.
Another post to Tim Haines' Yahoo Ancient Artefacts Collecting discussion list caught my eye, its from a US member not using their real name and calling themselves "Pearlquest1" who is writing to the "responsible" collectors' list to ask for advice how to spot if they've been buying fake artefacts:
Of course we have no evidence that all collectors behave like that, some do not have the money, but little snippets of information like this tantalise in that they reveal how little we actually do know about collecting patterns, even among (self-declared) "responsible collectors".
Another interesting mechanism emerges here, it was only after collecting some 170 "mostly Roman and Egyptian" objects that this antiquity collector started to try and find out something about them, in the course of which it emerged that many of the things (s)he had bought did not look quite right. While mantra of collector's is "get the book first", I get the impression that many antiquity and ancient coin collectors cannot cope with books. Pearlquest realised the objects were stylistically wrong by looking on the Internet (perhaps for the Roman ones, the Portable Antiquities Scheme database which statistics in the Scheme's own annual reports reveal serves mainly as a source of information for other collectors these days). This rather goes against the picture presented by the pro-market lobby which claims that collectors and collections "generate knowledge about the past", that collectors are (all) researchers, and that is why they are collectors. Pearlquest clearly is not.
Again, we still have a dearth of detailed information about why portable antiquity collectors collect antiquities. They keep this information to themselves, which is why collecting lobby groups can pull the wool over the public's eyes and present collecting as something it is not, as a scholarly enterprise as a whole.
Looking at eBay and the misshapen styleless monstrosities offered as "antiquities" [with varying degrees of 'small print' honesty] by many sellers (even those claiming a 'reputation'), and which are daily finding purchasers, it is clear that many antiquity collectors really have no idea at all what they are collecting. (A separate point is how many 'dealers' know what they are selling.) This would be fine if everybody was happy with that and the buyers only end up with fakes. No archaeological sites are trashed, the collector's vanity and greed are satisfied, they can make up their stories about the past, imagine "what it was like", and imagine they are "discoverers of lost truths" or whatever.
This however is not the way it is, indiscriminate collectors will buy the fakes (not eroding the archaeological record) thinking they are ancient, as well as real looted artefacts (thus the product of the erosion of the archaeological record). They will often be mixed up in the same personal collection, they will come back on the market together in the future, the difference between real and fake will be blurred, as it will be impossible decades from now to determine without expensive tests and attempting (and probably in the vast majority of cases failing) to trace collecting histories which objects are fake and which not. Given the vast numbers of fakes coming onto the market today, it may well be that any artefact which cannot be traced back beyond "bought on eBay March 2010" might as well be disregarded as a fake in the absence of any information about its provenance showing otherwise. Irresponsible collecting, irresponsible dealing, obscuring the provenances of the objects currently on the market will be responsible for the loss not only of the information about the context of discovery of the items themselves (and the layers of archaeological information that holds) but also will undermine any confidence in the reliability of any of the decontextualised objects circulating on the market at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the next as a source of any kind of "information" about the past at all. They will just be antiquity-shaped geegaws.
Some fakes are bad and laughable and easily dismissed as such, some are very good copies or plausible and potentially confusing. As Muscarella and others have shown, the archaeological record is already contaminated enough by fakes and dubious items from the antiquities markets of yesteryear. The situation in a few decades time will be worse. More importantly this totally indiscriminate and mass market buying of decontextualised colectables is already trashing what little of the accessible archaeological record there is left. All in the pretence that collectors are "responsible".
