The Basis for a Rational Public Discussion is... Rationality

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US Antiquity dealer Dave Welsh is apparently miffed that the world did not fall fawning at his feet over his suggestion that "source nations" should be given "quotas" of "redundant artefacts" to fill the market so a controlling clique of licenced dealers can sell them to a clique of licenced collectors. In a post he calls (in jest I hope) "A Rational Public Discussion" he complains:

It is, to say the least, very difficult to have a rational public discussion with anyone who is identified with the radical anticollecting or "archaeology" lobby.[...] Nowhere in the far-out views of that fringe can anything more unrealistic or extreme be found than this.

Well, I do not know if we are looking at the same text here, it seems to me that I took a very realistic hard look at Welsh's pie-in-the sky gimme-gimme "proposal". I think I raised some hard realistic questions that would have to be addressed by its proposer before he submits it to further rational public discussion (a discussion which in its present state I do not exactly see anybody else tripping over their own feet to engage in - even collectors like Candice Jarman consider it unacceptable in its present form). Welsh says:

Any archaeologist who imagines that a solution to archaeology's problems can be unilaterally dictated and enforced without the participation, cooperation and ultimately the consent of the collecting community is significantly detached from reality.

The sooner no-questions-asked collectors and dealers recognise that the ongoing destruction of the past by commercial artefact digging is not just an archaeologists' problem the better for them and everybody else. The reality is that it is not archaeologists that will get laws changed, but public opinion. Welsh goes on:

If archaeologists will engage the collecting community in a good faith discussion of how to do this, they would in my view be pleasantly surprised by the understanding and thoughtfulness of the reception they would receive.

yeah, like from Candice Jarman, and Dave Welsh? The PAS is busily engaged in doing this, and we all know just how much "understanding and thoughtfulness" they are getting from artefact hunters in England...

Dave Welsh presented - he says for discussion - an idea as a panaceum to the problem of commercial looting. If he was at all sincere in his presentation of it as such, and actually believed in it, instead of moaning that somebody engaged with his ideas and suggested that some areas needed clarification and questioning the workability of some bits of it, he could address the issues raised. Iron out the wrinkles. The trouble is that I am perfectly sure that Welsh was not a bit sincere in proposing this. It was a smokescreen tactic, and was simply seeking an opportunity to blame somebody else for the failure for discussion to advance - thus covering up for the failure of the dealers to budge from their no-questions-asked stance. This is what is demonstrated by his reaction. But he'd have written the same if his proposal was met with silence wouldn't he? What is it he wants?

Mr Welsh then adopts a threatening tone:

Those who instead insist upon a totally confrontational, one-sided, irrational, and accusatory condemnation of [no-questions-asked] private collecting as the root of all evils are instead likely to be unpleasantly surprised by the strength and effectiveness of the opposition they encounter.

Nah, I don't think we'll be at all surprised, we all know what the nasties look like. The collecting blogs, especially the coiney ones, are full of nastiness: confrontational, provocative, one-sided, antisocial and wholly irrational junk written in accusatory tone. Its the good side of responsible collectors that tends to be lost in all this opposition to the perfectly common sense approach to no-questions-asked collecting of antiquities. Perhaps however it is collectors and dealers who have been allowing the ACCG to lead them by the nose and act as the spokesmen of the whole milieu who are in for an "unpleasant surprise" in coming months. I hope so.

The British Disease is Catching?

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On the 9th July, the Associazione Nazionale Archeologi (ANA) published a petition and appeal against the promulgation of proposed new measures licencing the possession of archaeological artefacts in Italy (English and Italian texts available here). They say:

Thus overnight, the law will officially transform looters and the “archaeomafia,” which the current legal system condemns and prosecutes, into collectors and managers of cultural heritage, who with the antiquities they have robbed from the public patrimony, can engage, legally, in commercial activities and with museums and art galleries. From the moment of the law’s approval, until the end of petitions for remittance, the greatest plundering and devastation ever seen of the nation’s archaeological sites will be unleashed, with epic and irreparable damage to our cultural patrimony.

