Thursday 29 April 2010

Dealer SS wants to Bring Pressure on University Archaeology Departments

Following ACCG board member Dave Welsh's dismissal of the value of the archaeological record, on the "Unidroit-L" discussion list (which Welsh just happens to own), a fellow coin dealer calling himself "SS" suggests creating "an organized campaign to impact archaeologists, or at least AIA members", where they live. He surmises:
Perhaps officers or the most rabid retentionists tend to cluster at certain universities, or certain archaeology departments may have adopted anti-collector policies in some way, or are more involved than others in the political aspects of this. Is there a "worst case" institution that could be made an example of?
The University of Cambridge (McDonalds Centre) comes to mind. SS suggests
"Many alumni would be collectors of antiquities, coins, museum patrons, or simply intellectually honest and liable to be appalled at the radical archaeologists' actions and motivations, if they knew of them.[...] How practical would it be to launch a campaign against donations, or grant funding, or other sources of succor for a university as a whole, to bring pressure to bear on the political hotheads in the Archaeology department?

This of course has been tried, in 1922 onwards in Russia and in 1948 in Poland and other countries of the eastern bloc where pressure was brought on the political hotheads in archaeology departments. The ones who did not see the world in the black and white required by the group who persecuted them. This kind of suppression of academic freedoms of course well suits a group who calls itself the "Internationalists". We have seen how closely the rhetoric of no-questions-asked coin collecting so-called internationalists matches that of another group of Internationalists several generations ago, now it seems "SS" wants to follow them in more concrete action. What next? FEMA work camps for cultural property preservationists? Maybe a book burning (as here: world history goes up at 1:30)?

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