The future of the market for "pieces of past in your hand"

Over on an ancient coin fondlers' forum there's a bit of discussion going on about financial trends in the numismatic market in the face of the economic crisis hitting a few of the "market countries". Dealer Wayne Sayles reckons:

If you have money and don't trust the financial markets, what better vehicle to park it in than ancient coins?

Answer: probably any except a market which it is becoming incereasingly clear involves a huge amount of illicitly obtained material. I've been reading Nathan Elkins' The Trade in Ancient Coins in the USA: Scale and Structure'. Shocking stuff. He estimates that the US market consumes at least one million coins annually. I believe him. With 50000 collectors (a figure that Sayles came up with a few years back) that's only 20 coins each a year. The majority of them are those "uncleaned bulk lots" that dealers-who-think-we-were-all-born-yesterday want us to believe all come from "old collections" in the US since the old-timey years you could buy them by the bucket-load in Macey's (really?) but which those of us who have our eyes on that market know is an indicator of where the majority of the REST also probably come from.

I would say that Wayne Sayles' ACCG is well aware that when the public wake up and take note and say what they think about all this destruction of the archaeological heritage (just so a few foreign collectors can have gee-gaws to fondle and dealers can earn a quick buck or two) - collectors and dealers could well find that unless they clean their act up quite considerably and publicly, the bottom will be dropping out of this particular niche of the numis-market.

An archivist's take on the antiquities market

There is an interesting blog post here where Richard Cox (Professor in Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences) looks at the issues surrounding the antiquities trade from the point of view of his own specialisation. This is entirely appropriate since of course the archaeological rcord is an archive of knowledge about the past, and it is interesting to learn how an archivist sees what is happening to it.

Some of the difficulties in the antiquities trade concern the unavailability of records that ought to document the provenance of the acquisition of the colected artifacts. The archivist picks out a quote from Waxman's recent book ("Loot...") where she writes (p. 220), “

There is no simple way to track the source of these acquisitions or tally their provenances, no database for the public to consult. In the age of computers, this seems a strange lapse of information and one that denies the public the benefit of transparency”

She is talking about museums, but this could equally applied to bits of the common heritage "curated" in scattered personal collections. Why are there so few archives of the movement of archaeological artefacts between those "old" collections the archivist seems to wonder. I wonder too (though I suspect I know the real reason).

On a slightly different tack, I was interested in another comment he drew attention to - in this case on forgery, but I wonder how much this can also be applied to the creation of personal collections of contextless archaeological artefacts:

The forger or forgers had more personal motives than national pride or blind faith. Greed was part of it, surely, but something else was at work too. Human life is finite, while history is, if not eternal, relatively so. To create bits of the ancient past is to become, perhaps, something more than mortal. For some of those who can, it might be impossible to resist the temptation to sneak a tiny yet indelible fingerprint onto the vast canvas of yesteryear, and forge a personal link with an ancient temple priest or pharaoh, before our short time on earth comes to an end.

(Quoted from Nina Burleigh (2008), Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land, New York, p. 256). It set me thinking whether the very fact of the loss of context is not a more important factor in what collectors of portable antiquities are up to than we have tended to think. The collector by snatching them from being archaeological evidence is making "an indelible fingerprint on the vast canvas of yesteryear", their collection is their very own fingerprint made of immortal elements of the past, personalised by being devoid of its original context, freed of the need to base conclusions on the application of a methodology on observations of context of discovery, deposition and use, when narrative and speculative imagination has free rein.

A virtual coin dealer ethic?

For a while now the ACCG website has proclaimed that the previous president of the Guild, Peter Tompa was on his way out and his place will be taken by Bill Puetz of VCoins. This is potentially a very interesting move as V-coins ('The Virtual Coin Show'SM ) is currently being advertised as being 'The Strongly Ethical Alternative to eBay'. The reader is informed that:

Vcoins began several years ago as a marketplace for ancient coins and antiquities dealers to have an easy-to-deploy storefront for their coins. Vcoins founder Bill Puetz has a zero-tolerance policy regarding counterfeits, scams, and other dealer shenanigans, and his marketplace is widely seen as being the elite place to buy and sell ancient coins. Vcoins has recently branched out to include World and U.S. coins sections, and as more people get frustrated with eBay's escalating seller fees and disregard of buyer needs, expect Vcoins to flourish. Vauctions is an offshoot of Vcoins, and a good place to shop for coins if you value a secure marketplace with a strong dealer code of ethics, and want to have recourse if you have any problems.

