The ACCG hoard model rears its ugly head again

On the Unidroit-L forum there is a post called "German Collections are Being Confiscated" which is about portable antiquity (coin) collectors in some regions of Germany who cannot document the legitimate origin of the archaeological items in their collections having them confiscated (more of this later perhaps, see here and here). This has led to the issue of a statement: " Sammeln von Münzen fördert Bildung und Kultur" by a number of German numismatic groups. Its the usual "collectors rights" rant. That text need not detain us, its the same old stuff about "Petrarch collected coins" and "collecting coins is a Jolly Good Thing" which we know from "certain other" milieux. In fact it looks to me like these continental groups are taking a leaf from the US antiquity dealers' song book.

The author of the Unidroit-L post, Minnesota (St Paul) ancient coin collector (Jorg Lueke) provided a "translation" of part of this "Gemeinsame Erklärung ..." but changed the text of its point two in a significant manner. In the original it reads:

Wir unterstützen den Schutz archäologisch bzw. historisch wertvoller Münzfunde, da sie einen mehrfachen Quellenwert besitzen, auch unabhängig von der finanziellen Bewertung der einzelnen Münze durch den Markt.

Mr Luecke for some reason renders this as:

We support the protection of archaeological sites and historically significant coin finds. We understand coin hoards can have more worth than simply their financial worth.

We seem to be back to this fixation the US ancient coin collector seems to have with the "all the coins we collect come from hoards which are not archaeologically significant" fallacy. The Roman empire extended into parts of what is now Germany, and ancient coin finds are made across the whole area. German coin collectors cannot delude themselves so easily as the less well-informed US collector. So the US collector had to change the text to render it "ideologically safe" for the US collectors' market.