A Collector Repents

Here's something that does not happen often, at what would have been about nine in the evening, a collector over the far side of the Atlantic browsed/ read a dozen or so texts on this blog, and then sent a comment to one of them. The account name gives the gentleman's full name, he's a real person and the post is very articulate, honest and candid about collecting. For that reason (and to give me freedom to reply as I wish) I have decided to hide the gentleman's identity. I'll call him "Mr Respect". I have a lot of readers from the Washington area, and this reader is one of them, he lives in a small affluent looking town 42 kilometres from the White House. The gentleman starts off by admitting that he'd got into collecting minor ancient dugup artefacts "before fully forming a rounded perspective on the potential negative effects of that practice", but on reading around the topic, "Now I am frankly a bit ethically torn" and he asks my advice and for my "perspective on private collecting of artifacts [...] Am I wrong for doing it at all?". Whoah, heavy stuff for a Monday morning.

I think I'll pass on trying to present, at the moment, in a less-than-five-thousand-words-essay my perspective on private collecting of artefacts, I'm planning starting a book on that next year. Is it "wrong"? No, I don't think that per se it is wrong, but the way it most commonly is done is. We need to have collectors doing precisely what Mr Respect is doing (preferably before they start shelling out money), thinking about responsibilities.

Mr Respect is asking for my thoughts on what he should do with his antiquities. That I cannot tell him (a colleague was pointing out the other day the potential legal ramifications of offering such advice, apart from the ethical issues). Basically I do not now what he has, and what supporting documentation (if any) came with it, and would not like to offer any advice 'blind'. Having said that, I have a couple of thoughts on what he wrote, which I hope he will accept in the spirit they are written, which is to take a real, documented case to make more general points.

The first thing I found of great interest was right at the beginning, the writer's motivation for collecting: 

My intention has always been to expose the inexpensive and rather common artifacts to the people in my community, my friends family etc. as a way of broadening their perspectives [...] My intention is that eventually I would pass on the collection on to a museum [...]

This desire to use antiquities in order to be seen by peers as some kind of a philanthropist seems quite deeply rooted in the US mentality. We see the same thing in starkest detail among the arguments used by ancient (but oddly not Medieval) coin collectors, and those that lend or donate higher-end antiquities to museums of course. It also appears in the self-justifications of metal detectorists. In the US they all say they "share" their discoveries (in some less-than-well-defined form), while the British government has set up a Portable Antiquities Scheme to entice would-be sharers to co-operate (but pirate would-be sharers went ahead and produced the UKDFD to spite them). Observing what happens on the market and in collecting, we may ask: to what extent is this declared altruism in fact a cover for the desire to have some kind of status-enhancing 'trophies' to show off?  The same with museum donations. 

But wait a second. This "sharing in the community ... as a way of broadening their perspectives" argument may well be tenable in a five-shack-and-a-petrol-pump hamlet in South Dakota or Nebraska, but forty kilometres from the Smithsonian? That's just nuts. Mr Respect could take the family and friends to the museums in the capital for a day, throw in a pizza and sneaking into Peter Tompa's legal firm's office and leaving SAFE brochures in the waiting room, that's sharing too, far more socially useful and probably cheaper than buying ripped off antiquities.

Mr Respect then says that his misgivings stem from the fact that: 

possibly [I] am in fact reducing the impact of these object to historians and scientists. 

but then tries to assuage them by reminding himself that "the stuff I have is rather common, and it's uncertain to me what more could be learned from another example of a Roman evil eye ring". This is however a rather wonky object-centred approach. It is not the "loss" of an object that is a problem - the object still exists. Mr Respect has it and wants to "preserve and display" it before handing it on to somebody else to "preserve and display". But that is not the point. Neither is it the point that the object itself is of a rare type or not. What is the issue is that digging out objects (or collecting them away from a surface site )  from an archaeological site - like Archar or a patterned lithic tool scatter in the desert - produces lots of objects, the more saleable ones go to collectors who "preserve and display" them. The problem is the whole archaeological site they came from is trashed in the process. It is the destroyed archaeological context which is no longer available to be properly studied and documented - because it has been dug away. Check out the photos of the present state of Archar after the artefact hunters have gone over it ('Archar' on this blog).

