On Monday morning there was still no sign from their blogs or websites that the US coiney community was acknowledging the revelation on Friday of the existence of a request from Bulgaria for a bilateral cultural property agreement with the USA which would limit the flow of illicitly exported dugup artefacts and ethnographic material onto the US market. I am sure I am not the only one curious to know how they will deal with it. Not only that, many of the "minor antiquities" bought and sold by other groups (such as the dealers on Tim Haines' Yahoo "Ancient Artifacts" discussion group) to a large degree have also come from Bulgarian sources. Now there is already a huge amount of such stuff on the US market, enough to keep it ticking over a while anyway, and all perfectly legal when it can be documented as having been in the country before the beginning of the import restrictions. But what about collectors who have material which cannot be documented as having been imported into the US before that date? What about collectors who have such documentation, but become aware that the only thing that makes the freshly dugup artefacts in their collection more "kosher" than the other kind is nothing whatsoever about the way it was dug up, or taken out of the country of origin, but the date on which a piece of paper in Washington was signed? Would that not make the average responsible collector feel a little uneasy about the items they bought from "Respectable Ronny Grebkash" the dealer? Aren't we coming slowly but surely to a situation where the responsible collector of "minor" antiquities from the classical world is going to find asking themselves certain questions about what they are doing simply unavoidable?
From this point of view, I think it unlikely that the dealers in dugup antiquities are going to ignore the request to the US government by Bulgaria to help cut down the haemorrhage of dugup antiquities from the looters to external markets. I cannot see that they have any options. Nor can I see what their options to effectively fight this actually are these days. They seem rather to have painted themselves into a corner.
They do also seem to have been chased into a corner by recent events. Here's my ACCG benefit auction coin 'last known origins' map from a previous post; the red areas are those covered by MOUs or other legislation restricting imports of dugups including coins to those accompanied by the proper paperwork. That's Iraq, Cyprus, Italy, Greece (though whether coins are included in the latter has not been officially announced). The brown areas are those where there has been or is ongoing civil strife in the so-called "Arab Spring". I would imagine that no responsible dealer would be offering dugup artefacts from such an area without documentation that they left the country legally. The fact that there is a plethora of coins of Syrian and Ptolemaic, Ayyubid, Mamluk etc. origin on V-Coins without that being mentioned in the sale spiel is no doubt just an oversight on the part of their sellers. Possibly, as the situation develops, some of these countries (Egypt maybe?) will be covered by emergency legislation once the international community gets organized. Regardless of the colour of the shading, many of the countries shown on the map of course are also covered by the 1970 UNESCO Convention, though this does not have a particularly noticeable effect on the outflow of fresh dugups to the ginormous US no-questiuons-asked antiquities market or prosecuting those responsible.
This map suggests the sources of "free-range" ("free enterprise") dugup ancient coins is becoming increasingly restricted. Obviously to close the ring, we need Turkey and several of the Balkan states to ask for import restrictions and the US dugup coin trade will at last be forced to play clean with freshly imported material. It will be dragged, spluttering and protesting about a "violation of collectors' rights" into the resource-conscious world of the twenty-first century and begin to pay more attention to actually documenting the licit origins of the material it handles. Not before time.
There is still a lot of work before the conservation community. The MOUs with the US are just a beginning. We really need to pay much more attention to the European market, in particular the large German and Swiss concerns through EU channels.
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