Loot by Sharon Waxman

Alun Politics, The Past 2 Comments , , , , , , ,

lootcover

In short, the best archae­o­pol­it­ics book I’ve read since Edward Fox’s Sac­red Geo­graphy. I was kindly sent a review copy by the pub­lish­ers and I have a feel­ing that they were hop­ing for a bit more than that, so I’ll add a bit more.

It’s sub­titled “The Battle over the Stolen Treas­ures of the Ancient World” The ancient world here is pretty much Greece, Rome and Egypt, which means she doesn’t have a lot to say about the strip­ping of sites in Africa, the Amer­icas or Asia. To some extent that’s a bit of a shame, but by focus­sing tightly on a few examples Wax­man is able to go into the details of how the mar­ket for illi­cit antiquit­ies works. You have to keep a close eye on what’s hap­pen­ing as I get the impres­sion that one of the inspir­a­tions for the antiquit­ies trade was the three-card trick. The book is four parts. She opens by look­ing at Egypt and the atti­tude of the Louvre.
More

Do you need a note from a criminal to prove an artefact is stolen?

Alun Politics, The Past 4 Comments , , , , , , , ,

kanefernefer
Looks nice, but are looks enough?

This is the death mask of Ka Nefer Nefer. I can tell you she was con­nec­ted with Rameses II in some way, but not a lot else. It hard to find inform­a­tion about her lie on the web because her death mask is the big story as far as Ka Nefer Nefer goes. Or rather it’s the travels her mask has been on and the dogged determ­in­a­tion of the Saint Louis Art Museum to drag its own name through the mud.

The mask was found in 1952 in Saqqara by the Egyp­tian archae­olo­gist Mohammed Zakaria Goneim, as part of the exacava­tions of the pyr­amid of Sekhemkhet. After this events are dis­puted. In 1998 it was dis­covered again when the Saint Louis Museum of Art pur­chased it. They got it from Phoenix Ancient Art, who say it came from an anonym­ous Swiss col­lec­tion before them. The Saint Louis Art Museum is fur­ther claim­ing that a Bel­gian dealer had it back 1952. This would appear to be an object that’s been shuffled around deal­ers, like yesterday’s amphorae. If you read yesterday’s entry you’ll also remem­ber I said there was going to be a test. Here it is.

You are offered an Egyp­tian death mask from a site which was claimed to be the most import­ant dis­cov­ery since the tomb of Tutankhamen. The sellers claim it left Egypt in 1952 as ‘part­age’ the prac­tice where a host nation will give for­eign excav­a­tion teams some of the arte­facts it finds. Do you:
A) Say “Hang on, Goneim was Egyp­tian, how did part­age hap­pen? It would have been held in an Egyp­tian museum. I’d bet­ter con­tact the Supreme Coun­cil of Antiquit­ies in Egypt to check the story.
or
B) Say “Owned by an anonym­ous Swiss bloke? That’s good enough for me. After all if the seller’s hon­est then he wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.”

If you scored mostly ‘A’s: Con­grat­u­la­tions! You would not be not look­ing like a prize buf­foon. The claim of part­age looks ludicrous as these couple of para­graphs from the River­front Times make clear.

“That runs counter to everything I would expect,” says Robert Rit­ner, a pro­fessor at the Ori­ental Insti­tute, an Egypto­logy research cen­ter at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago. “If it left Egypt that early, it prob­ably left improp­erly. Any excav­ator for the Egyp­tian gov­ern­ment is under oblig­a­tion to provide that mater­ial back to Egypt — even in the ‘50s. It isn’t his per­sonal loot that he can then take out himself.”

“It never hap­pens,” seconds Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia art-history pro­fessor Mal­colm Bell, who is also vice pres­id­ent for pro­fes­sional respons­ib­il­it­ies at the Archae­olo­gical Insti­tute of Amer­ica. “It sounds like the sort of thing you could say if you didn’t really know the cir­cum­stances and you were try­ing either explain or invent. But it’s not the sort of thing that happens.”

