This is an overt demand for proof of licit origin, with a declaration that any artifact for which documented proof of licit origin is not available is to be presumed to be illicit.Yes, an overt declaration that if Mr Welsh sells me half a pig for my freezer which he got from a bloke with a truckload of them in a Walmart carpark, he'd better have the health certificates that indicate that meat is not infected. Otherwise I'm not buying. I don't trust coin dealers with paperless dead pigs or anything else.
Let's be clear about this: If [these] ideas are accepted, even more stringent burdens of proof would fall upon collectors than this new German law dares to impose upon German collectors.("dares"?) Note that, collectors get lumbered with the costs of their own carelessness here. If a dealer ("trust me") can con a collector into buying things without paperwork these days, sooner or later a collector at the end of the chain is going to find themselves lumbered with duff goods which they can do nothing with. But this is not "Mr Barford's fault", it is the fault of stupid collectors buying stuff no-questions asked. Collectors should read the 1970 (1970 that's 46 years ago, 'Nam days) Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property- start with article 10 and wonder why US dealers have for all those years fallen short of the standards it sets. Ask yourself why they have failed to even make a start in all those long years to live up to the standards of transparency that ethical and responsible trade in such a commodity requires. How many artefacts in that time have passed through and been systematically "orphaned" from their true collecting histories in the US market alone? Why? Ask yourself.
this almost indecipherable man who apparently wishes to become an "Archaeological Eichmann" who ferociously exterminates collectors.I think it is pretty clear from that that Mr Welsh has absolutely nothing substantive to say about the matter of transparency in the antiquities trade.
Actually, "What the Collecting Community is really Up Against" is the obstructive attitudes of the dealers they buy from who encourage the persistence of the same attitudes, denial and evasion ion the collecting communities. Once collectors mature enough to start thinking for themselves, the dealers will be forced to change their tune - and their business model. Thinking collectors, now there's a thing. 
Both Tompa and I have previously discussed the "actual text" of this legislation in detail. The detailed openPetition analysis thereof was quite clear in its devastating indictment of the unfairness of this legislation to German collectors and dealers.The petition was based on a text which was at least two redraftings earlier than the version passed several days ago by the Bundestag. There is no link in either the text of Dealer Dave or that of Bailey and Ehrenberg's Tompa to the current version they are (allegedly) "discussing". If they are indeed discussing the actual text of the document, then they should cite it to show us that they are not making it up when they and their fellows accuse it of being both "socialist" and "Nazi"' I say they are, let them prove otherwise with reference to specific articles of the current text. Go on then. Unlike Fascist-Communist states in Myth-Yurope, the Enlightened and United States of America of course grants full ownership rights to everything under the sun,... well, unless its items on their OWN extensive sanctions list of exports which are controlled. So what does this make them, then Dealer Dave?
Being a well-known dealer in ancient coins with an award-winning website seems to me to be at least as "socially respectable" as being.......the proprietor of a Manhattan antiquities gallery with charisma and who wears bespoke tailored suits to sell in opulent surroundings, high end objects often with some kind of collecting history attached to them? Does Mr Welsh claims equality with the Aboutaams? "Award winning" or not, there are, it seems, shopkeepers but also suave gallery owners in the same industry.
The sect targeted the ancient ceremonial area because it was “not Christian” and destroyed “at least a dozen” stone altars built by the indigenous Otomi people at the San Bartolo Tutotepec archeological site, according to TeleSur TV. Members of the sect say the destruction was motivated by a belief that the ancient indigenous religion involved devil worship. The perpetrators claim that they were following the word of God by destroying the temple site. The Otomi people still hold the site sacred ."Christian group vandalizes ancient Mexican site claiming it’s linked to ‘Devil worship’" DeadState June 28, 2016
Actually, "What the Collecting Community is really Up Against" is the obstructive attitudes of the dealers they buy from who encourage the persistence of the same attitudes, denial and evasion ion the collecting communities. Once collectors mature enough to start thinking for themselves, the dealers will be forced to change their tune - and their business model. Thinking collectors, now there's a thing. such legislation clearly reflects a Socialist perspective that "cultural property" is to a significant extent the property of the State in which it is locatedwhile a commentator on the same page contrarily suggests
There seems to be the whiff of: Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer in the air. Perhaps it's me being over sensitive? Now it's easy to see why the UK ditched the unelected Eurocrats - who dream-up the EU's laws - for a return to democracy. .Whether the legislation concerned claims state ownership of all cultural property has yet to be demonstrated by the shopkeeper. As for seeing Germany as a country of a single ethnicity under a dictatorship, one wonders what xenophobic newspapers this 'sensitive' Brexiter reads. Another claquer of Brexit in the collecting community (though ironically, himself - to judge by the name - from an eastern European immigrant family) agrees that the new law:
brings back bad memories of Germany's totalitarian past.Though is coy about saying whether he means that of 1933-45 or 1949-1990. Instead of all this empty sniping, it would be good to see the antiquities dealing and collecting lobbies discussing the actual text, rather than making hasty puerile "looks like" comparisons.
