Egyptian Stone Vase Heritage

Uh-oh... Night Scarab "Vase Scan Team: Civil War over Petrie Scans?" After 5 months of unpaid work for a "foundation", Petrie Museum scans analysis results published in public domain by the author of the analyses, Stine Gerdes. Good.

Report here: Arc.Scientific
MV11, MV16, MV17, MV18, MV19, MV20, MV21 are the excavated ones 

Vase scanners (VST) seem unhappy, it seems they did not prepare a good enough contract, Károly Póka @karolypoka moans 

@karolypoka 1 hour ago
The results that were published were not final and had not undergone peer review, nor were they posted with the team's permission.

This is a bit confusing

What does it mean "not final" if the author (Steine Gerdes) of the actual analyses considers them final enough to publish under their name? Does this NOT represent the results that THEY came to (reportedly after five months of their work)? Did you plan to somehow manipulate these results - and if so, is that why they decided to pre-empt that by publishing what they had? 

Find another analyst if you want other results. 

An EU directive is not law. Your Foundation has only the claims to the INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (not "trade secrets" - so unprofessional) stipulated in the contact you signed with the analyst.  

But I note that the only items from this teaching collection that have a secure excavated context, all but one have relatively low "precision scores" compared to examples from the antiquities market  (and the other one has no result yet). Could that be the problem why you are uncomfortable with these results being available? 

As a researcher into the market, I wonder whether these few results suggest that with more work, this "precision score" can be used as a non-invasive means of determining authenticity - the higher the score, the more dodgy the purchase?   

The publication of these results is good news for enquiring minds... I am pleased to see that the points I was making about objects from the antiquities market are validated. To reiterate, of the Petrie objects analysed, as I earlier warned would be the case, only seven of the teaching collection objects are specifically documented as from excavations and compared to some from the antiquities market, SIX OF THESE HAVE LOW "PRECISION SCORES" (c. 2,29,12,14,9,10) and one has no result available yet.

Obviously, we need more results than just 5 vases, but it's beginning to look as if to get a reliable view of the nature of production processes of these objects, we need exclusively to use excavated material, not stuff from any part of antiquities market. Thank you, Stine Gerdes for all your had work. Thanks also to the Petrie Museum for allowing the Scanners access to these vessels so that through prompt publication of analytical results we can learn more about them.

market