Portable Antiquity Collecting and Heritage Issues

While looking for something else, I found an old text on the internet and thought it was an interesting illustration of what kind of obstructive behaviour the British archaeological resource preservation lobby are constantly up against when dealing with British artefact hunters. This is the description from the point of view of delegates of the National Couuncil of Metal Detectorists to the draft Treasure Act which – for its propaganda value – the global pro-collecting lobby sees as the best thing for collecting of portable antiquities since sliced bread. The text is entitled “A record of a meeting held at National Heritage, Cockspur Street, London, on Monday 24th October 1994”. It would be interesting to see the official minutes of this consultation meeting.

It was the unanimous view off (sic) the delegates that we should make every effort to convince National Heritage that the Treasure Bill was unnecessary, unjust, unworkable, and too expensive to implement. […] This is a “metal" bill. It affects only metal detector users, and the honest ones (our members) do not need it. The thieves with detectors whom they need to address will not be affected by this bill. If the present Theft Laws cannot control them........ - this bill certainly will not ! No answer !

It is interesting to note the contrast between the NCMD insistence that the "honest ones don't need it" with the sharp rise in reported Treasure cases in England and Wales that the PAS highlights as being the result of its own activities in the past decade, suggesting much is being reorted now that would have simply disappeared before the PAS was set up. It would seem that - like so much in the topsy-turvy world of portable antiquity collecting - mere assertions of 'honesty" are relatively meaningless.

Also interesting historically:

“Our delegates made the point that too much land is being scheduled. There is no way, in the foreseeable future, for even sites already scheduled to be dug before acid rain, nitrate fertilizers and building development all take their toll. Not only that, but sites already scheduled years ago, examined, and low on priority lists for re-examination because of the new sites waiting for examination should be descheduled........... and handed over to us for our expert examination. Listened to with interest!

Yeah, right, too many scheduled sites... so they want us to deschedule scheduled sites to expose them to the "expert examination" of these people - these being the pre-PAS days of course, so what kind of information would have been recorded and made available if this proposition had been taken up is anyone's guess. I guess the message of why sites were being preserved had not really sunk in among this crowd, the national delegates appointed by their milieu to represent the hobby to the government.

In Italy, reports Philip Willan ('Art hit squad takes on tomb raiders after relics looted ') “robbing tombs and other buried archaeological sites has long been a popular rural pastime. Like tax evasion, it was known to be illegal but not particularly frowned upon. The homes of wealthy professionals often contained a secret hoard of archaeological treasures and many felt they might just as well be in private hands as gathering dust in a museum storeroom. In recent times, attitudes have changed and there is a growing awareness that the unscientific excavations of the tombaroli are stealing the country's history, as well as an assortment of its antiquities.”

This change in public attitude has resulted from a persistent application of strategies adopted by the Italian government which has made life increasingly difficult for the looter. Firstly there is more open discussion of the problem in the media, there is also closer monitoring of archaeological sites, effective prosecution of offenders, with tougher penalties planned, and especially the aggressive prosecution of museum curators and middlemen who trade no-questions-asked in illegally excavated antiquities which is drying up the market for their goods.

This seems to be reducing the number of illegal excavations. In the 1990s, the carabinieri art squad responsible for dealing with this problem would discover about 1000 illegal digs annually. Recently it was down to just 37. Of course it may well be that part of the reasons for this may be that the looters had already destroyed most of the accessible part of the resource they were so mercilessly despoiling - it is after all finite.

An important element in the fight against these exploitive culture criminals is that the psychological climate had changed and Italian public is more aware of the problem and efects of looting. Maria Bonmassar, a spokeswoman for the Italian culture ministry. said: "In the past, if people found antiquities while digging the foundations of a house they would try to conceal them. Now, there is an awareness that this is a part of our cultural patrimony."

It seems to me there is a lesson here for the supporters of the PAS of England and Wales as the "only possible" approach to cutting down the exploitation of archaeological sites as a source of collectables. Becoming "partners" with the tomborolli and artefact hunters and thus misleading public debate about the nature and effects of the activity they are doing archaeology a disservice. The reduction in looting postulated (though hardly demonstrated) by the recent "Nighthawking" report in the UK pales into insignificance besides the Italian achievement.

Willan's article suggests that a key element was cutting through the network of dealers selling to foreign markets and prosecuting those at the no-questions-asked receiving end. It is heartening to see that the UK might be considering the first steps towards such a regulation of its own markets.

As a matter of accuracy, while reported as current news, Willan's article is largely a rehash of an earlier article Anguillara Sabazia 'Italy's crackdown on art looting keeps plunderers in check, for now' (The Associated Press, e.g. Herald Tribune July 5, 2007 ).

Photo: Sicilian Carabineri doing their job, obviously here after arresting a metal detector using plunderer.

I really cannot agree with Derek Fincham’s earlier ideas on the Portable Antiquities Scheme, but was intrigued by his latest offering, a draft paper Fraud on Our Heritage: Towards a Rigorous Standard for the Good Faith Acquisition of Antiquities in which he discusses the theoretical underpinning for "a new and rigorous standard for the acquisition of art and antiquities". I bet that will not make him too popular with the no-questions-asked portable antiquities dealers. Although he begins with an example from the UK, the paper quickly focuses on US law and US legalese, perhaps the title should reflect that. Some of the legalese was a bit above my head but I gather this good faith business is a little more complex than US portable antiquity dealers like to pretend. His conclusion is:

No presumption as to good faith should be tolerated any longer. Rather increased scrutiny of the antiquities trade is needed in which objective evidence of a purchaser's investigation of the legitimate title of the object in question must be the bare minimum for the acquisition of good faith in a given transfer.

With which I wholeheartedly agree.

Photo: Swiss Tony, used car dealer. He has a nice suit and a way with words, but would you trust him enough to buy undocumented goods from him?

China said it will tighten control on the activities of Christie's
International, hours after the auction house sold a pair of Qing Dynasty bronzes in Paris for 31.4 million euros ($40 million), ignoring calls to return them. London-based Christie's must give details of the ownership and provenance of any artifacts it wants to bring into or out of China, the State Administration of
Cultural Heritage said today in a statement on its Website. Antiques that are without papers won't be allowed to enter or leave. [Bloomberg]

To judge from the forums it would seem that many dealers and collectors agree with James Sung, a political science professor at City University in Hong Kong who said: "China has overreacted". I would like to ask Christie's international to what extent they would have been wanting to take into and bring out of China artefacts without the proper paperwork anyway? Surely the right answer to that question is "none". I find it very odd that collectors can question a foreign state's right to determine what it will and will not allow across its own borders.

Katherine D. Vitale has published a text called “ The War on Antiquities: United States Law and Foreign Cultural Property”. It seems rather too pro-collecting in tone for my taste. Surely the title should read the “war on illicit antiquities”, since if somebody is trading items of legitimate provenance and can document the fact then they have no problem with US law. It's heavy going in places which leads the author to the conclusion:

“The United States should be enforcing the standards of CPIA, not those of NSPA and ARPA, because they expose museum officials to prosecution […].”

If a member of staff in any other kind of US public institution is found to have been knowingly handling illicitly-obtained material, are they not to face any consequences?

I must admit I’d not noticed before the full import of the precise wording of section 470ee(c) of the US Archaeological Resources Protection Act “No person may sell, purchase, exchange, transport, receive . . in interstate or foreign commerce, any archaeological resource excavated, removed, sold…”. Interesting. I guess that means private collectors too.

Washington portable antiquities dealer, Sue McGovern-Huffman "Sands of Time" is offering many "exquisite rare and collectable" antiquities "that date from between 4000BC to the 8th century AD. Geographically, they originate from Egypt, the Near East and Europe and include objects fashioned from marble, bronze, glass, gold, pottery and stone". And human flesh. Dessicated. One item of "ancient art" and "culture" being offered by this dealer is the barbarously lopped-off foot of a human cadaver. Ostensibly it is a fragment of Egyptian mummy ("Item ID: EM806 An Egyptian Mummified Foot, New Kingdom ca 1550-1069BC") , but the only "provenance" offered is "Private Delaware collection acquired in the 1930's". Unlike the UK and many other countries, the USA seems not yet to have any firm laws on the commercial use of human tissues and body parts (see a number of scandals involving US funeral homes in recent years). I wonder then if the Washington dealer could get collectors and put up on her website for sale ("price on request") the blackened foot of a Blackfoot Indian, or some Anasazi ankle bones, or maybe an "Indian skull" or two. If she feels it is ethical trade to openly sell ancient body parts, why not all ancient body parts? I wonder what value in dollars she places on her newly-acquired lopped off foot?

UPDATE 25/2/09
I see Mrs McGovern reads my blog. The chopped off dried shrivelled human foot which she was trying to sell yesterday* has been replaced under the link I originally gave here (and with the same inventory number) now with a picture of a wooden foot [I have replaced that link in the post above so the original message makes sense]. The webpage currently states that it also is "New Kingdom" and was apparently acquired in the 1930s and ended up in a "Delaware collection" - how many New Kingdom feet does this dealer have from the same collection? This one has a price though: EUR 509.28

Lest readers think as the result of Mrs McGovern's switching the pictures that this blog's author cannot tell the difference between a wooden foot from a Delaware collection and a broken off bit of corpse, the original webpage was up long enough to find its way into Google cache, links here and here which should work a while. The link to the mummified foot from a Google search now reads: Sorry, this product is not currently available.

So how has she disposed of the original item which had the inventory number EM 806? How do you get rid of bits of dead bodies in Washington if you decide not to try to sell them? Aren't there laws about at least that?

A while ago there was a discussion about all this on Yahoo's Ancient Artefacts discussion group (from 7th Feb 2008 onwards). It turns out that not only did dealer Ernie Krumbein have another unprovenanced ripped-off dessicated cadaver foot for sale (not the same one, initially he mistook it for a hand), but a lot of other members had other body bits. "Jeffkeith2001" has a mummy head ("i[t] doesnt give me the creeps and I promise to keep it safe and respect it the best way I know how"), Chris Simons has a finger, Bob "Manor antiques" has a "beautiful mummified hand [...], wrapped in linen [...] I had a special glass case made for it, with a royal purple velvet lining. It sits atop my fireplace in the living room"... . Now we are constantly being told by the pro-collecting lobby that portable antiquity collectors take these things and use them to "learn about the past". I can see where that argument might have some grounds for believability (though personally I do not accept it is as simple as that) in the case of coins and egyptian amulets and other "art"work with pictorial messages for example. I do not see that a piece of dried human flesh falls into the same category. We all know what a foot looks like, we most of us have two of them. I do not see what one can "learn about the past" having a hunk of corpse in a velvet-lined case on the mantelpiece. That sounds more like curio-collecting, cheap thrill generation which has nothing to do with advancing any "personal vision of the past", or "learning about other cultures". This kind of collecting seems to cater for the nastier side of "bragging rights", trying to get the neighbour's kids talking about the collector in hushed tones ("he's got a real MUMMY on his mantelpiece"). A nasty business.

UPDATE OF THE UPDATE (March 1st):
I can see Mrs McGovern regards human feet - real or sculpted a touchy subject and since I last wrote has now totally removed from her site the page to which the link above refers. Originally it was a shrivelled piece of human cadaver masquerading as "culture", then it was a New Kingdom sculpted wooden foot with the same inventory number and stated to be from a "Delaware" collection like the corpse chunk (and a NK canopic jar top now apparently sold). Now that page has gone and the wooden foot has reappeared on another page... here (until she changes the description and moves it again I guess) - but looky here... it's got a new inventory number, date and description, "EW713 An Egyptian wood foot from a statue, Middle Kingdom ca 2040-1783BC" and NOW it is provenanced "Private Californian collection" (is she making this up or getting her inventory confused with all this readjustment of inventory numbers?) With manipulation like this going on in the open, what in this trade is there that one can actually trust? But the price has gone down to $ 495.00 (EUR 391.50 ) perhaps because the dealer herself is no longer sure where it came from. The saga of the Footprints in the Sands of Time goes on and on... Pathetic.

*(Steven John wrote on Ancient Artifacts yesterday about the dealer's new website: "Only one criticism. On the 'New Items' page.. that mummified foot scares the pants off me!")

MORE FEET ON SANDS OF TIME (6th March)
It seems these are not Sue McGovern's own feet with the clumpy shoes apparently straddling an ancient pot from "Private Californian collection, acquired in the 1960's and then by descent"(sic). This is apparently an attempt at antiquity-dealing humour.

A few days ago the UK tabloid "the Sun" published an article stating that Atlantis had been discovered. Bernie Bamford a 38 year old aeronautical engineer from Chester had discovered on Google Earth at 31 15'15.53N 24 15'30.53 W “a perfect rectangle the size of Wales lying on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean nearly 3 miles down, a host of criss-crossing lines, looking like a map of a vast metropolis, are enclosed by a boundary.” Bernie is quoted as saying: “It looks like an aerial map of Milton Keynes. It must be man-made.” While actually Milton Keynes looks nothing like this (wrong colour too) people have become very excited by this announcement. The Sun even got a US archaeologist to comment… One reader comments online : “... it's an abandoned undersea ufo base - it was only a few fathoms down before the last polar shift...” and another (tellingly calling themselves “Burningbooks”) suggests “Seems to me we are looking ever more for eyes in the sky and lost lands and aliens these days... maybe...”.

In fact the grid had been announced on a website before that by Larkin and Cynthia Jones.

