Wagsant on "Antiquities control"

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In the comments under the recent Forbes article about antiquities collecting there are currently two comments, one by Larry Rothfield about establishing a registration system to identify material already on the established market (making it possible to spot freshly-surfaced looted items). The idea is a no-brainer [as are the REAL reasons why antiquities dealers oppose it so vehemently]. The other comment - apparently from just such a dealer - is telling. It is obvious that behind the screen name "wgsant" is the pen of Wayne Gerald Sayles, veteran antiquities dealer from Missouri. Commenting on the Forbes article titled "There's Big Money And The Need For Reform In The Antiquities Trade" he concentrates on the first aspect and clumsily skips the second. [Sayles] writes:

Big $ values always stimulate interest and commentary about cultural property and its control. The resulting laws and mindset unfortunately extend down-chain to the most common of utilitarian objects like clay pots and coins that survive in huge quantities. As a result, many collectors of relatively insignificant objects are characterized as supporters of looting and pillaging. They are not, and the failure to make this distinction is a travesty in itself.

What is in fact a travesty is the utter refusal of those involved in this trade to admit what the real problems is. What Sayles depicts lightly as "cultural property control" is of course not exercised for its own sake, any more than kiddie porn control is exercised because the cops and customs officers want to be the only people who can look at the stuff (during their investigations) legally. Whatever both paedophiles and collectors on their closed access forums may assert, the laws governing the passage of this material from hand to hand are in reality there to protect other things, other rights.

Is the trade in these so-called "minor artefacts" like "clay pots and coins" really so "insignificant"? Today on just ONE internet portal selling precisely one of these categories of so-called "minor" artefacts in just ONE country where they are sold, we finds there are "159 Ancient [dugup antiquities] Dealers" offering 107,679 Items with a total value of $23,418,999. Twenty-three point four million dollars is not an "insignificant" sum (enough to buy a combat-ready Chinook helicopter, or - to put the scale of this in a more proper context - keep the PAS running for 12 years at current costs). More to the point, 107 000 holes in the archaeological record just to put this week's coins on offer in one venue in one country is not "insignificant damage" when it is an ongoing erosive process. This one portal selling coins of undocumented provenance represents very major damage to the archaeological record. V-coins was set up in 2008, but ebay through which hundreds of thousands of similarly undocumented antiquities pass annually has been going since 1995. The scale of items passing undocumented from the (finite and fragile) archaeological record onto the global antiquities market (and the history-gobbling US one in particular) is incontrovertibly MASSIVE. Holes are being dug all over the place to keep the market which Mr Sayles represents supplied with fresh commodities, of major saleability and minor 'potboiler' status.

It is this damage that is the problem. It is this issue from which Wayne Sayles
wishes to detract the attention of "Forbes" readers in his comment above. The issue is not about in which country portable antiquities should be, which borders they cross, it is about a far more fundamental issue, the origins of the portable antiquities and what was done to the place they came from and how they came on the market which are the subject of scrutiny.

Yes Mr Sayles (who claims to have done an archaeology 101 course at a Wisconsin university), the "resulting laws and mindset" do indeed apply to all "portable antiquities" which are looted from archaeological sites to supply the collectors market. For the "most common of utilitarian objects like clay pots and coins that survive in huge quantities" are archaeological evidence while they are in the archaeological record (ground) and cease to be the moment they are hoiked out to join many thousands others of undocumented and freshly-surfaced dugups in a dealer's stockroom. Like that of Sayles and Lavender - where DID all that stuff come from, really? It is the "most common of utilitarian objects like clay pots and coins that survive in huge quantities" which keep the market ticking over, keep dealers like Mr Sayles in business. It is the affordability in the era of large scale commercial looting of archaeological sites of the "most common of utilitarian objects like clay pots and coins that survive in huge quantities" which allows the market to expand, persuading more and more individuals that they too an afford a "piece of history" in their homes and emulate and get the kudos in a small way of being collectors like Levy and White. What Sayles is arguing is that the vast bulk of the transactions on the no-questions-asked market should remain unregulatable, should remain no-questions-asked. That is precisely what he set up the ACCG to fight for.

Sayles bemoans the situation that [as a result of the fact that archaeological evidence and the objects of conservationists' efforts are not defined by the commercial value of the elements traded]: "many collectors of relatively insignificant objects are characterized as supporters of looting and pillaging". Note the sleight of hand. Sayles likes to pretend (note the name of the dealers' lobbying group he set up in 2004) that it is just collectors who are allegedly "victimised" thus. The DEALERS are as guilty as collectors, if not more so; who buys the stuff with undocumented provenances on a dodgy market? Who will not declare their sources, or reveal what process was used to ascertain (and verify) kosher provenance? Who actively discourages any discussion of these issues (even on the closed coiney forums)? Dealers, dealers, dealers.

There is absolutely no doubt, given the current state of the no-questions-asked antiquities market, collectors who buy freshly surfaced material without ascertaining and verifying it has a clean collecting history are indeed guilty of supporting the looting, pillaging and smuggling and trading of looted and pillaged artefacts. That is irrespective of whether the items concerned are the "most common of utilitarian objects like clay pots and coins" that are looted "in huge quantities" or whether it is a one-off pot like the Euphranios krater (pulled from the same tomb by a robber as many other more "utilitarian" vessels which also end up on the clandestine market). Or an Athenian deka that might (arguably) be found in a Turkish hoard with many thousand other more "mundane" issues. It is not the coin that matters, it is the context; once separated from the rest and smuggled into the US its just a chunk of metal (which is not to say that those handling it all down the chain of illegal activity should not be punished - they all should end up in jail, I'd like to see a few US coin dealers in a Turkish or Bulgarian jail for knowingly handling stolen property).

Sayles assures the readers of "Forbes" that, as long as the portable antiquities traded no-questions-asked are bulk lots of "relatively insignificant objects", neither collectors [and, by extension, the dealers who supply them] are guilty of being "supporters of looting and pillaging [or I, presume, illicit transactions in antiquities and smuggling]". He says the failure to make a distinction between these peddlars of plundered history and those dealing in "significant" objects is some kind of a "travesty". I rather think that word applies to the veteran antiquity dealer's arguments here.