SLAM Bumper Sticker

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The  Malibu office of the Association for Museum Professional Excellence  (AMPE) has brought out a bumper sticker to publicise the damaging effects of museums retaining artefacts which they know are of dodgy provenance.

The St Louis city fathers evidently see it as a source of pride to exhibit stolen objects in their art museum. This ignores the feelings of good decent folk having the stigma attached to admitting that they are a citizen of such a place. This campaign will hopefully lead to the Museum Trustees becoming more aware of the damage they are doing to the image of their city by refusing for so long to do the right thing. In the coming weeks, these bumper stickers will be available from a AMPE office near you, except in St Louis of course (SLAM does not belong to the AMPE).

Issues of Homs on V-Coins

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Homs is being shelled to smithereens and thousands of people trapped in the city are either dead and injured or about to become so. Houses and public buildings are being destroyed and their contents scattered. Soon the city will be overrun by its attackers. I was interested to see just how many coins minted in this city are on V-Coins at the moment. The search feature (under "Emesa") revealed 69. Fifty eight are Roman (many Severan) coins, mostly silver issues, nine are Byzantine or Arab/Byzantine issues. Those I looked at were accompanied by zero information on how they left the source country or when and where they had been since. I wonder whether it will dawn on dealers and collectors that in this difficult period for the countries around the south and east shores of the Mediterranean, there really should be information on these topics there. Searching for "Syria" gives 1597 items (603 priced over 100 dollars, 34 of which were priced at over 1000 dollars).

The Barakat Gallery has a whole (?) hoard of 508 6th century Byzantine gold solidi illustrated on their website as spilling out of the top of a narrow-necked jug. The origin is cited as "Syria" and the location as the United States. One would be very interested to know by what route this group of objects left Syria and ended up on sale in a Beverly Hills gallery. If it left the country recently (and no details are given on the website), what links between the gallerista and his middlemen and the Homs-shelling, people-murdering Assad regime might have been activated to get it through Syrian customs?

How many of the coins coming onto the US market in 2012 are there as a result of the current conflicts in the Islamic world? How many dealers are in fact selling "blood antiquities"? Do US dealers and coin buyers have any intention of showing that they even care about the answer to that question?


Illustration: My map from an earlier post, red are US-MOU-countries, brown are countries which have seen serious conflict in recent months. The coloured dots are where coins sold in a recent ACCG auction were originally issued.

Hearts and Minds, with What?

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In the comments to an earlier post, art historian Dr Marc Fehlmann has among other things written:

Greed has become such an uncontrollable force within the global art market that I see a strong parallels with the drug-trade - and therefore - lack of political will. [...] Strict regulations for the transfer of cultural property in the EU and Switzerland have certainly improved the situation within the relevant countries, but there will always be guys beyond that "juristiction"... One might be able to change the current situation if it became more appealing to buy pieces with solid histories of previous ownership. If buying unprovenanced material would become an equivalent to consuming heroin, but acquiring pieces with attractive provenances would become 'chic' and convey palpable prestige, then we might change the behaviour on the consumer side.

This is of course the answer, what is needed is for collectors to take responsibility for the form of the market they frequent. Or rather first of all acknowledge their responsibility for the form it is currently in, and accept the need to take responsibility. On present showing, that seems likely to be an uphill struggle for them.

But with reference to what Dr Fehmann said, I’d like to ask, is it not already “appealing to buy pieces with solid histories of previous ownership”? Is it not “chic” and prestigious to buy “pieces with attractive provenances” ? Of course it already is.

Of course if such stuff was readily available “We might change the behaviour on the consumer side” [or "see change" perhaps]. The trouble is it currently is not, because of the cloak and dagger manner in which the majority of the finds (antiquities) on the market “surfaced” on the market. Collectors have long valued provenanced pieces, the problem is that one might very well suspect that most of the stuff they’ve been buying since the ‘magic’ date of 1970 has been of a provenance that nobody is going to admit to. It is not being unduly cynical to suggest a number of reasons why dealers have not been keen to let on just where they got most of their stock from and how their supplier came by it. These probably have less to do with commercial secrets and gentlemanly discretion about former owners of an 'old private collection' or simple carelessness of such mere details, than the fact that deeper enquiry would reveal that these "freshly surfaced" objects are instead from completely dodgy sources. That is, I submit a perfectly valid interpretation of the number of artefacts on the market with virtually no information about where they were more than a few years ago - that they were then probably still in a (now destroyed) archaeological context in the ground.