Peter Tompa repreesenting the commercial interests is rubbing his hands with glee and commented on these measures yesterday as PAS Italian Style? and it is difficult not to agree with him this time.* In Britain, the PAS has transformed looters of unprotected archaeological sites into collectors and managers of cultural heritage, "who with the antiquities they have robbed from the public patrimony, can engage, legally, in commercial activities and with museums and art galleries". This legitimation of the activity has unleashed the greatest plundering and devastation ever seen of the nation’s archaeological site right under the noses of the British public and archaeological establishments, with epic and irreparable damage to the cultural patrimony of the country, which is part of the cultural patrimony of the world.

Do not let the British disease infect Italy (see also Looting Matters on this). The ANA invites

the whole world of cultural heritage and antiquities, all the peaple and those who in Italy and abroad hold dear the Italian archaeological and artistic patrimony, which constitutes our nation’s cultural identity itself and belongs to the cultural patrimony of all mankind, and is protected by our constitution, to mobilization against this law that would render vain in our country any legal efforts of protection and archaeological research. We petitioners appeal to the President of the Republic, to all political parties and to all those of goodwill to stop this mortal strike to the cultural patrimony of Italy.

This proposal has met with joy by collectors over on Unidroit-L and the Yahoo closed-access AncientArtifacts forum. This is because it has for some reason been presented to them by the dealers' lobby tub-thumpers wholly in terms of as a PAS-clone . They are all too dense to see for themselves that this is in fact instead a registration system (and one collectors have to pay for) like the ones they are adamant they do not want to see, and will never support when it was suggested that registration of artefacts held will be a way to stop freshly looted stuff being passed off on the market as from some "old collection".

* Though lawyer Tompa, wrapped up as he is in his own little vendetta against the US Government and its CPIA, fails to note that the proposed measures have no effect whatsoever on the need to have export licences to export antiques and antiquities, so have no relevance whatsoever to the MOU extension about which he is so concerned.
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UPDATE (Tuesday July 13th 2010) On the History Blog they are now reporting:

The Italian National Association of Archaeologists (ANA) has raised hell and the story got traction in the Italian press and all over the Internet [...] In the space of just a few days, the ruckus has forced a retreat. The parliamentary majority has said they will not add the archeo-remittance measure to the state budget. Assuming they actually make good on that, the acute danger will settle into a chronic one. The measure will remain in the pipeline as proposed bill, so the ruckus must remain loud to keep the scoundrels from making this monstrosity law.

While Peter Tompa records, apparently unconscious of the irony, that "Italy remains full of hidden antiquities" as :

I understand from a reliable source that the Italian Government has apparently withdrawn its recent proposal to encourage the reporting of antiquities in private hands"..

Tompa has come up with a theory to explain the scale of the opposition, far from being an expression that people actually care about the Italian heritage and fear this proposed law could have been used to 'launder' looted antiquities, Tompa surmises that this could have been: "just the latest anti-Berlusconi effort by members of Italy's left-leaning academic community". After all, he adds: "Previously, at least 7,000 academics signed a petition decrying Berlusconi's appointment of Mario Resca, a former McDonald's executive, as Italy's museum boss", obviously just their personal grudge against Berlusconi then, could not possibly be anbything to do with the lady's perceived qualifications for the task at the time...

