" Southern Urals State University Students Association for the Advancement of Archaeological and Anthropological Studies"

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I missed this post when it was published, but Doug Smith has recently taken a look at the webpage of the so-called 'Southern Urals State University Students Association for the Advancement of Archaeological and Anthropological Studies'. Ostensibly this is a webpage of an academic institution in Russia which is now selling off surplus artefacts from its teaching collections to raise funds for "advancing archaeological and anthropological studies" through a house on a leafy street on an island in Washington State in the US. As Doug spotted, the artefacts they are selling are - to put it mildly - on the whole, if not wholly dubious-loooking (my favourite are the "Victorian Europe" ones)*. According to the website:

the Roman artifacts were found principally in Romania (literally "land of the Romans"), Bulgaria, and Syria. The Sumerian artifacts were unearthed in both Turkey and Syria, which [...] constituted the majority of the sites of the ancient Sumerian civilizations [sic]. The Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection amassed in the mid-1960's, at the height of Soviet influence in Egypt. As well, additional specimens are occasionally acquired from other institutions and dealers in Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. 

These people have been at it a long time, I recall being pointed at them by artefact collectors years ago in the pre-blog days as an example of "how [other] academics can be involved in the antiquities trade". I do not expect I was very polite about them in response, wherever that was. Anyway, buying antiquities from suppliers with goods like these seems to me to be a way of collecting which is not likely to be contributing very much to the erosion of the archaeological record. They give you a COA (Certficate of Authenticity) issed by the South Urals University (is in in Cyrillic?).


[* Even here, most of the artefacts do not look to me very likely to be as-described. The 1937 two-mark coin is probably original, but the hype not really worth paying for. Such a coin can be got here in Europe for about ten Euros in that condition, they are selling it for 70 dollars.]