How is anyone going to “give” these undocumented pieces already circulating on the no-questions-asked market the provenance that would be required for the "provenance chic" model to work? Or are we to wipe the slate clean, accept that we’ve hundreds of thousands of potentially looted objects on the market (or dump them in a skip), and start stocking the market with freshly dug stuff which does have a provenance? That obviously is not that a sustainable model of managing what is left of the archaeological record?

How could anybody go about “changing the behaviour of the consumers”? Like the US dugup collectors who’ve joined the ACCG for example? What pointers do we have that even suggest it is possible to change attitudes to the extent that would be needed to severely curb the illicit trade to a timeline that would actually manage it before the world runs out of unlooted sites?

Looted Pots in Smithsonian Magazine?

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David Gill ('Publishing recently surfaced Mayan pots') draws attention to a recent article in the Smithsonian Magazine (Chip Brown, "El Mirador, the Lost City of the Maya", May 2011) which is illustrated by photos of what seem to be looted ceramic vessels

(see Michael E. Smith, 'Smithsonian magazine published looted artifacts', Publishing Archaeology May 26th 2011).

UPDATE 7th June 2011: Peter Tompa says:

[A]s a subscriber, I'm happy Smithsonian does not limit its illustrations only to artifacts from documented archaeological excavations.

That follows. If those complete pots had been looted from native American graves on US soil, would the subscriber be equally "happy"? Is looting OK for these people when it happens in somebody else's country?

In his haste to get the boot into "archaeobloggers Gill and Barford" Tompa misses that the point was originally made by US archaeologist Michael Smith on his "Publishing Archaeology" blog where, if he'd looked at it, Tompa would have found some interesting comments. The Smithsonian replies to Smith, rather feebly. Karen Olsen Bruhns adds:

my point was, and is, that NO journal should tart up articles with looted artifact. This is an appalling lapse of intelligence and ethics. These pieces are looted. Hence they were acquired by illegal actions. To publish such pieces is to tacitly acquiesce to looting, smuggling, and the vending of stolen goods. That Smithsonian should do it, and offer such puerile excuses, is not defensible.

But Peter Tompa - retained by international numismatic trade associations - openly states that he is "happy" that an institution like the Smithsonian ignores such notions and has lower expectations of his local museum.
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Bread and Circuses Archaeology: "Shiny Stuff Sets the Agenda"

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Over on Will Anderson's "The Assemblage: political archaeology" blog is a post raising a point dear to my own heart. It's called "shiny stuff sets the agenda" and is about treasure hunting in the UK. Will makes a significant distinction, not made by many UK archaeologists:

I should say that I think antiquarianism – the documenting and collecting of things from the past for their own sake – is not archaeology.

and it is nice to hear this said out loud by somebody else. No, it is not. Will is also as puzzled by the rest of us about Renfrew's odd stance:

Why is Colin Renfrew vociferous to condemn the illicit antiquities market but is comfortable with ‘responsible’ detecting?

That never has been satisfactorily explained by his Lordship. Surely if the exploitation of archaeological sites merely as a source of collectables is archaeologically bad for the archaeological record where it is illegal, it is equally archaeological bad for the record if it happens to be situated beyond a line on a map which says it is legal. I really do not get his logic. For Anderson, the big archaeological paradox is that:

But though finders who swiftly report major discoveries are described as ‘responsible … exemplary’, is this responsible and exemplary archaeology? [...] In terms of expenditure, buying finds and conducting salvage digs must rank only behind building development as a public cost for ‘archaeology’. But who does it benefit? [...] Archaeologists aren’t entirely blameless [...] Why is there not more pressure to rebalance spending towards investigation of important questions about the past rather than buying shiny stuff and running around after holes dug by looters, er, I mean detectorists?