[One saving grace, very probably something bought recently under the title "Roman evil eye ring", no matter how "reputable" the dealer pretends to be is probably a fake.]  Then Mr Respect asks about another qualm he has:

Everything has been purchased from supposedly reputable dealers that claim legal provenance - acquired before 1970 etc. which while perhaps legal is also perhaps morally wrong? 

If the object actually was dug up and sold before 1970, then I personally do not have any problem with that, as long as that can actually be documented in a verifiable form. A ("supposedly reputable") dealer's (nudge, nudge, wink-wink) verbal assurance however is most certainly not enough. Run a mile from such cowboys. You would not buy a used car or half a pig for the freezer here without the paperwork that the car is not stolen and the pig carcass has passed an inspection. Mr Respect is confusing legal and moral. Antiquities dug up ten weeks ago in a 19th dynasty cemetery in Egypt's Western Desert and sold over the counter in Grebkesh and Runn's Munich store and then shipped direct to Miami are not technically illegal in the US - ask Mr Tompa and Mr Pearlstein. Whether the laws should look like that is a different matter.

Then the uh-oh moment. Mr Respect says he'd been thinking of donating the Respect Collection to a museum, but:

I have been reading that donating to museums has become very difficult without proper export paperwork that establishes the items as having been legally acquired, or that document the item as being from an old collection in a way that is very credible. 

That rather suggests he's been carelessly buying things without such documentation. In his place, I'd write back to the dealers enclosing a xerox of the receipt and asking for a copy of the relevant paperwork to protect the value of his investment. Make them work for their cash. He asks what I think about the current "1970 cut-off" by museums, and whether difficulties in donating 'unpapered' items by private collectors ("so that they can become part of the collective knowledge of historians") and whether I think it will have a:

negative affect of the recovery of these items for posterity?

No, I am hoping it will have a positive effect in curbing the number of people in his country (one of the biggest no-questions-asked gobblers of portable antiquities in the western world) that give looters and smugglers money on the mistaken notion that they are  leading to the "recovery" (sic- from what precisely?) "of these items for posterity". In the place of boxloads of loose decontextualised geegaws and almost every accessible archaeological site in the world trashed by artefact hunters, posterity would, I am sure, be far more grateful for some unlooted sites they can study using the newest methods available to them. Why should our generation be the last to be able to see elephants and rhinos in the wild AND trash every archaeological site we can reach? Its called conservation Mr Respect. We should be conserving sites and not "just objects" in the same way as we should be trying to conserve ecosystems as much as individual rhinoceroses from poachers.

The object-centric approach is also visible in the focus on "repatriation" (a US aberration) rather than crime prevention.

And should I rather be orienting my thinking towards just returning them to their country of origin? Would I encounter problems from authorities for this? 

In answer to the second, unless you'd actually smuggled them out yourself, probably not. They might even give you a diploma (probably not cash though). But really, what is the point? Imagine someone in the US Department of State getting from Sophia, Bulgaria a package of artefacts once found in the US. In it are 234 sherds of assorted pottery, among them painted ones of Anasazi type, a chipped piece of stone and a note that the donor's late Uncle Teodor had brought them back "from America" when he went there to sell brushes, "several years ago". What would happen to those sherds? They'd go to a museum, perhaps one of the branches of the Smithsonian, and what would they do with a box of assorted loose sherds and an arrowhead, and what would be the point of that? Far better would be that selfish Uncle Teodor had left them where they were dropped by their users centuries ago for other visitors to the site to see.

Basically, once hoiked out of the ground and taken away, these artefacts can never be 'replaced' - the effects of looting are irreversible. Placing the blame on somebody else (a looter "feeding his family" a "mom-and-pop dealer" doing the same by trading remnants of a trashed past). The no-questions-collecting of antiquities is murdering the past, and unconcerned irresponsible collectors' cabinets are its gravestones. Only collectors like Mr Respect can change that by putting a stop to the no-questions-asked trade of such things which can ONLY abet and benefit looters and smuggler, and cowboy and dodgy dealers. It is to nobody else's advantage.

UPDATE 4th April 2014
Mr Curtis obviously was wholly unappreciative of the time I spent answering his questions honestly instead of ignoring him off or fobbing him off with a platitude or two. Not even a 'thank you'.