Balkan Artefacts like Manna?

A few weeks ago prompted by looking at ebay, I was discussing here the US trade in artefacts coming from the exploitation of archaeological sites in southern Europe on the basis of what one could find on a well-known internet auction site. In the discussion of some coin collectors’ (false) claims about “where coins come from” I was looking at some of the bulk sellers of ancient coins. It seems worthwhile extending that to look at the range of items offered by sellers on the portable antiquities market in the United States to see whether the buyer can determine whether the material is coming from “old collections” or “things soldiers buried before they went into battle”

The coins of course are not coming out of the ground alone, for the US market various types of artefacts imported from the Old World are segregated out and put into different "piles" (and some sellers will also mix objects from different regions of the world, and even on eBay add fakes to the mix). Let's have a look at one manifestation of the market in collectables including ancient coins. This is all perfectly Legal according to US law, but is it Right? The fact that US collectors are eager to buy (nay, recommend buying) these items provides a ready market an incentive for import of this material.

As the supplies of accessible authentic artefacts dwindles through non-sustainable overexploitation of what is after all a finite resource, many eBay sellers are now handling large numbers of fakes (this in itself is a topic of archaeological significance that I'd like to explore here one day). US collector Reid Goldsborough states that “the percentage of scam ancient coin auctions at any given time on eBay has been estimated to be around 10 or 15 percent (the percentage of scam ancient artifact auctions has been estimated to be around 50 percent).” So in order to try and steer clear of sellers who offered bags and bags of artificially patinated fake artefacts, I made use of his “Woefully incomplete list of recommended dealers” with one addition of my own.

Let us start with Empire Ancients (Danny Harris, Cordova, Tennessee, ebay: empiredanny 1302 feedback). He's the one not on Mr Goldsborough's list, but we've visited his virtual storefront before. Basically three months on he's still offering the same range of goods. In his eBay listings, he has at the moment 21 pages of coins and artefacts - mostly the sort of thing you'd find on archaeological sites in the Balkans. He has been discussed here before. He has a number of bulk lots of ‘partifacts’ such as numbers 250358851032 (ten pound lot), 290289937010, buckles and things 300248233730, 290251474806 etc etc, he has bulk lots of "crusties" (illegible because heavily encrusted coins), "culls" (illegible because worn, broken, generally cruddy coins), the brooch and buckle lots. Other items have been taken out of the mass finds and presented as single lots. These broken and complete items are obviously metal detecting finds from settlement sites, not isolated "hoards" (or as one collector put it on a forum yesterday “fields full of small finds”). The "partifacts" are being sold in bulk lots - but where are the more shapeless scraps that all archaeological sites produce? What happened to the less collectable portion of the archaeological assemblage from these sites? Mr Harris, himself says (and as I have previously discussed):

"In Bulgaria, there are artifact searchers that search with metal detectors every day that weather is permitting. They search around Vidin, Bulgaria and the surrounding area. They find all sorts of items from over 20 centuries of rich Bulgarian history [.] I have purchased over 2000 pounds of these items".

That is nearly a metric tonne.

An eBay seller on the Recommended dealers list is Ancient Treasures (Plamen Arsoff Granada Hills CA 91394, eBay ancient_treasures 37196 feedback). He currently has 12 pages of offers, coins and artefacts - mostly the sort of thing you'd find by metal detecting on archaeological sites in the Balkans) [Arsoff says he takes a cue from today's superstores. Day in and day out, he provides a steady supply of goods that his buyers can depend on. "Our concept is sort of like Home Depot and Costco," explains Arsoff, who has been selling on eBay for close to five years. ]

Then there is Ancient Caesar (Ilian Lalev, Newton, MA 02458, eBay ancientcaesar, feedback 12009) He currently has six eBay pages, coins and various artefacts - mostly the sort of thing you'd find by metal detecting on archaeological sites in the Balkans.

Cameleon Coins (Alex Stanichev, Winettka, United States eBay: cameleoncoins feedback 6938) currently has 6 pages coins and artefacts - mostly the sort of thing you'd find metal detecting on archaeological sites in the Balkans.

Diana Coins (Gantcho Zagorski, Hackensack , NJ ebay dianacoins/paganecoins0oh6, feedback 2112 + 7617) currently has four 4 pages, mostly coins, but a few artefacts - mostly the sort of thing you'd find on archaeological sites in the Balkans.

Several of these sellers also have VCoins stores which offer the same sort of material. These are just a few of the sellers on eBay, selected from those that appeared on a "recommended dealers" list - other dealers on that list offered mainly coins, which one suspects were in part at least at some stage selected from bulk imports such as those evidenced by the above five. Other wholesalers are known and discussed by Nathan Elkins for example elsewhere.

Now it seems to me that these artefacts do not drop out of the sky like manna into the laps of US dealers and wholesalers. It does not seem to me either, looking through these thousands of items currently on sale in the US in one internet portal alone, that these come from “hoards buried by Roman soldiers before battle”. To try and convince the buying public of that is simply sheer dishonesty in the face of what these sites seem to show.

We know illegal metal detecting is going on in southeastern Europe, in Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Makedonia, there has been looting of other kinds in Kosovo. Much of this stuff is going to European markets (Munich is one hub of the system, Geneva too) and then a lot of it is being re-exported to the US. Some of this material has also been appearing on the market in the Netherlands, and it is also reaching Great Britain in some quantities. It is not clear whether this is through direct contacts with the source countries or through German, Swiss and possibly Italian dealers. The material appearing in Poland seems likely to be directly imported from Bulgaria.

It seems to me pretty difficult for collectors to try and pretend now that the material being offered for sale here (some of it with earth still on it) is “from an old European collection”. In admitting that it is freshly dug stuff, exported from the source country under “unclear” circumstances (“those foreign restrictive laws are unfair”) we are now hearing that this really “does not matter” because actually (as collectors say) this material does not really come from archaeological sites (really? How many southeastern European archaeologists would confirm that I wonder). In any case as someone told us all last night:

Most of what is being offered on the market are objects that are very common. Large amounts of the exact same artifact over and over again in a varied states of preservation. From the pile faceless low grade late Roman bronze to the many buckles, pins, fire starters, lamps and other commonly found objects that you see being offered relatively cheap. There is no reason I could ever think of as to why these could not continue to be sold and sold in much the same way as they are sold today.

Well, I do. It is not the market value, or the degree of uniqueness of an object which defines how important a piece of evidence is. That is simply uninformed reasoning. This material is being taken undocumented from the archaeological record at a number of European sites, being mixed up and sold off as so many touchy-feely pieces of the past to be "glommed" and coveted by their possessors, who claim to be home-grown erudites. They are nevertheless Gollum-like apparently incapable of putting two and two together about where their "preciouses" actually come from, and what effect their providing a no-questions-asked market for them simply contributes to the continuance of the trade, and thus the destruction of the archaeological record.

Photo: metal detected artefacts from Europe on sale on a well-known internet auction site in the United States. Each one was obtained by making a hole in somebody else's archaeological record. This dealer has nearly a tonne of them in stock.