In his own writ­ing Goneim also indic­ates that it was Egyp­tian prop­erty. Goneim thanked the Egyp­tian gov­ern­ment for allow­ing him to use pho­tos of the mask in one of his books. You don’t tend to thank someone else for giv­ing per­mis­sion to use pho­to­graphs of your own prop­erty. There’s also the addi­tional prob­lem that the mask was recor­ded as being in the Saqqara ware­house in 1952 and 1959, but not in 1965.

If you scored mostly ‘B’s: Con­grat­u­la­tions! You’re gull­ible enough to work in the Saint Louis Museum of Art pur­chas­ing antiquit­ies. This is no mean acheive­ment. The Saint Louis Art Museum say they checked to make sure the Swiss owner was a real per­son. So did the River­front Times, and they found she was a woman who had no idea about the mask. But she had ren­ted prop­erty to two Lebanese men, Ali and Hicham Aboutaam, who turned out to be Phoenix Ancient Art. Since selling the mask to Saint Louis, the Aboutaam broth­ers have been con­victed of smug­gling illi­cit antiquit­ies. The Aboutaams are so dodgy even the Met has con­cerns about them. Assum­ing the Saint Louis Art Museum isn’t inten­tion­ally abet­ting illegal activ­it­ies (and I’d like to make clear to the museum and their law­yers I am def­in­itely not accus­ing them of this), then the logical con­clu­sion is that who­ever approved the deal was com­pletely incompetent.

The defence of the Saint Louis Museum of Art is that their pur­chase was legal, there­fore they should keep the mask. I don’t know enough about Amer­ican law to say whether or not someone keeps own­er­ship if they unknow­ingly receive stolen goods. Even if they do, this is con­fus­ing legal with moral. It is for instance legal to have unpro­tec­ted sex with the Saint Louis Blues while your wife has gone to the shops, but I don’t know any­one who would encour­age that kind of beha­viour. The museum’s own­er­ship of the mask is based on a shock­ing lack of curi­os­ity about the ori­gin of the piece. As for the claim that the mask leg­ally left Egypt via Goneim, the claim is legal in this sense; it only works because the dead can’t sue for libel. Goneim was not a cipher.

After find­ing the pyr­amid Goneim wrote a book and toured the USA. Sadly he gained enemies and on his return to Egypt life took a tra­gic turn. He was accused of smug­gling out a ves­sel found by Quibell and Lauer found in the Djoser com­plex. There was no evid­ence but he was repeatedly inter­rog­ated by the police and slandered. Lauer under­took to clear Goneim’s name and even­tu­ally found the ves­sel in a stor­e­room in Saqarra. By the time he found it, it was too late. Over­whelmed by the shame of a crime he didn’t com­mit, Goneim drowned him­self in the Nile in 1957. The records show Goneim didn’t take the mask for his own either. In view of his death I think the Saint Louis Art Museum’s claim is par­tic­u­larly repugnant.

Saint Louis’ insist­ence on hold­ing the mask raises quite a few unpleas­ant ques­tions. Does the slander of an inno­cent man mat­ter? Is it accept­able to gain arte­facts by any means, so long as you make sure you’re ignor­ant of exactly what those means are? Is it enough that an arte­fact is pretty? They don’t seem that bothered about answer­ing any.

Links:
I found this story via the Inter­na­tional Her­ald and Tribune, how­ever the best write-up is in the River­front Times from earlier this year. Even older is this 2006 art­icle from Al-Ahram

From blogs, there’s pieces by Paul Bar­ford this year and Derek Fin­cham from last year. I think they’re both more polite about the museum than me, which might be more pro­duct­ive. It’s just the read­ing round the sub­ject made the Saint Louis Art Museum appear more and more slimy to the extent that you won­der if they have a limit. Exactly how bad would the proven­ance of an arte­fact be before they refused to touch it? Would you actu­ally need to have a note from a crim­inal to prove an arte­fact was stolen?

I’ll try and write up a review of Sharon Waxman’s Loot for tomorrow.