“Supposing you are offered a marble Roman head which you are told was from a Swiss family collection,” whinges Günter Puhze, a Freiburg-based dealer in antiquities. “How could you get an export licence from the country of origin without knowing exactly where it was dug up, maybe decades ago? Would you have to go to all the states that were once part of the Roman Empire?”
The primary aims of the law are to stop illegal trafficking in looted antiquities and to ensure that works of art with national significance do not leave Germany. It has been warmly greeted by those whose heritage has suffered most from antiquities theft and smuggling. [...] The main bones of contention are requirements for export and import licences for cultural objects above a certain value, even within the European Union. The rules for archaeological assets, defined as objects found in the soil or water, are particularly stringent. The law would demand an export licence from the country of origin for any item offered for sale. [...] The antiquities trade in Germany has been in decline in recent years, with many dealers shutting up shop altogether in the face of increasing regulation or retirement. Few young dealers have entered the trade in the country, which Geerling estimates to be worth only around €15m a year.Just as if to show how the act is needed the article explains to circumvent the bit about its function to ensure that works of art with national significance do not leave Germany, we are told about German dealers who moved their stock outside the country to prevent them being affected. I think them spiriting away heritage like that says all you need to know about "art dealers" and why they are still trying to block this legislation.
Felix Salmon, 'With a single vote, England just screwed us all' Fusion 24th June 2016. So basically what their Portable Antiquities Scheme bonkers has been doing to the efforts of other European nations to cut down the looting and trade in loose antiquities for years. Basically both have the same intellectual (I use the term loosely) roots. Anyway, this means an end to the European Council of Metal Detecting, nobody here is going to listen to the Brits any more.
The German parliament on Thursday passed a cultural protection law that will regulate the sale of German art deemed to be of "national importance" and clamp down on illicit imports of cultural artefacts. The law was approved by Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s coalition government, which holds more than 75 per cent of seats in the Bundestag, while the opposition Greens and far-left Die Linke abstained from the vote.The legislation will allow artworks more that 75 years old and worth more than 300,000 euros to be assessed for national importance before allowing export abroad by five-member panels that will be set up in each of Germany‘s 16 states.
When the initiative was first presented by the Culture Ministry last year, it provoked a furious response from German art dealers, who said it amounted to excessive regulation by the government.In fact there was a petition organized by Ursula Kampmann, which ultimately amassed some 46,000 signatures (which gives some sort of idea of the size of the market for the antiquities handled by German dealers). The petition and objections of the German collecting community and trade were ignored by the German government and the Bundestag. The legislation was not even discussed in the Bundestag, but was adopted without opposition. Antiquity dealers and collectors are a minority 'special interest' group which are rapidly becoming voices increasingly alienated from matters of public interest and in some democracies they carry little weight in policy making nowadays.
