A Reply to "Rosemary85" who Knows More About Papyrology than me

Some blogger (apparently a classicist) called "Rosemary85" ["Moderator Archaic Greek Literature" on something called Reddit's "Ask a Historian"] has a few views about what I wrote about the news stories on a newly-surfaced papyrus with some Sappho on it. She seems defensively infuriated that there has been critical discussion about a recent discovery. Among the people criticised, she for some reason reserves especial Reddit bile for me.  The writer seems to miss the point that this blog is primarily about portable antiquity collecting issues, and we are discussing an object which came to the scholar from a private collection, and it is from that point that stems my attention to the story. Not understanding that seems to have led the anonymous writer to make several unwarranted assumptions.  

At least she gives me credit for being the first (really?) to raise the issue of the lack of mention in the text I was discussing of the all-important issue of where this freshly-surfaced object came from. Regretfully, she takes an elitist view and lumps me in with the "people who don't know much about papyrology" (which is true enough), and classifies me as "an untalented amateur". She dismisses my comments as "a very foolish blog post by Paul Barford". She say that it is "laughable" to express disappointment that the issue of establishing licit provenance was ignored by the object's publisher, and she regrets "the fact that other bloggers have been citing Barford's idiocy approvingly and unironically".  At least I write under my own name.

I was of course not discussing the -ology of papyri, but the archae-ology of an artefact, which IS my field. Current practices in private collecting are doing a great deal of harm, and it is disappointing to find that people involved in neighbouring and overlapping disciplines seem bot to be much aware of the issues and the reasons for concerns as archaeologists. I think "Margaret85" is a typical example of such a narrow approach to the issues.

She is right, I am no papyrologist. I am no palaeo-malacologist either, I can't tell the zonitidae from the gastrodontidae. What I do know is if someone presents me with a report on a "Roman snail assemblage from somewhere (sic)" without describing where the samples came from, how they were collected and prepared, and what relationship they have to the deposits they came from (integrity, taphonomy etc), then the report is incomplete. That is precisely the issue I raise about the presentation of this freshly-surfaced find. The data presented are depicted as though springing from thin air.

The woman suggests I "presume bad faith in everything" connected with the dugup antiquities trade, which I do. I think we all, buyers, collectors, observers and academics, should. There is undeniably a lot of dodgy stuff floating round and a lot of people trying to persuade us to take it all in good faith (no-questions-asked). I disagree. How else, except asking searching questions, are we going to combat the trade in illicit antiquities, to establish the authenticity and licit origins of the source material?

I thinkestablishing the legitimacy of such a significant piece as this is an important issue (indeed, it should be priority). In responsible scholarship it surely needs to be established upfront and not presumed, or the question simply ignored as it was in Obbink's initial draft of his proposed publication.

"Rosemary85" rants on that in the text she cited, I was "accusing Obbink of being a Brit (which he isn't) as one of his crimes". What? I wrote "UK academic" in the text's title. As far as I am aware Christ Church College of Oxford is in the UK. Furthermore, I do not think anybody thinks being British (or anything else) would in itself be a "crime". What an absurd idea - and one lacking any support whatsoever in what I wrote. She then proceeds to state that  I was "calling him [Dr Obbink] a "no-questions-asking looter-financing Philistine"...". What I think is that before poisonously tapping something like that out on her keyboard, "Rosemary85" might do herself the favour of checking what I DID actually write, so as to avoid coming over as, at best, a careless scholar.

Again, her ugly elitism comes to the fore. I am an archaeologist, with not a few publications to my name, I also sit/have sat on several editorial boards and taken part in working parties on archaeological publication. I have written at least one piece (book chapter) on the subject. As such, I am entitled to my view that we should strive to make a publication of something, anything, communicative. Jargon may make the ivory tower expert feel some satisfaction that he knows something the hoi polloi layman, or specialist from other fields does not, but it is not communication. I find therefore her criticism wide of the mark when she says:

He also seems to think the fact that a non-specialist can't understand everything in Obbink's article shows that it's the article that's dishonest ("Dr Obbink notes that the fragment he discusses was in the same handwriting as something called 'P. GC. inv. 105', but what that piece of papyrological jargon means for the context of discovery I could not say"). 

