Unfocussed Thinking from US "Analyst"

Mike Markowitz
from Coin Weekly

Michael Markowitz  is interested in wargaming, guns, female soldiers and ancient coins. I've looked at his efforts at 'research' before (PACHI Saturday, 24 May 2014, 'US Coineys: They Just Don't Get it...'). Once again Mr Markowitz, billed by Peter Tompa as a 'defence analyst' , shows he just does not get it. He uses the MILINET Listserve, 'which is read in Washington defense and foreign policy circles', to air his, somewhat schematic, thoughts on Erin Thompson's NYT opinion piece about the effects of looting of sites in Museums after the collapse of the US-backed Mubarak regime in Egypt ('One Collector's Response to "Egypt's Looted Antiquities"'). Markowitz had pereviously submitted a comment to the CPAC which contains the usual elements:

no benefit to whatsoever residents of source countries,
harm a wide range of American small businesses
opportunity [for US kinds] to actually hold an ancient coin
collectors are far better stewards of ancient coins than museums
interests of a small elite of archaeology bureaucrats
allowed to trample on the historic rights of collectors,
honorable history of schlarship that reaches back to the Renaissance.

and of course completely misses the point about what the CCPIA is intended to do and why the US has one at all. His "Milinet" piece reflects the same regrettable lack of incisive thinking. He begins as he means to go on:

This article is filled with distortions and propaganda typical of academic archaeology's holy war against collectors.  

"Holy war against collecting"? We are talking here about checking imports into the US of dugup antiquities for proper documentation of legal export (by the lenient terms of the current US legislation). Nothing else. This is about stopping smuggling. Is Mr Markowitz for or against smuggling illicit items across US borders? Also, perhaps he could explain in what way Professor Thompson's opinion piece consists of "distortions and propaganda" and his own opinion piece published on Milinet does not?

The main thrust of his complaint (it's difficult to see it as an analysis) is focussed on just one of the many types of objects which the New York academic wrote about. Ignoring the fact that the article was about a more general issue (collectors responsibilities), all the "analyst" sees is that she mentioned (twice) coins:

looters [...] sustain themselves on a steady trickle of small finds: coins, jewelry, vases, figurines, architectural fragments, textiles and manuscripts. These items are sold for a few dollars [....] Buying one of these coins or another small antiquity might seem insignificant, but it isn’t, in much the same way that buying a piece of ivory jewelry, no matter how small, isn’t worth the slaughter of a poached elephant.

Thompson argues for collectors taking a moral stand against participation of in this trade and explains why. Mr Markowitz - like most US collectors - shuts his ears and mind to all that. He's not having any of it. Perhaps part of the reason was that the paper version of the article was sabotaged by it appearing in print on May 31, 2014, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: "Don’t Buy Egyptian Coins". But Mr Makowitz obviously has no intention of reflecting about the general content or context of the article. Oh no, not for a second:

To begin with, ancient "Egyptian" coins are almost entirely Greek and Roman [...] Coins were mass-produced in thousands or even millions. Museums are massively uninterested in coins [..]

elephants too have been produced in thousands and millions and this analyst would no doubt say, carry on killing them ("zoos are massively uninterested in looking after the world's entire population"). These are the arguments of a twelve-year old, trotted out by the entire no-questions-asked coiney lobby. Here we actually see a US Defence analyst coming out with the same glib one-sided non-arguments, to be read by all those equally badly clued up in 'Washington defense and foreign policy circles'. Heaven help America. Like most collectors he cannot be bothered to read anything about archaeology, but is full of scathing words of course about archaeologists. So we get this kind of nonsense:

The only coins usually dug up at archaeological sites are "stray finds" -- low value small change in poor condition, of no interest to collectors. 

Look up the words you are using Mr Markowitz, it might help you look less like a fool when they are read by those who know how to use them properly. Whether or not Mr Markowitz and anyone else with a hankering for 'erudishun-by-the-dollar' is interested in stratified finds, it is the case that Professor Thompson explained (in very simple words for even dullards to follow) why they matter not just to "archaeologists", but all of us. The destruction of archaeological sites to get things out to sell, whether or not collectors are interested in them when they come on market, is destruction of the global record of our common history, it is our common heritage. Then a lie:

Coins that enter the ancient coin market are found in "hoards" - usually a clay pot buried far away from inhabited places. [...] Hoards therefore have almost no archaeological "context" - the thing that academics are always whining about when it gets disturbed.

