Balkan Antiquities Manna on US Market: Thirteen years on

 

I wish I'd updated this earlier, but time passes, and we do not always keep up with it. So I dropped the ball a little here, I see. On Monday 20th Jan 2014 I did a post on this blog 'Balkan Antiquities Manna on US Market: Five years on'. This referred to four previous articles ("Three pounds of Somebody Else’s History in Pieces" 28.09.08,  "Balkan Artefacts like Manna?" 20.01.09; "Bulgarian Antiquities" - The Oddest Thing", 01.04.09; followed by  Antiquity Seller Claims "Bulgarian Bonanza is over" 10.07.09). I want to look at the same issue - bulk lots of Bulgarian artefacts on eBay - from today's perspective.  

First on my original list was Empire Ancients (Danny Harris, Cordova, Tennessee, ebay: empiredanny). He's gone from the 7443 feedback he had seven years ago to 11563 (590 a year). It says: "Positive Feedback (last 12 months): 100% Member since: Nov-25-00 in United States Top-rated seller: One of eBay's most reputable sellers. Consistently delivers outstanding customer service". Seven years on, however, his sales offer has changed quite a lot. First of all, from the 3,147  listed items on sale he had seven years ago ("mostly coins and artefacts - mostly the sort of thing you'd find on archaeological sites in the Balkans", I wrote), he now has 47 (see below). 

Next, on the my list was Ancient Treasures (Plamen Arsoff, Granada Hills CA 91394, eBay ancient_treasures). He had  55997 feedback seven years ago. Now he seems to have stopped trading. Interestingly when I discussed him last time, he was selling much fewer items than had been the case earlier. 

Then there was Cameleon Coins (Alex Stanichev, Winettka, also in Los Angeles CA, United States, eBay  cameleoncoins) last time I discussed him, he had 14171 feedback, and again he had fewer items than before and of much more varied nature. I wrote in 2009: "the offering gives the impression of the dregs end of a larger assemblage, mixed in with modern tat". Now he too seems to have gone out of business.  

I also discussed Ancient Caesar (Ilian Lalev, Newton, MA 02458, eBay ancientcaesar) In 2009 his feedback was 18939. He had 567 artefacts on offer, but again a bit of a mixed bag. I also noted: "maybe its the photography, but at first sight not all of his artefacts look all that convincing to me". He also seems not to be trading. Possibly because a lot of people suspected by about 2011 that many of his artefacts were 'not as described'.   

Then we come to Mr Gantcho Zagorski (Diana Coins - Hackensack , NJ ebay dianacoins/ paganecoins0oh6, feedback 2112 + 7617 in 2009). You can look him up in the internet to see what kind of adventures he has been having. In 2009 he'd already stopped trading under his former names.

This is quite an interesting pattern. Four of these guys have eastern European names, all four of them between 1998/9 and 2009 sold extremely large numbers of artefacts of fairly homogeneous composition that look for all the world like artefacts metal detected from sites in the Danube/Balkan region. Some time after 2009 the trade comes to an end. 

That recalls something that I took at the time to be hyperbole. The Californian dealer exclaimed "The Bulgarian Bonanza, as I used to call it, is apparently over". Could it be that the excesses of the US antiquities trade within a decade had virtually emptied the productive sites that fed it? 

Coming back to the inventory of Empire Danny, of his 47 items, 32 are labelled as being "Viking" and from "Lake Ladoga". They are given this collecting history, or a variant of it:

This item is a Lake Ladoga Viking [....], as seen in the photos.
This item is GUARANTEED to be AUTHENTIC Ancient artifact dating from the 8th to the 11th centuries AD.
This item was found while metal detecting in the Lake Ladoga region of Russia. This item was purchased from a collector that lives in Germany. He purchased it from a seller in Russia over 20 years ago. Per Ebay policy, this item was LEGALLY imported into the US. The ruler is in millimeters (mm).

First of all, the German buyer about 2001 can't have bought the item legally from Russia without an export licence. Secondly most of these items are not Viking, but East Baltic (not my area, but I'm going to guess from metal detecting in Latvia - not Soviet Union by 2001, but still needs export licence). That most of these items are female personal ornament suggests to me that this material comes from grave robbing. 