Sadly for the desktop mysteries-of-the-past solvers, a little more honest approach to enquiry would have quickly revealed that there is a more prosaic explanation of these lines, it’s a piece of poor computer modeling of bathymetric data (there are apparently other examples – one off the coast of Ireland apparently and some similar traces NW of the Faroes). Presumably at some stage this problem will be cleaned up. The conspiracy theorists will then have a field day imagining a ‘cover up’ I suspect that for many years ahead we will be seeing this “Atlantis was proved” story resurfacing in the popular press, inviting reflection on “why people believe weird things”.

It seems to me that in the field of collecting there are some of these “weird things” being believed in. That ancient coins are “not artifacts”, that fresh portable antiquities on the market “do not come from the looting of archaeological sites” and so on. There seems no limit to the degree that one can show that these comfortable myths collapse on deeper examination and confrontation with other facts, despite this their proponents go on believing them and persuading like-minded desktop solvers of mysteries-of-the-past that its the "experts" who "got it wrong". Like Atlantis.

So lobbyists such as the Atlantean Commercial Coin Group carry on spreading the myths.

Photo: These are not looters' trenches, honest (from Google Earth).

A few weeks ago I mentioned an article claiming to be “World Coin News” in which Richard Giedroyc a numismojournalist implicated me in something or other. I pointed out that the gentleman had not really grasped the gist of the China MOU which he was moaning about and suggested his readers might be better served if he checked out the facts before setting pen to paper.

Lo and behold, Mr Giedroyc has just come up with another one ( Cultural Patrimony Policy Still a Concern ), again sycophantically quoting the Executive Director of coin delers' lobby group ACCG. Giedroyc now demonstrates his belief that it is only "socialists" who are interested in conservation and people obeying the law. Astounding (he should meet my Mum, a true blue Thatcherite conservationist).

Where are these mythical Left wing archaeologists in the United States allegedly "against private ownership of any antique item regardless of how it was acquired"? Can Mr Giedrojc provide his readers a few references to statements such as this but made by these people themselves (and are not just words which numismoprovocateurs have put into their mouths)? Otherwise we'd be justified in concluding that this is at best alarmist overinterpretation and at worst simple myth-making to persuade collectors that they need the ACCG to "watch their backs' (sic) for them. Are the problems in getting new members so acute that the organization has to rely on misrepresentation and scare tactics to recruit them?

Who are these anti-antique-ownership "lefties" ? Name them and shame them ACCG !! Mr Giedrojć?

"Peru appears to be the farthest that purloined Iraqi treasures have traveled. Most other recovered items have come from neighboring countries. More than 2,500 artifacts have returned to Iraq from Jordan, along with more than 760 from Syria. Many stolen items have made it to further west. Thirteen pieces were found in Italy; and at least another dozen have surfaced in the United States, including a large statue of a Sumerian king".

(Mark Kukis Iraq's Ancient Treasures Lost and Found Time Feb. 19, 2009). He forgot the ones that are reported to have ended up in London in 2003. Arrests were apparently made, but I do not recall any mention of charges. I would have expected to see more reports of material being stopped by customs officials in the Gulf States.

It really is difficult to believe that only "a dozen" items wandered west across the Atlantic since 2003 and all twelve of them were stopped by US customs (the ones stopped at Lima airport were reported to have been found in the luggage of a US citizen going to the US). In 2008, the USA returned more than a thousand illegally exported items from Iraq that had been seized before the 2003 looting ("No criminal charges have been filed at this time in any of these investigations").

The "statue" referred to by Mark Kukis is presumably the Entemena one excavated in Ur. It is perhaps not entirely accurate to say it was recovered "in the United States", it seems to have got there through a "sting" operation in which one of the Aboutaam brothers seems to have played a positive role. Interestingly enough, though there was a lot of fanfare about the return of the object itself to the Iraqis in 2006, I do not recall seeing anything about the persons involved in its smuggling or offering for sale being apprehended or punished. This seems to be a general pattern, I get the impression from reading these accounts that the actions undertaken were "object-centred", rather than "preservation-centred", aimed at actually catching the smugglers and breaking the chain of the market in illicit antiquities.

Mexico has denied the request of controversial U.S. wreck hunting and salvage company Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. of Tampa, Florida, to explore and recover artifacts from a sunken 17th-century Spanish galleon in the Gulf of Mexico, the government said Monday. The galleon Our Lady of Juncal, was part of a fleet hit by a powerful storm in 1631 and sank with the loss of many hands.
A statement by Odyssey’s chairman Greg Stemm claims that "the proposal presented to Mexico for archaeological services [sic] is in compliance with the UNESCO Convention and would keep all cultural artifacts together in a collection." The proposal was turned down by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, because it "is not intended to conduct research and does not have the approval of archaeologists or an academic institution of recognized prestige". Odyssey does however seem to have won the British government over on the Sussex and looks likely to over the 1744 Victory wreck too. They do not seem worried by such issues. But good for the Mexicans.

Those US dealers and collectors of no-questions-asked antiquities (the usual suspects) and others who seem to have jumped to the defence of British artefact hunters might be interested to see some posts on Facebook from a small semi-literate group calling themselves "The Metal Detecting Nighthawks". The members include at least four people from London, one from Nottingham, one from Wales and a gentleman with a Scottish sounding name (log on for details). I'd like to think this was a very bad joke, I fear though it is not.

The topics discussed on this forum tend to be about “looting I did last night” with a excursus on the relative values of a “tumbler” (sic) and electrolytic stripping for cleaning the antiquities (for the uninitiated – neither should be used on archaeological metalwork). It is interesting to note that these persons mention the places they do their searching and it is clear that they drive some considerable distances to get to some of them, presumably specific sites.

These unrepentant individuals are jubilant that their hobby was recently in the news due to the recent publicity around the release of the Nighthawking report and have a few things to say about it. For example: “Me and Dan were once stopped by the police, they didnt give two shits that we didnt have permision and just let us carry on! I think they have slightly more important things to do.” (London) and from Nottingham “hey up dave , theres no mention about my area notts , must be theres nowt round ere lol thats wat they think lol [***] em eh” [misspelt expletive deleted]. One London resident admits “I hate farmers. Inbreds.” To which another Londoner replied [spelling and punctuation as in original]:

It just isn't right, Who says the land belongs to them, In my eyes no one as the right to own land, I have the right to roam and i will. I'm helping to preserve finds by getting them out of the ground, finds that would be lost via chemicals & pesticides that corrode metal, Also helping by keeping the finds away from Archy's who in my experience are crooks and keep the looty for themselves. Don't be worried about getting bust, Police arn't interested, tresspass is a civil matter, plough theft is an offence if you have finds on your person. As a final note i want to add a comparitive... someone who pays £10,* detects all day, doesn't fill is holes in and doesn't record his finds OR someone who nighthawks, respects the land, fills is holes in and records his finds. Which one is Dick Turpin? and who as the right morals?

I wonder where a Dick Turpin nighthawk would go to “record” his finds? To the PAS(?) or to a rival “recording” scheme? We may ask ourselves what function "recording" them would have... The Nighthawking Report (page 93, point 9.3.9) mentions the concerns about the use of the PAS to give tainted objects a false legitimacy. When I mentioned this on this blog, readers may recall Roger Bland threatened to have the law on me. I would say that since the Facebook gang give what seem to be their real names, he might do better looking elsewhere for someone to criticise. Have any of their finds turned up on the PAS database?

_
* I think this individual is talking about metal detecting rallies. It may be that these people from heavily urbanised areas see only two alternatives, either paying to go on a commercial artefact hunting rally or going on land without permission but for no payment. The option that it they could get free permission from a farmer as do many responsible artefact hunters seems not to have occurred to them. "Archy's" (sic) in this text presumably means archaeologists.

Photo: candid action photo or posed? From the Metal Detecting Nighthawks page of Facebook (author unknown)

There was an extraordinary article published recently " Portable Antiquities Scheme moves to allay fears over nighthawking" by Richard Moss published on the 18th in "culture24" (which used to be MLA's '24 hours Museum'). In it Roger Bland head of the Portable Antiquities Scheme attempts to allay any fears the readers of the recent press coverage in the UK might have had about the scale of the problem of the various types of illegal artefact hunting in the United Kingdom.

It's not really a big problem he tries to convince us, along with "metal detectorist" and commercial artefact hunting rally organizer Norman Smith (here, with comment by US collector Jorg Lueke), former ACCG president Peter Tompa, ACCG officer, Californian coin dealer ('Classical coins') Dave Welsh and New York coin dealer ('Imperial coins') Alfredo de la Fe (see a pattern here?).

Over on Looting matters, Roger Bland attempts to defend his position as reported in the Culture 24 article. he admonishes david Gill:
Rather than just quoting headlines and opinions on this subject, it might be helpful to look at the facts that are published in the Nighthawking report. The problem here is that the report is pretty low on facts, it is based on a poor dataset and is rather incoherently-written. The label “nighthawking” is totally unsatisfactory and covers a number of different phenomena. Indeed, as Bland notes the report does indeed conclude (though on very uncertain evidence) that deliberate illegal artefact hunting on SMs is “down”, though I think not enough significance is attached to what it also says [Report p. 91] that one reason for this may be that all those likely to produce the material these people are after have already been denuded to such a state that further exploitation is uneconomical – this also means that of course that their archaeological and cultural value has been damaged severely. Likewise as Dr Bland himself points out the report explains why the raiding of archaeological excavations is less than it was in the mid 1990s [p. 91-2].

It seems rather disingenuous to claim that because the reports results suggested there two kinds of “nighthawking” were reduced that this is in some way a success of the PAS. The latter does not in any case not cover Scotland or Northern Ireland – in the latter the researchers found NO “nighthawking” (while in the former we do not have the 1995 figures). The counties identified however as most strongly affected are among those in which PAS outreach has been at a very high level of intensity and lasted longest.

Roger Bland further writes on Looting matters: But the facts in the Report do not bear out the assertion that came across in some of the media reporting that nighthawking is a growing problem. Well I suppose that really depends which “facts” one seizes on and which one ignores. I would say that the apparent non-reporting of treasure items in Scotland is not a problem on the decline, indeed we need more investigation to establish its scale, though measures are now being put in place in Scotland to combat it.

The 1995 study did not gather statistics on illegal artefact hunting on non-scheduled sites (ie the vast majority of known archaeological sites in the UK). The 2009 study had great difficulty gathering information on it, so it is impossible to say for sure using the gathered data whether it is actually “up” or “down”. That however is not the most important point. The results of the COSMIC study quoted by the OA “Nighthawking” report [p 31-2] however do suggest that it is currently a very substantial problem indeed. The report even suggests [p. 91] that this type of site is now being increasingly targeted as the formerly more productive scheduled sites have become denuded of finds.

Roger Bland suggests we in PAS want to work with EH to take the recommendations forward, but one of them was convincing the police and the courts (and landowners and law makers) that the problem is a serious and important one. That actually was one of the main reasons for compiling the report in the first place. I fail to see how the PAS is helping matters by issuing public statements working against this policy like “the report shows it is less of a problem than it used to be […] and we’re keen to get that message across”. What “message” is there here and on whose behalf is the PAS “getting it across”? In whose interests is the PAS trying to persuade the British public that this is “less than a problem than it used to be” when looking at the whole of the UK there is no evidence that this is the case at all (and it is simply weasel wording to say “but in a lot of areas of the country it’s hardly known about”).

The whole crux of the matter is that all the above-mentioned apologists seem to be saying that it is wrong to point out the problems engendered by existing policies, we should be looking at the "benefits" (sic) brought by the current system. That however is no excuse for not gathering information on illegal activity and discussing what to do about it, or showing that there is a need to do anything about it. This is like suggesting that since most citizens are law-abiding, we do not need to investigate crime. That would only benefit the criminals.

How ironic also it is that the article is illustrated by a photo of the Newark torc which newspaper reports indicate had been found under somewhat questionable circumstances by a man reportedly searching an aircraft crash site with a metal detector. The law of the United Kingdom (Protection of Military Remains Act 1986) requires that an artefact hunter (such as a "metal detectorist") needs a permit to search such sites. Enquiries last year indicated that no such permit had been issued to the finder by the relevant authority before the discovery was made.

Adrian Humphreys ('Plundered artifacts returned, but problem continues', National Post, Feb 18, 2009) writes:

Five valuable cultural artifacts seized by border guards while being smuggled into Canada have been returned to two African governments, ending their mysterious life on the run while highlighting the illicit trade in cultural antiquities, a pursuit that bonds wealthy art patrons to villainous thugs.

The items in question were two terracotta figurines and "an undated but culturally significant wood carving", repatriated to Nigeria, and three inscribed bronze bracelets turned over to officials from Mali. Of course any provenance these objects may once have had was (like that of many others) lost when they passed no-questions-asked antiquities market which is a cover for the illicit trade in "tainted" antiquities.

Nigerian High Commissioner Iyorwuese Hagher praised Canada's vigilance and called on citizens to support efforts aimed at "exposing syndicates who are still engaging in theft and smuggling and illicit trade in valuable items that form part of Nigeria's national heritage. "Africa continues to wallow in poverty when their raw materials and even artifacts continue to be plundered by thieves that benefit from illegal trade in these materials in international markets," he said.

