Mr Tompa "Loses" a Comment

Tombstone from Jordan (Yeshiva University)

Peter Tompa made a big thing about "Archaeology Magazine' publishing a short news item referring to a longer piece in the New York Times about a Jewish tombstone which he, jubilantly, says goes against the AIA principles on "unprovenanced antiquities" ("Archaeology Magazine Publicizes Unprovenanced Jewish Tombstone", CPO Wednesday, December 18, 2013). He concludes his post with the observation: "Yes, we can learn a lot from unprovenanced artifacts, despite what hard-liners in the AIA and archaeological blogosphere might say". Personally, I do not think anyone is denying that we can say something (sometimes many things) about, and maybe learn something from certain artefacts taken out of their context. To do so would be ridiculous, and certainly merit the name "hard-line", but then, who is actually denying that? On Wednesday, I sent a comment to the Tompa blog, but somehow it seems to have got lost in the aether (I see from that blog's comments sections that even the multitalented, ever-superior and distinguished Arthur Houghton III frequently has the same problem and has to ask somebody to do it for him). Atypically, I did not save a copy of the exact wording of this submitted comment (the ACCG bloggers are notorious for refusing to publish comments on their blogs which do not suit their world view).

I remember though that I started my response to Tompa's parting shot with the remark, "artefact or text?" What the NYT article describes is merely deciphering a blurred text in a known language. Reaching interpretations on the basis of texts and pictures is easy-peasy. They are what we call 'addressed sources' - ones that are intended to convey information, and so they do. That's what makes discussion of these issues so frustrating with coineys. They see only objects which are addressed sources, and seem quite oblivious to the fact that archaeology is on the whole dealing with 'non-addressed sources'. Nobody (almost nobody) is or was trying to convey a message in the way they throw away kitchen waste or deposit other rubbish. Yet that is what we mostly have to deal with. I really do not see what is really so clever that somebody can read an inscription saying "here lies Jenny" and tell us that a woman called Jenny lived somewhere in the place where this woman was buried. Duh. Having that same inscription on a stone associated with a particular grave (containing a particular assemblage of material) in a particular position in the vertical and horizontal stratigraphy of the cemetery, and in relation to other graves in that cemetery, which lay in a particular place in the settlement geography of the urban complex from which it came could give us a good deal more information than "Jenny". And that is the point, because somebody ripped off this stone, and it got to a private collector in the US (how, when?) who gave it to a church museum, who then gave it to somebody else, all the rest of the information has irretrievably gone. All we have is a group of smug young people happy because they read the name "Jenny" which somebody had written on it.  Not actually a big deal at all, is it?

I then added to my comment an invitation (including a link) to readers of Mr Tompa's blog to participate in the challenge (not such a difficult one as the artefact has two pictures on it and two lines of writing) about the Acre Christopher coin. Sadly the comment never appeared, so Mr Tompa's many esteemed readers will not see it and will not have the chance to exhibit their skills and allow us to examine the methodology they would apply to the study of a specific decontextualised object. That's a shame.