US dugup dealers Kumar and Sons of 2543 Gold Course Lane North, Scruton, Wisconsin have some objects from Syria in their online catalogue. They got them from "Dell Boy" Trotter who would not reveal his sources, but they came wrapped in pages ripped from last month's Lebanese newspapers. TYhey stuck them up on the website, saying nothing about origins or how and when they "surfaced" (from underground) on the US antiquities market. I guess they manage to run their business quite comfortably, thank you,without having the unpleasantness of meeting clients who ask about such things. Just down the road, cultural property lawyer Rick St Hilaire is penning his latest ("Roman, Byzantine and Other Conflict Antiquities from Syria ")
Antiquities from several Syrian cultural eras continue to appear on the art market [...] the Syrian civil war has led to a "bull market for antiquities dealers and thieves." American buyers should remain vigilant about purchases that have no collecting history or have suspicious provenance.
What are the dealers doing to facilitate this? Why are they not rushing to put up on their websites that, in contrast to their rivals, they can demonstrates that the dugup artefacts they are offering come from demonstrably kosher sources? There is a good reason why the Kumars cannot, what about the rest of the US dealers offering material of Syrian origin without any legitimating collecting histories at all? "American buyers should remain vigilant about purchases that have no collecting history or have suspicious provenance", basically I would say that in the current state of the market, the one equates to the other.
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