The newspaper reports that on average, there are more than three seizures of suspected illicit cultural items at Canada's borders every month, according to figures provided by the Canada Border Services Agency. In 2007, border agents reported 38 seizures. The Movable Cultural Property Directorate has investigated 240 potentially illegal imports of plundered antiquities and made 13 returns since 1978 to eight countries, including Egypt, Colombia, Peru and Syria. Nevertheless despite their vigilance a lot is probably still getting through, a lot more resources are needed to curb this problem.

The Canadian newspaper points out that the illicit trade is fuelled, in large measure, by patrons in western nations with an insatiable desire to posess "unique objets d'art". As the value of these items goes up as legitimate sources dry up, it becomes more profitable for those willing and able to supply them by illicit means.

The illicit art market, of which plundered cultural items is a subspecialty, is considered the world's fourth-largest criminal enterprise - after drugs, guns and money-laundering - generating about $4- to $6-billion a year, according to the United Nations.

It is interesting however to see that the Canadian media seem currently eager to inform public opinion about the background to this trade (see here too) which we may contrast with the misinformation campaigns being conducted by US dealers-in-no-questions-asked antiquities which tries to play down the contribution made to their market by illicitly-obtained artefacts. Obviously a line drawn on the map acrosss the North American continent is dividing something - but what?

There are two new blogs which seem worth a visit, both of them by collectors of portable antiquities, but these are not the usual "private property/constitutional rights/hang the rest" tub thumping collecting-mantra megaphones that seem to be springing up all over the place and all saying much the same thing (usually about coins). These two are different.

The first is by David Knell, British collector of ancient lamps whom I have had occasion to mention here earlier (Collection with Attitude). His blog is simply called "Ancient Heritage" and begins with a post called
Minor antiquities: the importance of keeping records which makes some interesting points with which I am broadly in agreement. He ends it saying: "Collectors can, and must, show that instead of working against conservation, they are working with it". ( A point seemingly lost on one apparently transatlantic "Lingocreative" who commented on it at length - but adressing his remarks to me rather than David... ).

The second blog is by an American lady called Robyn who collects Egyptian antiquities, but ethically. Her blog "Pieces of the Past: Ethical Antiquities Collecting" is also getting underway, at the moment with three interesting posts, the first on "why we collect, and the problems it can bring", then a discussion of some of the arguments we have all seen offered against responsible collecting and then a mention of the recent Greek vet case. Worth keeping an eye on.

While on the subject, I suspect I have not mentioned another long-established website of interest with similar aims. British "metal detectorist" Corinne Mills has a website "Metal Detecting... What's it all about?" which is dedicated to responsible metal detecting and is worth a look. A lady with the courage of her convictions.

A prominent "metal detectorist" has reacted furiously to claims in a report written for English Heritage that illegal “nighthawks” are pillaging the region’s hidden history, it says in the Northern Echo today. Norman Smith, from Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, is the organizer of frequent and sometimes huge commercial artefact hunting rallies, mostly in the north of England but also at other places around the country. Smith yesterday accused English Heritage of being misleading and said: “Illegal metal detecting is now virtually non-existent.” Smith said he helped with the Nighthawking survey, carried out for English Heritage by Oxford Archaeology, and that it found the problem to be minimal. “English Heritage are notorious for anti-detecting feelings and have unsuccessfully campaigned for years to have metal detecting banned", he said.

That's funny. We all remember the Water Newton rally which Mr Smith organized, and some of us heard the stories (on the Rally UK forum I think it was) in which participants recount sitting in their tents the first night and watching the torches of the nighthawks in the adjacent fields moving about. We recall in particular Mr Smith's remarks after the Stixwould rally reported here.
My parting comment on this subject, which I make in full knowledge that archaeologists visit this site, is that during the Oxford Archaeology project on nighthawking I visited London twice at my own expense to defend this wonderful hobby of ours and during the discussions of the Code of Practice for Rallies, did the same thing, but when I shouted from the rooftops that dishonest metal detecting was almost non-existent I showed the greatest of naiivity, and it is obvious that, although such illegal activities have diminished on scheduled sites the problem of nighthawking is still a major challenge, and the hard work of thousands of honest, genuine blokes who detect regularly is being undermined by dishonest, immoral thieving b******s, who live off the backs of the majority who are the “good guys”. The problem is we all know who they are and do nowt about it.

So the Nighthawking survey "found the problem was minimal" or was told that the problem was minimal? There is a difference Mr Smith. This well illustrates the sort of thing that the Survey was up against. Mr Smith admits freely to his fellows that there is a serious problem, but when an official attempt is made to gather facts, suddenly the "problem is minimal". We note he said he went to meet the Nighthawking survey people "to defend this wonderful hobby of ours" by trying to persuade the investigators that "dishonest metal detecting was almost non-existent". It is notable that after over a decade of liaison and strengthening the links between "detectorists" and archaeologists, that people like Mr Smith and his fellows refuse to share any information they have (and I am sure they have a lot) on illegal activity with a group of people trying to find out how we can best preserve the archaeological resource from further destruction due to the activities of these people.

A national survey has been carried out into illegal artefact hunting in the UK and Crown Dependencies taking place between 1995 (the date of the last attempt to quantify the problem) and 2008. The survey (the so-called “Nighthawking Survey”: Anon [!] 2009 Nighthawks and Nighthawking: Damage to Archaeological Sites in the UK and Crown Dependencies caused by Illegal Searching and Removal of Antiquities, Strategic Study Final Report, Oxford Archaeology for English Heritage) was undertaken by Oxford Archaeology. The study was commissioned by English Heritage back in May 2006 and it was supported by Cadw, Historic Scotland, Northern Ireland Environment Agency, Archaeology Guernsey, Jersey Heritage Trust, Manx National Heritage, The National Museums Scotland, National Museum of Wales, and the Portable Antiquities Scheme. As reported here earlier, the report was launched on Monday Feb. 16th.

The survey has revealed that despite the UK having some of the most liberal laws on artefact hunting in the world, the threat to the UK’s archaeological heritage posed by illegal artefact hunting is high. It affects both sites protected by law as well as illegal hunting and removal of artefactual material for collection and sale from other groups of archaeological sites.

The main culprits are artefact hunters who use metal detectors, since – unlike pot diggers or those searching for stone tools – they can work in the dark, and avoid being seen on protected areas. For this reason the offence has become colloquially known as “nighthawking”. The Oxford Archaeology survey concludes that the crime is most prevalent in the central and eastern counties (Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Oxfordshire, and the Yorkshire region) but rare in the west and south-west and Scotland but is almost unheard of in Northern Ireland, and the Crown Dependencies. According to the report, so-called 'Honey pot' sites such as Roman settlements are often targeted repeatedly (with regard another discussion, it is notable how many of the case studies mention the involvement of ancient coins which recall a certain US interest group insists "are not taken from archaeological sites" by looters). The period after ploughing is the most common time for the activity, with considerable damage caused not only to the buried archaeological remains but also to crops and fields.

The report finds that for various reasons violators of the laws intended to protect Britain’s buried archaeological heritage are rarely punished. This is a low priority crime for British police, who often do not know how to deal with infringements. Cases of arrest or prosecution are at an all time low, convictions even more so and penalties are woefully insufficient to act as any kind of deterrent. Since 1995, only 26 cases have resulted in formal legal action, with the punishment usually being a small fine from as little as £38 (Illegally parking a car in Britain carries a £120 fine). The secrecy surrounding the crime means that it is significantly under-reported, the lack of successful prosecution over the past few decades has led to the lack of confidence of the victims in the legal process. The survey found out that only 14% of landowners, when discovering that their property has been afflicted by nighthawking, have reported it to the police, thus 86% of cases remain unreported. Most landowners who recognise the problem responded by tackling the culprits themselves or imposing a complete ban on metal detecting or the responsible reporting of finds made on their land (which they argue would increase the likelihood of clandestine looting).

Yet it turns out that a regional survey (East Midlands) suggests that 17% of farmers in the region were affected. In the UK however there are approximately 300,000 active farms, so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that this is a problem affecting archaeological sites on up to 50 000 farms in the UK, the report itself concludes that incidences of looting are "down" (I will examine this important problem, already discussed here a few weeks ago, in a separate post, maybe tomorrow when I have read the 212 pages of the report more thoroughly).

Although most of the 10 000 artefact hunters in Britain “know who these people are”, it is telling that in the survey only 20 of them contacted Oxford with any information. The National Council for Metal Detecting (their main representative body) was initially also less than co-operative – which matches their lack of co-operation in the 1995 survey. Relatively few of the affected landowners contacted the survey and volunteered information. This severely hampered the information gathering at the basis of the report, but its authors are clear that the lack of reported incidents creates a false picture of the seriousness of the problem.

Key recommendations of The Nighthawking Survey (slightly edited):
1. Raise awareness of the negative effects of illegal artefact hunting in the UK. Provide clear guidance to the police, Crown Prosecution Service and Magistrates on the impact of nighthawking on archaeological records and understanding, how to identify that it has taken place, how to collect evidence for prosecution and appropriate penalties;

2. Provide guidance to landowners on identifying nighthawking and what to do when they encounter its traces;

3. Establish a central database of reported nighthawking incidents and
promote its use to enable data gathering;

4. publicise positive aspects of responsible artefact hunting and the negative effects of breaking the law then the criminal element will stop thieving (that's what it suggests folks)

5. Keep funding the PAS to further strengthen links between archaeologists and some artefact hunters and collectors then the criminal element stop thieving (seriously).

6. Get some artefact hunters involved in archaeological activities then the others will stop thieving (I'm not making this up)

7. Implement recent European initiatives on the selling of antiquities,
which increase the obligation on sellers of antiquities to provide provenances and establish legal title; urge e bay to introduce more stringent monitoring of antiquities with a UK origin offered for sale on their website, as they have done in Germany, Switzerland and Austria;

Recommendations 4-6 are the usual fluffy bunny politically-correct nonsense fashionable in British archaeological circles these days about “rais[ing] awareness of the positive effects of responsible metal detecting” (no mention here about discussing the desirability of encouraging artefact hunting and collecting), plus of course “reaffirm[ing] the contribution of the Portable Antiquities Scheme” (to what precisely?) and “encourag[ing] the integration of metal detecting into archaeological work”. The latter is really totally ambiguous if you think about what is usually meant by the inadequate label “metal detecting”. These three propositions are really quite puzzling, given the report's general premise, upheld throughout that it is not the responsible metal detectorists who can be held responsible in any way for the "nighthawking" but a totally different group of people with criminal and anti-social tendencies that we should not confuse with the ones that are "partners" of archaeology.

The report as a whole is rather incoherently written, it seems to have gone for length rather than clarity of delivery, and the (unnamed) authors lose sight of its aims in several places, and includes much which is irrelevant and padding. It also has a clearly pro-collecting agenda. I really am at a loss what the whole of Appendix 13 [pp 65-71] which is unattributed (who and what is "SRC"?) and misleading and has no relevance to any significant part of a report on illegal artefact hunting. The report itself is anonymous ""it is not policy for this document to name individuals"...

.

Vignette: Looking at Nighthawks (famous art by Dee)

The publication after a long delay of the so-called nighthawking survey raises a number of questions. Not least what on earth it was investigating. We can understand that it was not intended that the authors look at the illegal handling of portable antiquities as a whole (of which the United Kingdom has a totally deserved reputation as a hotbed) but only the search for collectables and saleable commodities in the UK’s archaeological record in violation of Britain’s all-too-lax laws. Fair enough. But the definition we are offered is incomplete. We are told “Illegal metal detecting is the search and removal of antiquities from the ground using metal detectors without the permission of the landowners or on prohibited land such as Scheduled Monuments. It is a form of theft and can be prosecuted under the Theft Act”.

Firstly, not all artefact hunting goes on with metal detectors. Those who illegally dig holes in stratified archaeological deposits on the foreshore for example use spades and sieves. Flint collectors denuding sites in national parks and other protected areas use only their eyes. A whole area of illegal activity is largely ignored in this report because it does not involve “metal detectors”. The debate on artefact hunting and collecting in Britain has become highjacked by the protagonists of the “metal detecting debate” which has clouded the central issues.

There is little attention paid however to another aspect of the problem (odd because it does involve to a large part the use of metal detectors in the UK), and that is violations of the law in Scotland. In Scotland artefact hunting is subject to more or less the same constraints in the field as south of the border. Scottish law imposes on the artefact hunter another condition to comply with the law. They are obliged to report their finds and hand them over to the Treasure Trove Unit for assessment and eventual acquisition for state collections. Taking objects from the archaeological record merely to collect them oneself or sell them is an illegal act which is depleting Scotland’s archaeological resource as much as any trespassing on a landowner’s property south of the border. The Oxford archaeology report hardly considers this issue, a whole area of loss to Britain's archaeological record is ignored in its statistics.

The label "nighthawks" is singularly unhelpful. As the report says not all illegal artefact hunting takes place at night and not all responsible legal artefact hunting takes place in the day. In fact three totally different phenomena are being lumped under this one totally inadequate term, and each has its own dynamics and remedies

1) Artefact hunting on sites protected by law (for example scheduled archaeological sites/historic monuments). The reason for the extra scale of protection is that they contain archaeological evidence known to be of national importance. Most of the people doing this know full well that the site is important, and at best they do not care whether it is protected by law or not. Are there people in the artefact hunting community who are unaware that in general there is such a thing as a site protected by law? I would think that very unlikely. There is the problem that one flat bit of a field looks the same as another and the boundaries of a scheduled area might be difficult to determine. That at least is the excuse of some that have been caught on a site with a metal detector.