That is comforting to the potential buyer I am sure. Let’s have a look at Mr Puetz’s “strong dealer code of ethics” and see how many of the issues of concern to the conservation lobby it addresses. Well, actually, none whatsoever. The VCoins Dealer Code of Ethics begins:

VCoins recognizes that all dealers are legally obligated to operate their businesses in accordance with applicable local, state, and national commercial laws. A further requirement for participating as a dealer on the VCoins site is strict adherence to the VCoins Dealer Code of Ethics. This Code is intended to promote mutual trust between dealers and the public through fairness, honesty, and integrity. […Article 2:] I will conduct my business in a professional and ethical manner, and will exercise common sense and courtesy in my professional dealings, to ensure that no discredit is brought to VCoins or other VCoins dealers.

The code has 14 principles most of which seem to be general business-centred issues about payment, representation of items and so on. Two of them (8 and 10) deal with the problem of the many fakes out there in the no-questions-asked market, several about not applying various unfair means to bump up the prices (including “historical conjecture, unsubstantiated provenance or pedigree, or other tactics that may artificially inflate the perceived value of an item.” Number 13) and so on. The emphasis is on customer-protection rather than providing a framework for the ethical handling of archaeological material.

So what is there here about illicitly-obtained archaeological artefacts? Maybe article 9 might be thought to do the trick: "I will not knowingly deal in stolen numismatic items. I will report such items to the proper authorities if they are offered to me”. Good. But what actually is the Vcoins definition of a “stolen numismatic item”? Here as anyone who frequents their discussion lists can see, numismophillic standards differ from those of the archaeological resource protection lobby. To judge by current ACCG rhetoric, a item illegally excavated and illegally exported from any country other than the US is not “stolen”, since the foreign laws that restrict US citizens making a quick buck on items removed from the archaeological record lying in the territory of a foreign country are by definition “bad laws” made by “retentionist nationalists” and anyway enforced by inevitably “corrupt” foreign governments. Applying the "two wrongs make a right" type arguments, these collectors and dealers use such generalizations to insist that buying coins from individuals that trash archaeological contexts breaking such laws in the process is “supporting free enterprise”.

The ACCG’s own weasel-worded “code of ethics” (with which the Vcoins one has a number of verbal parallels) has been discussed by Gill. Collectors are expected to “comply with all cultural property laws of their own country” (only, but then they can ignore the implications of those of others). Collectors should refuse to “knowingly purchase coins illegally removed from scheduled archaeological sites” (not all countries have a scheduling system, in them all archaeological sites are protected by law) or “stolen from museum or personal collections”.

There is nothing here in either the Vcoins of the ACCG Codes of ethics about ethical collectors and/or dealers ascertaining the coins they acquire do not come from illegal excavation or illegal export. There is a difference between merely obeying the minimum a law requires of ou and ethical conduct. There is nothing in the VCoins "code of ethics" about dealers telling customers where the coins come from and providing documentation of provenance and export licence compliance if asked (let alone offering it). Nothing of that sort.

Recently we looked on this blog at Neil Brodie's article about the trade in Iraqi antiquities and Peter Tompa's claim that the ones on the US market could have come from "department stores" in the earlier 20th century. I found on the VCoins portal sixteen cuneiform tablets (they are listed in the post below this), none of which had any sort of information offered where they had been before the dealer offered them for sale, nor when and how they had left Iraq.

No documentation of provenance whatsoever. We are asked to believe that all of them are former “Macey’s items” no doubt. So would not a “strongly ethical” antiquities showcase expect its dealers to be, nay insist on them being, explicit about what they know about the past of the items like this they are selling? I would say that in the present climate, dealers offering unprovenanced cuneiform tablets (to take just ONE category of ancient artefacts) on the Vcoins website are treading a ver fine line. There are two types of thinking observers of the VCoins website, those who on seeing these unprovenanced items have very real, very pertinent questions, and those who simply assume they "know" from recent news where these things came from which VCoins is offering for sale. I think not stating clearly why these objects are documentably licit is indeed undermining the “mutual trust between dealers and the public” and also undoubtedly potentially bringing “ discredit […] to VCoins or other VCoins dealers”. Presumably VCoins and other VCoin dealers do not see it like that. I'd very much like to see see a journalist take Brodie's article, Tompa's excuses and no-questions-asked-no-information-offered web sales sites like the VCoin website and see what the thinking public make of it all.

