More Wozzy Thinking from Under the Coin Cabinets

In last night's dismissal of something I wrote earlier, Peter Tompa reproduces two of the arguments often advanced in favour of maintaining the status quo of the no-questions-asked coin trade and collecting. The first is:

in an era where popular culture cares more about the Kardashians than the classics, we should celebrate pastimes like ancient coin collecting and not dismiss it out of hand.  

I am not sure why he says that. Perhaps he did not expect anyone to actually discuss it. Though there are many (and sometimes conflicting) definitions of the term, but in an anthropological and sociological sense a culture is generally defined by the patterns of behaviour exhibited by a core group in a society or community. What is done by a minority on the fringes of that group may be a subculture or it may be considered deviant behaviour. If the dominant group in US society (316.4 million people) really is more interested in "the Kardashians" than Cato or Catullus, then that is a feature of the culture of that society.  So I am not sure why we need to "celebrate" the aberrant behaviour of a minority (50000 people at most) deviating from the cultural norm. Why "should" (sic) we "celebrate" it any more than butterfly collecting, meteorite collecting, bird egg collecting, dinosaur bone collecting, happy fluffy bunny mascot or pez dispenser collecting, Elvis memorabilia collecting, vintage computer gaming equipment or juke box collecting, super-exlibris bookbindings, antique bird prints, or any other kind of collecting?

Is there supposed to be some kind of elitist kudos attached to being a collectors of little round pieces of "ancient art" able to read the Greek and Latin inscriptions? A sort of a distant echo of the Grand Tour? Do these collectors fondly imagine themselves to be the intellectual kindred of Hamilton, Elgin or Townsley, the Dilettantes, that part of the fashionable intellectual elite of the 18th century Enlightenment? I rather get the impression that this is the case. As such, a self-appointed (and self-financed) elite, they expect to be treated as some kind of "nobler" collector than the pez dispenser οἱ πολλοί. 

There is one thing however which differentiates the expansion of the ancient coin market from many other kinds of collecting, and which prompt a more circumspect attitude to blind "celebration". Let us take Elvis memorabilia as an analogy. One can collect record covers, concert posters, autographs etc etc. That's one way of doing it. Or you can go to Graceland with a razor and when nobody's looking cut a square out of the King's living room carpet to take home. I'd imagine nobody would have any problems with the first kind of collecting, it removes nothing. The second however is destructive. Once that piece of carpet is removed, nobody will ever be able to see the living room in the way it was when Elvis walked there. The collecting of antiquities dug out of archaeological sites is in many ways analogous to the selfish carpet-cutter. Too bad if the damaging digging was done way back when (like the 1780s), inexcusable if done now to feed greedy could-not-care-less buyers. The problem with the latter is that they rarely attempt to differentiate the two.

The second argument advanced by coiney-apologist Tompa is an equally self-serving one:

Coin dealers like Italo Vecchi and collectors like Arthur Houghton have spent years producing magnificent studies of ancient coins that help keep the cultures that produced them alive. 

A collector who writes a Catalogue raisonné of every single type of pez dispenser or every single vinyl record cover of an Elvis record ever produced is also "keeping something alive". I am sure many people will be made very happy by such books. And the dealer's book? Who has read it? A few coineys have read it I am sure. Let's give the proper reference:

 Italo Vecchi: "Etruscan Coinage. Part 1. A corpus of the coinage of the Rasna, together with an historical and economic commentary on the issues (gold, silver and bronze) from the mints of Cosa, Luca (?), Pisae (?), Populonia, Uncertain Central Italy, Vetulonia, Volsinii (?), Vulci (?) and unidentified mints, from 5th to 3rd centuries BC". Milano 2012, ISBN 978-88-87235-76-0

Gripping stuff and such a catchy title - very reminiscent of what we were reading yesterday about the As-guy! So this is a best seller then, to rival the Kardashians?

If we look back at a summary article by Andrew Burnett (not written as a private collector, curator in the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum) written five years earlier ('Etruscan Numismatics-An Introduction', 2007) we find that the principle problems studied at the time were chronology and place of manufacture, he specifically notes that the coin trade with its vagueness about where something entered the market is next to useless for resolving the latter problem (p. 82) the archaeological finds from excavation and survey are the way to resolve this for the uninscribed series (and greater emphasis on the associations of dugup stratified finds would soon sort out the chronology problem). Indeed again he notes: "Etruscan numismatics is an area where numismatists have sometimes misled historians and archaeologists by being too much confident about [their] dates" (p. 83). Burnett also stresses the comparatively small volume of these artefacts and asks what they were for in reality, some kind of special purpose coinage perhaps. I would therefore say that in such a case, it is really stretching it too far to say that  a narrow study focussing on such artefacts published in such form is really doing very much  to "help keep the cultures that produced them alive", any more than "third century AD military zoomorphic bootstrapends of the province of Moesia Inferior" would. Sterile artefactology. 

Tompa's pal Arthur Houghton may well have spent years producing "a magnificent study of ancient coins". So what? I have colleagues here that have spent years collecting data and produced monographs on Early Post Glacial Backed Blades of the Northern European Plain, and another who studies the precise form of the little knob on the foot of a particular type of Roman bronze brooches. There was another who studied (he's dead now) the changing (with time) shape of the penises of classical  male sculptures. All magnificent studies, I am sure. But in themselves this artefactology gets us nowhere to understanding the past, such individual studies are merely contributions to the toolkit for doing that.