Ethics Laws and Looting: Reply to Dave Welsh, Yahoo AncientArtifacts message # 49329

This is a reply to the lengthy comments of David Welsh, antiquity dealer and "collectors' rights" activist:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Ancientartifacts/message/49329

The thread where it appeared was closed minutes after he made his posting. Convenient for Mr Welsh no doubt.

Collectors of portable antiquities may like it or like it not that there is a divide between the responsible collector who conclusively determines the legitimate origins of every object they acquire for their collections and those who do not. There seems no reason why we should not call such people “no-questions-asked buyers” since that is precisely what they do. If Mr Welsh finds that “insulting” perhaps he should examine his own soul why that is. I have in mind, for example, our previous discussions about how coins get out of the ground in southeastern Europe and into Mr Welsh’s stockroom. This of course does not concern so much merely staying within the letter of the law (arguments along the lines of “no law was broken once they got to my country”), what I am concerned with are the ethics behind, those which actually define, this trade and the way they relate to the problem which concerns me as an archaeologist, the destructive mining (looting) of ancient sites merely as a source of collectables.

Mr Welsh constantly assures us that no archaeological site was damaged to get the stuff he and his fellow dealers in the US and elsewhere supply to their clients, because we have seen (the "edge of battlefield hoard" model) he argues that these coins by some magical process do not come from archaeological sites. Well of course he cannot tell us exactly where the individual coins come from as he bought them from a bloke who bought them from a bloke…. and somewhere down the line there were no questions asked. But then we all have to ask ourselves where precisely is one of the “blokes” in the chain getting kilogammes of mixed metal objects still with the earth on them from? "Old collections" or fresh digging?

The dealers who say that they are merely striving to “preserve presently lawful, time-honoured rights of collectors in the USA and elsewhere” as Mr Welsh asserts might like to specify more precisely quite what “rights” they think they have over coins and ancient artifacts coming from outside their own country. What "rights" Amercans claim over archaeological finds from archaeological sites and assemblages on Bulgarian soil if they cannot show us a Bulgarian export licence or proof they were out of the ground legally and out of Bulgaria before (say) 1970. What “rights” do they have over fresh “English dugups” unrecorded with the PAS?

Merely applying what my good friend Nigel Swift (who Mr Welsh knows) has christened the “it’s legal innit?” argument to define matters of ethics clearly is not enough. Slavery, displacing Native Americans from their lands too and race discrimination and were all no doubt considered “time honored” as well as “lawful” (and possibly even Divinely Ordained) by those involved in the past of North America, but it does not mean they were ethically right. This is the crux of the matter, one cannot define ethics by what is merely within the limits of one country's laws - especially laws which anyone involved in debate on portable antiquities knows were not constructed with the sole aim of protecting the archaeological resource and are in any case full of loopholes. Ethical trade, ethical collecting, morality in general all mean going at least that one step further than what one is legally obliged to do. This is what antiquity dealers in such discussions really fail to accept. It is ethical collecting which we are discussing. The type of collecting that asks questions about where the objects concerned come from, does not acquire blindly.

As for what the law says, I sincerely doubt whether the chairman of the ACCG International committee has the slightest inkling what he is talking about when he writes of the alleged laws in “Poland (where Barford presently resides)” which allegedly are “substantially restricting the rights of private collectors to own and trade in items which may or may not be archaeological artifacts". That is merely a facile attempt to dismiss what I say on the grounds that I am some kind of ignorant foreigner from a country with different ways.

In fact, Mr Welsh should have checked before he spoke. There are no such laws in Poland (for goodness' sake I was involved - albeit in a small way - in their writing!). Private ownership of collections of coins and antiquities is not restricted by Polish law. Neither were they in Communist Poland – where the collector was given help by the state to maintain their collections. This type of uninformed myth making is endemic in the collecting advocacy milieu, more concerned with spreading alarmist propaganda than facts, and thrives on the generally uninformed prejudices of collectors who cannot be bothered to check the facts and apparently simply believe what they are told.

