Why the Silence Over Violations of "Rights"?

In my discussion of the seizure in Canada of some coins and other antiquities exported from Bulgaria, I asked: Will the public ever learn anything about the intended destination of the items seized, so people can make their own minds up about the no-questions-asked trade in antiquities?

The fact that the people involved in most such cases are passed over not only in silence, but details are actively suppressed is telling. Somebody in Canada was waiting for those coins to come, probably they had already been paid for, and they did not arrive.

As we have seen, "collectors "rights" lobbyists consistently insist that in the business practices of North American dealers and collectors, "no North American law is broken". That is the basis for their claim that the whole business is not only legal, but legitimate and ethical.

The same lobbyists claim that buying material imported from foreign source countries is their "collectors' rights". They further claim that these "rights" are being eroded under the influence of archaeologists, gubn'mint agents and other evil people. This is the basis for their militant "internationalist" stance.

Imagine a normal bloke in a normal democracy like the UK, Canada or the USA, confronted by an over-zealous official overstepping the mark who accuses them of doing something wrong when they are in fact fully within their rights. If they are offered the choice between paying a 100 000 Euro fine to keep it quiet or going to court to contest the accusation of wrongdoing, what are they going to do? Pay the fine, sit back and say nothing? Or come out in public protest against the wrong that has been done and the officials that have infringed his personal rights?

Is it not odd that when seizures like this take place, the "wronged" party, the importer, invariably stays silent? If charges are hardly ever brought in such cases, what have they got to hide?

Where is the ACCG? Why are they not publicising the "wrong" that has been done to "Mr X"? The guy is 100 000 Euros out of pocket, a crippling loss to a small business for example in these financially difficult times. Or is this business such a big one that the sudden and unexpected loss of 100 000 Euros worth of stock is but a drop in the ocean?

Nevertheless, surely the "collectors' rights" organizations should be using cases like these of the "wrongs" that are being done against these busnesses, against collectors in their public agitation to get these "collectors' rights" in the public eye and get public support behind the coiney "internationalist" movement. Silence over the "victims" of these seizures allows their presentation in the media as nameless miscreants, but these martyrs for the "internationalist" cause should (surely) be holding their heads high and coming out in public to protest their case and the wrongs that have been done, and to make officials think again before repeating such actions. Why then, allow the state media hide their names, nay - even suppress them? The ACCG are clearly letting the other side pus them around if they do not fight this suppression of the information aout the identity of the "victims" of state-sponsored cultural property repression. At least that is what would result from the logic of their own arguments. So why are they not naming the victims, why are they not naming and shaming the officials (public servants after all) responsible for "infringing their rights"?

For all their talk about "transparency", there is a singular lack of transparency over this particular area where groups like the ACCG would argue "collectors' rights" are being actively infringed upon. Why? That is simply illogical.

Who is "Mr X"?

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Another Sentence in Four Corners Looting Case

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Paul Foy, 'Utah man sentenced for artifact looting, Durango Herald 6th Aug 2010). There were moving scenes in a Salt Lake City court, on a par with many famous courtroom scenes from sentimental Hollywood movies:

A Utah man who once bragged about taking American Indian artifacts from federal lands avoided jail time Thursday after a federal judge said he decided to show leniency after reading letters from the man's two daughters. U.S. District Judge Dee Benson said he planned to give Aubry Patterson, 57, prison time but changed his mind after reading the letters, which said Patterson was an "amazing father" who had a hard life but always "provided for us and put food on the table." Patterson's teary daughters accompanied him to court. Benson instead gave Patterson three years of probation, waiving guidelines that called for more than a year in prison.[...] "I think the word is getting out whether I put you in prison or not," the judge said. "Don't do anything stupid on probation".

Patterson was accused of having dug up valuable relics on federal lands surrounding his property outside Monticello in southeast Utah, he pleaded guilty in April to two felony theft charges (involving the sale of two bowls for $1,300 to an undercover agent). Prosecutors dropped six other counts involving the sale of additional artifacts. The guy knew he was breaking the law. If I ever go shoplifting in the USA, I will make sure I have some letters in my pocket saying I am an "amazing" dad and that my kids never went hungry either.