While the general outline of the argument is one with which I would wholeheartedly agree, I think the writer has been severely misled by the British establishment just how much money is spent on those 'salvage digs'. The whole area is severely under-resourced in what passes for 'policy' over these matters in Britain. In the case of the Staffordshire Hoard for example, a trench 9x13 m, costing a mere 25000 GBP - so about 1% of what the finder got for selling the nation its own cultural heritage - is all that was done to put the metal detector find in a landscape context, when it is clear that so much more needed to be done before the nighthawks got there and further decontextualised the original find. British archaeology simply has not the resources to deal with this properly. Many of the 800 reported Treasure finds from England, and most of the ones reported in Scotland do not get any kind of excavation follow-up whatsoever. Many of the objects themselves never see any kind of full archaeological report (such as all those individual coins from those coin hoards). Basically archaeology here is reduced to just "getting shiny stuff out of the ground and into showcases". As Will points out, this Bread and Circuses pseudo-archaeology differs in no way whatsoever from the kind of antiquarianism practised in the nineteenth century. He concludes:

Perhaps there is just too much invested by the establishment in the shiny stuff. It’s safe, it makes for happy stories, it allows for superlatives – the biggest, most significant, most valuable, goldest … It doesn’t demand the difficult questions and uncomfortable answers that archaeology provides.

Except it raises the very cogent question, just what on earth do British archaeologists think they are doing? About the only thing they are actually doing effectively is keeping the public debate very, very muted.

[all we can hear instead is that the sound of pigeons cooing not only in Bloomsbury Square but the gables of every single university archaeology department and museum building in the country is drowned out by the raucous calls of the magpies gathering shiny things into their nests].

"Responsible Collecting" a la Yahoo

To judge from material sent me by several well-wishers since I was blocked from accessing this closed-access group, the discussions of the social background to collecting are still going on over on the Yahoo Ancient Artefacts - much to the chagrin of those many members over there who'd rather bury their heads in the sand and forget that portable antiquity collecting has a social context and other stakeholders.

A number of responsible collectors are now leaving the group. Instrumental in this was a thread started by a coiney called in typical puerile low-brow fashion: "Barford is a looney". One of the people who has just left the list (a British collector whose truly responsible attitude to the material acquired has been mentioned on this blog) explained his decision:

Paul Barford has a blog giving an archaeologist's point of view on collecting antiquities: http://paul-barford.blogspot.com/

Dave Welsh has a blog giving a coin dealer's point of view on collecting antiquities: http://classicalcoins.blogspot.com/

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Paul Barford argues for ethical practice within the antiquities trade in order to preserve the archaeological record from destruction.

Dave Welsh argues for the status quo in the antiquities trade to continue exactly as it is.

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Paul Barford has been banned from posting on this Yahoo list.

Dave Welsh has been allowed to continue posting on this Yahoo list.

Both have blogs but only one of them is allowed to post his point of view on this list as well.

Far from being satisfied with what is already an unfair advantage, the one who can post on this list uses the opportunity to ridicule the one who cannot.

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I sense a vast imbalance on this list. At best, it is unfair. At worst, it is deliberate prejudice.

Whether you agree with Paul Barford, Dave Welsh, both of them, neither of them, or fall somewhere in between - the current situation is untenable.

With occasional exceptions by Paul Barford,* both exploited this list merely to preach their points of view regarding legalities or ethics. They were not participating members in the normal sense.

In the interest of fairness, either BOTH should be given free rein to vent their views on this list or BOTH should be compelled to vent them only on their respective blogs (or elsewhere).

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With both on-list, members were caught in the crossfire between two pulpits. Now there is only one pulpit left - but with nothing to balance it. Members are now subjected to only one stream of propaganda.

The current unbalanced situation gives the impression that the stream of propaganda from the remaining pulpit represents the consensus opinion of the list. I find this worrying [...]

I do not know why Tim allows the one-sided stream of propaganda to continue - whether from a hatred of Paul Barford or from support for Dave Welsh or perhaps a mix of both - but I personally find a biased discussion list unpleasant. Since I do not wish to be associated with such bias, I will no longer participate on this list while it persists.