2) Artefact hunting on a site where the seeker has not permission to be. In English law (whether or not its a good idea or not is debatable) it is the landowner who has stewardship of the natural and historical resources of his land and who is encouraged by various means to conserve them. It is their decision whether or not to allow a collector onto their land with the purpose of seeking archaeological collectables for entertainment and profit. Sometimes the landowner is only too eager to get a bit of the "profit" themselves (for example commercial artefact hunting "rallies"). It may be argued that some trespassers are hard core criminals out to steal, while others might be slightly dense individuals genuinely unaware that they are on private property - or who precisely they have to ask (and cannot be bothered to find out). They may feel "no harm is done" by them taking away a few bits of corroded metal when the farmer is not looking.

3) The artefact hunter will be committing an illegal act if they find something and not declare it as the law requires. In some cases it might be greed, a "finders-keepers" type situation, they do not want to surrender "their" find, because the state may take it away (actually to place in a public collection). Or it may be that they genuinely do not know they are obliged to report the find.

These are six separate situations in which artefact hunting is in conflict with Britain's liberal antiquity laws. It will be seen that three of them are due to lack of awareness while three rflect lack of concern. In the latter the people concerned regard themselves as above the law.

It is obvious that the solution to each of these six is going to be different, in some cases outreach and information campaigns may go a long way to solving the problem, in others its probably a waste of time, the hard core law breakers not only laugh at their responsible fellows for following the PAS line, but the latter often feel physically threatened by them (the Oxford team found there was a great resistance in the "detecting" community - including the NCMD - to run the risk of being seen to be informing on the law breakers) . There is no way that more "fluffy bunny" patting on the head will actually have any effect on the criminal element in the artefact hunting community.

The label "nighthawks" embodied in the brief of this report is more of a hindrance than a help to defining concepts, problems and remedies.

The publication today of the Final report of the Strategic Study on Illegal artefact hunting seems to mark an important watershed in the long and sordid story of the British market in portable antiquities.

The report received surprisingly negative coverage in the British press, it has all the makings of a good story of course, loot, buried treasure, secretive night time activities, careful detective work by the investigating authorities. Probably for the first time in many years the British media came out with a barrage of unfavourable publicity for the artefact hunter and collector, usually the subject of fluffy bunny "unsung heroes" type praise. The metal detectorists were furious on the forums, over in the US officers of the ACCG were quick to come to their defence (here and here for example).

The Oxford Archaeology report has serious shortcomings, but depicts the scale of the problem as serious. It stands by the typically British policy of reasoning with the culprits, maybe if we are nice to them they will stop. I am not sure how effective this will be against the hard core of criminals who undoubtedly exist in the artefact hunting milieu who are intent on profiting from sales of stolen finds, often obtained at night during well planned and organised raids where anyone who stand in their way is threatened by physical violence.

We should recognize that there are limits to the degree public education will have an impact on this group of individuals. The report recognises this and concludes that the motor for this activity (there is a substantial analysis of eBay sales on which this is based ) is the no-questions-asked market in portable antiquities. The conclusion is that the most effective means of dealing with the problem of illegal artefact hunting in the UK is to close the loopholes that allow them to find a market for the commodities they produce to make the venture worthwhile. Removing the ability to profit financially would clearly reduce the motive for these criminals to operate.

Monitoring of eBay UK by the Department of Portable Antiquities & Treasure, British Museum since October 2006 [main report pp 82-88] has shown that an element of the illegal movement of unreported Treasure items has been the lack of due diligence by British dealers in establishing provenance and title to sell while handling such material (hence current moves to have the Treasure Act amended to make it a requirement for all who come into possession of Treasure to have an obligation to report it). This monitoring of sales of antiquities listings on eBay shows a steady rise in the number of unprovenanced British antiquities on sale each month. Some of these at least seem likely to be the products of “nighthawking”, but which ones?

It is heartening to see that as a result of this report, British archaeologists are at last looking at the possibilities of regulating the local antiquities market. They are taking a vivid interested in the regulations reported here which were introduced last year on eBay in Germany, Austria and Switzerland which have shown that the auction house is prepared to take stricter action than has been the case so far in the UK. The Council for British Archaeology and PAS are now suggesting that Britain should be pressing eBay to follow suit in the UK to close down online auctions of illicitly acquired material.

The Director of the CBA suggested today at the launch of the Illegal artefact hunting report that there is a need for the introduction of a new criminal offence for a person to deal in such objects without being able to produce a clear modern provenance. Such a reform in attitudes and legislation would introduce the necessary transparency into dealings in cultural objects and ensure prospectively that persons dealt only in such objects with a recorded and substantiated background. Apparenly such a proposal is currently being discussed by a working group of the APPAG with the aim of identifying way add this to the legislation of England and Wales. There will be a review of the 1996 Treasure Act later in the year which will provide an opportunity to discuss this proposal with policy makers.

This all is bad news for the advocates of the current no-questions-asked market for portable antiquities which acts as a cover for the quantities of looted and smuggled material entering certain markets. They have until now had the "shining example" of Britain with its "wise" heritage laws which allow a question-free environment for the circulation of all manner of "pieces of the past". Now it turns out that the British are questioning the wisdom of this oversight, we may expect foreign lobby groups to start poking their noses into how this "source country" should treat the archaeological heritage found within its territorial borders as they do with those in SE Europe and the Middle East.

I have previously discussed the ideas of Derek Fincham on the Portable Antiquities Scheme of England and Wales here before. In his recent text (A Coordinated Legal and Policy Approach to Undiscovered Antiquities: Adapting the Cultural Heritage Policy of England and Wales to Other Nations of Origin
International Journal of Cultural Property, Vol. 15) discussed here earlier, he seems to want to see its approach as some kind of panacea which if adopted elsewhere would solve a lot of problems, like reduce looting. Earlier here, I questioned his asserting that looting had been reduced in England and Wales because of the activities of the Scheme. The discussion now starts up again after the publication of the Nighthawking Survey Final Report. On this basis Fincham writes “It appears that illegal metal detecting in England has declined since 1995, the point at which the Portable Antiquities Scheme first began its efforts” (let’s leave aside the question that the PAS actually began in 1997) and

“The most interesting revelation of the report is the suggestion that metal detecting has substantially decreased since the PAS began. In 1995, 188 scheduled monuments were reported damaged; in 2008, that number was 70. In 1995, 74% of archaeological units reported their sites had been molested; in 2008 that number is 28%. I take that as pretty strong support for the proposition I argued for in my recent piece on the Portable Antiquities Scheme, A Coordinated Legal and Policy Approach to Undiscovered Antiquities: Adapting the Cultural Heritage Policy of England and Wales to Other Nations of Origin, IJCP (2008)".

It is interesting to compare that with what the PAS itself is claiming, there is a subtle difference which Fincham seems not to recognise:

The Report shows that Nighthawking seems to have declined on two counts compared with an earlier survey in 1995, although there is still a significant problem with Nighthawking down the eastern side of England from Yorkshire through Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex.

Part of the problem here is that the label "nighthawking" is not terribly useful to define anything much since it refers to about six different things (see my post on the definition of this label above). The PAS points out that in "two counts" there has been a change in the situation since 1995. In fact these two counts are examples of the same kind of offence, people deliberately using metal detectors where they should not (SAMs and raiding archaeological excavations in progress). Quite frankly, when we are dealing with the sort of individuals that are deliberately targeting archaeological excavations or scheduled monuments, it is terribly naïve to imagine that the PAS is actually making any difference to "attitudes". I suggest Mr Fincham should join a metal detecting forum and ask there about the possibilities of responsible artefact hunters or anyone else "changing the attitudes" of the hard core element before accepting that it is possible or even likely that any of them would try (the phrases "tyre slashing" and "GBH" are ones that I primarily relate to cases I know of).

Certainly the PAS could be having effect on the dozier metal detectorists who "did not know" that Britain has a law of trespass, or that you cannot just walk over the nearest English Heritage guardianship site with a metal detector (cases have been known!). This however is only part of the problem - and arguably the easier part to resolve.

So what is the situation? What is actually happening? The actual results of the survey were diasppointing, very few people came forward and volunteered information (this in fact was to be expected, I have no idea who planned the project in the form it was). The discussion of the results and their interpretation is scattered throughout the recent report (which generally is a pretty unsatisfactory piece of writing). Nevertheless the situation is in fact relatively clear-cut.

In comparing the present results with those of the CBA/EH survey published in 1995 we should bear in mind that the latter was looking at a specific range of problems in a specific region. It therefore looked only at raids (in England alone) by nighthawks on scheduled sites and archaeological excavations in progress, two areas of primary concern in the archaeological community in the 1990s. These problems had however begun already in the 1970s. What was not looked at in 1993 (1995) was the scale of artefact hunting on unscheduled archaeological sites.

With regard the decline in looting on scheduled sites (not all of which fall into the category of those perceived as 'productive' by the nighthawks), it is important to note what the authors of the 2009 report themselves point out. On page 91 of the report we find the following explanation “reasons for a move away from Nighthawking on SMs include the suggestion that many of these SMs are ‘played out’, either through detecting or the effects of agriculture […]. After many years of Nighthawking the number of finds on many sites is thought to be too low for Nighthawks to bother with and Nighthawks are now moving to unscheduled sites where more can be found.” This is entirely explicable, the archaeological resource is finite. One cannot go on year after year since the 1970s extracting material from a finite body without it one day finishing on many of these sites. If this explanation of the observed effect is correct, it means that the archaeological resources on many of Britain's scheduled sites is now so severely depleted that they are not commercially exploitable. This means of course that their archaeological 'signature' [Report p. 2] has also been permanently deleted as a result of current inability to act against these people.

As for the raids on excavations, this is also discussed in the report, on page 91-2, where it is pointed out that since the mid 1990s there has been a change in the organization of excavations in the UK which has meant that now they are more frequently integrated into development projects where there is a greater concern with security “with plant to protect as well as Health and Safety issues. The installation of physical barriers and surveillance on sites […] make it more difficult [for looters] to target these archaeological excavations”.

But what about clandestine looting of unscheduled, often rural, sites? Has this too "decreased"? On page 91 of the report the authors suggest that the depletion of the material to be gained from scheduled sites is probably matched by an increase in the clandestine exploitation of the more productive (so mostly coin-rich [point 9.1.9 on p. 90] Roman sites and Early Medieval cemeteries report p. 90) unscheduled sites which are now in increasing danger.

Despite the obvious difficulties Oxford Archaeology had getting information, there are several pieces of evidence to suggest that there are less grounds for optimism here. We have discussed Mr Browning and his problems at Icklingham, but moreover heard what a local Suffolk metal detectorist had to say about the situation on farms around his. We heard of the situation at Stixwourth. Sadly the Nighthawking Survey Report does not actually publish details of the incidents reported to it, so we do not know whether they were included in the data they discussed.

On pages 31-2 of the report however is a brief presentation of the results of a regional survey (COSMIC) in the East Midlands which suggests that across this region as a whole of the 40 farmers who responded, 17.5% are suffering from Nighthawking of both scheduled and unscheduled sites on their property. Only one of the sites reported as having been looted in this survey had independently been reported, which implies that the Nighthawk Survey was not being informed by any means of all sites being looted, and that landowners are a key source for this missing information.

The COSMIC survey area is in a significant location, astride the eastern zone where the Nighthawking Survey suggests looting is much more prevalent, but extending into the Midlands where current evidence suggests the phenomenon occurs to a lesser extent. If therefore it can be treated (for lack of better evidence after a 100 000 pound government sponsored survey) as representative of much of Britain, and bearing in mind that in the UK there are approximately 300,000 active farms, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that this is a problem affecting archaeological sites on up to 50 000 farms in the UK. Even if we assume (since not all of Britain is lowland like the COSMIC survey area) that this figure is too high (for example three or even five times too high), it still gives pause for thought, bearing in mind that the total number of active metal detectorists in the country is something of the order of 10 000. There clearly is a need for further discussion (and sadly further investigation).

Far from the PAS being able to cope with the problem, it would seem that the postulated final denudation of the metal finds from the scheduled sites no longer being raided took place while the PAS was in operation. It is equally clear that the areas identified by the Nighthawking Survey Report as the most heavily affected are those in which there has been extensive PAS outreach (Norfolk and Suffolk, Lincolnshire and Kent for example). It seems to me dangerous to present the PAS as the panacea for the looting problem, the situation is far more complext than generally appreciated.

Despite the overall optimistic tone of parts of the Nighthawking Survey Report about the scale of illegal artefact hunting (written on commission for British Heritage, responsible - after all - for current policies), other parts of it give grounds for deep concern. This fact was picked up by most of the major British newspapers who wrote of the problem of looting in somewhat alarmist terms. It's nice to know they care.

Today two documents were released, above I have discussed the main one (212 pages), the full report of the Nighthawking Survey (above). This is apparently only available as a download. The second one is only twenty pages long, printed on paper but is available as a download too. It is presumably intended as a summary for the general public of the main conclusions and recommendations of the full report. The trouble is it is not. Not really.

This text gives the impression of being by a totally different author from the main report, and quite frankly is an atrocious piece of work. Although the main report bears traces of the apparent pro-detecting sentiments of the authors, this summary document oozes it. Let us take Page 3 in a document about illegal artefact hunting: "in the absence of real evidence, feelings have often run high and the reputations of responsible metal detectorists have suffered". One might ask, what "real evidence" has the Oxford Archaeology team come up with that could save the reputations of responsible "metal detectorists", and from what? What have the latter got to do with criminal activity?