Wikipedia

Then there are several "Sarmatian" items with collecting histories going like this:

Rare 3rd to 5th Century Sarmatian [...], as seen in the photos.
This item is of legal provenance per ebay policy. I purchased this item in 2016 in a large lot of metal detector finds from a collector in Germany. This item was brought into this country legally per the laws in place in the US at the time it was imported and laws that are still in place today. This item is guaranteed to be an authentic ancient item that was found with a metal detector in Russia.

If he means Russia and not Ukraine, one wonders whether this was the same German collector, and what their connections were. Then there is a: "Medieval period bronze finger ring as seen in the photos. This item is of legal provenance per ebay policy. I purchased this item in 2015 in a lot of metal detector finds from a collector in Croatia. This item was brought into this country legally per the laws in place in the US at the time it was imported. I have included a scanned image of the shipping document that was approved by Croatia for export to the USA. This ring is guaranteed to be an authentic artifact that was found with a metal detector in Croatia". And metal detecting and pocketing the artefacts is legal in Croatia? The document is dated to just after the end of the 1991-95 Croatian War of Independence.

It would seem that the Bulgarian looted artefacts bonanza is truly over. No longer can you find bags of uncleaned ancient coins sold by the kilogramme, they are now all counted out. Four of the dealers that were handling bulk lots of artefacts have gone out of business, only Empire Danny is still in operation, but his stock comes from somewhere else. And back in bulgaria, the sites that all that stuff came from lie empty and bare.

and where now ARE all those artefacts? In what state are they in? How many of the loose bits have been binned already? And how many have any documentation tying their presence in a box in a collector's Californian home to this episode of destructive and criminal looting of distant European sites?

What the Dealers will not Admit About the Source of their "Minor Antiquities"

.
I suggested readers might like to assess the remarks of coin dealer Sayles in the post above. Let us also remember previous attempts by coin dealers like Dave Welsh to claim that the coins that are sold on the US market do not come from archaeological sites at all. Before people accept that, I'd like them to think about some real examples of the antiquity trade in action. I'd like them to look at dealers like Empire Danny in Cordova, TN United States. I've discussed him before (here, here, here and here) , and since that time he has been busily selling off his stuff, week after week.

[Now the material obviously of Balkan origin is mixed with a much greater number of "Viking" artefacts coming from around the Gulf of Finland/Ladoga area than earlier. (He is obviously strengthening his contacts with the gentlemen from the former Soviet Union - but the question is "which gentlemen", gentlemen from St Petersburg ones?)]

So this dealer has job lots of metal detected stuff alongside the material sorted into categories such as rings (sold individually as they are most often found whole) and other collectable items.

Here's what's left over after sorting:
Metal Detector Finds - HUGE LOT OF ARTIFACTS 6701 US $119.00 ("These artifacts are guaranteed to be an authentic ground dug artifacts dating from Roman to possibly modern times, 100 to 1500 years old or older. These items are being sold UNCLEANED in "as found" condition. These items were found in the Balkans with a metal detector").
Metal Detector Finds - HUGE LOT OF ARTIFACTS 6702 $116.29 ("These artifacts are guaranteed to be an authentic ground dug artifacts dating from Roman to possibly modern times, 100 to 1500 years old or older. These items are being sold UNCLEANED in "as found" condition. These items were found in the Balkans with a metal detector. I have viewed these items under a microscope to aid in authentication") Whoopee.
Metal Detector Finds - HUGE LOT OF ARTIFACTS 6704 US $119.00
Metal Detector Finds - HUGE LOT OF ARTIFACTS 6236 US $119.00
Metal Detector Finds - HUGE LOT OF ARTIFACTS 1679 US $129.00 ("These items are being sold UNCLEANED in "as found" condition This item was found in the Balkans with a metal detector").
Metal Detector Finds - HUGE LOT OF ARTIFACTS 6237 US $119.00


Metal Detector Finds - HUGE LOT OF ARTIFACTS 6706 US $119.00 ("These items were found in the Balkans with a metal detector").


Metal Detector Finds - HUGE LOT OF ARTIFACTS 6703 US $119.00 ("These artifacts are guaranteed to be an authentic ground dug artifacts dating from Roman to possibly modern times, 100 to 1500 years old or older. These items are being sold UNCLEANED in "as found" condition. These items were found in the Balkans with a metal detector. I have viewed these items under a microscope to aid in authentication").