Ricky Smith, 34, of Cranleigh, was ordered to pay a total of £1,050 after being found guilty of theft at West Surrey Magistrates’ Court, said police. Smith was sentenced on Friday (June 17) after Surrey County Council staff told him he had to report his find to a coroner on September 17 2014. Smith, who had found the Bronze Age ring on bridleway in a private estate in Cranleigh, told the Finds Liaison department that he was a detectorist for 11 years and was ‘in it for the money’, said police. Three days later he called again to say that he was going to report the find to Sussex. But it was later confirmed that Smith had contacted a museum in Sussex but had not reported his find to the Coroner, breaching the 14 day gap granted by the Treasure Act legislation. Detectives later identified Smith and found the ring at his home. He was summonsed to appear for a court hearing on April 12 but failed to appear. A warrant was issued and he was arrested on May 9.The police were necessary to know the identity of the finder? Why did the PAS FLO not know and report him? The article explains at some length that what peopłe are stealing bz pocketing stuff without reporting is knowledge. Knowledge theft is the real crime in irresponsible collecting. Of course the article contains the de rigeur English PAS claptrap:
“The vast majority of detectorists comply with the law and have made a number of significant discoveries that have added to knowledge to our shared cultural heritage.”Bollocks, by PAS estimates (because not even they can be bothered to make the necessary effort to find out the real details) the majority of artefact hunters finds go UNreported - but yes, that is actually complying with a Bonkers-Britain law which is about as much help in protecting the buried heritage as a wet paper bag. And it is clearly untrue to claim that “The vast majority of detectorists [...] have made a number of significant discoveries". Many of them most frequently target known sites identified by "research" (sic) in existing archaeological literature and the plaintive claim that most of them do not find anything worth reporting is the stock explanation of why reporting is at such a pathetically low level after millions of pounds spent on attempting to get these people to adhere to even any rudimentary form of 'best practice'. Deceit after deceit, all at public cost.
John Letts and Sally Lane are charged with funding terrorism for allegedly sending money to their 20-year-old son Jack Letts. Jack Letts left his home in Oxford and travelled to Syria in 2014. He has been dubbed "Jihadi Jack" by some British media. His parents are accused of transferring payments of roughly 1,750 pounds ($2,600) in 2015 and 2016. They were released on bail. The trial date was set Thursday during a hearing at the Old Bailey court.Interesting case, first of all, there is the issue of defining what we mean by the coverall term "terrorism". Secondly, one wonders whether, if the case is successfully concluded, we will soon see trials of UK or US antiquities dealers and collectors similarly charged with funding terrorism by passing money to middlemen handling artefacts traded from or through ISIL-held territories. Now, that would be a good thing if it could be pulled off. After all, nobody could claim they bought stuff "in good faith" given the amount of publicity this issue has received. A few collectors behind bars would lead to an increase in awareness of the need for proper, not the limp declared ("Chapter 14") due diligence which is all these people usually manage.
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| Archaeology this is not, and whether this particular horrible hoiking hole is 'legal' or 'illegal' by a crazily liberal law is immaterial with reference to the archaeological damage done. |
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| Once again, looks like a grassland site with the archaeology just below a shallow topsoil - the sort of site the Code of Responsible Detecting says to keep right off - but who pays any attention to that any more? (Photo Exeter University digging along with the tekkies) . |
The discovery of a few muddy coins in a Devon paddock by a pair of amateur metal detector enthusiasts has led to the redrawing of the boundary of the Roman empire in south-west Britain. Previously it had been thought that Ancient Rome’s influence did not stretch beyond Exeter [...] Danielle Wootton, the Devon finds liaison officer, said [...] it was clear that Wills and Hewings had happened upon something important.”I suggest the FLO reads the Devon HER (online here) where a settlement and the road and previous coin finds are noted in records of the 1960s. Was it "research " of these existing records which led to the artefact hunters deciding to target the area to pull out another 150 coins for their own collection? Perhaps FLOs could state the case with accuracy and not engage in partner-coddling spin in future. Telling the public the truth about portable antiquity issues is - surely - what they are paid for.
