Those "Old Collection" Provenances Again

Over on the Yahoo Ancient Artifacts discussion list, unapologetic North Carolina dealer in decontextualised artefacts Steve Minor has done a rapid investigation of the "provenances" of artefacts offered by antiquity dealers. He notes that apart from real verifiable provenances which are in the extreme minority on the market today, there are two different types of provenance offered. The first says something like "From a[n old] private collection". The second variant is that an object is said to be from an "Old [Insert Nationality] collection". He argues that the latter may in a few instances give a real piece of information, but his impression is that "mostly it is just a meaningless phrase used by a seller to add a sense of legitimacy and value to an item with no provenance". He adds:

If you want to test my assertion, go to vcoins or Trocadero and ask the dealers that make the "old collection" claim to offer a shred of meaningful proof. Don't sit by your computer waiting for a reply.

He reports that using the search facilty of the V-Coins (we remember that is suppposed to be the "strongly ethical alternative") he found the following. Among the 118 000 coins and artefacts being offered today (with a total worth of $25,200,000):

Only 134 vcoin artifacts and coins apparently mentioned a "provenance" [apparently to a named collection or site].

4,399 items are said to be from the generic "Old Collection" but apparently with no other information,
407 - are said to be from an unnamed "Old German collection",
18 - are said to be from an unnamed "Old English collection",
11- are said to be from an unnamed "Old American collection",
3 - are said to be from an unnamed "Old Spanish collection",
3 - "Old French collection",
0 - "Old Swiss collection",
0 - "Old Dutch collection".
None of vcoin dealers offering 118,000 coins and artifacts thought it was meaningful to specifically admit a lack of provenance.
The term "Bulgaria" by itself produced just 100 hits, primarily coins but few artifacts. He found that a search for "Found in Bulgaria" indicated that only 10 items were declared as having been found in Bulgaria ("mostly strangely mint condition Scythian trilobate points except for one Roman military diploma fragment and one key"), he notes however that "most of the European artifacts clearly are [from Bulgarian finds]".

Even though its author stresses that these results come from a totally unscientific investigation of just one auction venue, these are shocking figures, illustrating quite clearly the degree that passing through the antiquities market in its current form strips artefacts of their context. Some 95% of the objects on the market today have lost their context totally, while if we are concerned with meaningful context, more than 99% of the objects on V-Coins have become totally decontextualised through the way information about their origins has been "curated" (or not) by collectors and dealers.

It should be recorded that Mr Minor's posts about these figures have so far met with silence on the collectors' forum, I would like to think this is shocked silence rather than the apathetic shrugged shoulders type.
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