American School Director: Its the Arabs and the Yellows doing it, not US!

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A minor flurry of excitement in the collecting world at the news that site guards in Greeece were ebing cut, which means more looted stuff will soon be appearing on the market (Greek antiquities at risk as budgets shrink, economy falters PRI, March 16th 2012). One of them noted this bit:

Jack Davis, director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, said [...] small-scale looting and black-market trading has always been a problem in Greece. But in recent years it’s gotten worse. “There are gangs operating throughout the Mediterranean, criminal gangs who systematically loot archaeological sites and smuggle finds outside the borders,” Davis said. The collectors who are driving the demand these days are mostly from the Far East and Middle East, and they have no interest in putting the works in museums, Davis said.

ACCG paid ideologist Canadian John Hooker ponders: "let us see if the archaeo hate bloggers start to reflect this information, or whether their anti-American discrimination still
continues...". Let's get this right, the director of the AMERICAN school is interviewed and says America is not to blame for the activities of criminal gangs in Greece, it is the fault of the "Arabs and yellow folk" and the US market is wholly blameless. Yeah right, and who is being discriminatory?

Oh, and Mr Hooker missed one thing: "The collectors who are driving the demand", the collectors who Davis says are the real looters, he means.

Do the Kuweitis, Koreans and Chinese consider that their culture is rooted in Classical Greek civilization? Do they to the same degree as US collectors at the drop of a hat use this justification for their voracious appetite for dugup Greek antiquities? Maybe Mr Hooker would like to back up this information (the information which archaeobloggers discussing no-questions-asked collecting should "reflect") by giving the link to the relevant Chinese, Korean or Kuweiti version of V-Coins so we can see how much greater the market is for dugup antiquities over there than in the United States of America.

V-coins alone: 158 Ancient Dealers (many of whom will no doubt now be shifting their sales to China, Japan, Korea and Kuweit) with 97,099 Items with a total value of $22,098,249.

For Mr Hooker's information, several of us have for years identified the Gulf States as a major area of distribution of illicit antiquities. I drew attention to a dealer out in Dubai with huge dealers' lots of Greek coins (including what seemed to be one or more hoards of Athenian tets). The dealer was reportedly part of a network that has been in the news recently and some members of which will be appearing in a New York court soon. David Gill has been questioning the Miho Museum over some of its acquisitions for years. The ACCG really should keep up with the discussion, not drag behind in its nineteenth century.