New US Artefact Database

Alfredo De La Fe has just announced the imminent launch of a new database which has been in active development for over a year and is currently in "beta". It has interesting possibilities:

1) a collaborative effort of 35+ dealers, collectors and scholars, some of which are among the greatest numismatic minds of our day.
2) it is non-commercial (will be funded by donations and banner ads)
3) it has a board of advisors comprised of collectors, scholars and dealers to ensure that access will always be free and unrestricted
4) it is moderated by specialists and collectors and where literally hundreds can volunteer to help manage an area in which they share an interest
5) anyone can contribute coins from their collection or inventory for consideration to be included in the database
6) It has tens of thousands, with the potential for millions of coins listed with all of the data broken out and fully searchable.
7) Coin legends are actually in the alphabet used (For now Latin and Greek, but electronic java based keyboards in Hebrew, Phoenician, Arabic and other alphabets are planned) and can be searched in those languages
8) Errors can be reported directly to the numismatic experts moderating the category
9) Anyone can easily create their own personal web-page to share their collection with others and where anyone can have their own personal numismatic blog
10) Contain full information on provenance of each coin listed to enable that information to be used to investiate patterns of coin loss and retrieval in the past and also by presenting the collecting history to follow the passage of legally-held ancient artefacts through ephemeral private collections.

De La Fe reports that there are 19,150 records which have been approved and are "live" for study (he is not giving the URL just yet as testing is still in progress) and which can be accessed via the search engine, plus another 150,000+ records pending, which will be uploaded for editing, approval and verification. So that is 170 000 coins in private hands recorded already. He now asks for volunteers to submit more coins from their collections and/or inventory for inclusion into the database to help "test" the site.

I could not help associating this with an announcement made a while back on the Britarch discussion list by Gary Brun one of the organizers of the United Kingdom Detector finds Database which was reported on this blog. Brun claimed in August last year that a few American collectors were planning to use the UKDFD data model as the basis for one of their own, and certainly what De La Fe describes is almost exactly a copy of the manner in which the UKDFD is organized.

It is good news that portable artefact collectors on the other side of the Atlantic are learning from the PAS model which artefact collectors over there strenuously promote as a model to be followed everywere. It is good to see that they are starting at home and are at last beginning to see the need and find the means to record the provenance of items in their collections and make the information available to researchers as has been advocated for a long time.

By the way, the last point (10) in the list of features of the new recording scheme does not occur in De La Fe's post, but that must have been an oversight in his excitement to break the news. I really cannot see why these historically vital data would be omitted by numismatists involved in serious study of archaeological material and broadening our knowledge of the past through the study of a single artefact type.

Roger Bland is not coming into this list telling collectors what they must do to collect "ethically".

ACCG agitator and dugup antiquity dealer Dave Welsh wants to use the Near Shrewsbury (England) hoard as some kind of test case and “and inquire (sic) into whether Mr. Barford's perspective regarding provenance is reasonable or sensible”. Of course it is.

It makes no difference that “coins such as these are likely (in most cases) to sell for £10 each or less on the average”. So do some meteorite chunks, and collectors of those manage to keep their provenance intact (some like Polish Pułtusk going back to the 1800s).

What actually is the significance of the “cost” here? Firstly a dealer sets the cost of an ancient coin or object. Its just a lump of (corroded) metal so if he wants to cost in another 25p for printing out a copy of the export licence and another 35p for the documentation of provenance, then the coin costs a 60p more. So what?

I think this has relevance also to Welsh’s insistence that any provenance registration be impervious to “counterfeiting or misrepresentation”. He maintains it is “not worth a dealer’s time” to place on record the provenance of a ten-pound coin. Obviously then replacing a less-than-ten-pound coin recorded as 1-GB-X-AJK 2139-0876 with the little nick in the flan between the M and P of “...TEMP” and the slight scuffing by the emperor’s nose by another illicitly obtained coin that looks roughly the same would be so much less cost effective. In any case, is Mr Welsh suggesting that a fellow dealer or a fellow collector would falsify such documentation? Why would they do that if the coin was from a legitimate source? Obviously this kind of manipulation and falsification is a matter for the trade associations who monitor the behaviour of their members (do they not?) it is not a problem that archaeologists should have to deal with.

