened pasttime, indeed one which is its own form of scholarship and having a didactic role. So why should debate about their opinions on the effects of collecting on our knowledge of the past, society and culture arouse such strong negative emotions? If one examines the phenomenon with a social anthropological eye, it becomes clear that the repetetive recitation of these comforting soundbites is a ritual of confirmation of identity with and belonging to an elite band of possessors of culture.

It seems to me that many previous discussions with portable antiquity collectors, and in particular metal detector users, for example in the UK, have failed to take into account the extent to which “belonging” to the group contributes to the personal identity of the individuals concerned. Quite often for these collectors, being a collector is a fundamental factor in defining “who they are”. This seems to me a crucial element which cannot be ignored in any dealings with this milieu.

It is for this reason that any criticism of the hobby is invariably treated in collecting circles as though a personal attack had been made. From the point of view of a person who builds a substantial, maybe dominant, part of their self-identity around their collecting, this is how it is seen. If such criticism is made in a group (for example on an internet forum) the pack instinct operates, knee-jerk and unreasoning attacks on any person questioning the basis of individual identity operate as an affirmation of collective identity and solidarity, even though on their own many of the individuals so aggressive in the group setting turn out to be reasonable one-to-one.

This tribalism extends further. Attitudes towards an "Other" is an element that is manipulated by those wishing to gain influence in any group. For the collector of portable antiquities, the archaeologist often functions as that “Other” against which an “Us” is defined, especially in a situation where there is perceived to be competition over scarce resources. Several tactics are adopted. In British “metal detecting”, for example, there is a group that defines itself as Progressive by association with the aims and ideals of this socially powerful Other, principally through the medium of the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Apart from being a reflection of the heartfelt sense of responsibility among these individuals, they not infrequently present such an association (and more importantly their own mediation in it) to other collectors as having the potential of protecting the hobby from possible consequences of negative scrutiny. Another group of UK detector users just as vehemently opposed any sort of compliance with the “Other”, loudly attracting support through anti-establishment slogans about "personal freedoms" and concerning “Self Determination for Detecting”. These rabble rousers tend to demonise archaeology as an elitist interest group, up to no good, and ultimately fated to be defeated by ‘people power’. It is in such unsophisticated circles that derogative phrases like "Heritage Brownshirts" and likening opponents to Josef Goebbels arise (see also An Example of Numismophilic Erudition). Similar factions can be observed in other areas of collecting, not only of portable antiquities.

Another group busily manipulating these personal identity formation strategies among collectors are the dealers. They are of course concerned to protect their commercial interests. Many of them warn what would happen to the antiquity market should collectors be foolish enough to listen to the conservationists and “Radical Archaeologists”. The prices of antiquities would skyrocket, collecting itself would disappear, collectors would become extinct. The rationale behind such doom-laden predictions is rarely presented, or asked for, it is enough that the prophets have spoken. This defines the course of action for the right-minded collector anxious to preserve what is dear to him (sometimes her). Out come the chanters of the traditional Collectors’ Mantras handed down as unchangeable holy dogma by word of mouth from the First Embattled Collectors (Byron's criticism of Elgin among them).

Ignoring the Inconvenient Truths

It must be an uncomfortable time to be a collector of portable antiquities. Their activities are coming under increasing international public scrutiny, dedicated organizations like SAFE are raising public awareness of the cumulative destructive effects of the portable antiquities market on the world’s precious archaeological heritage. They are referred to in less than favourable terms, with informed writers like Roger Atwood calling them "mindless consumers of heritage, depriving everyone alive and everyone who ever will live of part of the collective memory that makes us human". The feel-good factor of each successful reasonably-priced purchase of the next tangible personal “piece of history” must presumably for some collectors be tainted these days with a slight nagging worry about its origin. Surely, they try to kid themselves, “my cuneiform tablet fragment really was from an old European collection, like the nice gentleman who sold it to me so persuasively argued”. Further rationalization might include: “we all know that none of the recently looted Iraqi stuff is coming to my country, I read it on one of our ancient artifacts forums”. Others of course just shut their eyes and ears to criticism and carry on doing what they want to do.

