EBay, Lueke and the Coin Elves (Part 2)

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In his pursuit of what is being written by preservationsists about the scale of the US market for dugup coins, Tie-dye coin elf believer Jorg Lueke has been doing some searching of ebay figures ('What can [sic] eBay tell us about the Ancient Coin Market (and what it can't)' ):

eBay has been used to demonstrate the scope of the ancient coin market both at SAFE and on numerous occasions in front of the CPAC (Cultural Property Advisory Committee). Oddly the amount of thought that has been put into the numbers has been lacking and I aim to correct this oversight.

The clarity of his manner of communicating the results of his "thinking" however leaves a lot to be desired. He says that in order to find out how many coins (for it is just that topic which he is discussing) are being offered on eBay: "we have to differentiate between every lot on eBay and the actual volume of sales". No, no we do not, these are just two aspects of the issue. The number of coins dug up and put on sale is important, not just the turnover of dealers. Unless of course one believes that the coins that are not sold were not dug up but put there by the coin elves. Thus it is that Lueke dismisses as totally unimportant and unrelated to the issue of the scale of the depletion of the archaeological record that "when I just browse ancient coins I see 27973 lots".

His reasoning seems to be that many of these coins can be on offer on eBay "for months as well as many lots that do not sell". So he is proposing that there is a smaller number of fresh coins coming onto the market and being sold among a mass of some 20 000+ coins (see below) which simply lurk unsold on eBay week after week, month after month. Later on, Lueke presents information on what (in his opinion) sells and what does not - you would think that all those dealers spending time and money listing all those 20 000 coins with pictures and sometimes cutesy bits cut-and-pasted from Wikipedia would have worked that out for themselves and saved themselves the effort, eh?

In fact one might wonder about a retailer that stays in business despite the fact that they seem, like three shops near my home, never to sell anything. In the case of the shops near my home it seems to me that the retail outlet is a front for other activities - which could included laundering dirty money. So what is the reason why coin dealers keep offering the same stuff week after week, if it is obvious that there is no market for them? What would be the connection between such a 'dead weight' of surplus-to-market-needs-coins and the appearance of freshly surfaced (from 'underground') coins on the market? Is it not the case that the dead weight to which Lueke draws attention is there to mask the appearance of coins of less-than-licit origins on a market and to justify the view that "there are so many coins we cannot be expected to differentiate old stock from new"?

Anyway, to cut a long story short, Lueke discovers that if he looks at "sold lots" instead of active auctions "the volume in the ancient coin category is a bit less than 3500 lots per week" on EBay globally (at least I think that is what he's getting at). Then his text gets really confusing. The (whole eBay-served) "European market" is either (he says) the same size as the American market [USA pop. 213 million, EU 503 million] or, in another place the market in "Europe" is twice or three times that in America. Let us recall the fact that Lueke omits, that of course most of these ancient dugup coins are being dugup in Europe and adjacent areas and those that come on the market are being collected by collectors within the source countries, or region. Ancient Greek and Roman coins tend not to be dug up very much in North America. Although the lots "originated in the US" the coins in them did not. Lueke says that:

Still we have about 1750 ancient coin lots per week sold in the US and some of those are probably imported recently and some of the lots outside the US probably found owners inside the US.

So what Lueke is saying is that "only" 7000 lots containing ancient coins are sold by US-based dealers through eBay a month (that is still some 90 000 a year). That is apparently meant to arouse in us warm fuzzy feelings about coineys and rush out in a desire to cuddle a collector today. Ninety thousand dugup ancient coins sold in the US is still ninety thousand needless holes, big or small, in the archaeological record, and the tens or more likely hundreds of thousands of unsold surpulus-to-market-needs coins to which Lueke draws attention are another several tens or hundreds of thousands of needless holes in the archaeological record.

Unless of course you believe in coin elves.