Far from it being the case that “Mr. Barford has consistently refused to engage in any meaningful discussion of practical details” as Welsh alleges, there are numerous posts on various forums where in the past I have rashly attempted to do precisely that. As an example we might turn to Welsh’s own Unidroit-L forum where on a rainy Sunday Sept 30, 2007 I answered his “challenge” to present some practical details of such a record. Welsh obviously has a short memory, for at the time he obsequiously announced: "The detail is instead commendable, and is exactly the sort of thing needed for serious review and discussion”. I invite the reader to scroll down to the rest of the thread to follow how it quickly got out of hand with talk of soil acidity and other totally unrelated topics. This is always the way with the collectors and dealers when you try to talk to them sensibly and openly about difficult issues. Always the sidetracking. It certainly is not my fault that this discussion on the list Dave Welsh moderates (and of which he is the chief contributor) did not get anywhere meaningful.

But of course for coin dealer Mr Welsh, the practical details are not actually as important a problem as something else entirely. The only reason such discussions have got nowhere is the refusal of antiquity dealers and collectors to budge from the position that they have NO responsibility for the objects they trade in and collect. So, for them, the problem is that Barford’s:

approach has instead always been to attempt to thrust the entire burden of proving provenance back upon the collector and the trade that supplies collectors.

Welsh's standpoint is that since it’s the “archaeologists” who want this documentation of provenance, then its archaeologists who must provide the mechanism by which that provenance is recorded. Of course his clients the collectors agree with him, as he claims merely keeping track of where the items in his stockroom came from will make his prices skyrocket. (nota bene: my local grocer can tell me where the onions I bought were grown with no additional cost - can Mr Welsh's?). Anyhow Welsh concludes:

It seems to me that if the archaeological community cannot propose a sensible and practical approach to proving provenance that collectors and dealers should follow, which is economically feasible in the case of coins valued at £10 or less, they really have no right to criticize the collecting community for not being able to prove provenance.

This ignores one fundamental fact. This is that the ancient artifacts (in his case coins) coming onto the market pass through the hands of dealers and collectors, and not of archaeologists. It is usually the dealer that has first contact with fresh dugups from metal detecting.

It is also plain nonsense to say that the archaeological community have no right to criticize the collecting community for not being able to prove provenance. The global community as a whole, not just archaeologists, has every right to criticise the current no-questions-asked trade in antiquities which shields the trade in illicitly obtained artifacts. Every right Mr Welsh.

I mentioned that I wanted to ask Roger Bland, head of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, about what Welsh had said earlier. The coin dealer retorts crossly:

I do not believe the reason is that it is Roger Bland's responsibility to make such recommendations. Roger Bland is not coming into this list telling collectors what they must do to collect "ethically." Paul Barford is doing that.

Yes, I am. I think many of my colleagues simply don’t have the time for (or want the bother of) tangling with the likes of David Welsh in interminable word juggling all aiming to show that the no-questions-asked dealer in antiquities is the innocent victim of a nasty archaeological conspiracy against "collectors" ("out to ban them" of course).

Actually, making recommendations to artefact hunters and collectors about best practice is indeed one of the tasks of the PAS and has been since its inception. The PAS is not concerned about portable antiquities divorced from their context, but their value in their context, which is why in recording them, findspot is so important. I think if Roger Bland, busy though he is, were to come on any artefact hunting list and give recommendations about best practice in collecting, he would concentrate on exactly the same issues I raise. That is the issues of where the objects come from, establishing the vendor’s title to sell, and the legality of the transaction (see the PAS Advice for people buying archaeological objects from the UK and his advice would concern labelling and cataloguing the individual finds in a collection. Here is a fragment of the PAS website with such recommendations about labelling and recording provenance.

Everything in your collection should be labelled in some way, so you know when and where it was found. […] catalogue your collection, either in a loose-leaf file or using a computer database. Whichever you use, it is important to include a good photo or two. Then you can add notes on identification, find spot, conservation details, other examples etc. If you want to learn more, speak to your local FLO.