A rapid survey of the web-based catalogues of a selection of US purveyors of “affordable pieces of the past” reveals a worrying trend. The world knows, for example, that looting archaeological sites in Iraqi for saleable portable antiquities has been going on since 1990, and carried out in some regions at the time of and since the 2003 invasion. Nevertheless, very few of the US dealers in portable antiquities selling substantial numbers of cuneiform tablets, both whole and fragmentary, cylinder seals and other so-called “minor antiquities” bother to put in their sales offers a single word about where the offered items have come from. Not an “from an old European collection” in sight, let alone “this item of course is accompanied by a full set of paperwork indicating legal origin and export”. The purchaser is expected to be impressed by the web design and company logo and put to the back of their mind the pictures from the newspaper and the thought that this object could be one of the tens of thousands ripped out of their archaeological context in recent years. It would seem that many buyers, eager to add further sought-after items to their growing personal collection, do not ask too many questions.

In fact the number of buyers who have pursued questions like this with the dealer before a purchase is obviously not sufficient enough for the vendor to feel its worth expending time explaining in their sales offer how each individual item on offer has been vetted for legitimacy. Not even in the case of the categories of portable antiquity which in this day and age most obviously call out for such an explanation. If we care to take a closer look, in most dealers’ catalogues (and not only in the US), this appears neither in the short caption or detailed description of dozens and dozens, hundred upon hundred items. Website upon website. Neither is there anything on the home pages of most portable antiquities dealers about their vetting procedures. It would seem that they are confident that their buyers need no such assurances from them. The most that any of them offer is that the dealer belongs to one or other of the trade organizations with some form of pro-forma codes of ethics, but if we take the trouble to read those ‘codes of practice’ of antiquities dealers, they are often worded in such a way as to leave plenty of wiggle-room ("not knowingly / stolen from collection/ scheduled archaeological site").

In the light of this, there are obviously many greedy collectors of portable antiquities to whom concerns on the legal origin of the goods they buy are of little concern, their interest focuses on getting hands on an attractive object. The lure of the exotic and romantic, the emotion of capturing and possessing for oneself, excludes all other considerations. These collectors are not at all interested in the wider issues, except where they can select from among them elements which they can claim as some form of justification for their careless acquisitions. We have seen these pathetic excuses trotted out time and time again. A repetitive series of glib statements comprising little more than aggressive and accusative rhetoric intended to deflect attention from the real conservation issues.

Archaeologist Nets the "Truth"?

Pro-collecting British archaeologist David Connolly has recently jumped on the Iraq Looting Misinformation bandwagon. On his blog, appropriately titled “Anarchaeology in the UK” he has a headline Archaeologists debunk claim of looting in S. Iraq war zone . There is no text, but a link is given to an article he found in WorldNetDaily . ("An unpublicized survey last month […] despite earlier, widespread claims of extensive damage. ....") Unpublicised? Its getting a fair amount of coverage in collecting circles.
Mt Connolly has a penchant for similar stories, he has his own archaeology forum (with its own "understanding metal detecting" section) where we find another story: "Archaeological sites in southern Iraq haven't been looted, say experts". This one comes from an Indian news website (which is in turn a modified version of the earlier misleading Art Newspaper one discussed here earlier). The lack of comment on Connolly's blog and the explicit reference to good news in the forum suggests Mr Connolly wholly supports the conclusions of such journalism, in other words that some archaeologists have debunked the claims of other archaeologists and culture heritage professionals in Iraq about looting in southern Iraq, leading to the conclusion that it's a made-up story. From this it would appear that this British archaeologist prefers comfortable pro-collecting stories from sensationalist journalism found in the Internet to actually reading the products of fellow archaeologists, even though some of them too can effortlessly be found in the Internet.

A Renewable resource or irresponsible self-delusion?

Over on the US-based numismatic forum Moneta-L, the discussion, precipitated by the new eBay regulations in some European countries, is still going on about how utterly harmless and even socially beneficial (sic) collecting of unprovenanced portable antiquities is today. In a depressing show of group solidarity and intellectual inertia, the same tired old defensive mantras are being trundled out and mouthed. It would be useful to make a typology of them, but this will have to wait for now.

