Some "misleading flights of fancy" and Rat Droppings

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Before repeatedly questioning my "credentials" as a blogger and representing what I say about the definition of cultural property on his discussion list as "misleading flights of fancy" maybe Mr Welsh would like to reread what I actually wrote, this time with understanding. That is the only basis on which there can be any reasonable discussion.

As I say, it is not for the foreign dealer or the US customs officer to decide if an object is legally exported from a source country, but the relevant authorities in the country of origin, by issue of an export licence.

With regard Welsh's other totally superfluous comments, when the USA acceded to the 1970 UNESCO treaty it did not put Art. 5 into action (it has no national antiquities service, and a totally different approach to the designation and protection of important cultural property, based on whose land it lies).

I am sure I am not the only one who is at a loss to know where Welsh is leading with his divigations about exporting (or is it importing?) ancient rat faeces. What is the precise point he is trying (and failing) to make?

PS. the bit of Article 1 of the 1970 Convention which Dave Welsh accuses me of "hiding" was actually quoted verbatim in the tenth paragraph of my original post; I can only assume he could not manage to read that far down.

Vignette: A bit of palaeocoprology 101 just for Mr Welsh who in his last couple of posts exhibits a growing interest in rodent (and perhaps lagomorphic?) faeces.

Cultural Property - wassat then, eh?

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Part time coin dealer from California Dave Welsh seems to be confused about "what is actually the law" concerning cultural property. He is puzzled by my earlier comment that "... the archaeological remains of a territory are cultural property ..." though my bet is he is one of the few who are. [Nota bene, the coiney typically completely ignores the whole thrust of my post about Giedrojć's recent article, concentrating on picking apart just one phrase from it to deflect attention from the other points made].

Anyhow, Welsh argues that it cannot be the case that archaeological remains are cultural property since they "include anything and everything buried [let us add deposited and constructed] or discarded upon the surface of the earth by past humanity, certainly including its garbage, and perhaps even including remains such as ancient deposits of fecal material". He then goes on:

It seems to me that the concept of "cultural property" inherently implies some sort of actual and tangible identification of objects with the culture of a people. It would be surprising if that were asserted in the case of ancient miscellaneous garbage such as fish skeletons and unworked bivalve shells (not that such things are likely to attract collectors).

Well, here we observe the limiting effects of the narrowness of the coin dealers's worldview. "Cultural property" is for him limited not only to objects, but also only those that are collectable. That which is not collectable cannot be for him cultural property. Neither did I write of a "people" but quite specifically of a region.

Welsh suggests that treating archaeological remains as cultural property "...may be extending the concept of cultural property well beyond the intent of the conventions, implementing statutes and bilateral agreements that define and implement cultural property law". Really? Well, the the definition given in article 1 of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict:

Article 1[...] the term "cultural property" shall cover, irrespective of origin or ownership: (a) movable or immovable property of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people, such as monuments of architecture, art or history, whether religious or secular; archaeological sites; groups of buildings which, as a whole, are of historical or artistic interest; works of art; manuscripts, books and other objects of artistic, historical or archaeological interest; as well as scientific collections and important collections of books or archives or of reproductions of the property defined above [...]

In turn, the 1970 UNESCO Convention (which I assume he knows) says in article 1:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term `cultural property' means property [...] of importance for archaeology, prehistory, history, literature, art or science and which belongs to the following categories: [...] (c) products of archaeological excavations (including regular and clandestine) or of archaeological discoveries ; (d) elements of artistic or historical monuments or archaeological sites which have been dismembered;

Well, that really seems to settle the issue of whether the international "conventions, implementing statutes and bilateral agreements" include archaeological material, doesn't it?

Welsh confuses several things here. The function of the "conventions, implementing statutes and bilateral agreements" is quite clearly not to provide direct protection of the archaeological record of any specific country. Quite clearly they are intended to support (in specific situations) the efforts to protect it by other means. The 1970 Convention clearly states in plain English: "property which [...] is specifically designated by each State as being of importance for archaeology, prehistory, history, literature, art or science". The legislative grounds for such designation differs from country to country. A metal detectorist who takes a spade to an archaeological site to dig up an Anglo-Norman penny or cauldron fragment in Poland without a permit falls foul of the law, wherever the site is and who its owner is. In the USA he is OK if the site is not on Indian land or public land. In England he is OK if the site is not scheduled and the landowner says he can be there. Obviously it is impossible to draw up overall international laws about what is legal acquisition of antiquities and what is not which coul apply to antiquities from all countries on all continents.