Since I was blocked, the Ancient Artifacts list has been invaded by the coineys with their gung-ho anti-preservationist ("internationalist") claptrap, several of the usual culprits have reactivated (Sayles, de la Fe, Hooker, Welsh). Recent weeks have therefore seen the continued use of the discussion list with 2000 members to produce a one-sided stream of anti-archaeological propaganda, claims that there is "not one shred of evidence that irresponsible collecting encourages looting" and so on. Since one of the main protagonists on that list of the view there that the two go intimitely together has been blocked from replying, these essentially go without answer from either the general membership or the moderator (a moderator who defensively declared unilaterally that the forum supported responsible collecting). Not that anyone on the outside can see what the Yahoo definition of "responsible collecting" looks like in action, as it is all shut away behind closed doors and anyone discussing it outside the group (such as on a blog about responsible collecting like this one) is censured and expelled. What have responsible collectors got to hide? (register with the site and take a look and write about what you see there on your own blogs, truly responsible attitudes to collecting have no need to hide).

What is galling is that the main "evidence" offered to the outside world that - in contrast to what actually happens in the members-only section of that list - it is dedicated to discussing only responsible collecting is a document which is linked from the home page and is thus one of the few elements of the group that is visible to the outside world. This is a code of ethics. This, the blurb says was "created by group members". It was in fact edited, by just two collectors and one of the few British dealers to consistently offer provenanced artefacts, from a document I supplied. There was some desultory discussion on the list of individual points, but there was not a great enthusiasm for hammering out a text that would truly define "responsible collecting". My post here shows the original text and the yahoo Groups version clearly owes much to that.

It is therefore ironic that the author of the original draft on which this document was based was later blocked for promoting responsible collecting and openly criticising irresponsible collecting and those who advocate it on that list. This is very revealing about what is going on. The facade of responsibility on this key online artefact collectors' forum is only skin deep. The Yahoo group is freely used to promote the sale of tainted and unprovenanced artefacts of unstated origins. There is no commitment to investigating or discussing the current social context of nineteenth-century style collecting on that list, just heads-down (head in sand) talk about the collectables themselves and where to get them cheapest and avoid fakes. Maybe truly responsible portable antiquity collectors need to set up another discussion list with a clear policy on tainted artefacts and leave the recalcitrant hoi polloi of the antiquity collecting world to their howling about their nineteenth century "collectors' rights" and leave Mr Haines and his ranting anti-preservationist dealer friends to stew in their own juices.

*"With occasional exceptions by Paul Barford,"Actually I contest that, there were more than "occasional" situations when on that list I gave an opinion as an archaeologist about the accuracy of the description of an object being offered by one of the many dealers who offered items through the list. Most of the time this was less than appreciated by the dealer trying to flog it under a less-than-accurate description and many collectors also turned nasty when their favourite dealer was challenged, often generating a log-jam of anti-archaeological posts. An Ottoman tobacco pipe sold as seventh century AD Byzantine generated some acrimonious attacks on the archaeologist who pointed out a rather obvious anachronism.

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Vingnette: Looking in on Lilliput (Aidan Courtney).

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What is wrong with the ACCG "Newcastle paper"?

The text I summarised in the post above perhaps really does not deserve much attention, and I am well aware that in discussing it I am drawing attention to it. On the other hand, perhaps we should be paying attention to material like this and analyzing what the writers are and are not saying. Perhaps drawing attention to it will prompt people to look more carefully into the real motives of the groups behind it.

This text was written for presentation to an international audience at an academic (archaelogical) conference. The title declares this text is about "Coin collectors" and "cultural nationalism". What neither it nor the introduction to the text says is that the article is actually not at all about coin collecting or coin collectors as a whole. It is all about US coin collectors, but then not even all of them, but the minority who collect dugup ancient coins derived to a disturbingly large degree from the illegal and damaging exploitation of archaeological sites in foreign countries. In this respect the title is wholly misleading. It is important to realize what a small minority this vociferous group is - both in US society as a whole, as well as in the US coin collecting community as a whole. There are many million coin collectors in the US, collecting for example wheat pennies and state quarters, but (ACCG estimate) at most 50 000 collectors of ancients, probably much less, in a country with a population of 309 million. The authors of this paper however presume to speak for all coin collectors.

