Gunning for the Fertiliser Argument

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Bruce "Chip" Gruszczyński - plant manager for a big paper and pulp company in Atlanta, Georgia - sells dugup ancient coins on eBay and perhaps elsewhere, he has a somewhat moribund blog (with just two posts on it). Notably however he did not use that blogger account to send a comment to a post I wrote a while ago discussing what Texan collector Scott Head had been writing online about dugup coins. He used his wife's. Mrs Gruszczynska is a kindergarten teacher and has an equally inactive blog with two posts on it (which carefully avoids mentioning her husband collects and deals in ancient coins). Chip seems concerned about fertilisers.

Paul.... Do you suggest we leave the coins in the ground to rot from fertilizers and other corrosion sources? Your argument is complete and utter crap.

Hmm. What I was writing about (coming up to a year ago next week) was a post by Rev. Head called "The Reality of Uncleaned Coins for Beginners about the collecting of ancient artefacts bought in the form of bulk lots of "uncleaned ancient coins". To find out which "argument" of mine is considered to be "complete and utter crap" by the American (and to which the fertiliser argument is trotted out to counter), have a look at what I pointed out :

Nevertheless, from what we know about the supply of the US market at the moment, the great majority of these coins are the rejects from the sorting through of the vast bulk of metal artefacts which is being stripped on almost industrial scale from the archaeological sites of southeastern Europe and other regions of the former ancient world (Texas has no ancient coins of its own). [...] Apart from being archaeologically damaging, the commercial stripping of collectable objects from archaeological sites is illegal in most of the countries where this is going on. Even in parts of the otherwise liberal UK. The non-reporting of these finds is equally illegal in most areas of the ancient world. The removal of these items from the region without going through the proper procedures is also illegal. US Coin collectors argue that buying these coins is "not illegal" in the US, because "no US law was broken". But quite clearly buying illegally produced goods cannot be moral, even if done by a pastor and Church elder. Should it not be these pastors and Church elders, not to mention school teachers, that are setting the moral tone of the nation?

Well, I think it should of course, but Chip (writing nota bene from schoolteacher Mrs G's address) seems to disagree. He says, never mind the archaeological destruction, never mind that it's putting money into the pockets of criminals, it's "saving coins from the fertilisers" (as if saving the coins was the only thing that matters to everybody). It is therefore ironic that half (!) of the coins illustrated on his own blog have what he calls a "desert/sand patina" - in other words the coins he buys do not all come from fertiliser rich environments (there's not much point fertilising deserts - waste of money if they are deserts). Now, as we know, US coineys are not very interested in precisely where the coins they buy come from. If he did take an interest, Chip probably would have found that a lot of the coins that came onto the US market when he began collecting and dealing came from a place called Archar in NE Bulgaria. There's no fertiliser there at all, much of it was under pasture, before it was bulldozed to get the artefacts out. Take a look on Google Earth. What "fertiliser" is Chip actually talking about when many of the coins on the US market come from where they come from?

Photo: 'Bulgarian farming' by clivehol (from travel.webshots.com)

Now there are two consecutive processes referred to in the post to which Chip Gruszczynski is answering, both in most cases we are discussing illegal. The first is the removal from the archaeological record. The second is the smuggling from the source country. Now why do dug up European and Near Eastern coins have to be taken all the way to America to be "saved from fertiliser"? Do US collectors think European and Near Eastern coin collectors and museums do not have numismatic cabinets but store their collections in vast vats of fertiliser?

Secondly, Mr Gruszczynski claims there IS a threat to coins from fertiliser. This is an argument which, due to the frequency with which it is trotted out by metal detectorists and coineys, Nigel Swift and I examined very carefully in our book. After a pretty extensive survey of the literature, both British and international, we conclude that there is no evidence for such an effect. Buy the book to find out why.

POSTSCRIPT
Neither did we find that there was evidence supporting the idea that air pollution was causing the effects on buried artefacts sometimes ascribed to it (particularly by Scandinavian investigators). It's quite significant that Mr Gruszczynski avoids mentioning that because it is reported that the firm he works for was identified not so long ago as "the fifteenth-largest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States. In 2000, Georgia-Pacific facilities released more than 22,000,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into the air. Georgia-Pacific has also been linked to some of the United States' worst toxic waste sites". Its a bit much that somebody connected with such activity should be criticising foreign farmers for fertilising their fields to grow food. Clean up your own back yard Mr G. before you tell us how to clean up ours.

Vignette: Georgia-Pacific's Green Bay Broadway plant,What's this doing to the historic environment?