It turns out that the key to resolving the problem is not only to let people know what-a-jolly-good-thing-responsible-metal- detecting is [p. 12] but also "provide opportunities for legal detecting" [p. 8], by "supporting properly organized metal detecting rallies" like the text infers the PAS does [p.12], heaven forbid that a farmer should "impose a total ban on metal detecting" [p. 8] on his own land as a response to being raided... One way, we are told, "proven to be effective in preventing Nighthawking is to allow responsible metal detectorists to detect (sic) a site" [p.9] in other words take it all away to their ephemeral personal artefact collections? Yes, that would stop the nighthawking of that piece of land, but also it rather defeats the object - which is site preservation. There's some not-very-joined-up-thinking going on here.

Recommendation four to stop "nighthawking" is a real side-splitter. "Publicise the positive effects of responsible metal detecting..." [p.12] "Part of the problem is that the subject is clouded by ignorance and prejudice on both sides of the debate with self-appointed champions of both extremes broadcasting antagonistic propaganda via the various available media, serving only to perpetuate a pointless conflict" [p. 12].

Apparently "organizations like the PAS and NCMD are building bridges [...] and making constructive contributions to the debates on the various web forums". That's a laugh, especially with regard to the PAS who make a concerted effort to keep OUT of debates on any forums (including their own - now defunct).* I'd like to ask the Oxford Archaeology when it concerns the commercial or otherwise exploitation of the of archaeological record as a source of collectables, IS it actually a "pointless conflict"? What is "pointless" about questioning policies which go against everything modern archaeology stands for? In referring to "both extremes" I assume the text's author is referring on the one hand to the archaeological resource protection lobby echoing the ACCG labelling of them as "radical archaeologists". Who would Oxford Archaeology see as the other "extreme" - advocates of illegal artefact hunting. Where please can we see the "propaganda" of the self-appointed champions of illegal artefact hunting in the UK media? I think we have a right to know where Oxford Archaeology is finding this stuff, otherwise these are just so many empty words which have nothing to do with the activities of criminal artefact hunters.

Personally I do not think the key to tackling heritage crime is even more of the fluffy bunny pro detecting propaganda ("examples of the constructive use of metal detectors should be publicised more widely... " p. 13) which simply confuses public perception of the nature of the problems facing archaeology. We have enough of that. We do need more informed debate on portable antiquity collecting as a whole which forms a basis for the whole problem.

*As for the PAS engaging in debate on the forums... it is instructive to take a look at the PAS blog run by Dan Pett. There we read "If you are interested in discussing the Scheme’s role in the production of this report, please contact Michael Lewis or Roger Bland in our Central Unit on 0207 323 8611." Who is that aimed at? Who would be perhaps concerned at the "role" of PAS in the production of a report on illegal artefact hunting, and why? Why can PAS not simply take part in a debate on the issues it raises and not invite their partners to discuss it with the head and deputy head of the scheme quietly and privately over the phone? All very odd.

Vignette: Cover of the summary text (Oxford Archaeology)

Udate 20th March 2009: The links in the posts that follow to the location of the Nighthawking Survey are broken. They worked when I made the posts. At the time of writing, the following link http://www.helm.org.uk/upload/pdf/NIGHTHAWKS.pdf actually works, but who knows how long?

Most of us have to wait until tomorrow to learn about the results of the survey into illegal metal detecting in the UK. Over on the UKDN metal detecting forum however one of the artefact hunters (jcmaloney, an NHS worker from Gloucester) has somehow managed to get his hands on the press release (from whom he does not say) and although it's supposed to be embargoed until tomorrow,on Friday afternoon posted it up for discusion, calling it a " devisive (sic) wedge that achieves nothing". Far from it, if the press release is anything to go by, it is rather more revealing than we were led to believe from the PAS-centred leaks earlier. I'll discuss it tomorrow.

The 'political archaeology' blog The Assemblage has a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the exploits of Odyssey and its "let's-empty-the-site-onto-the-market-now" arguments for the Victory called a hint for the good collectors of the sea - which I could not resist drawing attention to.

With a compliant British government, Odyssey can expect none of the lawsuits or bad press caused by those pesky Spaniards. [...] Since Britain’s archaeological resource is officially up for grabs to whoever looks for it (as long as they’re not an archaeologist), perhaps Odyssey should establish an onshore operation.Using its massive budget to invest in cutting edge technology that can detect metal over many acres and far beneath the ploughsoil, it could set to work across the countryside, scanning every inch of the nation, revealing to us the wonders of the past, delighting in the hoards of context-less antiquities, and then selling them to us for a profit.

I am sure portable antiquity collectors would be only too happy.

A few years ago Susan Headley wrote a text "The Saga of the Uncleaned Coin" which tells ancient coin collectors and afficionados of Balkan 'partifacts' precisely where the things they collect come from and how they get to the USA. Her point is actually to offset the claims of US sellers that what they are selling is "unsorted" and what rarities the buyer "might" find. It illustrates two things very clearly the first is how the hand picked artefacts at the "high end" of this lowdown dirty trade relate to the other offerings of US dealers and wholesale indiscriminate illegal metal detecting of archaeological sites in the source country. She also coyly hints at the nature of the groups involved in the trade which US collectors are financing by their indiscriminate purchases. The second thing it illustrates (since I know this is a well-known text) is that since its first publication, US collectors have had ample opportunity to find out where the objects on internet auction sites and in dealers' 'job lots' actually come from. Do they care? Obviously not. Not a bit.

Susan Headley is the founder of Uncleaned Ancient Coins Discussion Group and Ancient Bulk Marketplace, so I guess she knows something about where they come from. Of course she could not resist romanticising that her "reparatio" had been deposited in a hoard, though it is clear from her text that she envisages that having been deposited on a site where there are other archaeological settlement finds.

The text disappeared I think from the internet for a time, so it is good to see that the link posted in Nov 2005 still works.

The controversy about the famous bust of Nefertiti found in 1912 in the sculptor Djetmose's workshop at Tel el-Armana continues. The BBC now reports (following Spiegel) that newly published documents discovered recently in the archives of the German Oriental Institute (DOG) suggest that Ludwig Borchardt, German archaeologist and Director of the "Imperial German Institute for Egyptian Archaeology" perhaps had not been totally forthright with the representative of the Egyptian authorities to secure the fabulous sculpture of the Egyptian queen, Nefertiti for Germany during a division of finds. This has led to new calls to review the allocation of this find.

The excavations 1907-14 were carried out by the DOG - and for the period the standard of work was very high. Egypt and Germany had an agreement to split antiquities found by the German team "à moitié exacte" (or 50-50). The partage of the finds was agreed at a meeting on Jan. 20, 1913 between Borchardt and Gustave Lefebre (the Inspector for Middle Egypt from the Department of Antiquities).

The newly discovered document was written in 1924 by the secretary of the German Oriental Institute (DOG) and contains an account of what had happened at this meeting at which he had been present. Borchardt, the witness noted, "wanted to save the bust for us" and therefore had played down its significance.

The 1924 text apparently suggests that although Borchardt had listed the bust among his finds (in fact it was at the top of the list), in the inventory shown to the inspector, it was described as of gypsum (like other examples discovered in the same workshop). In addition, the photograph of her that Mr Borchardt showed the inspector was reportedly "deliberately unflattering." Furthermore the bust was "tightly wrapped, placed in a box in a poorly-lit chamber and kept hidden". It is unclear whether Lefebre went to the trouble of lifting the bust out of the box to examine it more carefully.

After looking over the excavated material, in accordance with the collecting policy of the institution he represented, Lefebre chose the half share of the excavated material that contained the inscriptions and stelae, and the other items were perfectly legally exported.

Already a year later a perfectly adequate photo was published of the bust, and Egyptologists knew what had made its way from Armarna to Germany, but it seems that at the time there was no reaction from the Egyptian authorities. It was only when ten years later the excavation permit holder transferred the finds to the Prussian State and the Nefertiti bust went on public display that the Egyptian authorities took a more serious interest in this sculpture and started regretting that Lefebre (who by then had advanced to curator in the Cairo Museum) had not taken a closer interest at the time.

The affair is discussed in some detail by Urice, S. K. (2006): The beautiful one has come - to stay pp. 135-192 [in:] J.H. Merryman (ed.) Imperialism, art and restitution, Cambridge.

The authorship of the 1924 document nor the context of (motivation for) its writing have not been reported yet.

photo: BBC

On this blog I’ve recently been discussing the 'Wenneb.. shabtis' which several top UK dealers are now refusing to handle because they are of highly dubious origin, and there is at the moment a strong suggestion that they are possibly from a recently-looted tomb. But that is just one part of the trade in portable antiquities. At the other end of the scale are petty and often ephemeral dealers who offload through internet auction sites various real and pseudo antiquities, primarily nowadays those that come from metal detecting. Nobody these days blinks an eyelid as Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are emptied onto eBay alongside material shipped (smuggled) en masse from the Balkans and Edwardian watch fobs. The trade in locally derived artefacts however acts as a cover for various types of abuse.

One seller (his first name is “Rob”) with a veritable Aladdin’s cave of varied metal detected tat (who buys this stuff?) and artfacts calls himself “ antiquebottledigger”. He has an online store called “digthatbottle” and he hails from Nottingham in the United Kingdom. Among the 473 “misc antiquities” he is offering today is a Wenneb… shabti, still with some soil on it. Two members of the AncientArtifacts Forum asked where he got it, apparently he replied: “I bought this about 6 months ago from a dealer who I believe bought it in France from a French auction of Ushbtis but I don't have further details of when and where it was held”.

This is a good illustration of one of the totally undesirable effects of treating the commercial exploitation of the archaeological resource by artefact hunters as in some way a socially beneficial phenomenon carried out by "unsung heroes of the UK heritage" and "partners" of archaeology. It is in fact none of these things (and it beats me why my colleagues over in Britain say such things, it must be something in the water).

Whatever the actual status of the 'wenneb-shabtis', we see here clearly the problem with (or for) the small dealer who is not bound by any professional codes of ethics and so do not have the need (and anyway do not have the resources) to do a proper due diligence check on this sort of item. He bought it from a bloke who got it from a guy and where he got it from... well, he does not seem to have been too interested. Now if the suspicion that these come from a freshly-looted tomb are correct, Mr Rob Bottle-digger could be in breach of the Dealing in Cultural Property (Offences) Act of 2003, but that need not worry him, as from past history that turns out to be about as effective as a dead haddock in fighting culture crime in the UK .

Whatever the actual status of the Wenneb-shabtis, this well illustrates how looted stuff will be moving through the UK market alongside masses of other antiquities generated by the exploitation of the British archaeological resource for pleasure and profit. There is no reason why this gentleman should be too concerned about establishing provenance and legitimacy of the items he is selling, in a few days the auction will end, by which time he might find someone who will give him 85 quid for it (it is quite unusual and collectable), and he’ll go back to selling old bottles, knocked-about flint flakes and metal detected tat.

While there is absolutely no regulation of the market in antiquities in the UK, it will continue to serve as the laundry for illicit antiquities that it is... while British archaeologists largely just watch on.

.

Photo: not a bottle, but a 'wenneb-shabti' on eBay.

The launch of the delayed and long, long awaited report from the survey on the scale and effects of illegal metal detecting in Britain is due on Monday 16th February. Hooray.

I have touched on this survey here before. It was recently leaked, first by Kate Clark and then by Roger Bland that the report will say that the survey revealed that "illegal metal detecting is down" in Britain since the last attempt to gather statistics. It will also apparently say that this is ascribable to the Portable Antiquities Scheme. On Monday we will at last have an opportunity to examine the basis of these conclusions.

There will be a major press conference at the Society of Antiquaries of London. There will be three speakers: Barry Cunliffe (English Heritage Interim Chairman), John Browning (a Suffolk landowner from whose land the Icklingham Bronzes were stolen and who is constantly plagued by trespassing metal detectorists) and Mike Heyworth (Director of the Council for British Archaeology). As far as I know, nobody from the PAS will be expanding on how they single-handedly slew the monster of illegal metal detecting.

I am absolutely sure that the general mood in the media, forums and blogs on Monday is going to be that the looting problem in Britain has been solved. Once again, we will hear from the pro-collecting lobby that all we need to do to solve the global looting problem is institute officially-sanctioned free-for-all artefact hunting like the English have. The world's looting problem will disappear, we will no doubt again be told, by legalising it.

What the report itself says beyond the "summary and conclusions" page however is another matter. I think this is a text which will require careful scrutiny and analysis before we can use it as a basis for construction of global models of how to protect the archaeological heritage.

.

Photo: Newark metal detectorists Mark Longdon and Dean Wright after conviction for daylight illegal metal detecting on the scheduled Roman site of Margidunum in 2007. They look really unhappy at the severity with which they were punished, don't they? A real deterrent - phew, its a good job we have the PAS. (Photo: Newark Advertiser)

There is a rather interesting, if unequal, discussion going on over on the new Heritage Action blog in the comments section to a post I think I have already mentioned here. A concerned citizen of a "source country" writes:

And of course, the people that are choosing their own commercial gain over British damage reduction are the very ones that are banging on about what ethical dealers they are! If they can’t even act ethically towards Britain, the heritage protection regime of which they consider an exemplar, or fall in with the clear advice to purchasers by PAS, which they say is the best thing since sliced bread, what hope elsewhere? “Other countries should act like Britain” is their claim, but what’s the point when they are already providing a market for the artefacts dug up by irresponsible non-reporting detectorists here? It’s the way of the world we fear. Money talks and money-makers talk of ethics!