It is a widespread stereotype of the average North American that their worldview is dipolar, "them and US". Despite the fact that the question discussed is an international one and the paper was written for delivery to an international audience, this comes over very strongly in this text, to a degree that is intensely annoying. The authors paint a totally "US"-centred picture. The double meaning is intentional, this is a chauvinistic view that the entire outside world should bow to the demands and interests of the US and each and every one of its citizens, and also a very self-centred view ("me, me! I wannit and by hell I'm gonna git it"). There is detailed presentation of US laws (carefully pointing out they oblige the US citizen to nothing), while all others outside are merely dismissed as unworkable. There is talk of US institutions (the writers' own ACCG central among them) but no mention of any outside groups working for collectors elsewhere. This is odd, given that this text was produced for an audience on the Continent. An audience which will by its very nature - the conference was attended by metal detectorists - have contained many collectors of ancient and medieval coins. This text contains zero acknowledgement of that fact.

Likewise the title suggesting the article was going to be discussing "cultural property nationalism" is equally misleading. Nowhere is the author's concept of what this entails is actually defined. This seems on the one hand somewhat lax of the authors who seem to get lost in their own verbosity. On the other hand it is a convenient ploy as it means the noun and adjective "Nationalist" (with a capital N) can be used pejoratively with impunity to cover all sorts of groups in opposition to the no-questions-asked market in dugup archaeological material whom this band of indiscriminate collectors of dugups do not like.

If we ignore such rhetorical use of the term and examine the text carefully, it can be seen that the whole text is in fact built around a critique of a single document and it is with reference to that which the term is defined.

The document in question is the 1970 UNESCO "Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property". For a group of North American dealers, this forty year old document which most people in the international arena see as a beneficial (if not always very effective) step forward from the nineteenth century is what the fuss is about.

The text presented by Sayles and Welsh to a British audience at Newcastle make clear, if one supports the aims of the Convention, if one agrees to the application of the measures it outlines, then you are according to the ACCG a "Nationalist".

So who are the nationalists? Well, I guess US military personnel who stop local criminals from smuggling artefacts out of Iraq which is against international accords compliant with UNESCO 1970 must be "Nationalists" then. US museum directors who in a recent statement accepted a 1970 cutoff date in determining ethical (note that word) acquisition practices, must be "Nationalists". US Customs officers, Homeland Security and FBI officers who in the course of doing their patriotic duty recover smuggled items which are then returned to the places from which they were illegally removed (for example Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Iraq) are also "Nationalists" by the ACCG definition. It goes without saying that Members of the Archaeological Institute of America are also "Nationalists" to a man (or woman).

So what about the member of the US military who ships his “souvenirs” of “ancient art” home from Iraq without paying any attention to the requirements to do so by the book? An “Internationalist”? Museums that buy freshly dug up Greek vases in pieces with a nudge-nudge-wink-wink and the earth still on them? “Internationalist”? Or (if such things exist) bent US Customs officers, Homeland Security and FBI officers who would turn a blind eye to an illegal shipment or two of antiquities for a “friend”? Why, “Internationalists” of course. Nice company ACCG coin collectors would like to keep!


Sayles and Welsh argue there is no need for any kind of treaty about giving back “stolen” cultural property when the very definition of what is cultural property can be challenged, and the notion of what is “stolen” is relative. The main challenge to whether dugup ancient coins really are cultural property however comes only from self-centred intellectually challenged transatlantic coin dealers and collectors, and the notion of what is “stolen” seemingly is relative on whether you are a victim of the theft or the seller of the items in question.

Let us be clear. People who break laws are not "internationalists", they are criminals. People who willigly or unwittingly do business with those who break laws are not "internationalists", they are people who do business with criminals. People who sell illicitly obtained goods mixed up with those obtained from more legitimate sources are not "internationalists", they are at best careless, always somewhat lacking in ethics and at worst complicit in criminal activity, whether or not they "agree" with the laws broken between the initial supplier and the shop counter.