Welsh says foreign laws like those of “Poland” are not necessarily better or more moral “than nations such as the USA which do not impose the same restrictions”. I really do not know what he is thinking saying that there are no restrictions on what people can collect in America when 1001 km almost directly east of his home a drama is playing out in Utah and Colorado which has at its basis laws which are EXACTLY the same as those in Poland and a number of other countries! The United States of America has laws about who can dig up artifacts where and declares them state property, even if they come from unutilized public land. Perhaps before campaigning about "collectors' rights" over archaeological material taken from the archaeological record in foreign countries, it would be far more logical for US "collectors' rights" advocates to establish those same "rights" over archaeological material taken in their own. Why should foreign states be forced by American collectors to accede to demands that would be rejected at home? I have asked this question a number of times now, but it seems to me that the milieu concerned is studiously avoiding supplying an answer - or even acknowledging that the question exists at all. Whose there is the "intellectual dishonesty"?

According to Welsh, "Barford is actually advocating radical changes that would greatly restrict, or even eliminate, existing rights of private collectors and dealers in antiquities". It depends whether one sees rights as existing without responsibilities, and again quite what those “rights” consist of. Actually, it is not just me who is advocating that the current status quo in the antiquities market cannot go on indefinitely. To take just one country as an example, at the official launch of the UK Nighthawking Strategic Report Feb 16th this year, the Director of the Council for British Archaeology said the same thing. The All Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group chaired by Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn says the same. The Portable Antiquities Scheme does too. What is being proposed is nothing more or less than collectors are able to document that the objects in their collection do not come from recent looting. That is all. Now why would any antiquities dealer oppose that? Would that really lead to the elimination "existing rights"? What "rights" would they be precisely, Mr Welsh? To buy anything without questioning origins?

Mr Welsh may have his own personal ethical standard which rejects acquiring coins without valid export licences by (as he himself states) asking the would-be vendor "where are the coins located? " But this question is meaningless in terms of the issue in question, which is the looting of archaeological sites to provide collectables for the market. His approach seems to be symptomatic of a fixation of US dealers (necessarily separated from the source of the ancient coins they collect) with “export, export”.

Since ancient artifacts do not grow on trees or fall from the sky, the important question is “where have these coins come from?”. This is precisely the “No-question” that is of concern here. Mr Welsh does not say he asks it.* So the heap (yes, top photo) of “specials” from the Balkans on sale in Mr Welsh’s shop, how did they leave the ground? So what if somebody bought a bucketload of coins from the Holy Land with an Israeli export licence? On what grounds was that licence issued? I don't know, but the foreign dealer relying on it to ascertain licit origins should check. These may be coins recovered by controlled metal detecting surveys of ancient sites by the Israel Antiquities Service and then sold as surplus to museum needs through registered antiquity dealers. Or they may very well be coins looted from sites in neighbouring countries, exported to the Gulf States, and from there imported into Jerusalem and thus wholly legally exported from there with an export licence. In the latter case they'd be totally “legal”, but looted from archaeological sites nonetheless. These are the questions both dealers and collectors need to be asking (and information dealers which obviously ought to be passing along to the new owners with the artefacts) to avoid being a link in the chain of looting.

The value of a export licence in these discussions is that any normal state would not (we hope) issue an export licence for items that had been looted or otherwise dishonestly obtained from its own archaeological record. Sadly, despite international agreements, most states have no compunction whatsoever about issuing export licences for material taken by whatever means from archaeological sites outside its borders – even if it was illegally imported into that state. That is simply wrong, but it is a fact of life dealers in archaeological artefacts constantly take advantage of. They claim they’ve done "nothing wrong", as indeed in legal terms they have not, but surely the rest of us can agree that looted is looted. So coins looted in Palestine and shipped out through Jerusalem would get an AIA export licence if the dealer assured them (perhaps they require documentation?) that these are not 37 kg of ancient coins stripped from the archaeological record within the borders of modern Israel. There is nothing much under Israeli law that the AIA could do to not give a licence. That does not make the coins un-looted though.

So to reiterate, the only question of importance is “where, exactly, did these objects come from?”.

