Bazaar Archaeology: Issues About Four Artefacts Displayed in Internet Yesterday

Oka and Riazan

When an auctioneer plasters information all over the Internet about stuff they have on consignment, it is inevitable that people from various walks of life will look at it. That includes my Mum, it includes me and my colleagues (I have one that cites objects from the UK market as parallels) and it includes collectors. One of the latter has helpfully shared some observations on some of the items sold by one very prominent UK auction house to some happy buyers yesterday (Renate "Timeline Auctions yesterday" Ancient Artifacts Groups.io Feb 23 #96340). She points out some careless cataloguing of items they have accepted from consigners and the four items discussed illustrate the range of problems with the no-questions-asked antiquities market as a whole. These are all issues that should be being more widely discussed and that dealers thrust evidence and real-life cases right under our noses is an incentive to embark on such discourse. I'd like to reiterate what she says and add some points.

Renate notes issues with a "Large Viking Age Openwork Annular Brooch 10th to 14th centuries" Lot No. 0378. The "provenance" is very sketchy, provides no information on grounding "Acquired 1971-1972. From the collection of the vendor's father. Property of a London, UK, collector". Of course that should be read the other way round, and then "acquired" needs more expansion, where, from whom, how, and with what legitimating documentation. Silence from the sellers.

TimeLine Auctions are very fond of using a Soviet-era book as reference, without recognising, it seems, its propaganda purpose (and from other evidence in the auction, without being able to read the Russian text, they refer mainly to the pictures, summary plates that were created to make a Soviet-era point). They really need to get some specialists in this material to vet their catalogues. [the book is by Valentin Vasilyevich (not "B.B." as TimeLine have it) Sedov (d. 2004), 'Finno-Ugri i Balti v Epokhi Srednevekovija', Moscow, 1987]. TimeLine refer to the picture, Renate explains that rather than being in any way connected with "Vikings",

"the piece is a filigree ring brooch of the ancestors of the Finno-Ugrians. These pieces were worn in the Ryazan-Oka region around the 5th century"

 and provides more details. Just in case any Brits are geography-challenged when it comes to anything east of the Elbe, there is a map up above. In the last TimeLine auctions they also had some stuff from the same general region, also misidentified. Now, it is very unlikely that there were many metal detectorists in this region in 1971-2, so how was this item found? Who cleaned it and who exported it from the Soviet Union to the former owner's father's collection? What connections did that father have with the Soviet Union? All these questions about the origins of this item are left unanswered by the consigner and seller

The second item is a "Roman gilt silver crossbow brooch, 4th century AD, Lot No. 0096". Here is a 31-second video of it and you can see how it is constructed, note that the "Comments are turned off" so you cannot discuss or share opinions on it. This is pretty typical of this auctioneer. I love these things, in another life, I even persuaded a former girlfriend to write her undergrad thesis on them so we could talk about them. The seller’s description is rather skimpy on construction detail and condition. The "provenance" equally so: "North American collection, 1990s-2000s. Property of a Surrey gentleman". rather bald, no? In which Roman province was it found, even? Renate correctly notes:

"Looks like the piece is damaged by pimping. The surface on the foot is expected to be as smooth and even as the surface of the bow, but there are tooling marks (see image attached). Either the foot is a modern addition, or more likely the volutes were carved out after excavation. More manipulations are possible, but not clearly recognizable".

This is where better photos, from other angles and a more expressive description would help the buyer see what they are getting. But you show me a dealer that writes a sales description to the detail of even the most skimpy PAS report (serving as a model for the collector for 25 years - why don't they learn from it?).

The third set of issues concern an odd little thing marketed as a "Merovingian gilt silver fly brooch, 4th - 6th centuries AD, Lot No. 1435". Oh yeah. I think the collector is supposed to recall here the gold cicadas in Childeric's grave, aped by Napoleon. Again, a photo f at least the underside would help understanding what they've got. The "provenance" determined by the auction-house is as skimpy as the rest: "German collection before 2000. Collection of Mr D.H., formed in UK, from the EU art market. Property of a Surrey gentleman". There we are a collection history going back to the owner-before-the previous-one. But what does that actually tell us about where and how it was found, by whom, and what paperwork made its pocketing and sale legal? (Answer: zero). D.H. might know, but how can we find out if we do not have a proper name? So what is the point of a dealer giving half-facts that mean nothing? (Answer: zero, apart from plausible deniability if challenged). The consigner/ repeated by TimeLine apparently without checking cite "Arrhenius, B., Merovingian Garnet Jewellery, Stockholm, 1985"... Renate has checked:

"An even remotely similar insect brooch does not appear in the book mentioned. It does not appear in other books either, because it is not ancient. It looks as if the head of no. 15 on the attached page from Kühn (1935) and the wings of no. 17 had been put together. The style of both parts is too different to be of antique making. There are also small impact marks on the body, the granulation and around the eyes. On the one hand, these are traces of manufacture that have not been removed by polishing, on the other hand, they are faked signs of age".

Seems fairly clear. I'd also draw attention to how those garnets are set. So where, then does that put "D.H." and that German collector who bought the thing as a real antiquity. Did they shift it back onto the market when they realised it was not? Is that why there are so many fakes currently in circulation? Was TimeLine appraised why the object was appearing on the market the third time in 20 years? [reference cited by Renate: Kühn, Herbert (1935): Die Zikadenfibeln der Völkerwanderungszeit. In IPEK - Jahrbuch für prähistorische und ethnographische Kunst (10), pp. 85–106.]

Let's also note that things that look like this are frequently seized upon by the Loony-fringe and represented as "evidence" that earth was visited by alien space ships, because... well, this looks like a plane doesn'ty it?

     Pair of fibulae (TimeLine Auctions,
 fair use for comment and criticism)

The fourth item discussed by Renate was a "Germanic Radiate Brooch Pair, 6th-7th century AD Lot No. 0381". And I am glad she wrote about it first... The "provenance" is vague: "Family UK collection, 1980s. UK art market. Property of a Surrey gentleman". So this "family" got it how, and from where? In the 1980s. Again, from behind the Iron Curtain. As Renate notes (with correct use of the inverted commas):

"Not Germanic, but “Slavic”. They’re local East European variants of Gothic brooches, Werner I B type" [refs cited, one corrected here later].

It's notable that this seems to be a matched pair (from a burial perhaps?). Note that these fibulae are unusual in that they were worn "upside down" compared to the majority of earlier fibulae. 

There are very few such items in British public collections.  But a Surrey "gentleman" was flogging a pair off. These items would most likely have come from one of two regions, up on the Baltic coast in the region of what is now NW Poland, or down in the south in the Carpathian Basin and along the lower Danube. It is a matter for further research (which I am supposed to be doing in my day job) why they are so rare in the areas between. Of course if artefact hunters are ripping them all out of the ground on the sites where one could look at their associations with other evidence, this is just one area where research will not make any progress because careless collectors have thieved a large portion of the material evidence without leaving any paper record of what came from where. "Family UK collection" is not a usable findspot or context of deposition/discovery. This is selfish in the extreme because it is not UK archaeological heritage being trashed here, UK collectors are deliberately trashing the heritage of other countries with not a care for any kind of collaboration to make sure information is lost. This is knowledge theft across international borders and must be stopped. STOP Taking Our Past.

It is gratifying to see that among collectors, there are some like Renate who can  actually see through all the fog created by sellers around the issues of origins, grounding, and information content of the trophy objects they sell.