There has however been in the past few days some playing with numbers which is highly revealing. (The reader is also refered to Nathan Elkins' several recent texts on the numismatic trade in his blog and elsewhere.)
Wayne Sayles, US coin dealer suggests that in the US there are perhaps 50,000 collectors of ancient coins. He also accepts that on average these collectors each probably buys ten coins per year. This means that over a ten year period the US market alone consumes five million pieces of the past taken from the archaeological record of the "source countries". His conclusion is surprising:

"Does that not prove the point that they are common?"

Sayles delves deeper into one other aspect, I am going to quote him in extenso to avoid accusations of “twisting his words”:

“Now lets take that average, which I think will stand up even in the early years of collecting (fewer collectors but lots more of them had unlimited wealth and bought everything in sight) and apply it to the years since ancient coin collecting began in earnest - about AD 1500. I think that is 508 years x 500,000 coins are roughly 254 million coins. That does not, to me, seem like an
unreasonable estimate of the number of ancient coins floating around the world in collections, dealer stock, museums, grandpa's trunk in the attic, etc. It may even be a little conservative.”

Who spotted the serious non-sequitur there? “Floating around the world?” In his obvious desire to explain away the concerns of the whole conservation lobby, Sayles loses sight of one important fact. The number of collectors quoted as each buying ten coins was for the United States ALONE. Sayles gets to the point lower down:

”We constantly hear from Mr. Barford that the bulk of the coins in collections are "illicit". That, to an archaeologist, means they entered the market since 1970. Can anyone with a straight face say that 200 million ancient coins have entered the market since 1970? If so, there is a huge market that I have never heard about.”

Well, let’s stop him there a moment. The first comment needed here is that Sayles aparently has temporarily forgotten what we mean by the term “illicit”. Its not the date when they were dug up that matters, but how they appeared on the market. Thousands of ancient coins appear in Great Britain on the market today (38 years after the 1970 Convention) totally licitly and ethically after having been reported through the Treasure process(es). Many of them are multiple finds from hoards. Some of them go to US dealers. Some are even in the ACCG “benefit auction” (among the only very small percent which have any kind of provenance given). The second point is a non-sequitur, the figure “200 million” (=254 million above) was a ballpark figure calculated on the basis of them having BEEN on the market since “1500”. It seems to me that Sayles is losing the track of his own argument. He goes on, picking up mathematical steam:

“If Mr. Barford is right and five million coins are purchased over a ten year period, then a decade of market activity represents the sale of about 2% of the ancient coins extant. So, I guess that means that over the 38 years since 1970 some 19 million coins have been sold. OK, let's accept that. I guess that means that a bit less than 7.5% of all coins extant changed hands during that period. Even if NONE of the coins entering the market before 1970 were traded during this period (which we know is not the case), the highest conceivable number of new market entries is a very very small fraction of the whole. So thank you Mr.
Barford for explaining what I have said for ages — the market is overwhelmingly legitimate.”

Well, I have “explained” nothing, Mr Sayles, you made all that up yourself. Let’s have a look at this claim.

The first question is (even if we talk just about the USA), how valid is it to extrapolate the current state of the market into the past? I do not have the figures to hand of the number of ancient coin collectors active in North America in the first decades of the sixteenth century, no doubt Mr Sayles would be better placed than me to answer that, but my bet is that until well after 1607 he’d be hard-put to find 50 000 of them each getting shipments of fresh ancient coins from the Old World. Indeed, if the number of ancient coin collectors in the US is proportionate to overall population numbers in 1940 there would have been less than half the current number, and in 1900 we are perhaps looking at a quarter of the current numbers (<13000 maybe), declining further in America’s past. The effects this will have on Sayles overall figures are quite dramatic. Instead of “254 million”, the actual value would be more likely somewhere around 40 million ancient coins consumed by the entire USA market since 1800, many of them presumably continually circulating between collections, so the actual number taken to the USA in this period would have been smaller.

Undeniably, from 1500 onward in many countries, especially those affected by the Renaissance and European Enlightenment, each generation would have held a number of collectors of ancient coins. The number of coins circulating among them must collectively have been relatively large, most of them removed from the surfaces of ploughed fields by ploughboys and shepherds etc. So actually how many ancient coin collectors have there been active in Europe and the New World in the period since 1500 until the present day? One can only guess. Likewise one can only guess how many coins the average bourgeois collector (as opposed to the magnates) would have had. We have some information about the latter, little about the former.