There's that "All items legal to buy/sell under U.S. Statute covering cultural patrimony Code 2600, CHAPTER 14" excuse again. So that means that the collector who obtained it obtained a UK export licence for it then? Can we see it? Can we see inside the helmet, is there any trace of a lining or the attachment of additional metal or organic elements? What does the other side of the riveting look like? What about the edges of the sheet elements making it up, why are they so rough and not cut straight if they were fresh metal when the object was assembled? Can we also see a helmet 20x 19cm displayed actually on Bab Dadge's actual dolichocephalic head - that is a rather strange hat measurement - especially if the thing had a leather lining. The description is hardly very precise.Anglo-Saxon England, ca. 6th to 8th century CE. An exceedingly fine iron helmet comprised of two wide iron bands attached with rivets supporting an iron "crown." [...] Size: 8" L x 7.6" W x 6" H (20.3 cm x 19.3 cm x 15.2 cm) [...] The Saxons were fierce bearded warriors who fought with a ruthless, surprise attack style that intimidated many, even the Romans. Anglo-Saxon society revolved around warfare. [...] The need to obtain more land for distribution encouraged policies of conquest, and the kings of Wessex were particularly successful because they were able to expand into Cornish territory. Provenance: Ex-private United Kingdom collection, acquired in the early 1980's. All items legal to buy/sell under U.S. Statute covering cultural patrimony Code 2600, CHAPTER 14, and are guaranteed to be as described or your money back. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. [...] Condition Intact save one small area, near choice.
The boards of both the International Association for Professional Numismatists and the Professional Numismatists Guild have, it is true, so far neglected to respond to my written request for further information about the recommendation they made to the CPAC in Washington that somebody make sure that off-season casual labourers are paid a "living wage" to prevent them looting archaeological sites in the vicinity. I am sure this is because they are putting together a proper answer with concrete proposals of how this could be implemented.Donna Yates @DrDonnaYates not long ago
Nineteenth-Century Grave Looted in Indiana http://www.wave3.com/story/32229371/gravesite-looted-in-harrison-county …
Paul Barford @PortantIssues even less time ago Paul Barford retweeted Donna Yates
US dealers lobby groups - CPAC should force Greeks et al to pay a "living wage" to stop looting there - start at home!
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| naive |
Although she had exchanged numerous emails with the owner and had met him in December 2011, she realized after reading the article that she knew next to nothing about him, she said. Walter Fritz had never mentioned his years at the Free University’s Egyptology institute, his formal study of Coptic, or his work as a pornographer whose star actress was his own wife—a woman who’d written a book of “universal truths” and claimed to channel the voices of angels. He had presented himself to her as a “family man” who enjoyed trips to Disney World and was independently wealthy. “I had no idea about this guy, obviously,” she said. “He lied to me.”This is extraordinary, she introduced material into the academic literature on the mere say-so of a complete stranger, one which a few mouse clicks Googling the information which she did have would reveal his "Nefer Art" business. Personally, if I learnt somebody was an art dealer with dodgy papyri on their website, I'd suspect them of being a yarn-spinner right away. She met Fritz in December 2011, but presented the papyrus 18th September 2012, and in that time had not made any progress in verifying where actually the too-good-to-be-true fragment had come from.
But King had placed her faith in the opinions of expert papyrologists, along with a series of carbon-dating and other scientific tests, at MIT, Harvard, and Columbia, that had turned up no signs of modern tampering or forgery.But this refutes nothing, because they only looked at a selected part of the evidence. The object "surfaced" in association with three other documents. Dr King did not submit the associated material to any tests at all for authenticity. That was left to a journalist to do four years later, and scholarship is all the poorer for that.
“Your article has helped me see that provenance can be investigated”.Wow. Yes, most other scholars take great care to examine the material they wish to use as a source of information about anything to ensure it is what it is supposed to be. The carpal of an ass can be radiocarbon dated to 28 AD +/- 22 yrs, can be shown by isotopes to have been fed grass which grew in the region of Jerusalem, and osteological analysis can show it walked with a slight limp from carrying heavy weights, but no amount of tests showing that "there is no evidence that this was not the donkey that carried Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday" will show that it was. But belief is not trammelled by constraints of logic:
King said she would need scientific proof—or a confession—to make a definitive finding of forgery. It’s theoretically possible that the papyrus itself is authentic, she said, even if its provenance story is bogus.It seems though that she is still clinging on to hope:
King hoped that Fritz would allow the scrap to remain at Harvard, so that scholars could continue to probe questions of authenticity.But she does now admit that the preponderance of the evidence now that Sabar has done what she should have done four years ago “presses in the direction of forgery.”
more..FricosisGuy
Only in the USA? @FricosisGuy 6 godzin temu
@emmaogreen@DouthatNYT: “Your article has helped me see that provenance can be investigated." A Harvard history professor said that.