The article is uncommunicative about the aspect (and the only aspect) that interests me, the context of discovery of the fragment being discussed, which has its cognitive aspects too, it might have bearing on discussions of the reception of Sappho in later antiquity (for example). I understand enough about the methodology of papyrology to know that "P. GC. inv. 105" is the shorthand abbreviation used to refer to a certain papyrus (fragment, usually) in another collection. My point was that the abbreviation is not expanded in order to allow us to use that scrap of information in any way to come to any understanding of its relation to the findspot of the new (unnumbered and unprovenanced) Sappho papyrus. Obbink does not develop that topic, which means he's not interested in addressing that aspect. I am not sure how "Rosemary85" determines that I think (for I certainly do not say) this is "dishonest", I think it is rather she who again is "presuming bad faith in everything".

In the comments under her rant, the same unjustified insulting tone is adopted (one "deadaluspark" for example).  The main issue lying behind all this ranting by object-centred "historians" comes out very well in the comment of one "balathustrius " just below. After a very metal detectorish suggestion about "professional jealousy", this person candidly writes:  

What's the general consensus about revealing the owner of such an artifact? I suppose there's a conflict of interests - on one hand, you don't want to shame the guy if he obtained it unethically - or get him into trouble if he obtained it illegally. That would encourage other private collectors with similar artifacts to never come forward. 

Well, it could not get plainer than that. What kind of scholarship is that to even contemplate handling unethically obtained or illegally obtained material? We come back to my allegedly "idiotic" analogy with the stolen laptops, don't we?  Rosemary85 casually continues the theme: "And once you start doubting everything anyone says, you're abandoning any hope of pursuing research". I would say that academic enquiry consists above all of questioning what is said. It also would do well to note what is not being said when it should. I would say it was up to scholars who according to his devoted fan "Rosemary85"is "one of the best [....]ing papyrologists on the planet, and definitely the most famous one" to be setting the standards, rather than simply ignoring the issue of the integrity of the source.  

An endrocrinologist pal has been telling me that there has been a lot of interesting medical data produced in a certain Asian country which cannot be published in the West because they come from experiments conducted on prisoners, political prisoners among them. Similarly I know that Mendele's Auschwitz experiments produced potentially useful data that cannot be obtained from other sources. They will never be used by ethical doctors today, because to do so would be to acknowledge that what this monster was doing to his victims was in some for legitimate "science".  I know that coineys (and it seems now papyrologists) will protest that knowledge is everything, overriding all other considerations. I personally wonder whether that is always the case, even in the situation where we have archaeological material belonging to the category of "addressed sources" (made to convey information) when it is obtained at the cost of trashing other information. Surely if the Sappho papyrus does not for some reason fit into that category, then all the more reason for Dr Obbink to begin his publication with stating that fact.

Who is this "Rosemary85" (there is quite a variety of people of that pseudonymous screen name to choose from on the Internet), and what relationship has she, professional, institutional or otherwise,  with Dr Dirk Obbink or the anonymous London collector who owns this object? 

UPDATE 7th February 2014:

For more on what "Rosemary85" ignores see "It's perfectly legitimate".

 It seems that I am not the only one thinking that this anonymous critic has not really separated fact from her own over-the-top emotional response "h1ppophagist " writes:

I just want to point out that Nakassis has disputed your characterization of his tweet. Follow the link to his tweet again if you'd like to see what he's said.

What he said was "Someone needs to chill".

Professor Justin Walsh (February 7, 2014 at 4:11 pm) has the same impression as myself, "Rosemary85" finds meaniungs in other people's words which are simply not there:

I don’t suspect that the fragment is a fake, nor have I ever said that I had these suspicions (no matter what rosemary85 on Reddit might claim — and at least I use my real name).