ACCG Blogroll

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The ACCG (under the "background" heading) has a helpful list of "Blogs"for its supporters: "The following list represents a sampling of views that may be found at some of the many blogs dealing with ancient coin collecting and cultural property issues". The list is a predictable, but nevertheless interesting selection:

• Cultural Property Observer
  Peter K. Tompa
• Ancient Coin Collecting
  Wayne G. Sayles
• RogueClassicism
  David Meadows
• Classical Coins
  Dave Welsh
• The Cultural Property and Archaeology Law Blog
  Kimberly Alderman
  Illicit Cultural Property
  Derek Fincham
  PHDIVA
  Dorothy King
• Culture Grrl
  Lee Rosenbaum

One might wonder what lawyers Kimberley and Derek Fincham have done to end up in such company, from which lawyer Rick St Hilaire for example (who has provided some very detailed coverage of the upcoming "Holyland Coins case") is excluded. Dorothy King and Peter Tompa speak with one voice on a number of issues, but Lee Rosenbaum? And where is Looting Matters? Should not coineys be reading what coverage Professor Gill is giving the issues? I think they should, but obviously Wayne Sayles and his mates would prefer them not to.

It certainly would seem from this that the ACCG is not at all interested in giving its members any guidance to seeing the issues concerning the no-questions-asked trade in dugup artefacts in their wider context (ie the accessing the views of those who oppose the collecting and trade in illicitly-obtained dugup artefacts). That would be too much like encouraging real "avocational scholarship" and might lead to the coineys behaving less like the flock of sheep that the ACCG clearly requires for its rabble-rousing, but asking a few more pertinent questions about what the ACCG dealers tell them. Collectors kept in the dark are more prone to scare-mongering manipulation, aren't they guys?

[It should be noted that in the left sidebar of this blog, there is a pretty full selection of the main coiney and antiquitist naysayer blogs and forums given (down near the bottom, it is true, but something has to be). Unlike the ACCG, I actively encourage my readers to look at them and see what coineys, artefact hunters and artefact collectors talk about among themselves. That's not because I am more magnanimous and fair than the ACCG, but because I honestly believe that any normal person looking at that lot for themselves will draw their own conclusions about the milieu and whether what I say about them here has any validity. One day I will get around to supplying links to all the UK metal detecting forums]