Spanish police seize looted amphorae (pay attention, there will be a test)

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , , , , , , , ,

From Typ­ic­allySpan­ish comes the news that two men have been arres­ted in con­nec­tion with some 1st cen­tury amphorae which may have come from the Bou Fer­rer wreck off the Costa del Sol.

Seized Amphorae
The looted amphorae. Photo Guardia Civil.

If you’re like me you might have a vague idea you’ve heard of Bou Fer­rer, but can’t remem­ber where. That’s because it’s not been widely repor­ted in the English-speaking world. Span­ish web­log Ter­rae Anti­quae had the details back in Novem­ber 2006. The Bou Fer­rer, named after a diver who worked on the wreck is poten­tially hugely excit­ing. It’s big, 30 metres long, car­ry­ing 400 tonnes of freight. It’s also extremely well pre­served. It’s embed­ded in the seabed which means the tim­bers have sur­vived in excel­lent con­di­tion. So far forty amphorae con­tain­ing garum, a sauce made from rot­ting fish guts, have been recovered. There’s about 1200 amphorae on the wreck.

Informacion.es says the amphorae were recovered after they heard a man had a col­lec­tion of amphorae from vari­ous eras includ­ing some from the Bou Fer­rer. After hear­ing this they chased round vari­ous antiquit­ies deal­ers. The typ­ical plan is to shuffle round the arte­facts until they get con­vin­cingly lost. Then you turn up with them at an auc­tion house call­ing them “Prop­erty of a European col­lector”. Trad­ing arte­facts found after 1970 is a prob­lem due to UNESCO con­ven­tions tar­get­ting the trade in illi­cit antiquit­ies, but simply say­ing they’re part of an old col­lec­tion is good enough for a lot of deal­ers. They may well check on the Art Loss Register, but given that the amphorae have been recently lif­ted from the seabed they won’t appear on that. This is why it was imper­at­ive that the Guardia Civil hit when they did because if they’d tried fol­low­ing them through the twisty-turny deal­ing that make up the antiquit­ies mar­ket there’s a good chance they’d lose them.

To be hon­est I have trouble see­ing them as art. They’re pretty ugly look­ing and I can’t ima­gine they’ll look that much more sexy when they get cleaned up. So why are they import­ant? Well, they’re clearly of Dressel type mumble mumble. I don’t know much about amphorae shapes, but there are plenty of people who do. They’re cat­egor­ised by their pro­file, known as their Dressel type after Hein­rich Dressel who cat­egor­ised vari­ous shapes of amphora and then worked out which shapes were pop­u­lar when. A large num­ber of amphorae gives you a large sample size and gives you a good chance of put­ting a date on the shipwreck.

It’s also import­ant that the wreck is excav­ated prop­erly because there’s a lot of other inform­a­tion there which loot­ers wouldn’t be inter­ested in. For instance ships com­monly car­ried things like roof tile as bal­last. Or did they? Recent work by Phil Mills sug­gests that a simple tile=ballast approach is naïve and that actu­ally people were ship­ping tile because it had value, rather than just because it made the ship more stable at sea. If that’s the case the bal­last in this ship might be inter­est­ing. It lies on the route from south­ern Spain to Rome. Was it just garum that the Romans wanted? What else is in the wreck? If it’s not valu­able then there’s a good chance it’ll be lost if loot­ers turn over the ship. The seizure is great news.

…and as I said there’ll be a test. Find out which museum fails it tomorrow.

Should we pass on the PAS?

Alun Politics, The Past 2 Comments , , ,


Treas­ure hunter. Photo (cc) Elsie esq.

I’m slightly late to be com­ment­ing on Derek Fincham’s paper, in the Inter­na­tional Journal of Cul­tural Prop­erty, A Coördin­ated Legal and Policy Approach to Undis­covered Antiquit­ies: Adapt­ing the Cul­tural Her­it­age Policy of Eng­land and Wales to Other Nations of Ori­gin. There’s a few reas­ons for that, but the major one is that I’ve been read­ing round what other people have been say­ing about the paper. A large part of the paper dis­cusses the Port­able Antiquit­ies Scheme, and my own per­spect­ive on that seems to be from a dif­fer­ent view­point to a lot of other peoples.

