Pedigree Orphan Tets and the CPAC

On Tuesday, Peter Tompa went to the CPAC meeting to oppose the bilateral agreement on restricting imports from Greece into the US of dugup Greek artefacts without proper export papers. In his pocket he had a jumble of old coins - including "this attractive Athenian Tetradrachm from the Morcom Collection [...] along with another Greek coin and foreign copies". His intention was to do a theatrical "show and tell" to members of CPAC illustrate "the point that such artifacts circulated far beyond the borders of modern nation state". Excuse me? The fact that heaps of such coins (nota bene artefacts) are already in the USA, some in Peter Tompa's pocket, is neither here nor there when discussing imports of ancient coins from Greece (except raising the question why the US coin industry needs more and more).

If Tompa's intent had been to show how these artefacts had circulated widely in ancient times to be discovered well away from their point of origin (minting/emission), then he should use dot distribution maps of findspots recorded by collectors and dealers as a result of several centuries collecting these objects. That would show how coins travelled in the past between regions. Except of course contemporary heap of coins on a table numismatics does not produce such maps as no-questions are asked about where newly "surfaced' finds come from. That is why Tompa could not bring an issue of "American Journal of Heaped Numismatics" to show the CPAC the distribution maps inside and had to take coins instead

Poor proud numismofer Peter was however prevented from triumphantly presenting his shiny well-fondled treasures ('Why Not Let CPAC See this Coin?', "for some reason, it was not to be").

"I was told by CPAC Chair Reid that she could not accept the coins "on advice of counsel." Yet, for some reason, Professor Reid was not "advised by counsel" to reject pictures of looted tombs that were passed out by an archaeologist. What gives? Why not let CPAC see this and the other coins?"

I imagine that a committee specially and individually appointed by the President of the United States to advise on cultural property issues in connection with the CCPIA would actually know what a coin looks like. Having one warm from Peter Tompa's pocket thrust under their noses really seems an unnecessary diversion. More to the point, as I have pointed out on this blog earlier, there are issues with people like Tompa bringing coins of unknown origins (see below) into CPAC meetings. How can something be admitted as "evidence" in deliberations like these which could well have resulted from criminal activity (abroad or in the US)? Such items should of course be excluded as evidence by the Committee, and should have been ten years ago when the ACCG started these stunts. It is disturbing that Tompa does not see any difference between a dugup artefact removed under unknown circumstances from a foreign country and a photo taken in situ of a piece of ground in a foreign country. Bizarre.

I am also curious about whether questions were asked when Wayne Sayles delivered his own oral presentation outlining the activities of former State department employee William F. Spengler in bringing dugup coins out of Afghanistan (presumably in his diplomatic baggage) when he returned to the States from service abroad. So far Sayles himself has not described his experiences at the meeting itself, merely about his struggle to get a plane seat from the quota the US airline had reserved for disabled passengers.

Still, at least there is some improvement, Tompa stressed that at least one of the coins in his pocket was from "the Morcomb collection". this probably means more to coineys than it does me, searching the Internet reveals that there was a Christopher Morcomb whose coins are now scattered across the Internet. This obviously is not the Christopher Morcomb who went to school with Alan Turing, it must be another one. Anyhow, the relevance of this is that Tompa in his blog post notes that the coin he was fingering nervously in his pocket as he awaited his turn to speak was supplied to him by the coin dealers CNG from the above-mentioned collection, and we learn from old catalogues that CNG had sold three years earlier (September 2007) a group of items known as "The Christopher Morcom Collection of Pedigreed Coins of Greece and the Aegean Islands". It seems however that these "pedigrees" often went back no further than the previous owner - but it is a start I guess, but how DID that coin reach America to end up at a CPAC meeting?

So it seems that slowly even the ACCG is beginning to be aware that their denial of the importance of maintaining records of the origins of coins is doing their cause a great deal of damage. Sadly Tompa does not reveal the origins of the "other" coins in his pocket which the CPAC did not consider it necessary to look at.
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