Sayles and Welsh indicate why their Coin Collectors’ Manifesto is against measures taken to prevent the sale of stolen cultural goods:

“The prevention of theft, clandestine excavation and illicit export seems innocuous enough, until one places the concept within the framework of a nationalist state with retentionist laws where all cultural objects can be, and sometimes are, declared property of the State. Through the repression of personal property rights, any export without a state permit is thereby rendered illicit and any private possession of cultural objects without a state permit is considered theft".

The notion of “retentionist laws” are nowhere defined in the text of their Manifesto, such labels hark back to the rhetoric of the ACCP. What is meant are laws which vest in the state the option to determine the degree to which resources within that state's territory of certain types of material (cultural property is one kind, natural resources such as endangered species are another) may be depleted in order to manage them in as near a sustainable manner as possible. The ACCP and following them the ACCG regard states adopting such measures to take responsibility for the management of certain resources as in some way evil. The logic behind adopting such a position while glibly professing to be interested in advancing “preservation” is unclear.

At the end of their article Sayles and Welsh state explicitly “Philosophically (sic), the Guild [ie the ACCG] is global in perspective, yet respects the right of every nation to impose and enforce cultural property laws within their limits of jurisdiction”. So if the United States declares certain archaeological finds state property to protect them and the information they carry, then the ACCG respects that, and presumably would condem the looting of Native American collectables going on in various parts of the USA today. If England and Wales or Scotland impose state ownership on certain categories of cultural property (for example hoards of Bronze Age tool fragments in pots) to protect them and the information they carry the ACCG recognises the right for them to do so. If however it is Bulgaria, Greece or Egypt that wishes to protect archaeological finds in the same manner, for the coin collectors they are evil “Nationalists” and nasty “Retentionists”.

Sayles and Welsh however consistently throughout their article represent the problem as concerning protection of “objects”. This is typical of course, it is what they both sell as dealers. Ignoring their original context is part and parcel of the no-questions-asked market in dugup antiquities.

The concerns of the preservationists regarding the scale of the market in illicitly obtained artefacts is not so much whether or not the objects are sold on illicit markets within a country or wander to markets outside it, but the fact that the existence of a market for illictly obtained artefacts exists at all. The problem is that it is the existence of this market that renders viable the wholesale digging over of archaeological sites to exploit the archaeological record as a source to supply collectables. This is the problem which sixty pages of turgid antiquitist drivel fail to address properly even once, except that “coins come to the surface by themselves” so they do not really come from archaeological contexts. This seems a fairy tale as dubious as the one about the Coin Pixies, Coin Elven and Tooth Fairies.

In reality, all this talk about “Nationalists” is just a smoke screen. The American Council for Cultural Policy used it, James Cuno uses it, and now antiquity dealers Sayles and Welsh are using it as a convenient bandwaggon which they think will carry them across the muddy areas of the debate on the current state of the antiquities market. Their waggon however has encountered problems, that market is not the patch of brownish mud they would like us to think, but a big black dirty swamp in which these two writers up to their necks in. Together with them, so is every single collector of ancient dug up coins which they claim to represent.

Cadaver Collecting in Colorado

Glenn Howard (Ancient Art, Ltd.; Ancient Art International,Inc.; Egyptian Antiquities, Westminster, CO 80036, USA) writes to the yahoo Ancient Artifact list that he was told (by whom I wonder) that the sale of his mummified human foot by Bob Dodge had "stirred a little attention and confrontation" on the list. He writes to tell the members his version of how it came to be on sale in the USA, the "real story behind this mummies (sic) foot....". The text he produces however is clearly crafted to offset the earlier criticism of fellow collectors, and is notable for what it does not say, as much as what it does. Neither is it explained why one dealer is selling another dealer's stock as his own. Let us see Mr Howard's retrospective justification for collecting human corpse parts.

Apparently a "few years ago" dealer Howard was asked by a collector's niece to look over some artefacts when the person's house was being cleared after their death:

"I sorted them in three sections. Fake, authentic, and pieces I was interested in. Among the pieces were two mummy hands, and one foot (in an old Tupperware container). She proceeded to tell me she was going to throw them out. I was shocked by this. I wrote a check out and handed it across the table. I thought she was going to fall off her chair."