What however the 1970 Convention says is that the movement of items between countries should be controlled, and the means of doing that is the export licence. A state authority is hardly likely to issue an export licence for antiquities it believes to have been illegally acquired within that country. Therefore items imported with valid export licences are valid commodities, those without are thereby not. Mr Welsh as a dealer is obliged, if not by law, by ethics and general morality to ensure that the objects he trades have not been acquired illegally - that means have been acquired in accordance with the law of the place of origin, and not in disregard of it. That includes laws on excavation, ownership, commerce and export. Does he do that? I've heard US dealers assert they are not obliged to do that by US law and so regard themselves as somehow excused from respecting those concerns.

Welsh says sorting out the what the law says is significant because:

it is presently unclear where the boundary is to be drawn between artifacts that have some sort of genuine and tangible identification with a past culture, and other objects which are considered to be part of the archaeological record. [...] Things such as ancient garbage can, in fact, have genuine archaeological significance, however it is not at all clear that they are actually cultural property protected under existing cultural property law.

Hmmphh. The Vindolanda tablets were thrown away as "garbage". Frankly, it is not up to the US dealer or the ACCG to "draw boundaries" to determine what is British, Polish or even US cultural property. This is determnined by the laws of those countries. The ethical foreign dealer and collector will respect those laws and like the ethical museum will not acquire objects obtained in disregard of those laws.

UPDATE: Another antiquity dealer Scott Semans questions the validity of the term "cultural property": " What is wrong with good old "artifacts"?" [Another object-based viewpoint: my car is an artefact, but even if it is old it sure as anything is not cultural property, but a piece of tattered cloth called "Old Glory" in the Smithsonian is not just a rag but US cultural property, the term has a meaning]. Semans adds:

those who favor the concept of individual ownership of artifacts - along with communal ownership as by museums and universities - best serve this goal by giving the politically invented term "cultural property" the scare-quotes it deserves, or the preface "so called," when compelled to use it at all.

Is it really a "politically" invented term? Is the problem here again the narrow views of people from a nation 235 years old which basically has very little which it can call cultural property of its own and thus have problems understanding the concept?

Turning a Blind Eye

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There has been over the past few days a whole series of posts on Looting Matters on the investigation in Geneva of the stock of Japanese antiquity dealer Noryioshi Horiuchi. Following so quickly upon the revelations about certain items bought by a national museum in Spain, David Gill asks:

Has the time come for dealers to move away from simple searches on the Art Loss Register (ALR) and other databases? Instead, should they adopt a more rigorous ethical position and insist on properly documented collecting histories that can be traced back to the period before the 1970 UNESCO Convention? Dealers and auction-houses could ignore the issue. But those involved in the trade also need to remember the adverse publicity that can be generated by turning a blind eye.

I would add "collectors" to that. It is they who decide what will sell, and what not. If they would show more concern for the hygeine of their collections than they do, dealers would have a hard time finding a market for illegally excavated items. It is widespread indiscriminate collectin which is behind the commercial sucess of looting. These collectors are the real looters of the archaeological record.

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Peter Tompa on Unpopularity

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I wonder how much more pathetic the no-questions-asked collectors' lobby can become. Peter Tompa now notes:

Italy's continued success in gaining such returns of artifacts that are suspected of being stolen from archaeological sites again suggests that there is no need to continue the unpopular US State Department ban on the import of unprovenanced Italian artifacts.

"Unpopular" with whom? The lawyer should note that it is not the lack of provenance that is the issue in the MOUs, but the lack of documentation of legal export, a completely different thing. Surely the fact that so much stolen and illegally exported material is being found is all the more reason for the US to make sure it is not its citizens that are being stung by those who buy such material. Then with reference to his own brag that he has served" (sic) 50 000 readers, He then goes on to whinge:

Speaking about numbers and averages, I was a bit surprised to see that my blog thanking Cultural Property Observer readers for their 50,000 plus visits has apparently helped prompt Messrs. Gill and Barford to brag that their own blogs have more visitors [or was it just Gill's 3rd anniversary?]. Good for them, but to the extent anyone cares, one might consider the relationship between the number of "hits" and the number of posts. And let's not forget the role Prof. Gill's mysteriously funded PR Newswire releases must have in directing traffic to his own blog. I only wish I had the free time these two individuals apparently have to devote to blogging, and the funding for such an effort.