Here's a turn-up for the books, the detectorists even collected metal-working waste and it got sent top the US and the dealer is flogging it off: METAL DETECTOR SILVER SLAG FINDS 3976 US $99.00 though with the proviso - should a collector decide to cash it in as bullion - "This artifact is guaranteed to be an authentic ground dug artifact. This lot weighs over 125 grams. I have not had any of these items tested for silver content. I am not sure that they are all silver, in fact, odds are some of them are not. This item was found in the Balkans. I have viewed this item under a microscope to aid in authentication".

Then another category Mr Danny and his business partners have been busily sorting out from the general run of partifacts are fibulae - categorised by whether they have pins preserved (or restored?) or broken. There's a price difference:
30 UNCLEANED ANCIENT FIBULAE FIBULA WITH PINS 5155 US $599.00 ("These fibulae were found in the Balkans").
LOT of 10 Ancient ROMAN FIBULAE FIBULA 4987 US $39.00 ("This item was found with a metal detector in the Balkans").
LOT of 75 UNCLEANED ANCIENT ROMAN FIBULAE FIBULA 5122 US $279.00


LOT of 75 UNCLEANED ANCIENT ROMAN FIBULAE FIBULA 5119 US $279.00

LOT of 75 UNCLEANED ANCIENT ROMAN FIBULAE FIBULA 5117 US $279.00


LOT of 75 UNCLEANED ANCIENT ROMAN FIBULAE FIBULA 5124 US $279.00
30 UNCLEANED ANCIENT FIBULAE FIBULA WITH PINS 5154 US $599.00 ("These fibulae were found in the Balkans. These fibulae are GUARANTEED to be AUTHENTIC ANCIENT ARTIFACTS").
30 UNCLEANED ANCIENT FIBULAE FIBULA WITH PINS 5160 US $599.00
30 UNCLEANED ANCIENT FIBULAE FIBULA WITH PINS 5159 US $599.00
LOT of 75 UNCLEANED ANCIENT ROMAN FIBULAE FIBULA 5118 US $279.00
LOT of 75 UNCLEANED ANCIENT ROMAN FIBULAE FIBULA 5120 US $279.00
LOT of 75 UNCLEANED ANCIENT ROMAN FIBULAE FIBULA 5116 US $279.00

Then there are collectors of ancient weapons in the States, so the bulk material received from "Balkan" contacts has been searched to make up a:
Lot of 100 Authentic ANCIENT MEDIEVAL ARROWHEADS 5016 US $399.00

there are lots of rings on sale, usually picked out intact. Metal Detector Find - Lot of 15 "SILVER" RINGS 5392 $392.70

Or they can be sold in larger bulk lots for sorting by the purchaser: UNOPENED lot of 150 UNCLEANED ANCIENT FINGER RINGS 4832 $959.59 (note the number on the bag): The same seller has also loads of coins on sale, singly if they are nice, or bulk lots of several hundred "uncleaned". Here's something for everyone:
a lucky dip, packages of coins packed in opaque plastic bags:
250 UNOPENED UNCLEANED HIGHEST QUALITY ROMAN COINS $934.01
1000 UNOPENED UNCLEANED ANCIENT ROMAN COINS $884.80


Then some bags were opened and sorted:
500 HIGH QUALITY UNCLEANED ANCIENT ROMAN COINS 6292
US $799.00. "These coins are HIGH (middle) quality coins. I have tens of thousands of Roman coins in my store so check it out if you want a different (better) quality than these".
500 LOWER QUALITY UNCLEANED ANCIENT ROMAN COINS 4316 $294.28
474 LOWER QUALITY UNCLEANED ANCIENT ROMAN COINS 4318 $280.50

Then some individual items picked out for separate sale, such as: Authentic ANCIENT Bronze GREEK COIN AE10 OWL ? 4630 $38.38
Bronze GREEK COIN AE36 PTOLEMY II Philadelphos 5458 $126.96
6 LARGE As / Dupondius Sized Ancient Roman Coins 6690 Buy It Now" $48.23

It just goes on and on. This seller has 2526 lots of antiquities on sale today. Some of them individually, some as job lots. Obviously the latter are amenable to purchase for the purpose of sorting, cleaning and restoring to put on the market again in smaller lots. So a lot of the minor artefacts sold through internet venues probably come one way or another from precisely such assemblages of material. And where do they come from?

