A measure of Coiney "Truthiness"

A few days ago Dealer Dave Welsh was spreading unfounded rumours about me, that allegedly I had not graduated from my first university, that allegedly I'd been working for the communist government in Poland and therefore I'd not worked as an archaeologist since the Fall of Communism in 1989 (he's confusing Poland with East Germany). Since then, he's checked his facts a little better and now grudgingly admits that now, since 1989:

Barford seeks, by writing journal articles (in which journals?) and doing minor volunteer fieldwork in Poland and Egypt, to maintain some visible credentials as a practising archaeologist. But all of what he does is in reality small scale, and not important in the view of real archaeologists [...]

Well, nobody is claiming to be "an important archaeologist", I really think the thugs are making rather too much of a meal of the bit on the profile of an archaeoblogger who says he is writing from an archaeologist's point of view, not a collector, not a dealer, not a cultural property lawyer.

But let us just correct Mr Welsh a bit more. There is nothing wrong with writing "journal articles", especially if they are peer-reviewed. Many UK and US colleagues spend a lot of their time writing nothing else. I think many in his own field (optical engineering I believe) also publish their results of their research in professional journals. Does that in some way disqualify them as optical engineers in Mr Welsh's eyes (and - not that any of us here are really interested - his own bibliography?). Just to put the record straight, the last two items in the bibliography in my CV are book chapters, commissioned book chapters. One was paid, though I actually gave that money to charity. 

Nobody has to work for the Polish Mission at Deir El-Bahari as a "volunteer", we are all paid, and paid quite well, including the Egyptian staff of the dig house. Mr Welsh is again guilty both of schematic xenophobic thinking ("Polish = unprofessional") and making things up where he has no information. I was also paid for the work I did for several months in the spring on the report of the motorway excavation of an Early Medieval cemetery near Włocławek, back here in Poland and have signed a contract for the second volume. Not "fieldwork", but most certainly archaeology. Important? Who is to say? Certainly not Mr Welsh - who knows, I will wager, much less about Early Medieval Poland and its archaeology than he does about modern Poland, which as can be seen is about as much as you could write on the back of an envelope. Who does he think he is to assess my work, when he knows so little of any of it?

So, here's the deal. Dealer Dave has - for reasons best known to himself - produced on his "Ancient Coins" blog, and now contributed similar material to Peter Tompa's "Cultural property Observer" blog a completely wacko account of my personal history. In these accounts (building in fact on a single sentence he found on the backflap of a book authored by me) he gets just about every "fact" in it completely wrong. He has produced and is now disseminating false information about me. I have, much against my better judgement, provided a number of corrections to these false facts.  Let us now see the coin dealer's attitude to presenting the truth. Will he  go through his texts, editing them to take into account what he has since learnt is not as he wrote it, and deleting information that he cannot back up through verified sources (without his fevered and schematic imaginings)? Or, like some of his dishonourable metal detecting counterparts, will he continue to leave his texts online as written disseminating false information?

How much can one rely on a dealer in ancient dugups like ACCG's Mr Welsh to take care to ensure that they are only reporting the verified truth? 

So far he has failed to do either, report the truth or use only verifiable sources. Is this the way ACCG dealers retrospectively construct (presumed) "collecting histories" for the goods they sell?


UPDATE 9th Oct 2013.
Dealer Dave reckons the above is an "hysterical reaction" to his constant attempts to bring this down to a personal level and suggests the above is not the reaction of what he (or his wife) would regard as a "normal person". He tries to persuade his readers that a vocifereous critic of current policies on artefact hunting and collecting and the current form of the antiquities market must be in some way mentally unstable. 

I was however talking of his own attitudes towards presenting the truth, not personal characteristics. My comments still stand. Is the coin dealer at all concerned that his public statements are any reflection of reality (in this or anything else), or is he only concerned to write whatever piece of nonsense which comes first into his head? He seems to be dodging this issue. Judge for yourselves whether that is the appropriate reaction of a person caught out disseminating falsehoods.