Sayles totally fails to recognize that the state of the market in 1608 AD or even 1908 is completely different to that today. The number of collectors (and dealers) has risen exponentially globally in the last century together with the ease of advertising and selling (for example through mail order and then, and probably particularly, the Internet). The metal detector has revolutionized the supply of coins to dealers. Whereas in the nineteenth century dealers might get visits of farmworkers bringing coins in tens and hundreds (evidenced for example by the diary of William Wire, clockmaker, antiquary, coin collector and one-time antiquity dealer in Colchester, England) after the widespread use of metal detectors, artefact hunters have them to dispose of by the carrier-bag full. Now instead of collectors buying choice coins singly a whole new generation has taken to buying them by the kilo and for entertainment “zapping” them (destroying them by dissolving the original surfaces within the corrosion layers in electrolytic cells).

Mr Sayles may attempt to use “statistics” of his own making to prove that the coins on the market today are “not illicit”, but since his figures are quite plainly wrong, until he can show the documentation that these coins were taken from the ground legally and exported from their place of origin in accordance with the relevant legislation and international conventions, we need not believe him. Indeed, such clutching at straws suggests that this is the best at least part of the dealers’ lobby can do. And it's clearly not good enough.

Holes in History, for what?

On a collectors’ forum yesterday, I got involved in a discussion of an ancient coin (a hemidrachm from Cherronesos in Thrace) which had been turned into a piece of wearable jewellery. Making it into a ring really does not seem to me to add anything to any numismatic scholarship or anyone’s knowledge or appreciation of the past (neither their own or anybody else’s). In my opinion, it is an ignoble end to what could have been used as archaeological evidence somewhere before it was hoiked out of the ground to end up decorating a party-goer's finger. The seller justifies the treatment of this object by claiming “there is nothing historically significant about this coin” and then goes on to say what he understands by a “historically significant coin”. (“It isn't a gold multiple. It isn't an Athenian dekadrachm. It isn't an Eid Mar denarius. It's a common hemidrachm”).

There seems to be a common type of misunderstanding among collectors that there are “major antiquities” like an early copy of Polykleitos' Doryphoros and the 'Euphronios Krater'. These they see for some reason as somehow different from “minor antiquities”, the ones they think its OK for someone like them to collect without bothering about provenance or documentation of legal export. This ignores the real reason why archaeologists oppose the current form of collection of portable antiquities. While being notably eager to criticize archaeology and archaeologists, collectors using this argument seem actually to have very little idea what archaeology is about, what it does and how. In connection with this approach, I cannot fail to recall two “coins I have known” from my digging days (please note: I have not got the report readily to hand so am writing here from memory).

The site concerned in the Baths Basilica site in the middle of Roman Wroxeter, England (excavations directed for English Heritage by Phil Barker, a wonderful man, who passed away in 2001). Its quite a well-known site and excavation, so I will not describe it in any detail. Suffice to say that it is a site with thin and incredibly sensitive vertical and horizontal stratigraphy, most of which relates to the period at the end of Roman Britain, and the various uses the huge public building and its site was put to in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. The excavation was slow, painstaking and very costly. There were thin trampled floors, rubble spreads, ephemeral (sometimes extremely ephemeral) traces of complex timber structures. There were also thousands of finds mixed in. Some of them were obviously redeposited (“residual”), first century samian and fragments of equipment from the underlying military occupation, but the main bulk was either undatable in itself (like loads of animal bone fragments telling us about urban diets if only we can date them by association) or of typical generic Late Roman type, including tonnes of pottery sherds. All this was carefully collected and segregated according to archaeological contexts (“layers”). Datable finds were carefully plotted. Among them of course were the coins.

Most of the coins from Wroxeter were the typical stuff metal detectorists and fieldwalkers get from any Late Roman site in southern Britain, various “radiates” and especially small corroded “Constantinian bronzes”. These are 'two-a-penny' to most dealers and collectors in Britain and beyond. Metal detectorists refer to them contemptuously as “Roman grots” and without much thought toss most of them into the bag destined to end up as an eBay “one kilo of unsorted uncleaned Roman” lot for spotty teenagers in Tucson to “zap”. So not much of any dealers’ idea of “coins of historic significance” then.