To my mind, this illustrates very well how the minor market in antiquities functions. A bulk lot created by the removal of metal artefacts from the topsoil (where?) on an industrial scale with metal detectors is bought, perhaps direct from source, or perhaps through middlemen (such as German or Swiss intermediaries). It is then sorted through. In some of Empire Danny's photos the objects are shown on a table with a metal grid behind. One can imagine the items spread out on the latter, hosed and then dried before sorting. Numismatic items can be picked out, different artefacts that can be sold individually too. That leaves a whole load of partifacts which are also sold in bulk lots to those who like to puzzle out what the fragments came from. I imagine there were also a lot of shapeless pieces, some of which are included in the partifact lots, I imagine many more going for scrap.
.

Antiquitist Quiz

Here is a quiz for all of those antiquity collectors out there. What well known site do the following two photographs depict? Where is it, and what has happened to it that it has such a marked surface texture? Answers next week.

Answer: It is the site of the colonia at Archar near Vidin in NW Bulgaria. This is the place whence apparently (by his own admission) came the artefacts and coins being sold by ebay dealers like Empire Danny and his business contacts. They have (had) almost a metric tonne of artefacts obtained by "excavation" (sic) ten years ago. You can see the "excavation' trenches dug with bulldozers to take the topsoil off so metal detectors can penetrate the archaeological layers quite clearly. The way to stop this kind of damage is for responsible collectors to stop buying archaeologcal artefacts witout ensuring (by means of verifiable documented provenance) that they did not come from robber-digging like this.

"The Numbers" and Diligent Research Show that Coin Elves Really Do Exist?

.
In the comments to an old post, one NormanW has joined the discussion on looting and coin collecting. As is typical this is a fresh profile giving no information about the poster, so we really do not know who this Norman "W." is though he boasts that he not only knows shoot-to-kill Texan Pastor Scott Head, but is also "personally acquainted with more than one European coin hunter who only metal detects on private lands" (a bit difficult not to in Europe I would think where all land has an owner). ["Coin hunter"?]

Mr "W." reckons that he believes that I have "overgeneralized" about the relationship between the bulk lots of what are quite clearly freshly-surfaced "minor artefacts" circulating on the antiquities market and the commercial looting of archaeological sites. He states - though without entering into the specifics - his belief that:

your claim that the bulk of uncleaned coins currently available on the market are the product of looting is not true. The enormous number of uncleaned coins entering the market annually is far beyond what could be produced by the number of archeological sites being looted. Diligent, open-minded research reveals that the numbers simply do not add up. There can be little doubt that some illegally obtained coins do end up in uncleaned lots, but they constitute a tiny fraction of the whole.

So once again we see recourse to the coin elves argument (12 April 2009, 'To all you young collectors out there'). According to collectors who believe in this model, bulk lots of so-called uncleaned, unsorted coins just materialise magically from thin air. Kilogrammes and kilogrammes of them. Mr "W." however does not explain where his "diligent, open-minded research" determines the coins and other kilogrammes of artefacts are coming from, he is simply in denial of the most obvious explanation, that these are the leavings of the coin dealers who cherry-pick the products of commercial artefact hunting of archaeological sites in various areas of the ancient world (most notoriously in Bulgaria). There was even an article on coin cleaning forums explicitly stating the origin and bearing every sign of having been written by somebody who knew what she was talking about (Susan Headley's 'The Saga of an Uncleaned Coin' discussed by me here 1st march 2010). This was distributed in multiple copies a few years back but as far as I can see every last copy has now been removed from the internet.

Mr "W." talks of the "enormous number of uncleaned coins entering the market annually" so where are these fresh coins "surfacing" from, if not underground?

It really is a huge stretch of credibility to claim that the dirt encrusted coins now being sold as bulk lots had at some stage formed part of some "old collections". Old collectors, not even brown-skinned non-American ones, did not buy mahogany cabinets to store thousands upon thousands of unsorted featureless and muddy coins. In fact such coins were not on the market in the days before metal detectors and internet-trading. There are a plethora of "how to" guides to coin collecting from pre-metal-detector days (I have a few in my own library) and I would be interested if somebody could post on the Internet an extract of even one of them which talks about the bulk lots before the 1970s. I have certainly never seen such a reference. So where were these coins before 1970 if not still in the ground?

