Gallant Gossipping Houghton and His DC Ducks

Arthur Houghton "suggested" Peter Tompa post an ad hominem comment from him. The ex-diplomat begins by engaging in some insulting name calling and rather ungallantly repeats some second-hand anonymous gossip about something he once heard about me of dubious relevance here. He then criticises me for expressing concern that, the way collecting takes place today, dealers and artefact collectors destroy and discard archaeological context:  

He rails and whines against collecting and collections, and the use of unprovenanced, out-of-context material -- and willfully ignores the fact that every professional academic numismatist worth their salt has worked with collectors and collections that include coins and related objects that are often fresh out of the ground. 

I suppose he assumes that I'd be in some kind of awed respect of the "professional academic numismatist" and it'd be just the private collectors I criticise. Obviously, because of his immediately dismissive attitude, he's not really understood anything I have written here. Still, that's his problem. What Mr Houghton is applying here is of course a typical schoolyard "two-wrongs-make a right" argument.


But of course he is also blinded by his Amerocentric prejudices. He refers to "every professional academic numismatist worth their salt" as though the only ones "worth their salt" are those based in US institutions. The rest of the world drops under the myopic radar of a Welthaupstadt-coiney.

It may well be that all those (how many in fact?) professional numismatists in the US have to base their research on institutional collections made by accumulating stuff hoiked in and 'somehow' removed from distant foreign "source countries" - the archaeological record of the US having no ancient coins of its own.

Over here, museums are filled by legislations which in most countries impose compulsory reporting, the coins held in many of our cultural institutions - the material available for research by those academic numismatists based in those institutions is for the most part (that muddled by the War being the main exception)* provenanced and has documentation curated with it going back sometimes to the nineteenth century. Several professional academic numismatists over here in Poland very much "worth their salt" have - due to these legislative measures - vast resources at their disposal of coins not only from known findspots, but often stratigraphic context, because they are "fresh from the ground" too, but not smuggled from some clandestine commercial relic hunting and acquired by a US institution, but straight from close collaboration with the archaeologist in the field. The quality of the information they can analyse is thus far greater than anything a coiney with his "heap of loose coins on a table" approach has access to.

At the beginning of this discussion, I (reasonably civilly and perfectly justifiably) asked the US advocates of this heap-of-coins approach for a reading list of the theory and methodology of this kind of analysis. They are very reticent to even try to produce one - trying to dodge the issue with posts and comments containing more ad hominem remarks precisely like the one to which I am responding here. If however we look beyond the narrow world of rampant 'Welthaupstadt-Gainesville-Goleta coineyism' to real numismatics outside, we find quite a number of methodological accounts (including some fine work in this direction by Suchodolski here in Poland). But, due to the nature of the data in the outside world, many of them deal with coins of known provenance and/or stratigraphic context.  Which is why I am so curious to know what the contemporary methodological handbooks of the heap-of-coin approach looks like.

Now, let us note that the laws which provides professional academic numismatists over here with their research data are precisely the ones that Welthaupstadt-wannabe groups like the ACCG oppose and question (who do they think they are?). Having pointed that out, I suspect we will now see the pavlovian response that those foreign numismatists are not "worth their salt" because they have no time to do what amateur collectors in the US can do better on their kitchen table tops with their heaps of assorted loose dugup coins. Which then brings us back to that question of defining what the methodology is of this kind of "research". Can we get a decent answer to that question instead of all this ACCG dodging and ducking?

Here's a numismatic duck, Guild Blowhard is his name.  He swims on a dank smelly overgrown pond near Peter Tompa's house, but has at time been seen in cleaner waters at Foggy Bottom. 

* but before anyone says it, the majority of private collections were totally lost in the War, destroyed or looted (and how many of those looted coins - maybe from murdered Jews - are now in the collections of today's no-questions-asked collectors? "Can't touch you for it", but they'll be there as sure as the looted paintings are).