Well, to the same degree some of his 50 000 hits have been from from the author of and readers of this blog. When I discuss something that Peter Tompa says on his blog, I always give a link, directing traffic over there. When Tompa discusses something we say (the present post is a case in point), he seldom does. I personally have no problems with people reading Tompa's "observations" alongside mine and deciding for themselves who is writing crap, me or him. Mr Tompa demonstrably seems not to have such courage of conviction (this goes for Sayles and Welsh and the other ACCG hangers-on too and other artefact hunters and collectors who rarely link to this blog).
Mr Tompa, the collectors who do not want US customs stopping illegally exported antiquities from entering the US are a minority of the citizens of the US. I am sure most US citizens who are aware of the problem do not want their country to be the hub of the illegal antiquities market. That is why normal people read the SAFE blog and Looting Matters rather than the all-excuses (or "I'm-being-repressed/victimised" whingings) of the collectors' blogs. It is interesting to note that the naysayers are a minority among coin collectors too. There are allegedly 50 000 collectors of ancient coins in the USA (ACCG Executive Director Sayles' estimate), but the ACCG has only 5000 or so affiliated members, so that is about 10% of the collectors. Ninety percent of them do not belong to the ACCG, and if 45000 ancient coin collectors were to even once look at the Cultural Property Observer blog to see if it has anything of interest, Tompa's "hit" figures would almost double immediately.

The point is that the no-questions-asked market in antiquities is fighting a losing battle, everything shows that their position is becoming increasingly isolated from what is acceptable to the majority of the right-thinking members of the public, and the sooner they recognise this and take forward-looking active steps to clean up the market instead of resisting taking such steps, the better.

UPDATE: David Gill has developed this theme on his Looting Matters blog. In a post called 'Reflecting on Readership' he presents a histogram which shows the differences in readership through RSS subscriptions of various cultural property-related blogs in English (better resolution on the original site):

Looting Matters and SAFECorner lead by a good margin, and my blog has the longest name :>), but more interesting is that the coineyranters as a whole (Tompa, Sayles, Welsh, Lueke, De La Fe, McGarigle et al.) score particularly badly. There is a very clear pattern here. Nice to see the currently intellectually bankrupt PAS down the bottom there too. That's how it should be now they have been declared as being in "partnership" with the collectors.

Patrimony Policy Not Affecting Coins: Coins and the ICE

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Coiney journalist and Ohio coin dealer Richard Giedroyc has decided to attempt to prove in an article in the US magazine Numismatic News that (US) Patrimony Policy is Not Affecting Coins . This is of course at odds with the ACCG standpoint which is that it does and will affect the imports of ancient coins into the US in addition to the huge numbers already there in existing collections. Giedroyć notes:

Since both Italy and Bulgaria are countries on the short list that the US State Department has been listening to as the State Department decides if it will honor the demands of certain vocal archaeologists and several foreign governments curbing the import of world coins deemed to be cultural patrimony by foreign governments, it is appropriate for readers to learn about the coins that have been recently forcibly repatriated from the United States. More specifically it is the recent activities of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that are examined here.

Well, first of all, it is not clear what (or whose) short-list Giedroyć is discussing, and why Bulgaria is on it. Bulgaria is of course (or has been before they started running out) a major source of ancient coins for the US market we know that huge shipments of them have been coming to the country for well over a decade to wholesalers of eastern European origin settled in the USA who then supply other dealers and sell direct to collectors too. It would be interesting to learn that the State Department has been "listening to" Bulgaria asking US authorities to step in and stop the imports of any antiquities that have not been legally exported.

Is the sole source of the concern about illegal exports of cultural property "certain vocal archaeologists" and "several foreign governments"? I rather think that when it comes to cultural property as a whole (paintings, furniture, manuscripts and incunabula, ethnographic material) it is not just archaeologists that would be getting "vocal". I think a lot of people (including local collectors and history enthusiasts) would be concerned about the drain of such objects from any individual country abroad. What the archaeologists would be urging however is that archaeological material is included on the lists of cultural property protected from destructive exploitation and illegal export. I would say that it is the duty of every government, among other things, to take care of the cultural and natural assets of the territory under their direct and indirect control. Not to do so as fully as possible would in my opinion (and not only mine I am sure) be failing in one of their duties as a responsible government.

