Where Did That Come From?

The four (!) day February Ancient Art, Antiquities and Coins (140) of "TimeLine Auctions, Inc. Gregory, Bottley and Lloyd (Gregorys) Est. 1858" is beginning today, and we will be watching the fate of certain objects that are going under the hammer there. They have been widely plastered all over the internet over the past few weeks* as part of the company's marketing procedure, and therefore can be examined, assessed and commented on by the viewing public from all walks of life through a variety of online sources.** As usual, the vast majority of the consigned items offered by the auctioneer (except a handful of recently metal-detected items recorded by PAS) lack anything but the most sketchy of collection histories or actual provenance, with no mention of any supporting documentation. Very few of them therefore are in any way "grounded" in a secure context and the potential buyer is dependent on them being correctly identified (and therefore valorised) by the seller - which is never a good situation. The auctioneer here adds a veneer of respectability (and plausible deniability) to the whole process. I may discuss a few items after the sale... there is quite a lot to unpack surrounding several of them, but for the moment caveat emptor and all that.

  Glass cup (TimeLine Auctions Ltd). Fair use for comment and criticism. 

Here's a nice thing to be going on with, I must admit that after a report I wrote back in England a lifetime ago, I do have a soft spot for Roman glass. If you bid in the auction, this could be yours: "Roman clear glass bowl" 3rd - 4th cent AD, 82mm (Barnaby's link). Collection history: "From a deceased Japanese collector, 1970-2015". Estimate £700 - 900 (USD 950 - 1,230). Here it is beautifully photographed, picking out the copious bubbles that are a distinguishing feature of this type of object.....

As an archaeologist, I would observe that fragile glass vessels like this would survive intact most frequently in graves, and ancient cemeteries are places where artefact hunters will find  lots  of "productive" loci all gathered together. A lot of material on the antiquities trade (like a lot of that "wearable" jewellery) is most easy for artefact hunters to find by grave robbing. Every sale will contain a large proportion of objects of this type (but of course since they do not actually state where they are from, it is easy to keep the customer underinformed about this). I would also ask the seller whether this palm-cup type object is not in fact later than 4th cent AD, is it properly described?

So, how did it get to a Japanese collector some time in the wide time span between 1970 and 2015? From which country was it initially exported? Where was it reported to have been dug up, and were any graves damaged at the same time? Where, actually did this come from? Where will it find a new home? Perfectly legitimate questions, everybody.


* and Mr Hammond, you do not "own" the Internet and cannot dictate through your lawyers what others do through it with regard to material you yourself place openly in the public domain. You may use it as your shopfront, but commerce does not have a monopoly over the information content of the web as a whole. 

** By the way, take note however of the number of places where the ability to comment on what is shown by TimeLine is in fact turned off, preventing any opinions being expressed. This seems rather to defeat the object of placing them on social media such as YouTube in the first place.