Thinking Below the Suds

The coin collectors' claim that US measures to combat smuggling of dugup artefacts from certain territories produced "call for import restrictions on coins based on their place of production rather than their find spot". Nathan Elkins comments on this when a sniping lobbyist-blogger raised that point in a comment to his post about "The Baby and The Bathwater":

I do not think it is fair to say that calls for import restrictions on coins are based on place of production. Import restrictions have only been placed successfully on coins based on place of production AND find spot. A look at existing restrictions proves this. For example, in Italy only aes signatum, the cast coinage, and the early Roman Republican struck coinage, as well as the colonial issues, are subject to import restrictions. These were made in Italy and also circulated primarily in Italy. If restrictions were based on place of production alone, we would have restrictions on almost all the Roman Republican and Roman imperial coinage, right? The same is true of Greece where only the locally circulating coinages are covered. "International coinages" like the Athenian owls are not covered. Clearly, import restrictions are not based on place of production alone, but also where certain types are primarily found.

The same goes surely for the pre-Tang cast cash coinage covered by another MOU. I wonder whether the dugup collectors will also raise the same point when the subject of import restrictions will be freshly-surfaced shabti-figures and Egyptian sarcophagus fragments. Will they be subject to scrutiny when imported into the US from Dubai, Madrid or London? or will they be exempt, meaning all a smuggler has to do is make sure that is freshly-surfaced (from "underground?") merchandise does not arrive in the US on a ship or plane from Suez or Alexandria. What would be the point of that? How do dugup dealers propose combating this kind of 'laundering' of freshly-surfaced antiquities? Because their stock answer of "let them adopt a PAS type system" really has absolutely no relevance here. So, we await a better answer from them, but my guess is none will actually be forthcoming, they will however continue their stubborn and unthinking sniping.