Worth noting is Mr G.'s little manipulation talking of "world coins". In collecting parlance this term refers to things like 2004 commemorative rubels, recent small change from the Andaman Islands and 1920s coins of Tibet. The curbs on illegal exports which so concern the ACCG are ancient coins which are dug up on ancient sites in ancient lands outside the USA. The use of the term "world coins" in Krause's "Coin News" by Giedroyć is an attempt to manipulate collectors of so-called world coinage that the ACCG's concerns affect them too. They do not.

A little reflection would reveal that any "coins that have been recently forcibly repatriated from the United States" will have been stopped from entering the US market because of the lack of documentation showing they had been legally exported or due to some other import infringements which prevent them legally entering the US. What is wrong with that?

The ACCG, as Giedroyć notes, argues that

"coins are a mass-produced item, not something that is unique as is a single piece of art. The more current problem, as far as coin collectors are concerned, may be what constitutes “ancient art”.

Nonsense. The problem is what constitutes cultural property, and the archaeological remains of a territory are cultural property, as they are in the USA itself. Not all the items seized in Operation Cerberus (the Four Corners/Blanding artifacts case) were "ancient art", old blankets, menstrual pads, utilitarian knives etc. Yet they were and are cultural property. The ACCG is misrepresenting what the object of protection of the archaeological resources of a source country are, the knowledge of the past of the region that can be recvovered from the proper investigation (and not mere commercial mining) of the archaeological record is the cultural property of the region, and of all of us. This is intellecttual property which is destroyed by the commercial mining for selected items which have a commercial value on the collectors' market. Whether or not the objects in those archaeological assemblages were mass produced (like pots for example were) or not makes no difference to the amount of destruction caused by getting them out of the ground and into the Wisconsin collector's back room.

Giedroyć then shows that there have been only three ICE press releases in Feb 2010, 2006 and 2005 which mention the "forcibly repatriated coins". His point is that unless ("world coin") collectors support the ACCG, it will get worse. Somehow he misses the seizure ACCG Baltimore Illegal Coin Import Stunt of the upcoming (amended and revised) test-case. He misses the cases currently being discussed in two threads on the closed access Yahoo Ancient Artifacts and Moneta-L discussion list where coin dealer Cameron Day had some coins seized by US customs. There are in fact a lot of ancient coins and other antiquities being seized by US customs which are not being trumpeted in individual ICE press releases. In a recent post to one of the lists (I forget which one) Wayne Sayles boasts how he has a number of times been called in by the ICE to give an expert opinion about the coins seized in a number of cases. There are therefore many cases not mentioned by Giedroyć of coins being seized and investigated by the ICE.

There are however also enormous numbers getting through the barrier of bubbles that separates the US antiquities market from the pool of illegal dugups. Like the ACCG, dealer Richard Giedroyć of HCC Inc. & Krause Publications would apparently like to see to see this barrier weaker still and ancient artefact imports not controlled at all. I think the rest of us would like to see the US doing its bit to help curb the international market in illegally obtained antiquities.

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"Ancient Art" on Flickr

Some guy calling himself "Ancient Art Project" (and whose email address usurps the name of the anciet Greek painter "Exekias") has posted some galleries of collectables on Flickr ("a few of my favorite examples of ancient art that are currently in public and private collections throughout the world"). The accompanying explanatory text asserts:

There are, inevitably, many other objects which would rank among my favorites but are impossible to show here due to unreasonable restrictions of photographing objects in museums. Many of the very finest objects extant from ancient civilizations are, unfortunately, held in countries that are completely ill-equipped to properly study and document the objects and as such, are unavailable to the public although they are in "public" collections. Many governments have turned objects into absolute political garbage and as such, have completely degraded the study of ancient art to a disgusting and irreproachable political issue which will, inevitably, make the subject inaccessible to future generations due to nationalistic attitudes of modern-day politicians who know absolutely nothing about the subject. Most ancient art that is being discovered in the so-called "source countries" is destined for warehouses to be eaten away by vermin due to the "supposed inability" of non-source country citizens to be able to study and document and display it properly. Enjoy it now while you can before our common cultural heritage becomes "illegal."

