Antiquitist Quiz

Here is a quiz for all of those antiquity collectors out there. What well known site do the following two photographs depict? Where is it, and what has happened to it that it has such a marked surface texture? Answers next week.

Answer: It is the site of the colonia at Archar near Vidin in NW Bulgaria. This is the place whence apparently (by his own admission) came the artefacts and coins being sold by ebay dealers like Empire Danny and his business contacts. They have (had) almost a metric tonne of artefacts obtained by "excavation" (sic) ten years ago. You can see the "excavation' trenches dug with bulldozers to take the topsoil off so metal detectors can penetrate the archaeological layers quite clearly. The way to stop this kind of damage is for responsible collectors to stop buying archaeologcal artefacts witout ensuring (by means of verifiable documented provenance) that they did not come from robber-digging like this.