Mr Lueke, the unconcerned collector, has just started up his own blog in which in his single post so far (Coins as Cultural Property ) he displays total lack of thinking outside the ACCG box and his rather schematic thinking on the notion of "cultural property". More to the point here, he displays his total ignorance of what the US coin collectors' beloved pet, the PAS is actually recording and why. He writes of coins as if they were some special kind of artefact which for some supernatural reason are not subject to the normal mechanisms of deposition of archaeological artefacts:

coins are almost always found in isolation. In published reports such as Coin Hoards from Roman Britain we see that coins are found either with some pottery or else scattered about in fields. If we look at the Portable Antiquities Scheme annual reports we can see that the bulk of finds are metal objects (weights, rings etc.), coins, and stone objects (usually pottery). Archaeological sites provide only 0.25% of all finds. This does not mean that coins aren't found at archaeological sites, but it does show that coins are primarily not found amongst most other objects labeled as cultural property. [...] To satisfy those nitpickers we can safely say that the majority of coins come from finds with no other archaeological context.

This is ridiculous. The PAS is charged with public outreach at public expense. The PAS produces lots of words and numbers and pretty pictures. Despite this, this is not an isolated instance of a member of the public with a more than average "passion for the past" (i.e., a collector of or seller of bits of it) who completely misunderstands what the PAS is saying about the origin and significance of the archaeological artefacts they record and their place in the archaeological record (for a reply see Elkins here: under 'common misconceptions'). If Mr Lueke and Mr Welsh and all the rest cannot understand what the PAS are writing, what is the hope that Mrs Bloggins who runs the chip shop and Bert the Builder or Percy the Policeman, Colin the Customs Officer and Jeremy the Judge do? The PAS is obviously doing something wrong that we keep meeting such nonsense about the origin of the collectables on the market all referenced to statements allegedly made by the PAS. Perhaps it is time the PAS as part of their outreach and partnership with collectors started to take note of what the latter are writing about their results and correcting misapprehensions like this, so the public is not led astray any more.

A few days ago I posted here the sad story about what seems to be a textbook example of the relationship between no-questions-asked collection of unprovenanced antiquities and what appears from the available (necessarily anecdotal) information gathered to be a probable case of recent looting. As a result of the contradictions in the stories about where these items come becoming clearer, Dr Bron Lipkin one of the dealers mentioned on this blog posted the following this evening on the AncientArtifacts Forum (quoted with permission):

As we now know that more of these shabtis have turned up on the market and with different apparent provenances I think it has to be admitted that the provenance issue has become very blurred indeed! I have emailed Cedric and asked him to return the few he bought from me. I have removed the other four I had on my website and will return them and those that Cedric has, from whence they came. Perhaps each dealer in the chain will do likewise. Certainly I know that the dealer from whom I obtained these will do as I do, as the information he had does not appear to be as reliable as we would want it to be. I would say very firmly to all collectors, that the background of these little shabtis is now so uncertain that they should NOT buy them. There is simply not enough information now to be able to say that they are not recent finds! I'm sorry that my information has turned out to not be as solid as I initially thought.I had not mentioned a specific provenance when I previously showed the four on my website as it was not that I could name a specific collection. I was relying on the good faith and judgment of another dealer whose previous provenance information was very reliable, to the extent of being able to double check some of it. By the way Cedric had posted that I had said that I knew where hundreds were. I didn't and don't. I was told by another dealer that quite a few more were available elsewhere a few months ago [...].

Several points, first of all it is very gratifying to see such prompt action to attempt to untangle to some extent the penetration of these items onto part of the market while their origin is so unclear and suspicious . In addition, a warning has been issued by one of the dealers in the chain to collectors to heed or disregard as they see fit. Dr Lipkin expresses his belief that his wholesaler too was duped. We note however that we still have no name for the UK dealer which apparently - despite the denials in hindsight - had a substantial number of them.

Now dealers have declared that they will be returning these items to their original suppliers, it will be interesting to see where these shabtis turn up in future, since the starting point of that new chain will presumably indicate the point in the previous chain of ownership at which a buyer knew that what he was aiming to sell was of dubious origin and thus he is unable to return them to his supplier. None of us are naive enough to imagine that these objects will end up back in the hands of the original supplier in Egypt, or that at some stage the ethics of the antiquities trade will prompt any of the gentlemen in this sorry chain to alert the Egyptian Antiquities Service so they can investigate. Nevertheless it is an indication that dealers can and should take responsibility for any failure in diligence to establish whether items have a secure provence which shows they do not derive from recent looting and illegal export.

I should mention that I have also received a message from Rolf Kiaer who has also withdrawn his Wenneb shabti from sale and is considering returning it to the vendor (who turns out to be an "antiques dealer in Copenhagen") as "its not in my interest to have legit stock contaminated with recent plunder!" Quite. It's in nobody's interest in fact that any antiquities dealer should have "recent plunder" in their stocks. [Dr Lipkin's link still works, but he assures me this is a web design problem and the objects are now no longer on sale]

To come back to the main point of my original post, the lack of immediate enthusiastic praise on the forums of the gesture of these two dealers withdrawing these items from sale reinforces what I was saying about the current prevalence of a could-not-care-less attitudes among collectors. I get the feeling that many of them in fact suspect that if the flow of recently looted and recently smuggled artefacts to the market was substantially reduced by this kind of responsible behaviour by dealers, there would in fact be very little for them to actually buy and collect. This is at odds with their unproven claims that all the currently unprovenanced items on it are of legitimate provenance because "Petrarch collected coins" and other such arguments. We need more transparency about where the archaeological artefacts in the market today are coming from and where they are going.

"New Findings Document Authenticity of Ancient Sandstone Tablet that Supports Existence of Jewish Temple on the Mount" so the Touro College blurb goes.

"The antiquity of one of the most significant Israeli archeological finds in history has been documented in a recently-published article co-authored by Howard R. Feldman, a biology professor at the Lander College for Women/ The Anna Ruth and Mark Hasten School at Touro College."

The only problem is it is not actually an archaeological find, it might have been had it not ended up as a lump of inscribed stone (a "portable antiquity") on the no-questions-asked antiquities market. It is a lump of inscribed stone and instead of being usable as evidence of anything, a lot of effort is being expended to find evidence that the thing is not a forger's fantasy like so much else on the antiquities market today.

Am I alone in feeling 'post carbon-dating Turin Shroud deja vu' on reading such announcements? Was this another 'success' for vanilin dating I wonder?

Here are the texts:
Ilani, Shimon, Rosenfeld, Amnon, Feldman, Howard R., Krumbein, Wolfgang E., and Kronfeld, Joel 2008a “Archaeometric analysis of the ‘Jehoash Inscription’ tablet”, Journal of Archaeological Science 35, 2966-72.

Ilani, Shimon, Rosenfeld, Amnon, Feldman, Howard R., Krumbein, Wolfgang E., and Kronfeld, Joel 2008b “Archaeometric evidence for the authenticity of the Jehoash Inscription Tablet”, The Bible and Interpretation.
microbes, and gold globule sizes it seems are the clue...
.

Artefactum (Jennifer Unruh) has a post on the "Trade in Cultural History" which draws attention to the complex nature of the no-questions-asked antiquities trade. She mentions the case reported recently when a group of men in Cyprus were charged with illegal excavations, smuggling antiquities and the possession of explosives. Among the items seized was an "Ancient" (?) Syriac bible. They were not only involved in moving archaeological finds from Cyprus to foreign markets, but other types of cultural property were also being illicitly traded. She concludes:

In this case it appears that the transaction was prevented, but an unknown number of such operations likely succeed every year, in all corners of the world– including the United States – taking an untold number of culturally significant objects away from both the public and the possibility of scientific and cultural study.

This shows that not everybody finds believable the rather odd notion being propagated by collectors' (dealers') lobby groups that items are ripped out of their archaeological contexts so that they can be circulated to a wider public than if they were part of public collections such as museums and the sole purpose of collecting is to study the artefacts out of context.

Over on SAFE Corner a small discussion broke out over a report of Renfrew's talk in NY (Renfrew asks for clarity in New York). Collector and artist Bill Donovan writes: Archaeologists [...] fritter time and resources away fighting people who view antiquities as their connection to history and the larger narrative of world culture" and argues that "Archaeologists need to institute a system of documenting and releasing less signifigant finds, thereby allowing the creation of an individual known as the "ethical collector." I replied in the comments on SafeCorner, but post that reply (slightly edited for clarity) here too.

Well, first of all, I do not accept the argument that its „archaeologists” who need to change the current status quo. As Mr Donovan says, it is a “minority” of the population which are causing this problem, and the effects and scale of the quarrying of the archaeological record for collectables is an issue that the conservation-minded majority is becoming more aware of. The “benefits” of which Mr Donovan speaks affect that minority, the damage that is done by looters to the archaeological record to supply this erosive hobby affects everyone, and not only of the current generation.

If collectors want to carry on, then instead of just going on about their “rights” as collectors, it’s obviously time for them to start considering their responsibilities. I suggest that, instead of allowing themselves to be pushed about by the dealer naysayers as they self-evidently do at the moment, collectors need to take the initiative and show that a legitimate trade does exist and can exist (if it can). If collecting is, as Mr Donovan explains, an expression of capitalism, then it is the demand which shapes the supply.

The obvious first step would be for collectors to create a collectors’ code of ethics, which cuts out all the weasel-wording of the existing traders’ ones and answers the concerns of the critics of collecting in its current archaeology-damaging form. Let it clearly and unambiguously define what (in a period when the looting of sites to supply this market is taking place on an unprecedented scale) is and what is not acceptable to collect and how. Let it define the questions the supplier is required to answer to demonstrate to the ethical collector the licit origin of their goods, and let it say unequivocally that if the seller cannot answer the questions, the ethical collector moves on to one who can. Perhaps when they have defined what ethical collecting actually is, ethical collectors can form an association of people united under that banner which could act as its spokespersons, so we can bypass the aggressive defenders of the no-questions-asked trade that so far dominate the discussions and cloud the issues. That seems to me to be vital for progress in this area.

[Mr Donovan explains: I am against the state telling me I cannot own something as common as a bronze Roman coin. Roman coins were produced in the hundreds of millions, and are scattered in the top soil through out Europe].Collecting Late Roman bronze coins? I do not think this is in any place actually “banned” as such, though in some places (though obviously not in the USA) certain conditions have to be met. How can Mr Donovan collect them ethically? Well, thousands of them in perfectly collectable condition come from British sites and are recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Some are single finds and many are from hoards recorded under the Treasure Act and released on the market as superfluous to museum display and study needs. Buying only such coins should mean that one has an object which has been recovered responsibly and recorded by the archaeological authorities (so the information can be used by the public at large in whatever way they want). The object has a unique number and photo in an external database which is accessible online all over the world and can be associated with data on provenance and find circumstances. The PAS record can be the beginning of a chain of ownership which will accompany the coin as it moves from the collection of one responsible collector to another and show it has not been recently ripped from the layers of an ancient military site, cemetery or settlement in Bulgaria and illegally shipped by the lorryload to US wholesalers like many currently on the market. We have all heard the pathetic self-justificatory arguments from collectors, and – especially dealers - why this is “all right because…”. The point is though that any responsible thinking person can see that it is not “all right” at all. Archaeological artefacts are not potatoes to be dug up and sold and bought by the kilogramme.

Whether or not “archaeologists” and politicians should, at great cost to their own citizens, set up PAS-clones in all the source countries to primarily serve the needs of foreign collectors is something that we can obviously only discuss when collectors are able to demonstrate that they actually are concerned enough to actually buy only the provenanced and traceable antiquities that it would produce. At the moment, we see very little evidence that in the collecting community there is actually any real demand for PAS-provenanced antiquities for example. That includes the US market, the one which demands that every country sets up a PAS so they can freely buy the artefacts from them. Some US dealers are very dismissive of the whole idea of collectors buying provenanced so-called "minor antiquities", it is not difficult to guess why though.

The same goes for deaccessioning “duplicate” (how to define that?) items from museum collections for collectors’ enjoyment. Again I would say let us wait with discussions of that until such a time that collectors can mature to a stage where provenance and associated documentation are not being lost every time an object is sold to a new owner (one can hardly call them a ‘curator” or “steward” is that information is lost every time an object changes ownership among private collectors).

I therefore really do not see the logic in Mr Donovan's response to Renfrew’s “a point of crisis has been reached in the destruction of the world's archaeological heritage, and that this can be met only by a general agreement not to acquire unprovenanced antiquities”. Mr Donovan says “The position you are arguing turns many thoughtful, good-natured, curious, well educated, wealthy people into criminals.” I really fail to see the connection there. It cannot be denied that this is a conservation issue, not one of “personal rights”. Surely the “thoughtful, good-natured, curious, well educated, people” if they cared about the crisis of destruction of the world’s archaeological heritage would indeed agree “not to acquire unprovenanced antiquities”. They would not patronize cowboy dealers offering unprovenanced material from goodness-knows where. They would not be kicking against those trying to stem the tide of destruction of the finite and fragile archaeological resource, but working with them. That seems a no-brainer to me.