Their use as archaeological evidence however is not reliant on how “common/saleable” an artefact is. Although somehow its an uphill battle persuading collectors of this (they “know better”), in archaeology this comes of course from where and how it is found.

At Wroxeter at the end of the 1980s I was supervising the east end of the South Aisle (just in front of the Old Work for those that know the site). Something really odd had happened there after the basilica was not being used as a building, but an open space after it had lost its roof. A huge rectangular hole had been dug through the floor across the whole of that end of the South Aisle, and then backfilled with a thick sloping layer of rubble mixed with black earth (in the background of the photo here by Roger White). This infill contained many finds, plaster, glass, roof tile, nails and other metal objects, and as we slowly and carefully removed it several corroded 'Constantinian' small bronze coins came up from one spot. We started detailed three-dimensional plotting of these items as they came up over the next few days. This was potentially useful dating material for the activity we were studying. If their distribution in the rubble showed they had been hidden there as a group, then their deposition would be a date (a so-called Terminus post quem) for the rubble layer itself. These coins changed quite rapidly and if the find had been a hidden hoard, we’d have got quite a close date for the whole deposit and what is more, those stratigraphically related to it. Also we’d have to think about why a hoard was deposited precisely here right next to a major thoroughfare, but in an area of known ceremonial activity at the time. As it happened when we’d finished all that work, it became relatively clear that the distribution of the coins relative to the internal structure of the rubble dump was such that they had been dumped (probably unnoticed) together with the rubble. Presumably they had been dug up somewhere outside the excavated area in a clod of earth and only scattered when the earth was tipped into the hole with the rubble. As it happens our hopes to use this particular assemblage of coins were futile, but had the question not been posed and the three dimensional distribution of finds not plotted in detail, we would never have known, and indeed could well have drawn quite the wrong conclusions.

Now let us think what would have happened if this shallow deposit had been located and dug out by a metal detector using artefact hunter. There is absolutely no way that in a narrow hole they could have recorded the distribution of those items with the same detail as over a week of detailed open area stratigraphic excavation. In fact, I suspect they would not have located all the coins of that group. This is information about that part of the site that would have been completely lost had that deposit merely been dug out to go on sale as “grots” on eBay. Even if the PAS had been involved, my opinion is that the character of the evidence was such that true nature of that group of coins and its relationship to the basilica would never have been established.

The second coin was also a Late Roman bronze of the same general type, a single coin, but a crucial piece of evidence. After several years digging, recording, planning, finds plotting our way through very complex stratigraphy of several major phases compressed into a few tens of centimeters, an oven was found, securely sealed by all the deposits above it. At the bottom of the oven, and absolutely certainly deposited in it after it had gone out of use, was a single coin. The point is that the entire sequence of stratigraphy and a floating seriation of the pottery evidence laboriously constructed over the preceding years was at last given a fixed starting point (almost) by that one securely sealed coin. That single coin gave the rest of the work over most of the site the fixed beginnings of a chronological framework that had been lacking (or rather the subject of informed surmise) before that. It turned out that beginning of the formation of the series of deposits we had been examining [and which we'd already worked out clearly had been the product of a long period of development and redevelopment of the site] had been much later than we had previously concluded on the basis of other evidence. What we had thought were layers of the early fifth century higher up in the sequence were in fact in most likelihood much later and all the finds in them were redeposited. Explaining that away, when Britain was supposed to be in terminal economic, social and cultural collapse is a connundrum a decade after the excavations were published.

Again, if a metal detector user had gone over that field before the excavation and pulled out that “Roman grot”, the whole sequence of this part of the Wroxeter site would have been irreparably damaged, and that information and all the consequences following on from it, would have been irretrievably lost.

The portable antiquity collector really should be more aware of this kind of situation and how their hobby does affect the archaeological record in ways they cannot even imagine (though they should try). The bottom line is that the importance of individual pieces of evidence in archaeology only emerges when they are seen cumulatively and in the full richness of its context. Taking coins or any other atrtefact, no matter of how “common” a type, out of its context produces very little information in itself, but potentially (and in ways the artefact hunter is unable to predict or guard against) simply trashes a whole portion of a site, making it impossible to interpret.