This highlights the key question. In what way is the Vcoins "Dealer Code of Ethics" in its present form actually going to help stop unscrupulous individuals trashing archaeological sites the length and breadth of the ancient world for the money they can make from no-questions-asked dealers in Europe, the US and beyond? In what way does it help create an ethical trade in archaeological material?
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A Virtual clutter of Cuneiform, where's it from?

In the post above I discuss a few aspects of the code of ethics of the Vcoins web sales site for portable antiquities and question whether it is a code of ethics that actually takes into account the principle criticism of the archaeological resource protection lobby, that is that dealers and collectors are doing next to nothing to address the problem of looted objects on the global antiquities market.

In recent years the looting of archaeological sites in Iraq has been a very visible reminder of what is at stake, and the issue has become a very sensitive one in collecting circles. Dealers and their supporters have suggested that stories of the looting are “exaggerated” and that the looted items are allegedly not coming onto the western market, which should be (it is asserted by collectors and dealers) saturated by “department store” and other “legitimately obtained” artefacts of Iraqi origin.

This means that (even if a proportion of them have lost provenance) there must still be out there a substantial number of items whose legitimate origins and presence in former collections must be documentable. This is good news for reputable dealers who cannot these days run the risk of selling-on items of which they cannot document the legitimate origin. In that case, one might expect that those selling items that can be shown to be of legitimate origin would be keenly broadcasting that fact in order to set themselves aside from those who dare not reveal where the items really came from and when. (Unless of course there is a conspiracy of silence to shield the latter?)

So it was with some interest that I looked through the cuneiform tablets (the archetypical Iraqi archaeological artefact sought by artefact hunters and collectors alike), not on eBay, but ACCG president Bill Puetz’s :Strongly Ethical Alternative to eBay” Vcoins site.
Using the search engine, I found a number of COIN dealers on this one portal alone were offering these items.

Isadore Goldstein 'ZUZIM JUDAEA', Brooklyn, NY
UR III Sumerian Cuneiform tablet, 2112 - 2004 B.C.E., Approximate time of Abraham's birth
Ancient Babylonian Tablet. Period of Hammurapi, circa. 1750 B.C.E.
no provenances mentioned.

Wayne Hardenberg, Ancient Byways, Wethersfield, CT, USA
Sumerican (sic) Cuneiform Clay Tablet – O[ld] B[abylonian] Adminstartive (sic)
no provenance given.

Kevin Barry, Barry and Darling, Pt. Pleasant, NJ, USA
Mesopotamian Cuneiform Tablet, c. 3rd - 2nd Millennium BC.
Mesopotamian Proto-Cuneiform Tablet, c. 3,000 BC.
no provenance cited.

Pegasi Numismatics, Ann Arbor, MI/Holicong, PA , U.S.A
Cuneiform Tablet. Old Babylonian, XX-XVI Century BC. Temple receipt for donated goods.
no provenence mentioned.

But there is a whole lot on one Australian dealer’s site: Walter Holt, Bondi Junction, NSW Australia.
Mr Holt has had a number (eleven at the moment, but his numbering goes up to 17) of other cuneiform tablets (some which to my eyes look to have been in a very similar state of preservation) on his Vcoins store . All of them without any kind of explanation of where they came from, when and how they left Iraq (do they have Macey's in Australia?), such as:
CT 01 Cuneiform Tablet; Old Akkadian c.2350-2150BC Administrative document.
CT 04 Cuneiform Tablet; Ur III Period c.2150-2000BC
CT 11 Cuneiform Tablet; Ur III Period c.2150-2000BC
CT 12 Cuneiform Tablet; Ur III Period c.2150-2000BC Administrative document.
CT16. Cuneiform Tablet; Ur III Period, 2150-2000BC Administrative document.
CT17. Cuneiform Tablet; Ur III Period c.2150-2000BC Administrative document. I am not a cuneiform reader, but to my eye, CT16 and CT 17 are very similar in form and content. My guess is they originally came from the same archaeological site and the archive. Odd then to find them still together then if they’re “Macey’s artefacts” which have been on the market any length of time… To be honest I find this group of objects very disturbing and hope sincerely that Mr Holt can contact this blog and tell us how these items got from a hole in an ancient site to his shop in Australia.

In none of these cases of items offered for sale on the “strongly ethical” site is there any mention of documentation of provenance or legal export that the potential buyer can expect to obtain with their purchase. We can only presume in that case that they are all being sold “as seen”.