In secret recordings, Patterson said he knew when a ranger took his days off, but worried more about running across tourists who could give him away. He dug fresh holes on his property in case "someone comes asking" about the origin of his artifacts. He said he dug up burials - but not since he lost a son - and avoided caves where he could be trapped by law-enforcement officers. He said he would rather die than get caught. He circled on maps for the government agent where he had taken artifacts from Bureau of Land Management tracts - "You aren't going to show BLM?" - then signed certificates claiming the objects came from his own land.

The Amazing Dad also surrendered hundreds of artifacts (which he had been keeping at home with the fake holes outside it where he was raising his daughters to be model citizens able to write tearful letters). Patterson promised never to dig up any more artefacts from protected sites, and apologised in court "to the federal government and American Indian tribes".

Prosecutor Rich McKelvie said the prosecution has all but shut down the black market trade, and the judge agreed that the largest-ever such federal investigation has sent a message that artifact looting no longer is acceptable.

Well, that is not exactly what Judge Waddoups said, was it? Patterson has become the eighth defendant to receive leniency and avoid prison time after the Operation Cerberus sting operation which rounded up 26 defendants last summer in Utah, New Mexico and Colorado. Charges are pending against 16 more defendants and an investigation remains open in Arizona and New Mexico.

I would say the real message this gives out is that although there are laws which envisage a specific penalty for stealing artefacts from and damaging protected sites in the US, it is unlikely anyone caught and convicted will actually receive the punishment envisaged by those laws. A second lesson is that in any case you are unlikely to get caught as it seems to me that the relevant authorities in the southwest are not ever going to mount an operation on this scale again after it has been proven that the US judiciary simply does not take protecting the archaeological resources of America from looting at all seriously.

NZ Museum Theft

Museum staff at the Otago Museum are said to be "shocked" by a 'brazen theft' that occurred there on Tuesday ( Debbie Porteous, Theft of dinosaur egg shocks museum staff, Thu, 5 Aug 2010). A fossilised egg of a Cretaceous hadrosaur dinosaur was taken in what is believed to have been a premeditated walk-in theft captured on the museum's security cameras. Museum development and planning director Clare Wilson said: "when someone steals from a public institution it's not just one person affected. Really, they are stealing from the whole community". she said.

The fossil was taken not however from the museum's exhibits or research stores, but the museum shop. It was on sale there for 1700 dollars. The object had been collected "in the Henan province in China and sold to the museum by a Nelson fossil supplier". One assumes though that the export licence that would have accompanied any legal export of such an item from China was not taken from the shop display, making it impossible for the thief to sell it to an ethical dealer or collector. A senseless theft then?

See also Cahal Milmo Fossil rustling a 'huge international problem', says palaeontologist', New Zealand Herald, Nov 25 2009.

original heads-up from MSN.

So „How many” did you say it was?

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One might have thought getting numbers out of the computer was a pretty straightforward process, so when one sees figures like the number of finds recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme between 1st Jan 2008 and 31st Dec 2008 in a government report, one assumes they are going to be pretty reliable… well, that is the assumption. A report by the British Department of Culture Media and Sport published 23/07/2010 Treasure and Portable Antiquities annual statistical release 2008 reckons the number is 53,346 finds were recorded on the Portable Antiquities database. Well, they’d had over a year and half to press the buttons and check and double check the figures, so it must be right. Right?

Nah. It seems it still is too much to expect that the PAS could get their figures to agree. Just three days later, a rival guestimate appeared on the PAS website: Another milestone reached posted July 26th, 2010 by Daniel Pett. There the number is reported as: 56449, the previously invisible records of a mere 3100 finds (5.5%) more “found” somwhere. The PAS attempts to explain this discrepancy:

You might wonder why these figures don’t always match the Annual Reports; well, the database is constantly being worked on, errors corrected, finds removed if duplicate records and so on.

So, "so on" covers three thousand records found in the back of a cupboard just three days after the official DCMS report was published? This is ridiculous. The error is nearly 6%. It is by no means the first time such discrepancies have been observed between the figures claimed from year to year. What else are the published figures getting wrong?

Well, look at the tables in the DCMS summary, in the northeast hardly any finds were being reported in 2008 by metal detectorists, even though we know the area is crawling with them. Wales has pretty poor showings for 2008, and what happened to all those "fieldwalking" finds that were included in earlier Annual Reports?

Also let us note that nearly half of the material being reported comes from the metal detecting of Roman sites, which fits closely with what we have seen is commercially most valued on the internet market. British Prehistory is poorly represented as is (my own favourite) the Early Medieval period.