Douglas Boin and...@douglasboin 3 godziny temu
Scholar meets world. "Your article has helped me see that provenance can be investigated."
Douglas Hunter or...@DWHauthor 3 godziny temu
Douglas Hunter podał/a dalej Douglas BoinThere's something to be said for scholars learning some basic journalism skills.
Seth L. Sanders and....@SethLSanders 21 godzin temu
Seth L. Sanders podał/a dalej Roberta MazzaThe real story of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is scholars' low standards of evidence for things that tell good stories
Douglas Boin @douglasboin 4 godziny temu
I have the best provenance, really good provenance.
I am sure we can agree that the issue is that objects just "surfacing" from the opacity of the market should have their collecting history and actual origins thoroughly examined by academics before they decide to handle them. If they do, a condition of handling licitly-obtained and licitly-owned source material must be complete disclosure, not hiding of important facts about their origin. The fact that the academic here agreed to hide important details to gain access has landed her, her institution and a whole field of study in a highly embarrassing situation. [My understanding was that the fragment is currently housed actually in the Harvard School of Divinity, hence my remark.]There is a tendency among collectors, dealers and some academics studying such things to believe that in the case of what theoretician of historiography Jerzy Topolski called addressed sources, (coins, inscriptions, manuscripts, cuneiform tablets, papyri) the message they carry can be interpreted in its own rights, without regard to its context of discovery. But each text or image is created, used and then lost in a particular context, and these factors relate not only to their creation but also reception (by the addressee). The fragment now in Harvard Divinity School has markings on it which are 'addressed' to a certain audience, and where and how this artefact "surfaced" is important in determining the motives for its creation and dissemination (and meaning) of the "information" it contains.
The Amber Room was a gift of King Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia to Russian Emperor Peter the Great. The room was brought to St. Petersburg in 1717 and was fitted into Russia’s Catherine Palace in the Tsarskoye Selo imperial residence. Architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli added gilded carving, mirrors and mosaic panels made of agate and jasper to the room’s interior decoration under the rule of Empress Elizabeth of Russia (born 1709-died 1761), the daughter of Emperor Peter the Great. The Amber Room remained intact for about 200 years. It was stolen by German fascists who occupied Tsarskoye Selo during WWII.It was then shipped off to the Castle in Koenigsberg (now in Russia’s Kaliningrad region) in 1941, and then when the Red Army advanced on the city, one story is that it was evacuated by the Germans and hidden somewhere in the Reich in 1945. One of the several places where it was believed it had been hidden was the bunker complex at what is now Mamerki in Poland. There were searches here in the 1950s-1960s because a witness claimed that the Germans had unloaded treasures there in 1945 (one of several dozen places where hearsay evidence located secret treasure hoards - very few of which prove to be in any way grounded in fact). Field engineers tried to find the alleged hidden treasure for several days, dynamiting entrances into that concrete facility, but found nothing.
All items legal to buy/sell under U.S. Statute covering cultural patrimony Code 2600, CHAPTER 14, and are guaranteed to be as described or your money back.
Except the ones where he does not."Three seasons of monitoring at Fifa have demonstrated that UAVs can provide quantifiable evidence for the rate of ongoing site damage," said Kersel in a DePaul University press release. Their work shows that while looting at the site is ongoing, it is now continuing at a much reduced pace compared to when the project began. "An element of the ongoing research is the examination of why looting has abated," says Kersel. "Are there no more graves to loot? Have looters found more lucrative financial resources?" The team is now using ethnographic interviews with people in the area to understand why looting at the site may have slowed.Here are two drone shots of one of these sites:
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| Somebody else's, not Jesus' wife |
King wasn’t interested in talking. “I haven’t engaged the provenance questions at all,” she said. What she did know, she’d already reported in her 2014 Harvard Theological Review article. “It’s all out there,” she said. “I don’t see the point of a conversation.” I told her I’d spent months reporting in Germany and the United States. Didn’t she want to know what I’d found? “Not particularly,” she said. She would read my piece once it was published.and of course she should have been, to guard against handling illicit material, and to guard against being palmed off with a modern forgery. Or end up as the Hollis Professor of Divinity in Harvard Divinity School who publishes dodgy papyri owned by bareback-gangbang-filming pornstars. Certainly we now know that the scholar had not put "all" that could easily have been found out in her publication of this piece. There were suspicious discrepancies in the owner's story and material supporting it which she should have spotted and resolved. For example, the owner sent an email stating he'd bought it from the previous owner Hans-Ulrich Laukamp in 1997, but the invoice of that sale was dated 1999. The object was said to have been exported through the Iron Curtain in 1963 at the height of the Cold War. An authenticating letter from 1982 bore typewritten text of two different alignments, suggesting it was a pastiche. Professor King failed to spot any of the discrepancies.
