US Dugup Coin Collectors: Raising the Standard, or Lowering the Bar?

The Ancient Coin Collectors' Guild based in the United States of America is highly active among collectors, trying to create a position for the collection of ancient dugup coins from foreign lands in modern society. It is one of the most vociferous of the lobbies supporting the collecting of portable antiquities in the English-speaking world, and for that reason, it deserves attention and scrutiny.

Surely an organization such as this should be striving to instill among its membership impeccable standards of ethics in the acquisition and disposal of the portable antiquities they collect. Only by these means can the hobby as a whole escape the opprobrium which attaches to the no-questions-asked market which shields the illegal digger and exporter of freshly dugup antiquities of illegal origin. Such an organization should be at the forefront of raising standards.

This is not however what this organization is doing. It has, it is true, a weasel-worded code of ethics of no real worth, but everything the ACCG and the public statements of its officers aim to achieve is a lowering of standards of 'due diligence' and ethical dealing in archaeological objects in the trade as a whole. This is the aim of the Freedom of Information request, to ascertain the background of the recent imposition of temporary import restrictions on undocumented archaeological objects from Cyprus and China. This is the background of their recent provocative coin stunt. They say they are preserving the "freedom to collect", but forget to add the words, "in the couldn't-care-less ways we've always done".

That is simply no longer good enough. The current status quo is damaging and one wonders at the motives of all those so concerned to maintain it, and to so strenuously deny the self evident truth that the current form of the antiquities market is an ally of the looters and smugglers.

Let us have a look at who the ACCG benefactors are, let us look who supports their efforts to maintain the no-questions-asked trading of archaeological objects in the US and worldwide, let us see who supports a lowering of the bar.