Mr Markowitze dismisses archaeologists as "whining" about something they allegedly do not understand, and only he and his fellow collectors understand. Yet, if you try to get dealers to label the coins they sell with where they come from, it turns out (they say) that they've zero idea where they came from, they did not ask, they were not told. So how, suddenly can they "know" that they all come from "hoards"? This is coin fairy land, looters are digging holes in archaeological sites, they are taking away artefacts, smugglers are caught with looted coins among the items constituting their haul, but Mr Markowitz in his "analysis" wants us to believe in coin fairies who take all the looted coins to Fairyland, and the dealers obtain their stocks not from them, but the Coin Elves who live below a mountain outside Munich. This is no less nonsense than the arguments with which Mr Markowitz tries to fob us off. Look at the PAS record, the German Fundmunzen volumes. What is coming, and what has been coming, onto the ancient coin market for decades is not by any means composed of hoards alone. Huge numbers of site finds and "stray finds" are precisely what people are collecting, that's where these data come from, people's collections.

Once again, despite the fact that last time he wrote about it, it was pointed out he'd got it wrong, the "analyst" trots out the same junk about "countries with sensible antiquities laws, like the UK", where "everything must be reported" (and actually if it comes to what can be documented from England, the majority of ancient coins on the market are not coming from hoards, because most hoards end up being bought by museums). Markowitz thinks its wonderful that because in Britain, the government has stepped in and made a record of where collectors are ripping coins from context, we "know more about the circulation of ancient coins in Britain than anywhere else" at a cost of fifteen million quid. Elsewhere collectors (yes, collectors who claim they are researching) have destroyed that information by their no-questions-asked hoarding. This picture was built up not only from bulk lots of coins thought to be from undocumented and smuggled hoards in bags in a dealer's stock room, but hundreds of thousands of stray finds, site finds, votive finds, and documented hoards And also, who analysed the results of all that recording? Was it Britain's numismatists? Absolutely not. The monograph which is the basis for Mr Markowitz's claim (though I doubt he's read it) was written by a British archaeologist, Philippa Walton (numismatic bibliography here). Note the title however of the monograph, its not about understanding a narrow area like "coin circulation", the evidence gathered is used, together with others, to write a more general study: 'Rethinking Roman Britain: Coinage and Archaeology'. This is the difference between the coiney approach to the study of the past and the archaeological use of the evidence. US analyst Markowitz clearly knows nothing about this. He just thinks archaeologists are "whining" obstacles to information-destructive coin buying.

And of course, scratch a US coiney and  not far beneath the surface you find a rabid God-loves-America xenophobe. The natives of the source countries are stereotypically (pars pro toto) depicted by Mr Markowitz as thoroughly brutish, dirty and primitive people: 

the police will confiscate it, it will either be tossed in a dingy storage room, or sold by corrupt cops on the black market, and you get thumped on the head for your trouble [...] in the Islamic world [...] growing hostility [...] smashed with sledge hammers.

People who the American implies deserve to have their heritage hoiked away to America with no import controls whatsoever. So religious fanatic American collectors can dissolve "their" artefacts in Palmolive soap, and V-coins dealers can make millions of dollars while the people that dug them up get nothing. US collectors like to present their materialists lusts as some kind of artefact-centric Captain-America-Saves-the-World altruism. This seems to find resonance there outside collecting circles too.

Meanwhile the actual point made by Professor Thompson gets lost. She talks of the need for enlightened US collectors to take action  to clean up the US market. I think she perhaps thinks that it is enough to present a case to them, and - in accordance with the picture the like to present of themselves as responsible, thoughtful, thinking people - they will react by voluntarily doing the right thing. That right thing is for collectors to refuse to patronise dodgy dealers who offer zero documentation verifying licit provenance of their wares (because they refuse to buy from those who in turn offer no such documentation).  

Looking at the analysis of Mr Markowitz, and seeing it in the context of the other CPAC comments, leads us inevitably to reflect that currently, the main reaction to any attempts by their fellows to use reasoned argument to support efforts to clean up the antiquities market is an arrant display of wilful stupidity and an uncritical inability to assess the full range of arguments in a broader context. Is there really ANY chance that these people will actually be doing any independent thinking of their own? Or can we rather infer from the frequency with which we see it happening, these people will go on believing in their coin fairies and coin elves and parroting the same tired non-arguments ad infinitum? I rather think the evidence points to the latter. In which case perhaps another approach is needed.