Mr "W." suggests that the "enormous number of uncleaned coins entering the market annually" is far beyond what could be produced by the number of archeological sites being looted". Since archaeological site looting is an illegal activity and therefore for the large part a clandestine activity, how on earth can our putative Texan say what is the scale of site looting in in various parts of the coin-producing ancient world? How "many" sites does he think are looted (and how does he define that term)? Perhaps we should turn that round and suggest (since no other origin has been determined for them) the "enormous number of uncleaned coins entering the market annually" is in fact an index of the amount of commercial archaeological site looting that has been and is going on. Mr "W." also omits the fact that bulk lots of coins are just part of the picture, we also have bulk lots of "partifacts" on sale by US dealers such as Empire Danny who used to be more candid about where they were coming from. They are less so now, so goodness knows where their clients "believe" (like Mr "W.") that they come from. Perhaps instead of clinging to baseless beliefs, the collectors of such items should take a close look at the wider context of the activity and think a little harder about the consequences, which brings us back to what I was saying about the blogging pastor whose dismissal of the issues was the basis of my original comments.

I would say that if they were to do this, they would indeed conclude that "diligent, open-minded research reveals that the numbers simply do not add up" and they'd have to abandon both the "coin elves" and "old collection" models as an explanation of the origins of commercial offers of bulk lots of "uncleaned coins".

Its the no-questions-asked collectors of ancient artefacts who are putting money into the pockets of the looters.

Balkan Artefacts like Manna?

A few weeks ago prompted by looking at ebay, I was discussing here the US trade in artefacts coming from the exploitation of archaeological sites in southern Europe on the basis of what one could find on a well-known internet auction site. In the discussion of some coin collectors’ (false) claims about “where coins come from” I was looking at some of the bulk sellers of ancient coins. It seems worthwhile extending that to look at the range of items offered by sellers on the portable antiquities market in the United States to see whether the buyer can determine whether the material is coming from “old collections” or “things soldiers buried before they went into battle”

The coins of course are not coming out of the ground alone, for the US market various types of artefacts imported from the Old World are segregated out and put into different "piles" (and some sellers will also mix objects from different regions of the world, and even on eBay add fakes to the mix). Let's have a look at one manifestation of the market in collectables including ancient coins. This is all perfectly Legal according to US law, but is it Right? The fact that US collectors are eager to buy (nay, recommend buying) these items provides a ready market an incentive for import of this material.

As the supplies of accessible authentic artefacts dwindles through non-sustainable overexploitation of what is after all a finite resource, many eBay sellers are now handling large numbers of fakes (this in itself is a topic of archaeological significance that I'd like to explore here one day). US collector Reid Goldsborough states that “the percentage of scam ancient coin auctions at any given time on eBay has been estimated to be around 10 or 15 percent (the percentage of scam ancient artifact auctions has been estimated to be around 50 percent).” So in order to try and steer clear of sellers who offered bags and bags of artificially patinated fake artefacts, I made use of his “Woefully incomplete list of recommended dealers” with one addition of my own.

Let us start with Empire Ancients (Danny Harris, Cordova, Tennessee, ebay: empiredanny 1302 feedback). He's the one not on Mr Goldsborough's list, but we've visited his virtual storefront before. Basically three months on he's still offering the same range of goods. In his eBay listings, he has at the moment 21 pages of coins and artefacts - mostly the sort of thing you'd find on archaeological sites in the Balkans. He has been discussed here before. He has a number of bulk lots of ‘partifacts’ such as numbers 250358851032 (ten pound lot), 290289937010, buckles and things 300248233730, 290251474806 etc etc, he has bulk lots of "crusties" (illegible because heavily encrusted coins), "culls" (illegible because worn, broken, generally cruddy coins), the brooch and buckle lots. Other items have been taken out of the mass finds and presented as single lots. These broken and complete items are obviously metal detecting finds from settlement sites, not isolated "hoards" (or as one collector put it on a forum yesterday “fields full of small finds”). The "partifacts" are being sold in bulk lots - but where are the more shapeless scraps that all archaeological sites produce? What happened to the less collectable portion of the archaeological assemblage from these sites? Mr Harris, himself says (and as I have previously discussed):

"In Bulgaria, there are artifact searchers that search with metal detectors every day that weather is permitting. They search around Vidin, Bulgaria and the surrounding area. They find all sorts of items from over 20 centuries of rich Bulgarian history [.] I have purchased over 2000 pounds of these items".

