Buckets of coins on his desk

Californian coin dealer and ACCG officer Dave Welsh is apparently an avid, though sceptical, reader of this blog. He’s picked up my last post and it seems to have got him rattled. Over on his Unidroit-L discussion list he’s posted the following comment:

There are no academic institutions conveying expertise in the ancient coin market, and it is not clear what qualifications Paul Barford (or Nathan Elkins) may have to pontificate on this topic. To the best of my knowledge, no expert in the workings of this market has made statements that support such assertions.
It would be desirable to see factual evidence (not estimates or opinions) presented about the "huge amount of illicitly obtained material" Barford asserts is presently flowing into the ancient coin market. My own experience indicates just the opposite - the level of "uncertain" material offered in the market today seems to be much less than it was five years ago. "Uncleaned bulk lots" are not necessarily illicit. I have just such a "bulk lot" on my desk right now, about ten pounds of ancient coins together with the export permit which accompanied them. Large numbers of uncleaned ancient coins are now being licitly exported.

Well, the first point is that some of us have been saying for ages that what we really need before we can even begin to discuss the archaeological effects of the antiquities collecting as a whole on the archaeological record is a proper survey which would produce such figures. So far, the pro-collecting lobby (and that includes archaeologists in the UK) has not seemed particularly keen on that. If Mr Welsh and the ACCG would be willing to join the calls to have a proper nuts-and-bolts survey done of this whole sorry market by an academic institution (how about Stanford?) and co-operate fully with it, then I can only support that. I am sure that Nathan Elkins would like to see this too for the coiney part of the market, in fact, that seems to be the conclusion of all of his writings on the topic, including the article I cited yesterday.

I am not sure who would qualify as an “expert in the workings of the market” in Dave Welsh’s eyes. I guess he means so-called “professional numismatists” (dealers) like himself. Well, I suspect its very likely that we’d not find too many US dealers in ancient coins or antiquities who would agree that Nathan Elkins’ assessment is correct. They prefer to call him names rather than analyse (or even, I suspect, read) his arguments. It is precisely this behaviour, public posturing and self-interested weasel-wording that reduce the credibility of the public statements of this milieu as a source of information. To get a better picture of the nuts-and-bolts of the portable antiquities market and collecting milieu, we have to look below the skin, the public façade, and yes, the sooner we have a proper pentrating and fully documented analysis (or better still, a whole series of them), the better.

As for whether the estimate I quoted yesterday is realistic, there is a published estimate (by the executive Director of the ACCG no less) of the number of ancient coin collectors in the US of 50 000. In that light Elkins’ assessment of a million coins a year is only 20 new coins each a year on average. Some of them, as we can learn from their forums, buy that many coins in a single auction.

Let’s be clear, that is just the market for ancient coins in just one country. Where are they all coming from? Old collections? How many ancient coin collections were there in the US in 1965? How many coins did they contain, and where are they all now?

It seems to me that ancient coins are now more available than they were when I was a youngster, and if we compare the prices in old catalogues, even though the market has expanded considerably (the internet having a major effect here) the comparison of prices since the early 1970s (adjusted for inflation) show that this cannot be the re-circulation of a fixed stock, but new coins are coming in. Like the metric ton of coins Elkins mentions in his article. Where are they coming from? Do they drop from the sky maybe? Do US coin dealers get them from the leprachauns or elves?

I asked these questions earlier, I think we'd all not be averse to hearing some responses from dealers and collectors - backed up of course with verifiable facts to which they claim only they have access.

As I said the ‘dealers-who-think-we-were-all-born-yesterday’ strenuously deny that huge amounts of illicit material are coming on the market. They would, wouldn’t they? Mr Welsh boasts he has an “about ten pound” uncleaned lot with export licences on his desk right now. Bully for him (I hope they are not from that Israeli wholesaler discussed here earlier who boasts he can provide Israeli export licences for all his items). Let us recall, however, that collectors-rights activist Dave Welsh of "Classical Coins" is the same coin dealer who earlier declined to answer questions posted (first on Unidroit-L and then here ) about two lots of coins (one which seems to have come from the Balkans, another group of Parthian coins) he was offering for sale last year. I asked him if he had provenance details for them and an export licence. We got no answer (though reader will recall he tried to claim the Parthian coins had been found in Spain! That sounds like the Jerusalem antiquities seller ZZAntiquities who declines to document his extraordinary claim that his Isin foundation cones were 'letters' found in a hoard in the Holy Land – can you believe these guys?)

Welsh suggests that "Uncleaned bulk lots" are not necessarily illicit. So maybe Mr Welsh would like to say where the many dozens of dealers currently offering them on internet portals are actually getting them from in such quantities, and what happens to the “metric ton” type shipments of clandestinely-dug and undocumented ancient coins to US wholesalers which Elkins points out do make it through the vigilant scrutiny of US customs (and probably many relatively anonymous and wrongly-declared postal packages sent annually through the international postal service from "source countries"). I personally think that it is only logical to accept that the two are as intimately connected as Elkins suggests. Unless all this corroded impure ancient copper alloy is being imported as scrap metal by US scrap merchants of course, I see no logical reason for anyone to import a metric ton of ancient coins unless there is a market for them. Like a market of 50 000 people anxious to have and possess and fondle ancient coins and other such ancient gee-gaws and who are not going to ask where they came from.

While I agree that not all uncleaned bulk lots are necessarily illicit (I do not think I said they were), the appearance on the market of tens of thousands of crud and mud coated artefacts like this, week in week out, does indeed raise a lot of questions about the truth behind the “old collection” (or “department store”) explanation of the origin of all ancient coins on the “ancients” market. Questions it does not need a “degree in coin-market-ology” to ask (because I think EVERYONE should be asking them), but questions which do need an honest answer.