I have been actively, well too actively in hindsight, acquiring artifacts (mostly Roman and some Egyptian) over the last 8 months or so on eBay. Most of these pieces cost less than $100 but a few cost me more. I had also bought 30 pieces from Sadigh but I was fortunately able to return those for a refund. It is the eBay pieces which are amulets, brooches, pendants, hairpins, rings, terracotta oil lamps and some other miscellaneous items that concern me at this time. [...] After returning the Sadigh pieces I now have maybe 140 items which is a considerable amount to try to to get authenticated.The last eight months is 240 days, and Pearlquest bought 170 "mostly Roman and Egyptian" pieces from New York's Sadigh Galleries [reputed in collecting circles as a notorious seller of tourist tat for the undiscerning] and through the Internet at a cost, presumably, of several thousand dollars. This is quite interesting, and is one of the sort of statistics that collectors want to keep out of the public eye by keeping forums like "AncientArtifacts" as closed access groups. One collector binge-buys an artefact every two days over a period of eight months, how typical is this? If the Yahoo group has two thousand members and they all behaved like this, that would be some 514 000 objects bought annually by members of a single artefact collecting forum. That's quite a substantial amount of erosion of the archaeological record. A decade of that is enough to empty an entire landscape of collectables items, in the course of which millions of non-collectable artefacts will also be hoiked out of the ground, assemblages disturbed and damaged, stratigraphy trashed.
Of course we have no evidence that all collectors behave like that, some do not have the money, but little snippets of information like this tantalise in that they reveal how little we actually do know about collecting patterns, even among (self-declared) "responsible collectors".
Another interesting mechanism emerges here, it was only after collecting some 170 "mostly Roman and Egyptian" objects that this antiquity collector started to try and find out something about them, in the course of which it emerged that many of the things (s)he had bought did not look quite right. While mantra of collector's is "get the book first", I get the impression that many antiquity and ancient coin collectors cannot cope with books. Pearlquest realised the objects were stylistically wrong by looking on the Internet (perhaps for the Roman ones, the Portable Antiquities Scheme database which statistics in the Scheme's own annual reports reveal serves mainly as a source of information for other collectors these days). This rather goes against the picture presented by the pro-market lobby which claims that collectors and collections "generate knowledge about the past", that collectors are (all) researchers, and that is why they are collectors. Pearlquest clearly is not.
Again, we still have a dearth of detailed information about why portable antiquity collectors collect antiquities. They keep this information to themselves, which is why collecting lobby groups can pull the wool over the public's eyes and present collecting as something it is not, as a scholarly enterprise as a whole.
Looking at eBay and the misshapen styleless monstrosities offered as "antiquities" [with varying degrees of 'small print' honesty] by many sellers (even those claiming a 'reputation'), and which are daily finding purchasers, it is clear that many antiquity collectors really have no idea at all what they are collecting. (A separate point is how many 'dealers' know what they are selling.) This would be fine if everybody was happy with that and the buyers only end up with fakes. No archaeological sites are trashed, the collector's vanity and greed are satisfied, they can make up their stories about the past, imagine "what it was like", and imagine they are "discoverers of lost truths" or whatever.
This however is not the way it is, indiscriminate collectors will buy the fakes (not eroding the archaeological record) thinking they are ancient, as well as real looted artefacts (thus the product of the erosion of the archaeological record). They will often be mixed up in the same personal collection, they will come back on the market together in the future, the difference between real and fake will be blurred, as it will be impossible decades from now to determine without expensive tests and attempting (and probably in the vast majority of cases failing) to trace collecting histories which objects are fake and which not. Given the vast numbers of fakes coming onto the market today, it may well be that any artefact which cannot be traced back beyond "bought on eBay March 2010" might as well be disregarded as a fake in the absence of any information about its provenance showing otherwise. Irresponsible collecting, irresponsible dealing, obscuring the provenances of the objects currently on the market will be responsible for the loss not only of the information about the context of discovery of the items themselves (and the layers of archaeological information that holds) but also will undermine any confidence in the reliability of any of the decontextualised objects circulating on the market at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the next as a source of any kind of "information" about the past at all. They will just be antiquity-shaped geegaws.
Some fakes are bad and laughable and easily dismissed as such, some are very good copies or plausible and potentially confusing. As Muscarella and others have shown, the archaeological record is already contaminated enough by fakes and dubious items from the antiquities markets of yesteryear. The situation in a few decades time will be worse. More importantly this totally indiscriminate and mass market buying of decontextualised colectables is already trashing what little of the accessible archaeological record there is left. All in the pretence that collectors are "responsible".
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