It’s the same as elephant ivory, same as any CITES protected items. The responsible buyer asks questions, if the seller gives an evasive answer, they walk on to somebody who can offer something which can be verified as not recently looted. There IS such stuff, isn’t there? After all, portable antiquity dealers bang on about how a “legitimate trade” (made up of all those items which entered the market legitimately since Petrarch started collecting coins) does exist alongside the cowboys selling looted items. Perhaps it is time to find out how extensive the one is with regard the other and collectors can act accordingly.

So, in a nutshell, to "create ethical collectors", it is obvious that we need collectors themselves (“thoughtful, good-natured, curious, well educated, people”) to become more aware of their responsibilities (through, for example, reading material like the SAFE website and supporting organizations like it) . I’d also like to see the responsible and ethical collectors working (for example through their internet forums) to bring the less responsible, the less thoughtful, good-natured, curious, well educated people in their ranks round to the idea of ethical collecting. It seems to me that the obvious first step is for collectors of portable antiquities to create their own code of ethics formulating what is and is not socially acceptable for collectors of portable antiquities in the twenty-first century.

It was as we suspected, the website of the ancient coin dealers’ lobby group the ACCG had failed to record a change in the leadership which had taken place within the organization last year. As a result of these changes at the ACCG annual meeting in 2008 Peter Tompa had lost the post of President of the Board of Directors to Bill Puetz – the owner and developer of VCoins.com, the largest ancient coin e-commerce site on the Internet. After I queried this yesterday on Nathan Elkins’ blog, the ACCG website was swiftly updated:

przez vcoins Ostatnio zmodyfikowane 2009-02-07 05:06
David Hendin - Treasurer
Bill Puetz - President
Wayne G. Sayles - Secretary
David R. Sear
Peter K. Tompa
David Welsh
Kerry K. Wetterstrom - President Elect

Mr. Wetterstrom will assume the position of President of the ACCG Board of Directors for two years at the ANA convention in 2010. The position of Secretary and Executive Director remain unchanged and both posts are occupied by Wayne Sayles. It remains to see whether the changes in the top will be reflected in any change in ACCG policies concerning no-questions-asked collecting and its relationship to the illegal exploitation of the archaeological record all over the world as a source of saleable collectables.

Culture Property Observer, ACCG President (?) Peter Tompa tries to save face after accepting that if he’d checked out the facts of the case before posting his “German police run amok…” blog post, he’d have discovered that the story of the German investigations of collectors was not quite as the Californian coin dealer had led us all to believe (it’s what he is now calling a “different perspective”). So now he claims:

it is gross overkill to seize an entire coin collection based on a few coins purchased openly on a commercial website like eBay that allegedly came from an illicit source. The" little guy" simply does not have the financial resources to contest these seizures or the stomach to stand up to police intimidation that demands a collector surrender his entire collection to avoid possible prosecution.

I’d like to ask the lawyer how it is in Washington. The police investigate somebody (let it be an unemployed German immigrant) for receiving four stolen items, the police have proof he bought them. They could be stolen cars, TVs, ipods, mobile phones, Old Master paintings, whatever. On a visit to the suspect's property, they find another fifty three items of the same nature there, and the person already under investigation is unable to present any documentation proving legal origins of those other items either. What is the Washington policeman to do? Is it really “police intimidation” for the investigating officer to impound these other items for the duration of the investigation? Or is it a policeman actually doing the job they are paid to do? Is it really "overkill" to conduct an investigation of crimes like theft and handling stolen goods thoughly? I wonder if Mr Tompa has ever been the victim of burglary or vehicle theft?

This has been a message to you not from archaeologists
who you constantly demonise but from some ordinary British people who object to the careless attitude that you and any of your fellows in the States that are like-minded take towards our
communal archaeological resource.
The overseas proponents of a ‘no-questions-asked’ commerce in freshly-dug artefacts taken from the archaeological record of many countries of the Old World to fill their coin cabinets and living room displays refer to their opponents as “archaeologists”. They actually mean of course conservationists, but there’s a bit of a stigma these days to openly admitting to being against conservation of finite resources. These dealers and collectors represent their actions as opposing the “unfair” restrictions of foreign governments (who it goes without saying must be “repressive” and “corrupt” to boot). The citizens of those "source countries", however, well the only place they figure in the pro-collecting picture of the world is that if collectors did not buy these artefacts and give them a good home, they’d all be melted down and broken up to end up as “puddles of bullion”.

Not surprisingly, not all the inhabitants of these source countries fit the ACCG stereotype. In Germany, the ACCG are currently desperately trying to show the collectors who buy artefacts stolen from the archaeological record as heroes victimised by the “radical” conservationsist. Instead, if one searches for German articles on Eckhard Laufer [the policeman the ACCG are currently bending and stretching the evidence to portray as some kind of “rogue” with a personal vendetta against the collector], the reader will find there is a lot of public support in Germany for his work against “raubgrabung” which is destroying archaeological sites there merely to produce collectables for a no-questions-asked market. This German market is of course where a lot of overseas dealers (US ones for example) get the coins they sell on (it is therefore interesting to note the opposition of US dealers to moves to clean up this market by excluding stoilen and illegally imported material from it).

Heritage Action is a grassroots organization in Great Britain of concerned citizens involved in obtaining a better protection for the country’s historical heritage. As part of this, they have become concerned about the scale of unmitigated erosion of the archaeological record caused by British policies towards artefact hunting. Incidental to this they have previously written about the way these policies are being abused to produce commodities which are then exported, both legally and illegally to foreign dealers and collectors. In their latest article on the new incarnation of the online “Heritage Journal” subtitled “Deconstructing some false claims by US Coin dealers and others….”, some citizens of a source country express their dismay at the shallow arguments offered by the no-questions-are-to-be-asked money-makers in support of a constant drain of the archaeological record into scattered ephemeral personal collections. I suspect if the truth were known, and if more citizens of the source countries became aware of the pathetic arguments offered by the pro-collecting lobby in defence of the commercial mining of the archaeological record of their own 'local homelands' for saleable collectables for illegal export to a distant foreign market, we might see more of this kind of comments. For the time being, let the Brits speak for the rest, "if you want to sell somebody else pieces of my land's past - you might have the courtesy to ask us all first!".

We are promised that very soon the report on illegal artefact hunting in the UK (the so-called "Nighthawking Survey") will be published. Some results have been leaked which sound a bit dubious, so we are all eager to see the basis for these remarks.

The publication in Scotland of a Code of practice about Treasure trove in Scotland sets out the obligations of finders of archaeological artefacts (more than 300 years old) in that country. As everybody with a metal detector in the UK knows - or should know, Scotland has different laws to England and Wales (and Northern Ireland differs from both). It's not too confusing however as all archaeological finds must, by law, be reported when they may be retained by the crown (whose property they are, in which case the finder gets a reward and the finds go to a public collection) or released back to the finder to do with as they please. To engage in the latter without going through the former formality is illegal. Anyone failing to declare a find risks a potential prison sentence. That's what every metal detectorist in Scotland (and people buying artefacts from them) should know.

The Treasure reports show that annually about 300 or so finds are reported to the Treasure Trove Unit in Edinburgh. There are however in Scotland probably around 1000 metal detectorists - so it seems pretty clear that by no means are all of them obeying the law. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, most of them seem to be practicing their hobby totally disregarding the law, and disregarding the right of their fellow citizens to have access to information about the past which they want to take away in tangible pieces.

A newspaper account about the new code (Julia Horton Treasure hunters urged to read the rules before seeking their fortune, The Herald, February 04 2009) asserts that "up to 10,000 objects including silver coins and jewels are now found each year", meaning that the 300 reported items are a mere token of what is disappearing from the archaeological record annually in Scotland too. That is despite the very clear laws. That is despite the outreach that has been done to tell artefact hunters of their obligations. That is despite Scottish metal detectorists not being uneducated toothless peasants who know-no-better living in villages "each of which has its own melting pot" to which to take the metal scrap scavenged off the fields by subsistence diggers as some apologists for the "no-questions-asked" antiquities market would have us believe is the situation in all the "source countries".

The reaction to this news on a US metal detectorists' forum was revealing: A certain "Emdees" writes: Yikes! Hope they never do that in the U.S.! and a "RickO" replied...Try as I may, I will never understand this....my belief is that found items belong to the finder - period. Hmmm. Still, over most of the US there's not much chance of metal detectorists coming across too many metal artefacts older than 300 years, is there? I suspect that this is part of the problem US collectors have understanding attitudes of those of us who actually live and work in the "source countries" of the collectables they covet.

The ancient coin dealers’ lobby group the ACCG seems to be seeking new members and apparently feels the best way to do this is to try and stir up some (self-) righteous indignation to create solidarity within the ranks of the collectors they wish to represent. Thus it was that a few days ago Californian antiquities dealer and self-proclaimed “professional numismatist” Dave Welsh (Classical coins) started up some alarmist nonsense about German heritage authorities raiding pensioners’ homes and confiscating collections as a result of some imaginary new “import laws of September 2008”.

This started with a misleading post on Sat Jan 31, 2009 on the coin dealers’ forum Unidroit-L this was followed by other similarly alarmist posts made the next day (Sun Feb 1, 2009) on several forums such as Moneta-L, Unidroit-L and Ancient artifacts (“Collections Confiscated - Coin Collectors Criminalized”). Despite the fact that this message contained a number of factual errors it was reposted on the same day by Peter Tompa as a “translation” (it is not) of a news article on his blog (“German police run amok…). On the Ancient Artifacts forum on Tuesday I wrote a post on the ancient artefacts forum where Welsh had posteed the original message pointing out the factual errors in what he was writing and which other ACCG-affiliated individuals were now eagerly repeating. Welsh was making things up as he went along, had not checked the facts and (not for the first time) totally misrepresenting the nature of the events taking place in the heart of Europe. A similar post had appeared on this blog earlier. These are not new events, and we have all had the opportunity to find out more about the background, some of us have made use of those opportunities, but others seem not to have done so.

I therefore am “surprised” (well, having seen US ancient coin dealers in action before, actually I am not) to see that several days on Welsh is still persisting in his misrepresentation. On Wednesday he posting on his blog a text Die Wacht am Rhein holding on to the original alarmist and totally false version which he had posted four days earlier on various forums and which were there shown there to be in error. Why? Well, apparently the truth does not serve his purpose. (It seems to me a general characteristic of all those involved (as producer or consumer) to see and hear only what they want to see and hear.)

As a result of this, now Nathan Elkins has also tried to set the record straight (Police Action with Antiquities and Ancient Coins in Germany: Some Clarifications and a Call for Reason). He points out that “since American dealers and collectors have found out about these events, there has been little reason in the ensuing discussions or little desire to understand the issues or circumstances involved”. Personally, I would have put that in stronger terms, but Nathan is a polite chap. After setting out the facts of these recent stolen property cases (which are of course not at all what the Californian dealer suggests), he makes a point with which it is difficult not to agree:

When it comes to both law and ethics, "good faith" is simply not a substitute for due diligence. It is up to collectors to demand greater transparency and due diligence from dealers and/or to be more vigilant about the coins they choose to buy for themselves and where they are coming from. These events provide an opportunity for dialogue about how collectors can avoid buying recently looted and stolen goods and how they can insist on change in the current state of the "no questions asked" market. Consumers have the power to change the way the market operates.

I think we have here in a nutshell why dealers in "no-questions-asked" unprovenanced antiquities are so unwilling to see any kind of open discussion of the connection between collecting of and commerce in portable antiquities and looting of archaeological sites to produce the fresh quantities of collectables that this exploitive industry needs.

If anyone is waiting for a reply to emails, wants to share some portable antiquities scandal, warn me of impending lawsuits, ask where their translated (ahem) texts are or whatever... this is just to let anyone who thinks of looking here to see if I am still alive that I'll be off-line for a while after a spectacular meltdown yesterday of my computer. So I will be spending much of the next few days hunting down and installing the backup files into the next incarnation of my machine (I am writing this on Barford Junior's old computer, on which I cannot seem to get my email account working just now).

Metal detectorists and portable antiquity fans whose ears might have pricked up at the news will be pleased to know that the manuscript of the book on the UK's Portable Antiquities Heritage was not lost, the most up to date copy is safe in England (as well as archived away on several discs). So not all is lost eh?

The "History Lost" multimedia exhibition on the illicit antiquities trade and its impact on society and culture will officially open at the European Parliament in Brussels on Feb. 10, hosted by the Hellenic Foundation for Culture, with the support of the chairperson of the Europarliament's committee on culture and education, Katerina Batzeli.

The exhibition, to be held at the EP's Yehudi Menuhin Hall on Feb. 9-13, will feature copies of finds that have been returned recently to Greece and Cyprus, following relevant requests and has already been presented in Trieste, Lisbon and Dublin.

"Tampa, FL – February 2, 2009 - Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc. (NasdaqCM: OMEX), pioneers in the field of deep-ocean shipwreck exploration, has discovered the long-sought shipwreck of HMS Victory lost in 1744, solving one of the greatest mysteries in naval history. ..."
and presumably looks to make a pretty packet from raising artefacts from her and selling them since that is what they are in the business for. The trouble is that these are the remains of a warship of the British navy and went down with all hands, so its a grave.

No problem. The British like letting treasure hunters do their thing on archaeological sites on land and under water, so it is no surprise to learn that "terms of collaboration between Odyssey and the UK MOD on the project are currently being negotiated, and an agreement similar to the Sussex Partnering agreement has been proposed". That's all we need.