That is nearly a metric tonne.

An eBay seller on the Recommended dealers list is Ancient Treasures (Plamen Arsoff Granada Hills CA 91394, eBay ancient_treasures 37196 feedback). He currently has 12 pages of offers, coins and artefacts - mostly the sort of thing you'd find by metal detecting on archaeological sites in the Balkans) [Arsoff says he takes a cue from today's superstores. Day in and day out, he provides a steady supply of goods that his buyers can depend on. "Our concept is sort of like Home Depot and Costco," explains Arsoff, who has been selling on eBay for close to five years. ]

Then there is Ancient Caesar (Ilian Lalev, Newton, MA 02458, eBay ancientcaesar, feedback 12009) He currently has six eBay pages, coins and various artefacts - mostly the sort of thing you'd find by metal detecting on archaeological sites in the Balkans.

Cameleon Coins (Alex Stanichev, Winettka, United States eBay: cameleoncoins feedback 6938) currently has 6 pages coins and artefacts - mostly the sort of thing you'd find metal detecting on archaeological sites in the Balkans.

Diana Coins (Gantcho Zagorski, Hackensack , NJ ebay dianacoins/paganecoins0oh6, feedback 2112 + 7617) currently has four 4 pages, mostly coins, but a few artefacts - mostly the sort of thing you'd find on archaeological sites in the Balkans.

Several of these sellers also have VCoins stores which offer the same sort of material. These are just a few of the sellers on eBay, selected from those that appeared on a "recommended dealers" list - other dealers on that list offered mainly coins, which one suspects were in part at least at some stage selected from bulk imports such as those evidenced by the above five. Other wholesalers are known and discussed by Nathan Elkins for example elsewhere.

Now it seems to me that these artefacts do not drop out of the sky like manna into the laps of US dealers and wholesalers. It does not seem to me either, looking through these thousands of items currently on sale in the US in one internet portal alone, that these come from “hoards buried by Roman soldiers before battle”. To try and convince the buying public of that is simply sheer dishonesty in the face of what these sites seem to show.

We know illegal metal detecting is going on in southeastern Europe, in Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Makedonia, there has been looting of other kinds in Kosovo. Much of this stuff is going to European markets (Munich is one hub of the system, Geneva too) and then a lot of it is being re-exported to the US. Some of this material has also been appearing on the market in the Netherlands, and it is also reaching Great Britain in some quantities. It is not clear whether this is through direct contacts with the source countries or through German, Swiss and possibly Italian dealers. The material appearing in Poland seems likely to be directly imported from Bulgaria.

It seems to me pretty difficult for collectors to try and pretend now that the material being offered for sale here (some of it with earth still on it) is “from an old European collection”. In admitting that it is freshly dug stuff, exported from the source country under “unclear” circumstances (“those foreign restrictive laws are unfair”) we are now hearing that this really “does not matter” because actually (as collectors say) this material does not really come from archaeological sites (really? How many southeastern European archaeologists would confirm that I wonder). In any case as someone told us all last night:

Most of what is being offered on the market are objects that are very common. Large amounts of the exact same artifact over and over again in a varied states of preservation. From the pile faceless low grade late Roman bronze to the many buckles, pins, fire starters, lamps and other commonly found objects that you see being offered relatively cheap. There is no reason I could ever think of as to why these could not continue to be sold and sold in much the same way as they are sold today.

Well, I do. It is not the market value, or the degree of uniqueness of an object which defines how important a piece of evidence is. That is simply uninformed reasoning. This material is being taken undocumented from the archaeological record at a number of European sites, being mixed up and sold off as so many touchy-feely pieces of the past to be "glommed" and coveted by their possessors, who claim to be home-grown erudites. They are nevertheless Gollum-like apparently incapable of putting two and two together about where their "preciouses" actually come from, and what effect their providing a no-questions-asked market for them simply contributes to the continuance of the trade, and thus the destruction of the archaeological record.

Photo: metal detected artefacts from Europe on sale on a well-known internet auction site in the United States. Each one was obtained by making a hole in somebody else's archaeological record. This dealer has nearly a tonne of them in stock.