Interesting that last comment, somebody invites a dealer to look over some artefacts and is surprised to get a cheque? This obviously is intended to convey that for the former owner, these artefacts really had no value. The fate of the recently acquired pieces of human tissue is then described. Note, no mention is made of whether the foot and two hands belonged to the same cadaver:

One person's trash, is another persons treasured mummies hands (and foot), right? Anyway.... Now.... since then these have been cared for and kept from an certain destruction. I sold one of the hands to a collector that absolutely treasures it.I sold the foot in the auction that honest and well respected dealers Bob and Teresa Dodge worked so hard to make a great success.The last hand? I have have under a hand crafted redwood and glass display case in my private gallery. An interesting note, This hand has an original bronze pin holding the bandage gently into place on its palm. It is fascinating, and in an incredible state of preservation (I guess Tupperware really does keep things fresh!) Seriously. It may have helped in keeping this hand intact. To me personally.... this hand gives me some a the greatest inspiration,and thoughts this Egyptian culture has ever given me in 15 years.I wonder what this hand held [... snipped lengthy romantic speculation ...]? I don't think I will ever part with this hand.... It will sit beside me through life. I will instruct my estate to transfer this hand to a museum or a family member after I pass, as so they can be the next caretaker of this fascinating piece of history. Probably a family member of dear friend. Besides many of us know if would probably end up in an old metal chest down in the basement of a museum, if that's where I sent it. Just as bad as the trash. Not cared for as it should be. [...] So many of you should really think before you go on your insane tirades...".

Mr Howard therefore has given the fragment of cadaver a "good home" (in a "a hand crafted redwood and glass display case" in his private gallery) and "saved" it [for now] from "an (sic) certain destruction". He uses it as his muse, an aid to entertaining speculation about the past. On his demise he intends to will a piece of somebody else's corpse to a family member or friend (as a memento?). He regards it as "insane" to question whether this is ethical collecting.

What of course he does not say is what kind of "good home" he has assured for the foot he also bought at the same time and now sold on, through another dealer. It is not going to any "good home", it is going to the guy that came up with the most cash for it. That could be anyone, the piece could be going anywhere, to a freak show owner or foot fetishist, or a loudmouth drunkard Neo-Nazi wife beater given to smashing furniture perhaps. What actually is the US definition of a "good home" in which to lay to rest human corpses? In fact, whatever that definition is, neither Mr Howard or Mr Dodge seem to have taken any measures to 'vet' the bidders in the foot auction to make the "ensuring it goes to a good home" argument stick. But we note that in the text Mr Howard published on the collector's forum, the destination and type of "care" offered to the foot itself (that is what was being discussed) is mentioned only in passing.

Let us look at his key argument that he saved it: "This would be buried in a landfill right now". The first point is that whether it is the uncaring heirs of one collector or another that dispose of items like this as trash, it still does not resolve the general issue of whether temporarily housing lopped off bits of human cadaver in ephemeral private collections (or with family members and friends of a deceased collector) is an activity which we should be applauding or decrying. Is it actually "insane" to ask such a question about the nineteenth century trophy-hunting attitudes of private collectors in the twenty-first century? I think not. Secondly I wonder whether in the US state where this woman lived it is legal and normal to dispose of human remains in the trash? Some guy's girlfriend's dead baby for example, grandma to save funeral costs, aborted human foetuses, human tissue from hospitals, the hobo that died of cold round the back of the garage. My guess is it is not. So is buying a bothersome artefact the only way to save it from somebody doing something illegal or unethical to it? Or is the motive for buying it the notion of a "handcrafted rosewood display case in my private gallery" and the potential for making 6000$ on the foot and an undisclosed sum on the hand, and the rest is retrospective excuse-making for this behaviour? The reader can examine the whole text and decide.

Renfrew ('Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership') has examined the collectors' "good home" argument (2000, 20-1, 77) and concludes that it "may apply for stray dogs" but not antiquities. I think it applies even less in the case of pieces of dismembered human body, however much one might like to justify their acquisition in order to then ghoulishly stare at it on display in a personal gallery of decontextualised antiquities and speculate whose dismembered and scattered body it is a part of.

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Vignette: A collection of feet.