addressing King as “Mrs.” rather than “Dr.” or “Professor” and claiming that he didn’t read Coptic and was “completely clueless.”It is reported that on the Nefer Art website were some other dubious-looking documents (these photos seem to have gone, I have not seen them myself [UPDATE: They still exist, courtesy of Dorothy King: https://web.archive.org/web/20130925080353/http:/nefer-art.com/photosart1.html. The Amarna relief looks dodgy too]). As Sabar reports, one was in Arabic and the other in Greek:
I e-mailed the images of these manuscripts to a few scholars, who found them almost comical. The Greek one, which bore a drawing of a nude woman, superficially resembled texts from Greco-Roman-era Egypt known as “magical papyri.” But the Greek words made little sense, the scholars said, and the script was more or less modern print. “Perhaps not in Times New Roman,” Sofía Torallas Tovar, a papyrologist at the University of Chicago, observed drily, “but in a modern typography.” The drawing of the female figure, meanwhile, was “in a style unparalleled to my knowledge in an ancient document, but easily found in modern school notebooks.” Two experts in ancient Arabic manuscripts told me that the script on the other fragment was backwards, as if someone had photographed it in a mirror.So where did Nefer Art get these Coptic papyri from? One of the key documents in the object's alleged collecting history is a contract concerning “6 Coptic papyrus fragments, one believed to be a Gospel” dated November 12, 1999; signed by Hans-Ulrich Laukamp and the Walter Fritz. It has on it a handwritten annotation: “Papyri acquired in 1963 by the seller in Potsdam (East Germany)”. Sabar quickly confirmed what was already suspected that Hans-Ulrich Laukamp was unlikely to have been the owner of six Coptic papyri allegedly bought in Potsdam in 1963 and put together a convincing case that the invoice bears an implausible date (Laukamp was apparently not in the country when it was allegedly signed in a kitchen in Florida).
“No owner has ever claimed this is real,” he said of the papyrus. He was right: In the e-mails to King, the owner never said he had an authentic piece of antiquity. He wanted King’s opinion about that very question, and in the end she and the experts she consulted could find no signs of fabrication.Yet he is extremely aggressive in his defence of the papyrus:
He had even more scorn for critics of the Jesus’s-wife papyrus, deriding them as “county level” scholars from the “University of Eastern Pee-Pee Land”He perhaps means that place in Ohio next to the township of Biegański.
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| Where does this lot come from? |
The lawsuit says his son learned in 2015 that the museum had bought the art a decade earlier but that Notre Dame refused to acknowledge his ownership. Although the museum bought the art from a legitimate dealer, the dealer apparently bought it from the thief, the lawsuit says. [...] Scott Leff reported the theft to Pittsburgh police in 1996, according to a copy of the police report included in the lawsuit. He valued the collection at $575,000. In a letter to Scott Leff included as an exhibit in the lawsuit, the university notes that there's no evidence that anything came of the police report and neither of the Leffs ever took any action to recover the art from the person the son believes stole it. “We do not believe a true owner of this valuable art would do nothing for 20 years about the theft of art allegedly worth ($500,000),” the letter said. The university said that without “compelling proof” of Leff's ownership, it would reject his demands for return of the art or a negotiated sale.
