Missing the point - again

On the collectors' "Unidroit-L" forum, Jim McGarigle (Polymath Numismatist) responds to the posting there of a link to Svetlana Guineva's article 'Italy to send back stolen antique coins confiscated in Verona' from the Sofia Echo mentioned above. McGarigle writes:

If these were coins stolen from a museum I am glad they were returned but if they are coins that were recently unearthed - what a waste of the police's time and the taxpayer's resources. 3,800 coins valued at $35,000 EUR so we are talking about coins valued at about $12 USD each roughly. No national treasures here!

The point is however not the "treasures returned", but catching those that are destroying the real treasure, the archaeological resource from which these twelve-dollar geegaws were all snatched, trashing history as the diggers dug. Is it a "waste of police time and taxpayer's resources" to protect the archaeological record from deliberate destruction? To some extent it is, because this is destruction that should not be happening, and could to a large extent be curbed if there were more controls on how the loot can be turned into cash. It is the failure of those at the other end of the market, the consumer, to be choosy about who they do business with and how that contributes to the costs (often considerable for poorer countries which should have other priorities) of policing sites to try and curb this looting.

3800 coins is a minimum of 3800 individual and destructive holes in the archaeological record. Anyone who has ever been on an archaeological site will know that it is much more, in every ten "bleeps" of a metal detector (and thus ten holes dug to get the source of the signal out of the ground) on a typical lowland Roman site in Britain (at least) you'd be lucky to get one collectable coin. So those 3800 collectable coins seized on their way to a foreign market represent a considerable amount of destructive activity in the ground at the source sites.

The Verona-bound coins however returned to Bulgaria last week. Devoid of context, they could perhaps be used for handling collections for local schools as part of an educational effort teaching Bulgarian kids about the rich historical heritage that foreign collectors want to take away from them. Maybe the ACE would like to help them set it up? Would they be "comfortable" with that?
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