Well, I am sure Mr Ancient Art would prefer many of the "very finest objects extant from ancient civilizations" to be available to private collectors in countries which like him use US spelling and have so many photos from North American collections. Note the emphasis throughout on the mere "object", that which can be bought and sold and then possessed, rather than the archaeological information.

I rather think it is greedy collectors who have degraded the subject of the accumulation of such "art works" to the level of political garbage. It is the disgusting no-questions-asked antiquities trade which will, inevitably, make archaeological information become inaccessible to future generations, because it has all been dug up without record, and what is not destroyed in the process is whisked away clandestinely to various scattered ephemeral private collections, to eventually "surface" anonymously on the market when they are split up.

Let it be noted that the "attitudes of modern-day politicians" who according to this aesthete wannabe "know absolutely nothing about the subject" are those that would like to see the material excavated properly with due regard to scientific procedure and made accessible for future generations to both admire and study through being placed in properly curated public collections. Something which "internationalising" (sic) collectors like "Exegias123" aka Ancient Art Project would not like to see. They want it all for themselves to control in private collections.

The concerns of the archaeological preservationists are not with the "ability of non-source country citizens" (sic) to be able to "study and document and display ancient art objects properly", but the fact that such collectables are generated for the market by the dismantling of something else, the archaeological record. The point is not what a collector in a foreign land can "document" once he has a decontextualised "art object" in his hands. The only thing that can be documented at this stage is how the object arrived in his hands. In most cases as we have seen (and many of the objects depicted in the galleries are no exception) they cannot be bothered [or are simply unable] to do even this. What is lost because not documented is the entire range of information that derives from studying the associated archaeological information in the context of deposition and discovery.

It is not "nationalism" to want to protect the archaeological resource from being treated merely as an "artefact mine" for the sole "benefit" of the self-centred accquisitiveness of the greedy foreign collector with his dollars and self-serving pseudo-justifications.

Exekias123's "favourites" include: 69 photos of Ancient Greek Coinage, 58 photos ofAncient Roman Coinage (pictures taken from "those that have come on the market", so presumably not his own photos, funny how he sees no "unreasonable restrictions on the use of this material, cf aengland's galleries where many of the same coins appear). Then there is a whole series of 209 photos from the Miho Museum in Kyoto, and the George Ortiz collection (he also claims own copyright on these photos). His favourites also include 29 items "currently on the market" (many of them in the gallery of Phoenix Ancient Art in New York and Geneva) and as many as 178 items from (just the) Greek galleries in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is interesting to note the relatively restricted range of the "world culture" represented by Ancient Art's favourites, hardly very comsmopolitan, virtually nothing from the world of the nomads, let alone northern European groups, little from the Far East or Australasia. Just loads and loads of the little (easily smuggled) objects of Greek and roman civilization and a few bits and bobs from their neighbours in the Near East. As if nobody else had anything worthy of the name "ancient art".

Mysterious funds, mysterious photos

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Peter Tompa comments on the SAFECorner blog (which has a larger readership than his own):

PRNewswire is a paid service [...] Prof. Gill's funding for this PR effort remains a mystery as is the source of at least some of the photos with which he plays his game of "gotcha" on collectors and museums.

Mr Tompa surmises that Gill has a powerful benefactor who enables these news releases. The ACCG has no such benefactor. Just Mr Tompa. There is no mystery about where Mr Tompa of Bailey and Ehrensburg gets his funding from, his firm is one of those retained by the ACCG - and his blog's conspiracy theorising is presumably funded directly from the ACCG fighting fund, which in turn comes from the sale of ancient coins supplied by local dealers in "benefit auctions". I find it interesting that Tompa will not let the question rest of where Gill finances his information campaign, but is not in the least concerned where those US dealers got their coins from.

ACCG employee John Hooker asserts that each press release costs Gill $400 (USD), that means he has spent so far 14,400 USD on them. That is a fraction of the 80 000 dollars the ACCG has raised through its "benefit auctions". It seems to me there has been a lot more benefit arising from Gill's use of the social media to spread the word about "looting matters" than the silly posing, conspiracy theorising and frivolous court cases of the ACCG.