Questioning public stewardship

Californian coin dealer, ACCG officer and Unidroit-L listowner Dave Welsh opines:

It is my opinion that any objective study of the subject must conclude that public stewardship of antiquities has been a disaster […] It is now time to ask hard questions and move beyond the platitudes and misdirection we receive from
SAFE, Paul Barford and their fellow thinkers. Instead of the defenders of private collecting having to answer their questions, I believe that it is now time for them to answer ours. My first question is, exactly what has public stewardship of antiquities (outside the British Isles) ever accomplished that would create public confidence that this approach is superior to the social
benefits of private collecting?.

That’s a hoot Mr Welsh, but hardly an original joke, it’s been cracked before, hasn't it?

Just in case Dave Welsh is actually serious…. So this viewpoint would be suggesting that public collections such as museums, archives, libraries, reserves and national parks and antiquities protection laws (such as the US' own 1906 act) serve no useful purpose, achieve very little. They are “socialist (even Marxist)”, ideas espoused by elitists (eh?) we are told… (that’s funny, I thought they were supposed to be ideas from the Enlightenment – that’s what the proponents of Universal Museums were suggesting). Presumably then if we are to question the accomplishments of public stewardship of resources, the opposition would propose that the only way forward is to privatize the lot, sell it to private collectors to look after and thus allow the free market to dictate what happens to formerly public resources? In such a model, if people want access to the past they must pay for it by individually buying a piece of it for themselves from dealers like Mr Welsh. What a wonderful “cunning plan” that would be. No, this "challenge" was a joke surely? I expect the captains of whaling ships, makers of elephant ivory walking stick knobs, loggers of tropical hardwoods and property developers tell the same type of jokes about conservationists.

Welsh Pompeii: a Portable Antiquity Dealer’s ‘vision’

In his questioning earlier today of the notion of public stewardship, Californian coin dealer, ACCG officer and Unidroit-L listowner Dave Welsh opines:

“the vast majority of redundant antiquities controlled by such "meritocrats" are doomed to languish in conditions of appalling neglect and negligence that are in no way comparable to the care and conservation they would receive in private collections. It is my opinion that any objective study of the subject must conclude that public stewardship of antiquities has been a disaster. One really need look no farther than Pompeii to see the essential issues.”

On reading this, I thought it might indeed be a good idea to take a look at Pompeii to see these essential issues. The current state of this fragile exposed and popular site is indeed a cause for extreme concern. Is the problem here that it is in public stewardship instead of being partitioned among private collectors as Welsh suggests? Let us examine where Welsh’s arguments seem to be heading. Let us imagine that a 'forward thinking' administration has replaced Renato Profili by Mr Welsh with his innovative ideas about how to provide 'proper' stewardship of the pieces of Pompeii’s past. In the light of what he is quoted above as saying, and as a collectorship advocate, let's imagine that he would put into practice what he preached about how to provide proper stewardship by engaging in the sale of collectable items from among the 'redundant' (sic) elements of the site not already transferred to a museum. The resources generated from this would go to solving the problems of crumbling frescoes, tourist and natural erosion of the structures, litter and stray dogs.

Very probably the first to go would be any original statuary left in the ruins and stored away from the public gaze, these items should quickly fetch a bit of ready cash to finance further stages of the privatisation. Any reusable panels with parts of inscriptions, or architectural features such as columns, architraves, thresholds and suchlike could be salvaged from their exposed position in the upstanding remains under an Italian sky and reused eclectically in other contexts as architectural features enlivening many a piece of spartan modern concrete architecture, lending a soulless modern interior a certain ‘timeless elegance’ linking its owner with the classical traditions of the past and marking him as an erudite, culturally aware and sensitive individual as well as forming a useful conversation topic at suburban cocktail parties.

Probably some of the better frescoes could be detached from the walls and sold to eager art buyers anxious for a slightly unusual décor in the downstairs bathroom. The ones with erotic imagery would probably be sold even before they could be got off the wall and crated up and would most likely would end up in a Moscow brothel. The famous street-wall graffiti could also be detached and individually framed. They would be ideal to hang on US high school Latin classroom walls (spreading classical education in the US like the Ancient Coins for Education - more of this another time). The famous cross from the wall of one house in the shadow of Vesuvius could probably be found a new home in a New York Evangelical church.