Excavations at a Gallo-Roman Villa
The site at Goeblange-Miecher.

By and large my archae­olo­gical train­ing has been on com­munity pro­jects. My first dig was on a com­munity pro­ject excav­at­ing a Gallo-Roman villa, organ­ised by a soci­ety based in the local vil­lage in Nospelt. In the UK I was in the local vil­lage archae­ology group and did a bit of excav­a­tion and geo­phys­ics and a lot of field­walk­ing. All the pro­jects I’ve worked on have been poorly fun­ded, even by archae­olo­gical stand­ards, or more often not fun­ded at all. My exper­i­ence then with archae­ology out­side of aca­demia is of know­ledgable, enthu­si­astic people with rel­at­ively little access to expert­ise, equip­ment and information.

The great attrac­tion of the PAS from my point of view is the out­reach aspect. All sorts of little bits of inform­a­tion are being gathered by ama­teurs and rather than being cent­rally hoarded they’re being made avail­able to any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion. It’s not that there’s been a lack of will in any of the museum ser­vices I’ve seen when it comes to pub­lic engage­ment, but there hasn’t really been the insti­tu­tional frame­work to help it hap­pen. The PAS is built around enga­ging with the pub­lic and it’s in the bones of the sys­tem. For example below is some data uploaded to Swivel. To be hon­est I can­not see myself using that par­tic­u­lar data­set, but that’s not the point. I’m used to being told there are strict lim­it­a­tions on what I can do with pho­tos from museums. Here someone is act­ively encour­aging the pub­lic to take away data and do some­thing inter­est­ing with it.

Finds and Records vs. Number of Treasure cases in England and Wales Number of Treasure Cases vs. Number of Treasure cases in England and Wales Number of Treasure Cases

More

Bad news for the Christians

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , , , , , , ,

There’s a 1st cen­tury BC tab­let which has been found pre­dict­ing a Mes­siah that will rise after three days. I can’t really see this shak­ing Chris­tian­ity by con­nect­ing it to Juda­ism. The whole concept of a Mes­siah is Jew­ish. It’s not like Judea was short of Mes­si­ahs in this period. As for proph­ecies Mat­thew is known to have drawn on Jew­ish proph­ecies for his gos­pel, hence the whole being born in Beth­le­hem thing. It is of his­tor­ical interest though. It seems like a mes­siah proph­ecy we didn’t know about before. That could have told us more about the devel­op­ment of Christianity.

Sadly it can’t tell us a lot, because the mater­ial is unproven­anced. Any­one who’s Chris­tian has had inform­a­tion about tab­let of import­ance to their faith trashed and it’s inform­a­tion which can­not be replaced. It’s been com­pared to find­ing the Dead Sea Scrolls.* It’s not like find­ing the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s like burn­ing them unread and sift­ing through the ashes to see what you can make out.

How­ever as long as there’s a mar­ket for unproven­anced and illi­cit antiquit­ies there’ll be a profit to be made from other people’s beliefs.

See also: The Boston Globe and Jim West’s web­log.

*Actu­ally in some ways it is. An awful loot of inform­a­tion about them has been lost too due to the trade in unproven­ance antiquities.

The Burg­lars. Photo (cc) John Carl Johnson

Illicit Antiquities linked to Islamic terrorists — Who’da thunk it?

Alun Politics, The Past 3 Comments , , , ,

It shouldn’t be news. I men­tioned the pos­sib­il­ity in 2005, and again late last year. When you buy unproven­anced antiquit­ies you don’t know who you’re buy­ing them from.

Now the Ash­land Daily Tid­ings reports on the work by Mat­thew Bog­danos, which he says shows that the con­nec­tion between the trade in illi­cit antiquit­ies and Islamic insur­gents is undeni­able. Yes, you read that right. It turns out some mem­bers of Al-Qaeda are prone to crim­inal activity.