"Artemis Gallery is an ancient art gallery and antiquities dealer specializing in Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Pre-Columbian art, as well as collections of Near Eastern, Far Eastern and Oceanographic [sic] antiquities for sale. Our extensive inventory includes ancient pottery, stone, metal, glass, textile objects and Pre-Columbian art from South America, Central America and Mexico, as well as art from Greece, Italy, Rome, Egypt, the Middle East, China, India, Japan and the South Pacific. All antiquities for sale are unconditionally guaranteed authentic for as long as you own them".Bab Darge (Artemis Galleries Erie, CO 80516 USA) sells a whole lot of stuff and offers some advice to collectors on "Cultural Patrimony and Legal Collecting",
There are lots of lars and lots of areas of confusion about these lars [...] this is something you must know about as a collector, dealers, if you don't know about it, you shouldn't be dealers.
Mr Darge then goes on to show what he knows about it:
Well, first of all, in 1983 the United Nations held a canference called UNESCO [sic] and UNESCO was a number of countries around the world gitting together and creating a treaty that started to regulate the exportation [sic] of cultural property, but a lot of people think, OK, 1983, magic date, that's the date you have to be concerned with. Well in the United States [...] 1983 isn't a magic date. In 1983, UNESCO was signed, but that is a,... it's an agreement but it's nut a lar. The first lar that came about as a result of UNESCO was [inarticulate noise], ironically, in the United States in 1983 and it is culled the Cultural Property Implementation Act. An' it basically put some, um, things into place that allowed lar enforcement to prevent the smuggling of items from these countries where items are found into the United States [...] if you are not on this list of what is currently seventeen different countries, it is still legal to import items from these countriesOK, let's leave it there. The real name of the document he mentions is the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Anyone who actually knows about it as much about as the Barfords' cat (but evidently not Dealer Darge) can see that the guy has got the whole thing right round his neck. The last point of course ignores exactly what the Convention is about - the legality of export relies on the issue of a permit for objects which in the legislation of a source country such a permit is required. UNESCO (as my cat knows) is not a "conference" and does more than just write a convention or two (or would if the US would pay its subs). The Convention without-a-name was written in 1970. The US was not the first country in the world [sic] to implement it - but most other countries who are state parties implement all of it, not just Article 9 ignoring the other 25 as the US does.
There is what is called a Safe Harbor Provision of the [Convention on the] Cultural Property Implementation Act that allows items that have been in the United States for greater than twenty years to be awarded Safe Harbor. It means that if you can prove they have been in the United States for longer than twenty years, in theory according to this lar, they're now legal. It is OK for you as a collector to own them, for me as a dealer to buy them and sell them.He means 19 U.S. Code § 2611 (2)D which gives the definitions of items from the Designated Lists which are excempt from to seizure and forfeiture (as long as "the claimant establishes that it purchased the material or article for value without knowledge or reason to believe that it was imported in violation of law" Note: imported as opposed to exported). So basically anything in the US before 1996. Dealer Darge seems distressed that another US law the [1934 National] Stolen Property Act (18 U.S.C. §§ 2314–2315) applies to those same objects.
that act basically says the [C]CPIA is meaningless [sic]. The Stolen Property Act basically says that if an item is stolen, it is stolen. So it doesn't matter if it was stolen fifty years ago [...] if this item was smuggled out of a foreign country and they have lars in place that prevented that, the United States can enforce the those laws of those countries, so it takes those seventeen or so states we've got treaties with and lars enforcing and says "it doesn't matter" [waves arm dismissively]. Fortunately, that law is seldom if ever used but it can be.For Holocaust art for example, Mr Darge. Or that Acoma Pueblo shield stolen more than twenty years ago, or that inverted Jenny stamp. And it should be for any portable antiquity looted even twenty-one years ago in 1995. What is there to contest about what is and what is not stolen property based solely on when the crime was committed? The US dealer's attitudes to law expressed here really beg questions about just what moral issues we are dealing with. Basically stacking a load of looted objects from a country pillaged by artefact hunters at the back of a cupboard for twenty years or less if the MOUs expire (and we all recall how strenuously US dealers and their lobbyists try to fight their extension) should not be allowed to make tainted goods somehow (legally) kosher. Mr Dodge's enthusiasm for a mere two decades long Safe Harbour period (it's less than he's been dealing antiquities) is a tainted argument.