Balkan Antiquities Manna on US Market: Five years on

Five years ago today (Tuesday, 20 January 2009) I posted a text here "Balkan Artefacts like Manna?" which has raised a lot of interest. I thought in the wake of the signing of the US/Bulgaria cultural property MOU, it might be instructive to go back there. Readers may recall that what I did was take the "Woefully incomplete list of recommended dealers” of a coin collector's website (with one addition of my own). Let's have a look at them again to see what has changed.

First on my original list was Empire Ancients (Danny Harris, Cordova, Tennessee, ebay: empiredanny). He's gone from 1302 feedback to now 7443. Basically five years on he's still offering the same range of goods, with perhaps a greater influence on cleaning and 'preservation' materials than before. In his eBay listings, he has at the moment 3,147listed items on sale, mostly coins and artefacts - mostly the sort of thing you'd find on archaeological sites in the Balkans. He indeed admits they've been found with a metal detector in the Balkans. They are still being sold singly and in bulk lots, with no mention of excavation permits or export licences.

Next, on the "Recommended dealers" list is Ancient Treasures (Plamen Arsoff Granada Hills CA 91394, eBay ancient_treasures). He has gone from 37196 feedback five years ago to  55997. He currently has just 150 coins and artefacts on offer, again mostly the sort of thing you'd find by metal detecting on archaeological sites in the Balkans, under some of the bulk lots it says "Found in the former Yugoslavia" (since that country ceased to exist long ago, why not say the name of the country they came from unless he wants to hint these are conflict antiquities from the 1991-99 wars in the region?) and "We have been selling ancient coins and artifacts on ebay since 1998 and buy our items from reputable dealers in Europe", whose name he refuses to mention. The bronzes have for the most part been atrociously stripped, not all are what they are said to be, the Greek coins probably come from regions other than "the former Yugoslavia". They are still being sold singly and in bulk lots, with no mention of excavation permits or export licences.

Cameleon Coins (Alex Stanichev, Winettka, also in Los Angeles CA, United States, eBay  cameleoncoins) currently has 14171 feedback, up from 6938 back in 2009. At the moment 258 items on sale, coins and artefacts - some of which are the sort of thing you'd find metal detecting on archaeological sites in the Balkans. There is a lot more post-medieval stuff mixed in than I recall being sold back in 2009. Lots of Ottoman (and imperial Russian) 'silver' coins, many pierced, some Hungarian ones and a Polish one, the offering gives the impression of the dregs end of a larger assemblage, mixed in with modern tat. The descriptions are a bit wonky, such as a (Roman) pottery flask labelled "Exactly as pictured. (Kylix, Pyxis, Oinochoe, Guttus, Olpe, Kantharos)". Hmm, swallowed a dictionary and spat out the wrong words. The artefacts are mostly  being sold singly with no mention of the place they were found, excavation permits or export licences.

Then there is Ancient Caesar (Ilian Lalev, Newton, MA 02458, eBay ancientcaesar) His feedback has gone up from 12009 in 2009 to 18939. He currently has 567 artefacts on offer, eBay pages, coins and various artefacts - many the sort of thing you'd find by metal detecting on archaeological sites in the Balkans, though his "Medieval coins" (POST medieval, please!) are groschen of the Polish king Sigismund III. There is no mention where most of the objects are "from", the somewhat amateurish descriptions leave a lot to be desired, like the post-medival (nota bene)  metal icon which actually says across the top who it is for goodness sake (the St Nicholas of Mozhaisk) but I guess out dealer cannot be bothered to try and read the cyrillic and he says  "Some of the most successful rulers in the Medieval centuries were depicted as Saints. Broken and cracked in the antiquity. Intact suspension loop, perfectly wearable". Huh, he may take his lady friend out wearing broken cracked tat like that, the lady in my life would not be seen dead with that round her neck. Maybe its the photography, but at first sight not all of his artefacts look all that convincing to me... The artefacts are still being sold singly and in bulk lots, with no mention of excavation permits or export licences.

Diana Coins (Gantcho Zagorski, Hackensack , NJ ebay dianacoins/paganecoins0oh6, feedback 2112 + 7617) is no longer in business under that name.

The ebBay feedback increases are interesting, Harris 6147, Arsoff 16801, Stanichev 7233, Lalev 6930. If each one of these is a single dugup ancient artefact or group of artefacts, that is 37111 items sold by four dealers alone in five years, some 7400 a year. Four dealers alone selling seven thousand dugup items a year. How many dugup artefacts are passing no-questions asked onto the market?