Des­pite that fair-play to Ant­o­nia Kim­bell at the Art Loss Register who said that she’s seen no evid­ence of a dir­ect link. The way the Art Loss Register works is they check a data­base of illi­cit arte­facts. Obvi­ously that means that someone needs to have registered an arte­fact as illi­cit, but that’s not a prob­lem so long as Al-Qaeda remem­ber to fill out the paperwork.

I went to look at David Gill’s blog to fact check the work­ings of the Art Loss Register because Kimbell’s com­ments seemed unfeas­ib­ily mor­onic. I can’t believe someone that cred­u­lous would be able to hold down a job at the Art Loss Register if it worked the way I described it. But it does, and David Gill is also blog­ging this story.

There’s a lot of things I’d like to see hap­pen with the Iraqi occu­pa­tion. One is that I’d like to see UK and US gov­ern­ments sup­port our sol­diers by mak­ing it harder for ‘art col­lect­ors’ to fund the enemy. If you’d like to read more about how you can fund the killing of Brit­ish and Amer­ican sol­diers and pick up a nice antiquity into the bar­gain then you can read Loot­ing Mat­ters, Illi­cit Cul­tural Prop­erty and Safe Corner.

Things that really matter can’t be stolen

Alun The Past 1 Comment , , , , ,

When some­thing pre­cious is lost, it is well to be reminded of what really mat­ters. In the week since the theft of Vic­toria Crosses from the Waiouru Army Museum, it has been hard to put the crime into perspective.

Edit­or­ial: Things that really mat­ter can’t be stolen — 08 Dec 2007 — His­tory — NZ Herald

There’s an inter­est­ing art­icle on what the theft of arte­facts can mean at the NZ Her­ald. In this instance it’s the theft of nine Vic­toria Crosses. The loot includes the double VC awar­ded to Cap­tain Charles Upham in World War II, one of only three ever to be awar­ded. The Vic­toria Cross is the highest award that can be given to a sol­dier and the import­ance of Upham’s medals to New Zea­l­and was under­lined by the gov­ern­ment barred their export.

It is a loss, but the edit­or­ial gets it right. Without the con­text of the museum all the col­lector will get will be bits of metal.

The answer depends on the question

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , , , , ,

Pothunters looting
Pothunters des­troy­ing a site, or a prob­lem­atic excav­a­tion? Photo (cc) gbaku

David Gill has put up an inter­est­ing blog post show­ing how the kind of ques­tions you ask lead you to cer­tain kinds of answer. It’s really inter­est­ing to see how the assump­tions are skill­fully built into ques­tions. The ses­sion he picks apart is Tain­ted Objects, which tackles arte­facts of prob­lem­atic proven­ance. (If you’re won­der­ing what prob­lem­atic means: The evid­ence against OJ Simpson was prob­lem­atic.) The prob­lem starts with the title, he argues. How does being smuggled, or expor­ted with a nod and a wink, taint the arte­fact? The taint as he rightly says isn’t any­where in the arte­fact, it’s with the people who are happy to handle them. And that’s just the start.

He’s also linked to an inter­view with Jack Davis in Athens News. Davis is the new head of the Amer­ican School in Athens and the inter­view is start­ling from the open­ing:

At the Uni­ver­sity of Cin­cin­nati we passed a res­ol­u­tion in our depart­ment, which is strongly focused on archae­ology, that we would not accept the dona­tion of any antiquit­ies from private sources into our depart­ment, and that we would not accept fund­ing for archae­olo­gical pro­jects from collectors.