After what has (undeniably) been going on in Iraq since the imposition of sanctions, I find this on-line cluster of cuneiform bits for sale without any kind of provenance even hinted at in any of the sales blurbs profoundly disturbing. Maybe all of these dealers have a portfolio for each of these objects which the future buyer will get, including old Macey's sales receipts, export licences, former collection catalogue numbers, but if they have, why on earth do they not mention this fact on the "strongly ethical alternative to eBay"? Surely this is something which gives the object greater not less attrractiveness as a collectable? Surely this is a factor that would give VCoins more, not less kudos as an "ethical" site?

Personally I would have said - whatever their ultimate origin - that these items displayed in this way would be a factor very strongly undermining the “mutual trust between dealers and the public” and potentially bringing discredit not only to VCoins but also all other dealers associated with VCoins.

The bottom line is that it is quite clear from this sort of thing that both the Vcoins “Code of Dealer Ethics” and the “code of ethics” of the ACCG fall very far short of what is needed to clean up this untidy market. Perhaps, if they really are concerned about not encouraging the destruction of the archaeological resource by looting, it is time for those who created them to look at them again. The appointment of Bill Puetz as President of the ACCG seems a wonderful occasion in which this might be achievable. All that is needed is the will.

Welsh Treasure System Failure

Another treasure find from the United Kingdom, land of opportunity for artefact hunting metal detector users, is in the news. Early to Middle Bronze Age items found at Rossett in Wrexham county, North Wales in 2004 (the so-called Burton Hoard just off the A483) were declared treasure and the three finders William May, Joseph Perry and Peter Skelly, all from Liverpool, shared the £85,000 reward with farmer Derry Willis.

Farmer Willis likes treasure hunters, one of them thanked him and the other landowners recently “for their hospitality over the years; they’ve looked after us with cups of tea and have even phoned us when the field is being ploughed.”

So after a recent ploughing the three men were back on the treasure field in late August 2007 with a “a hi-tech computerised metal detector”. Just two inches down, and ten metres away from the original find, they found more gold, declared Treasure in an inquest last month. The Wrexham Mail notes dryly “The addition to the Burton Hoard has now prompted the National Museum of Wales to commission a survey of the field which could lead to further discoveries”.

This is ridiculous. Three responsible guys do what the law requires, and report a find which goes – as it should – to a public collection. The findspot will have been recorded in the archaeological record. Now it turns out that although money was raised to buy the objects, not enough fnds were made available to investigate the site to give the recovered objects a proper context (which anybody can see should include making sure that there were no more related finds lying just two inches down ten metres away). The whole point of the Treasure Act and its Code of Practice was not just to get sparkly goodies into museum collections (otherwise they could be bought – and possibly cheaper – on eBay). It was to allow the recovery of archaeological information about their contexts of deposition. The fact that more gold items are coming out of this field shows that in the case of the Burton hoard, we do not have as much information about that as we might have. Also we are now having another Treasure inquest about objects that should have been included in the first one. How many more associated items are there in this part of the field?

We saw the same thing happened in the case of the Newark Torc where the context of deposition remains totally unclear (by the way the PAS never did clarify the position over that airplane wreck search permit). We saw that after the Cold Brayfield hoard was reported just a tiny hole was all the local archaeologists could manage to try and find its context of deposition (failing here too to do so). To my mind, if there was gold left lying in farmer Derry Willis’ fields, there are a number of ways an enterprising “nighthawk” could increase their chances of finding it. This is why the Stixwould hoard was revisited under archaeological control to recover what the nighthawks had not yet had the time to pinch. At Burton, they’ve had three years. It seems to me that some better archaeology-oriented strategy needs adopting here to make sure that the archaeological aspects of the reported discoveries do not lag behind the "glomworthy shiny goodies" ones.
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A cure for looting in Turkey?

Mehmet Özdogan’s 1998 essay. Ideology and archaeology in Turkey, (from in L. Meskell (ed.). Archaeology under fire. Nationalism, politics and heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East: 111-24. London: Routledge.) has just appeared online. It should interest all those post-Cuno clones in the antiquity collecting world who perceive calls for the better conservation of the archaeological resource and heritage in general as an expression of “nationalism”. The author is clear where he sees the main problem: he concludes his paper with quote that ‘Third World nations resent those in the West who would deny them their past while claiming history as their own’.

The last section of this text is on ‘Treasure hunting and the antiquities market’ and is equally thought-provoking. Let us see how the author treats this.