Probably a ready market could also easily be found for a lot of the smaller objects, while the sculptures and frecoes would probably be most profitably sold through foreign art galleries, these could be more easily sold through Internet auction sites. Complete pots, lamps, metal items, coins, found lying where they had been left in the final hours of the city’s life in AD 79 could be sold relatively cheaply and allow anyone to have their own collection of authentic Roman goodies. Amphoras (after discretely drilling drainage holes) would be snapped up as plant holders on suburban balconies across Europe and the USA. Or they could serve as umbrella stands in office foyers.

The casts of the bodies of suffocated Pompeiians might be a bit of a problem. Probably a theme park however could be found to take the most shocking and contorted as a revenue-generating horror show. The ones done in transparent acrylic though might find a place in an art gallery as 'body art', like von Hagen's dissected plastificated corpses.

There might be a problem getting rid of animal bones and charred plant remains to collectors. Possibly this could be got round by tastefully framing them with an explanatory label and a handful of “authentic Vesuvius volcano ash" glued to the backing and spray-painted lurid ‘hot’ colours). The same could go for hand-sized bits of painted plaster, potsherds, window glass fragments.

I would imagine that with clever marketing, some of the more time-worn street paving stones could be taken up and sold to garden enthusiasts wanting to give their lawns and borders the air of respectable maturity. Complete Roman bricks would be intriguing stands for fondue sets or hot teapots (“yes, its 2000 years old, can you imagine that?”). Visitors could be hired small ice pick-like tools to take their own piece of mosaic (“dig and explore like a real archaeologist”), sold at a price calculated at 15 cents a tessera.

And so on… lots of opportunities for private collectors to each have and look after their own “genuine authentic Roman pieces of the past with a Certificate of Authenticity personally signed by authority of the new Minister of Culture”, all that is needed is to develop a collector-friendly approach to stewardship, just like Mr Welsh and his fellow collectors and dealers have been advocating. What I have suggested above would happen to the "minor antiquities" of this site is just a logical extrapolation of what they have been suggesting is how we should (continue to) allow archaeological sites to be treated in general.

While the collector of portable antiquities might be rubbing their hands at the prospect of a glut of cut-price and authentic antiquities coming on the market, let us spare a thought for context.

Collectors suggest that their own personal collection of contextless relics are a valuable way for them to “have access to the past”. No doubt that is the case if that access is primarily measured in emotional terms. But each artefact on the market has come from a context of deposition. Pompeii is a prime example (archaeological theory discusses even the “Pompeii premise”). What makes Pompeii so fascinating for everyone, even the non archaeologist, is the way the evidence can be used to reconstruct past events, past lives, past processes precisely because many of the objects are found in the position (read: context) where they were dropped at or just before a certain short period of time at the end of August AD 79. It was here among other places that the notion of context that was to turn antiquarianism into archaeology began to develop.

What would Pompeii look like after the dealers had finished stripping it of collectables for people to “curate” in scattered ephemeral domestic personal accumulations spread over most of the northern hemisphere? It would be stripped of almost everything which gives the site archaeological (and not only) value today, bare walls would be left, the street plan would remain, but anything along it which gave it character will have long gone to California, Wisconsin, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Murmansk, Birmingham and Konstancin. As a place that tells a real story of the past in the full richness of its authenticity and complexity, a collectable-emptied Pompeii will have been gutted, trashed.

This is a very good analogy explaining why archaeologists and others are against the stripping of archaeological sites by artefact hunters of collectables to feed scattered ephemeral portable antiquity collections. Destroying the context of discovery destroys any chance we and others may have of understanding that site and the rich story it could have told if the artefact hunters had not got there first. That is what the issue is.

Portable antiquity collectors may be in denial, but the issue is not one of elitist archaeologists restricting access to individual items (objects, artefacts which collectors want to accumulate), but trying to work towards the preservation and public accessing of the information that is inevitably trashed when a site is "done over" to get a few saleable items for selfish (often foreign) collectors to rub their hands over.

PS. Of course one of the main group of problems with Pompeii are those associated with making its remains accessible to anyone who wants to see and experience it. The easiest answer would be simply to excavate what archaeologists want to research and then backfill the site, cover it all up again making it inaccessible to the general public. The collectors seem not too willing to discuss the 'public accessibility' element of the problem when roundly criticising the current state of preservation of the site and attempting to use it as ammunition for their anti-archaeological case.