ACCG - Arguing Round in Circles Group

The ACCG might as well be renaned the ARCG (Arguing Round in Circles Group). Now their current mouthpiece in his daily onslaught suggests that I am "Missing the Point" (Ancient coins blog Friday, September 27, 2013) when I stress that since (a) the ACCG has now joined ranks with metal detectorists to fight for "collectors rights", and (b) PAS responsible collecting is about preserving archaeological context, it follows that responsible collecting as a whole should logically be defined as doing the same. The ACCG are having none of that.

Collectors acquire these things for their intrinsic value, not because they have an interest in the archaeological context in which they are found.

[...]

To a collector or dealer, provenance is NOT the recording of a findspot. It is instead the collecting history of a coin or other antiquity.

Yes, we can see every dealer's website, every online showcased collection full of that [irony script /off]. And the process of taking it out of the ground, where when and how and under what legal situation, is someow NOT part of that collecting history? It is surely the fundamental first part of the collecting history which determines the licitness of all subsquent transfers of ownership. Meanwhile one has to congratulate Mr Welsh on his astuteness and grasp of the subject in hand. He gets it in one when he suddenly (it seems) discovers:

 Meanwhile Mr. Barford clearly is only able to think about artifacts being illicitly excavated today and later being sold to collectors. 

Yes indeedy, that is, in a nutshell, what the whole blog here is about. And one of the problems here is the way that dealers and collectors pretend the problem does not exist, because "coins have been collected since the days of Petrarch don't ya know"? ("consider the immense numbers of unprovenanced coins and other artifacts that were excavated long [ago]") and when the collectors and dealers alike have busily been throwing away of carelessly losing all the documentation of previous ownership, then who is to say what is what? I have addressed this question so many times I really cannot be bothered to repeat myself. ACCG's Welsh is wasting everybody's time and trying to deflect us from getting to the core of the matter by arguing around in circles. It is not me that is "missing the point".