A final area where archaeology matters concerns the illicit looting of ancient sites to supply the demands of the art market. Cultural heritage in Turkey, like all “archaeologically rich” countries, suffers considerably from the exploits of
treasure hunters. This phenomenon is provoked by the antiquity markets of the Western World and is not the result of any ideological reasoning. Turkey’s government, like that of Northern Cyprus, has been desperately struggling to stop illicit digging but it seems that, as long as there is a market in the
West, the destruction will continue. Given these attempts, the West should not accuse these authorities of being unconcerned with illicit digging. To stop the illicit export of antiquities, buying them in Turkey (for Turkey) by paying sums comparable to the Western collectors has been suggested as a solution. For some years Turkish Museums bought from illicit diggers and, at the same time, private museums and collections were encouraged. This, of course, only encouraged further destruction of the sites. Museums [ob]tained important objects at the expense of losing scientific knowledge of their contexts. The most significant destruction took place in the East and, in a few years, thousands of Urartian cemeteries were looted.

The view of this writer is unequivocally that it is the western collector, unconcerned about where the things they accumulate come from, that is the motor of the looting of archaeological sites in countries like Turkey. He also points out that merely applying a “reward” system in the “source” countries [as foreign collectors almost universally propose as the “cure” for looting], can have the opposite effect. Local archaeologists like Özdogan observing on the ground what is happening blame foreign collectors and dealers for the damage being done to their country's archaeological heritage. Those foreign collectors and dealers as we see daily blame "the archaeologists" (and so therefore Mr Özdogan too) or those foreign oriental (= "corrupt") governments for the shortcomings of the systems of protection. And so the futile blame-alloting goes on, while the looters dig away and the no-questions-asked antiquities market flourishes, and day by day archaeological sites all over the world are irreversibly damaged to provide collectables for a minority foreign market. Instead of criticising the governments of the poorer countries affected by this problem (which nevertheless affects us all if we ascribe - as most collectors do - to a 'universal' view of the cultural past), perhaps 2009 is the year for considering what steps caring people in our part of the world can take to try to curb this?

* Page 74 of McIntosh, R.J., McIntosh, S.K. and Togola, T. (1989) “People Without History,” Archaeology 41: 74–82. [Is there not the word "their" missing here? I have not the original to hand at the moment].

More sneers from Observer

Peter Tompa has a blog on "cultural property observing" which consists almost entirely of a series of sneering attacks on the whole world that does not collect antiquities. It seems he has a chip on his shoulder about SAFE in particular. SAFE is hosting Lord Professor Colin Renfrew who is giving a lecture in a few days time about the antiquities trade in which (one may infer from its title) New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art's acquisition policy will be one of the things discussed. The Met in response released the full text of a draft of its new acquisition policy. Tompa criticises SAFE for publicising that fact. In his latest blog post "LA Times Culture Monster Swallows SAFE Bait-- Hook, Line and Sinker" he writes that:

The problem (sic) is that the MET (sic) has in fact adopted the new AAMD standards, a fact reported on the "CultureGirrl" blog some time ago.

Personally I do not see any "problem" in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art abiding by the new AAMD standards, in fact - given its past history - I see that as good news. Nevertheless, let's stick with the facts. Renfrew's SAFE lecture title was announced before 4th November, but the final version of the Met's revised policy to which Tompa refers was drafted later (12th November). More to the point, there seems to be some doubt when it was "adopted" (to use Tompa's term). The document itself says:

This Revised Policy shall be effective immediately upon approval by the Board of Trustees and shall supersede all prior policies on the topics addressed herein.

Presumably the adoption of this policy would have a terminus post quem of November 12th rather than some time in June when "CultureGrrl" reported what she had been told by a Met spokesperson.

I really do not see the reason for yet another "numismo-rantic" attack on SAFE. If one considers Culturrgirl blog post 'public announcement from a major institution, it's their choice. It seems to me pretty clear that the full draft text of the Met's new policy was made public as a reaction to SAFE's announcement of what Lord Renfrew was going to say in a few days' time, which is what SAFE are saying. Which is what "CultureMonster" said.

Let it be noted that the style in which this was handled between SAFE/Renfrew and the Met was the polar opposite of the numismo-rantic method: no attack, no clobbering. SAFE was polite and civil to the folks at the Met but surely is free to ask them and anyone else questions about what they are doing.

Photo: Peter Tompa