Any finds that have been through the PAS system have been registered (and by archaeologists), there is a unique number, at least one, often several photos and a description of the object. There seems to be no reason why a responsible collector should not give priority to acquiring such an object with documentation that it was disposed of only after responsibly reporting it to the relevant authorities. There seems to be no reason why a responsible collector acquiring such an object should not want that information to be retained in the documentation of their collection, and accompany the object in any future sale. The information is documented in two places, a secure database, and a printout in ‘certificate/report’ form of the details.

The suggestions I made two years ago in the posts that Welsh denies exist envisage just such a system of paper records deriving from a secure database of a similar nature to the PAS one, the entries of which would be made as an object newly enters the market from an old collection or is recorded in a registered collection, or is a documented (eg by the PAS) find. That seems a perfectly reasonable proposition, not inconsistent with standards accepted by organizations such as the PAS and not inconsistent with responsible and ethical trading. So where are the objections coming from?

Portable Antiquities Reporting Scheme for Israel

The Jerusalem Post ("Antiquities Authority begins to register private collectors") reports that while Israeli collectors of portable antiquities have been required by law to register their collections since the legislation of 2002 (I think actually this requirement also existed there before that, but stand to be corrected) this had not so far been particularly stringently enforced. At present only several hundred collectors are currently known to the state, while the number of citizens who have private antiquities collections is estimated as 100,000. In February, regulations allowing the Israel Antiquities Authority to enforce this law took effect (with a penalty of up to six months in jail and a significant fine for those who continued to ignore it).

Amir Ganor, director of the IAA's Prevention of Antiquities Theft and Supervision of Antiquities Sales Division, told The Jerusalem Post "One of the things we want to do in this operation is to help people not break the law", adding that "Maybe some of them have a specific item that is very important to archaeology and nobody knows about it, so we need to know what they have". [Do we detect the influence of the aftermath of the James Ossuary fiasco here?]

In the next few months, until December 31, the IAA hopes that collectors will come forward for registration, which can be done through the IAA's Web site or at any of their offices throughout the country. Those who report their antiquities will receive a certificate officially designating them as a collector. "Once collectors are registered, they will be asked to send a list of the artifacts in their possession, along with photographs, to the IAA. Archaeologists from the IAA will be available to help with this task if needed". They will also offer, if the collector wishes, an appraisal of the historical significance of their artifacts. Ganor made it clear that collectors would not be asked to give up any of their artifacts. "The items belong to the collector, and we are not trying to take anything from the collector," he said. The article finishes with the plea:

"We call on members of the public who hold pieces of history to assist us in gathering the archaeological information, which is part of the whole puzzle that makes up our past," Ganor said. "Without parts of the puzzle, it is difficult to know what the complete picture is exactly."

This clearly is a project which is intended to be for public benefit rather than being (as I certain elements in the collecting community will no doubt be presenting it as) "another" infringement on "private property rights" by those allegedly nasty "nationalist archaeologists". The IAA recording scheme as reported seems in fact to be a partnership scheme which differs very little in intent from the Portable Antiquities Scheme of England and Wales and is certainly more collector-friendly than the corresponding legislation of Scotland or Northern Ireland.

On his Unidroit-L forum however, Californian part-time antiquities dealer and pro-collecting activist Dave Welsh posted a manipulated version of the Jerusalem Post text under a somewhat misleading title - "IAA requires collector registration". (It is worth pointing out that it is Israeli LAW which "requires" this for public benefit, the Israel Antiquities Authority is only here the organ by which the law is put into action.) What is even more interesting is that he silently drops the final paragraph (the passage in red quoted above). It seems the attempt was being made to depict the IAA scheme as something far more sinister than it looks to in fact be. Such playing to the gallery is nothing new from the ACCG bunch though, and it seems that even the naysaying stalwarts of the Unidroit-L list have become wise to this tactic, there has been no discussion there of this 'shock-horror' presentation of what seems a very interesting move.

Phot: one of Israel's most well-known private owners of a portable antiquities collection, Oded Golan.