There is an interesting report about the site that was initially code-named "Legend" here and (unlike the Black Swan affair at the time of discovery), we learn the names of the archaeologists involved: Neil Cunningham Dobson, Dr. Sean Kingsley, the former is acceredited as employed by Odyssey. They give all the reasons why they think the site should be explored and not preserved.

The preliminary "pre-disturbance" work on the wreck will figure on a Discovery Channel “Treasure Quest” episode, airing in the United States on Thursday, February 5 at 10PM ET/PT and in the UK on Sunday, February 8 at 9:00 PM.

Illustration, The Victory (from Treasure Quest).

A few months ago as a result of the MOU about the import of archaeological artefacts from Cyprus into the USA, the portable antiquity collecting forums were full of talk about some vast conspiracy aimed at portable antiquity collectors, collecting, "truth justice and the American way". A group of coin dealers set themselves up as shining crusaders ready to fight the good fight agains the forces of darkness that had decided (shock horror) that ancient coins were archaeological artefacts. They held a "benefit auction" selling mainly contextless coins to raise loads and loads of money for the fight against this notion. They claimed they had leaked information from the CPAC, they made a Freedom of Information Request and got reams and reams of paper on the basis of which all manner of spurious conspiracy theories were constructed and proposed in solemn tones. Then.... silence on the issue.

Could it be that the coin dealers' lobby group ACCG finally realised that in fact there was no way they could fight the rather obvious fact that ancient coins are archaeological artefacts? Neither in court, nor in the eyes of public opinion? Is this why they seem to have lost impetus on this issue? After all, when coins were included in (they say "added" to) the China MOU which was announced a few days ago, all that happened was that they grumbled and mumbled a bit, but certainly no talk emerged of another FOI request or any "fight". So are they in fact going to fight the decision behind the Cyprus MOU? I think we all have a right to know. (And if they are not, what are they going to do with all the money they raised for that specific purpose?)

Now the ACCG seems up in arms about recent events involving coin collectors and metal detectorists in Germany. They seem determined to misrepresent these events as the harbinger of the return of nazism or something, hoping to rouse the US collector and convince them that the ACCG is worth supporting. They have just appointed a new officer to help increase membership numbers (are they flagging, or do they just need more funds?). In fact, the story they are putting around has very little relation to any of the real facts in these cases (not all of which am I at liberty to write here for various reasons). US collectors of portable antiquities (especially coins) seem to be a gullible lot and are reacting predictably to the latest announcement by the ACCG of the next "great conspiracy against us collectors".

It seems to me that the coin dealers' lobby group ACCG has no overall plan, but is lurching from one made-up "cause" to another, trying to avoid facing the real issiuue which is the no-questions-asked market which these dealers insist must be retained and which they insist is not in any way deleterious to the conservation of the world's archaeological resource, even though their businesses and their clients hunger for great chunks of it as cheaply as possible.

In the previous post I made a mention of what an antiquities collector said on Yahoo's ancient artifacts forum about the origins of some shabtis that have been appearing on the market in some quantities recently. In it we see the main problem is the no-questions-asked way in which artefacts like this change hands. Here is some more of what the collector said:

I know a very go[o]d friendthat lives in Egypt and sells Egyptain oranments to Austrila, South Africa and has had his fingers in the illegal trade too. He tells methat in the last 5 to 6 years dealing in antiques is a huge trade inEgypt esp[ecially] with tourism not being as good as it use to be. He tells me
that the main places of sale is to Germany and the Nordic countires, he says people pay the price and don't ask
q[uestion]s. He says hundrends of "low" value objects
are discovered weekly. I was told that when locals are employed to work in the winter dig season they make sure they pocket a number of items for themselves to see themselves through times of no work etc. [...] He also pointed out to me that there a quite a few excavations going on in the delta parts of Egypt and a lot of pottery has been discovered and is being sold illegally to Europe. In desperate times people sell there hertiage next to nothing.

Well, no-questions-asked collectors buying these items stolen from excavations are no doubt are very happy to get their preciouses at such prices. Is Mr Seshan's friend implying that he thinks the 'Wenneb.. shabtis' we are discussing were stolen from an excavation by somebody temporarily employed to take part in the project?

Collectors so often try to justify themselves that by "giving artefacts a good home" they are in some way "saving" them. If they are being stolen from excavations in progress they are not, they are contributing to the destruction of knowledge. Some collectors suggest that if they did not buy the artefacts, the metal would be melted down, because - they claim - the real (sic) destruction of archaeological sites all over the world is not done by looters looking for artefacts to sell, but by scrap metal merchants, looking for metal to melt down. 'Wenneb...'s' shabtis however are in no danger of that, but what may have happened to any metal objects in his tomb equipment is another matter. Where is it? How does the collector buying a dodgy shabti on eBay know how the rest of the assemblage was treated? An assemblages that was dug up and dug into, divided and discarded in order to put a few brightly coloured and shiny pieces of mysteriously-marked faience onto the foreign markets. This is a very feeble (and object-centred) argument.

Mr Seshan's informant "has had a finger in the illegal trade" (it says a lot of portable antiquity collectors that there are not too many other milieus where somebody could write on a public forum that he has a good friend who engages in illegal activity and not attract negative comment). It is interesting that he is suggesting that the illicit trade is on the rise in Egypt.

The collectors would say that this is because "Egypt has restrictive laws" which prevent "finders" benefitting from a reward system like in the UK. But our informant is sugesting that many of the finds which are reaching the western markets come from theft, pure and simple, from excavations. Since no-questions-asked dealership is unable to tell us how many items reaching foreign markets were "found" and how many "taken", this argument really has no force.

It is interesting to learn that the "main places of sale" for illicitly obtained artefacts from Egypt are now "Germany and the Nordic countries" where there are collectors (or dealers?) who "pay the price and don't ask questions". Presumably though these countries are just as much staging posts for the movement of these items further afield.

The home-grown hieroglyphists puzzle over the symbols.
"wn nb p(A) wp-wA.wt Dsr(w) iAm.t is - that's Wennebpawepwaoetdjeseroeiamet, is there a title to start with? Does the name starts with pA-(n)-wp-wA.wt or perhaps pA-n-inpw? Mysteries to solve".
Not least is the mystery where these archaeological finds come from and how they got to the dealers who are currently selling them by the bucketload. "As for the provenance of this shabti, all i get is that they are coming from a dutch collection and i can't get anymore informations. Bron told me that there are hundreds of these shabtis left. And i have seen many of them on ebay, all slightly diffrents". That's Bron Lipkin (see below) [see also the update at the bottom].

A collector called Seshan (Moodley? I have a recollection he's South African) says "I have three of these little shabti's from the same owner" Another collector called Cédric P. near Montpellier has "a dozen of these shabti myself now. And you can find some of them on Bron's site, and 3 or four more on ebay. Rolf has one on Hélios Gallery."

Here is what the Lipkin (Collector Antiquities) was offering [they have since been withdrawn from sale - this is an old link 8/2/09]:
Four interesting small inscribed shabtis.[...] All approx 55mm All intact Late Period. Circa 500 BC Price: 75 each GBP. No provenance is mentioned.

Here's the Helios Gallery (Rolf Kiaer , Lower Kingsdown, Wiltshire UK) one [they were later withdrawn from sale, the link is now broken 8/2/09]: A pale blue/green glazed faience ushabti figure of squat form with a moulded hieroglyphic inscription extending along the full length of the back. Egypt, Ptolemaic Period, 332-30 BC Intact, the small brown patches are accretions which were created during firing. Size: 5.9 x 2.4 cms Ex. private collection, Denmark.

and here was an eBay one (Stormbroek antiquities/ Ancient Art Gallery Stormbroek BV, Ekkersrijt 4411, Son en Breughel, Netherlands - the address is an industrial estate just north of Eindhoven, proprietor seems to be A.C. Wouters):
17472 Ancient Egyptian faience Ushabti with hieroglyphic textAncient Egyptian faience Ushabti with hieroglyphic textLate Dynastic Period c. 26th Dynasty, 664 - 525 BCHeight : 5.8 cm" No provenance is given
Stormbroek seems to have been one of the dealers that was first to offer these items. They seem to have been telling their clients that the material came from a 'Dutch private collection'.

Dik van Bommel, knowledgeable collector of ushabti figurines writes:"Where does this batch come from, is it fresh (illegal) or comes it from a attick ;-/. I did not know of it's existence for 6 month's or so". Confirmation of this artefact's relatively recent appearance on the market in Egypt too comes from Seshan: "I know a very god friend that lives in Egypt and sells Egyptain oranments to Austrila, South Africa and has had his fingers in the illegal trade too. [...] He told me he has seen at lest 3 of these shabtis in quetsion in Egypt over the past few months. But his asking price is more than what they are sold for than stormbroek etc. I would assume if you buy in bulk etc you would get a better price.Therefore I would say more than likey they are a new find."

So let us pose a hypothesis. So far (almost) no evidence has been forthcoming from the dealers or collectors that these objects were outside Egypt before 1970, or 1983 or whenever. In fact almost everything seems to point to them being recent finds which have only in the past few months appeared on the market, but we learn that one dealer seems to know that there are "hundreds" of them. One dealer is telling its clients that they came from a "Dutch collection" (Stormbroek), another (Helios) says a "Danish collection" - both unnamed. But then, if they are only just now appearing on any market, how long were they in these "collections" for? Are these not just euphemisms? The collectors on the forum seem to be in little doubt that these are fresh finds illegally exported.

What is interesting is that two of these are members of the ADA whose code of conduct involves the dealers undertaking to

"establish the identity of the vendor and obtain a warranty that they have good title to the objects and where applicable have confirmation from the vendor that the item has been exported or imported in conformity with local laws" and "not to purchase or sell objects until I have established, to the best of my ability, that such objects were not stolen from excavations, architectural monuments, public institutions or private property".

we note that it says "excavations" rather than "archaeological site". One vendor (who is a qualified Mesopotamian archaeologist with a degree from The Institute of Archaeology, UCL in London - like me) claims the object they are selling is from a "Danish collection" which he however does not name nor say how long it was in that collection, the other offers no provenance data whatsoever. This is despite the fact that both of them will be aware that there is no real evidence that these objects left Egypt more than a short time ago. If they have evidence to the contrary, it is notable that they do not mention it in their sales offer. Why not? The ADA is unlikely to take action over this since its code of conduct is so fluffily phrased that it means next to nothing in cases like the one postulated here.

What about the collectors who have themselves decided these objects are a fresh find? Does anyone on the ancient artifacts forum suggest that it is in any way unethical to buy these items? (No). Does anyone point out that the information from the dealers who are selling this stuff could be used to trace back the trail of where they are coming from and maybe punish those responsible for the looting of this ancient gentlman's tomb and smuggling the items out of Egypt? (No). Do they think if we can find out where these items came from and what else was found in the tomb we may yet be able to salvage some archaeological informations? (No). All they are interested in is reading the hierolyphics and having the ushabtis in their scattered ephemeral personal collections in their homes. The fact that yet another unique archaeological context seems to have been trashed in recent months so they can play Champollions and have their living room mini-museums seems not to particularly worry them. I am sure the looters are happy too that the collectors and dealers are not too bothered and not asking too many questions, I bet they are out there now looking for more archaeological objects (shiny bits of faience, some brightly coloured cartonage pieces, some mysterious pieces of papyrus) to dig up and flog off to no-questions-asked dealers and collectors.

The collectors here must share the blame for the looting when we all know that there ARE on the market shabti figures - Niek de Haan has some in his collection - with good licit provenances which could be bought instead of this apparently dodgy material. Where are the ethics of collecting?

UPDATE 8th Feb.
Collector Cedric P. has been trying to get to the bottom of where the shabtis he bought came from (a bit late now after he's bought them one would have thought). He reports:

it seems that most of them are now comming from an English dealer who has hundreds of them. I asked dealers in Spain England USA and Italy, they all say that they came in the first place from England. for exemple this is the answer i receved this morning from a Spanish dealer about the wenneb shabtis."I
get all my antique items from a specialist dealer in the UK.
This means that they are purchased within Europe with no restrictions."But no one accept to give me the name of this dealer.

Well, this is interesting. Even though they are being sold abroad as "from a Dutch collection" and an English dealer is saying they are from a "Danish collection", there is an (unnamed) English dealer who apparently has a whole group of them. I wonder where he says they are from?

If their origin was all legitimate and above board one might wonder why that dealer is not - as far as I can see - openly advertising "I have several hundred of these legitimately exported items" to the collector. Instead (from what is being said on the forums) it seems they are contacting other dealers behind scenes "pssst... do you want to buy one of these?" and selling them cheaper than the price they eventually reach on the open market. What does that suggest?

Photo, from Bron Lipkin's former sales offer.

Saturday, 28 February 2009

Thursday, 26 February 2009

Tuesday, 24 February 2009

Monday, 23 February 2009

Saturday, 21 February 2009

Friday, 20 February 2009

Thursday, 19 February 2009

Tuesday, 17 February 2009

Monday, 16 February 2009

Sunday, 15 February 2009

Friday, 13 February 2009

Thursday, 12 February 2009

Wednesday, 11 February 2009

Monday, 9 February 2009

Sunday, 8 February 2009

Friday, 6 February 2009

Thursday, 5 February 2009

Wednesday, 4 February 2009

Monday, 2 February 2009

Blog Archive

About Me

FEEDJIT Live Traffic Map

Counter

Related sites

Further Information

Apologists and Propagandists of the Current Form of the No-Questions-Asked Antiquities Trade etc.