'Green Saharas, Grey Markets: Commercial Exploitation of North African Prehistory'

Loose arrowheads for collectors

Here's a new paper on collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record, gets the discussion away from "metal detecting", also points out that collecting damages surface sites as much as it does 'stratified' ones, talks about fakes on the market, addresses some of the nonsenses of the Ixelles Six/Helsinki Gang (more in another forthcoming one). There is a tabulation of the state of part of the market (ebay) as it was last year that surprised even me when it came to assessing the scale of the phenomenon and how much it is "worth". This is in a volume that is about Polish archaeological surface surveys in the North African desert, so it shows the damage collecting does to the type of evidence described by other authors in the volume. It's downloadable as a zip file here.

Barford, Paul M. 2020, 'Green Saharas, Grey Markets: Commercial Exploitation of North African Prehistory, an Overview', Archaeologia Polona [Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw] Vol. 58 (2020)  pp 311- 336 .