There very probably is not a dealer in Mr Welsh’s acquaintance who does not declare that they are concerned about handling stolen items, after all, the long arm of the law can reach them for that. But they prefer to take a very narrow view of what the word "stolen" means. If one day however the flow of objects stolen from the archaeological record of many source countries were to dry up, I am pretty sure that would be a source of real concern for many dealers. Many dealers will probably find it much more difficult to buy goods from a bloke who bought them from a bloke….. But of course that source of supply will not run out just yet. The coin and minor antiquity market was revitalized as the Balkan artefact mines started production about 1990. Huge loads of them went to the US. There are signals however that these sites are almost exhausted, where will the foreign dealer turn next for a country to supply the quantities the expanding market needs?

Mr Welsh considers that the use of the word “stolen” for illegally excavated items is “something quite different from the normal, plain English definition of that word”. But that is exactly what 25 (+) residents of Utah and Colorado are going on trial for. The word is used in their indictments in the “normal, plain English definition of that word” by Federal authorities. I really would like to see one day "collectors' rights" advocate Welsh arguing that out with them. US pot-digging for entertainment and profit and Balkan metal detecting for entertainment and/or profit are self-evidently in effect exactly the same. They both trash the archaeological record, they both produce collectables. If it is not "intellectual dishonesty" to treat them as in any way different, then let the ACCG and other collectors' "rights" activists show why.

Mr Welsh says that he has come to believe that “Mr. Barford thinks private collecting of anything that might conceivably perhaps have once been a buried artifact should be prohibited by law”. Well, he can make up whatever nonsense he likes, but there are six hundred posts here and equal numbers on several forums (including his own Unidroit-L) which should be ample evidence of what I really think. Let him show his readers one sentence which states even obliquely the opinion he imputes to me. He cannot because I have never said such a thing. This is the boring old "Banning Bogeyman" argument again.

What I do think is that private collecting of archaeological artifacts should be subject to a rigid code of ethics accepted by responsible collectors aware of the damage that has already been done by looting and intent on enjoying their hobby with a clear conscience. I also believe that alongside this, their trade should be regulated better by law than they are now. I believe that there should be transparency in and public scrutiny of all dealings concerning portable antiquities on the open market. Never have I suggested that the trade and collecting should be stopped, that would serve no purpose whatsoever.

At the beginning of his complaint, Welsh moans that I talk of a no-questions-asked market. I do this to make clear what part of the wide range of activities on the global market in archaeological artefacts I see as a problem. The use of this term should make clear that I am not generalising about the entire market, all dealers and all collectors, just the ones that trade in material of indeterminate, or undertermined origins despite the large quantities of illicit material known to come onto the market annually. These are the people who are causing the problem, and certain factions of the pro-collecting lobby (sadly Mr Welsh and his ACCG chief among them) are intent on prolonging precisely these practices by whatever means, fair or foul it seems at times.

“Barford is actually advocating that no one should be allowed to possess or trade in antiquities unless the individual concerned is able to "prove provenance," Well, no again, that is not at all what I said. I think collectors themselves should in the interests of what may be called the hygiene of their collections be rejecting items which the seller cannot actually demonstrate has legitimate provenance. It would be nice to see the cuneiform tablets without any stated provenance and any stated documentation I discussed here a few months ago still on sale because nobody would touch them. They have however almost all gone. I think dealers on the other hand should be constrained by law to maintain documentation of origins of their stock and be able to present that on demand. That is anyway what some countries today require (Canada and Switzerland for example). That seems to be a not unreasonable request since shops and traders in general do tend to have to be able to provide such documentation any time there is doubt about the quality and origin of the objects they sell.

Neither do I see why it should take any kind of “expert investigation to assemble "paper trail" documentation” on the part of dealers proving the provenance of any ancient object coming on the market. A seller has an object they want to sell, the buyer says “no papers, no thanks”. That applies to dealers as well as their clients. After all, we are constantly told that people have been collecting artifacts like coins in the US for six hundred years, so there must be some artifacts out there with a history. So where are they? Apparently, since the trade "never required" documentation of provenance because the antiquity could be appreciated as an art object without, nobody kept the little tray slips in Petrarch’s handwriting. But I really do not see why the world's archaeological record should continue to suffer as a result of their sheer negligence.

*Addendum, now see Marcus Preen's comment reminding me of an episode I had fogotten.