Also take note at this thinly veiled attempt by the PAS to vindicate their "partners" the metal detectorists:

# In 2008, 806 finds of Treasure were reported.[...] # In 2008 82 parties waived their right to a reward in 51 cases of Treasure, allowing them to be acquired by museums at no (or reduced) public cost.

But in 755 they did not. Were the 20 among the 51 cases who did not resign from the reward, "finders" or grasping landowners? More importantly than trying to dispel the vision of "treasure hunters", an archaeological outreach scheme should be reporting statistics such as in how many of the 806 cases was there anything left in the ground for archaeologists to investigate. What proportion of these finds came from topsoil and how many were found below ploughsoil? How many came from sites known to have produced archaeological finds in the past?
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Mr Haines, Where Can I buy a nice Antique Buddha HEAD?

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So where can somebody who "does not know much about collecting in that area" get information where they could buy a real genu-wine "affordable antique buddha head"? Why of course from the "responsible collectors" gathered on Tim Haines' Yahoo "Ancient Artifacts" discussion closed access group. How many "responsible" answers will they get? And how many dealers on the list will offer them the effects of statuary decapitation which they have in their own stockroom?

Question: why just the HEAD? Is not the full figure exhibiting the mudras not an option for some reason? Or is it that heads are so fashionable on western markets as they are easier to obtain "in the field" and get out of the source country without being noticed? Why actually if one just wants to gaze on the face of Buddha in Wisconsin or wherever does one have to have a knocked-off antique?

UPDATE 4th August: Well, one piece of advice the would-be purchaser has had from list members came from a dealer in Portland, Oregon:

Make sure that the Budda head you buy has papers for providence as it is against the law to export antique Buddas from Thailand and other Asian countries today.

The guy is an antiquity dealer ("reasonably priced ancient antiquities, Holylands oil lamps, Roman and Greek coins") and does not even know the right word for it...

Artefacts "Saved" from the Scrap Metal Market

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One of the "justifications" offered by collectors for buying ancient metal artefacts no-questions-asked is that by doing so, they are saving the items from being melted down as recycled scrap metal. They postulate that individuals and groups are digging their way across the ancient landscape moving tonnes of sterile soil to systematically remove all the metal encountered to sell as scrap. Their buying of the metal from these scrap-metal hunting "subsistence diggers" (otherwise known in plain English as 'thieves' when mining archaeological sites in this way is illegal) is, they say saving them from ending up in the melting pot. I have questioned the degree to which it is possible to make a living doing what collectors assert and even challenged them to put their money where their mouths are and demonstrate that it is possible. So far the challenge has gone unanswered. Here however is the text of a Problem-Oriented-Policing brochure from the US on scrap metal theft (thanks to MSN for the heads-up). Interestingly it does not even mention digging ancient sites as a common source of stolen scrap metal. It does however indicate a large array of other much more cost-effective ways that thieves use to gain scrap metal of commercially viable quality and quantities. It also details manners of dealing with the problem other than buying the stolen items back no-questions-asked.

Dealers and collectors buying ancient artefacts from scrap metal thieves should perhaps read it and think about it. Maybe they would like to write to the authors of the pamphlet and suggest that buying the stolen items for resale is the only viable approach to fighting this crime. Will we see the ACCG announcing on its website that they have done that?
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No Export Licence from Source Country? "Legitimate business" - No Export Licence from USA? USA: Go to Jail

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Despite the fact that US dealers in ancient dugup artefacts think other countries' export licences are irrelevant to their own business practices, US citizen of Latvian origin Anna Fermanova found out the hard way that the USA takes its own export licenses pretty seriously. She is now under house arrest for taking some sports equipment out of the USA without a licence (Samuel Goldsmith 'Nice Jewish girl' Anna Fermanova busted for trying to smuggle night-vision scopes to Russia, New York Daily News July 28th 2010).
Fermanova was arrested at her home near Dallas on July 15 after returning from a four-month trip to Moscow - where her husband lives. She had bought online on the open market three night-vision scopes in Texas for her husband's hunting buddies in Russia. Now she has been charged with "knowingly and intentionally" attempting to export "defense articles on the United States Munitions list". Her lawyer says "She bought them legally. They are available for purchase on the Internet, you just need a license to export them," Palmer said. Just like ancient coins from most of the source countries then. So why cant all US collectors and antiquity dealers respect that?

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