As I recall, and North Amer­ican read­ers are wel­come to cor­rect me if I’m wrong, Cin­ncin­nati is a major uni­ver­sity which could well expect to receive this kind of dona­tion. I know it’s easy to say that you shouldn’t fuel the mar­ket by accept­ing dona­tions from dodgy ‘phil­an­throp­ists’ and val­id­ate their pur­chases. How­ever when one col­lector, who is said to have bought arte­facts with dirt still on them, offered another uni­ver­sity up to $200 mil­lion for a new insti­tute, they took it. Say­ing no to dona­tions when oth­ers are accept­ing them does require huge amounts of integ­rity. (Note to the rel­ev­ant law­yers. I accept that being offered an arte­fact caked in dirt does not mean there’s any reason to assume it had been recently looted. In much the same way I’d like to reas­sure OJ’s law­yers that I have no doubt that their cli­ent was found inno­cent. I get email.)

The photo is titled “Pothunters” des­troy­ing an archae­olo­gical site on the Columbia River (Ore­gon, USA) and it’s one of the many put up on Flickr by gbaku. He’s been put­ting up some great images of archae­olo­gical excav­a­tion in action recently and, even bet­ter, they’re avail­able under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons licence.

Sympathy for the Art Collectors

Alun Politics, The Past 2 Comments , , , ,

There’s an odd story on the Independent’s web­site today. It seems Uni­ver­sity Col­lege, Lon­don may have been hous­ing hun­dreds of arte­facts illeg­ally expor­ted from Iraq. It’s con­tro­ver­sial not because of UCL’s acquis­i­tion of the pots, but for their reac­tion after it was sug­ges­ted that these may be illi­cit materials.

The arte­facts are devil bowls dat­ing from the 6th to 8th cen­tur­ies AD. The idea is that you put an incant­a­tion on them and then tip them upside down to trap an evil spirit. These were loaned by the Nor­we­gian phil­an­throp­ist Mar­tin Schøyen who bought them in good faith from a Jord­anian dealer who swore blind that they’d been in his family’s pos­ses­sion for gen­er­a­tions. How­ever not every­one was con­vinced by the story so UCL set up a com­mit­tee to invest­ig­ate where these bowls came from. Schøyen, for reas­ons which aren’t entirely clear, sued for the return of the bowls. The com­mit­tee, it is said, con­cluded that they were prob­ably looted from Iraq. Until then this had been unknown to UCL and there’s no evid­ence that Mar­tin Schøyen had even the faintest ink­ling that they were looted either.

The Inde­pend­ent story makes it very clear that it was an open and shut case, Schøyen had title to the bowls for seven years, there’s no sug­ges­tion that he looted the bowls nor that he was aware that they were looted. The bowls are his. What is caus­ing the fuss is that the Invest­ig­at­ing Committee’s report has been with­held as part of an out of court set­tle­ment. It’s all puzz­ling as it would be help­ful to know how these pots were able to be fenced without arous­ing the sus­pi­cions of an upstand­ing cit­izen. It’s a strong argu­ment for tougher reg­u­la­tion for the antiquit­ies trade as it would be ter­rible if it could be proven again that someone else has taken advant­age of Schøyen’s trust.

If you’re won­der­ing what they look like, a quick search on on ebay reveals that you can buy them for around $600 from the Mal­ter Gal­ler­ies. You can see pho­tos on their site. Again there’s no evid­ence these are know­ingly looted from Iraq. In fact you can’t be cer­tain where they come from at all apart from the Near East. Is that enough to make them a safe purchase?

An obsession with context

Alun The Past 2 Comments , , , ,

Fol­low­ing yesterday’s post on the roots of archae­ology, I’ve read an inter­est­ing post David Gill’s Loot­ing Mat­ters web­log about an obses­sion with con­text. The key quote is so good I can’t help lift­ing it:

“The archae­olo­gical community’s obses­sion with con­text puzzles numismatists.”

Lest you think the good pro­fessor is writ­ing with his under­pants on his head I should make clear it’s a quote from an art­icle he read. It makes more sense if you see numis­mat­ics as an heir of anti­quar­i­an­ism and archae­ology as a pre­tender. Archae­olo­gists are more likely study the pasts of peoples who simply don’t appeal to the wannabe-country gent. It would seem a bit odd though as not all numis­maticians are paro­chial in their studies.

Of course if you are a bit of a social dino­saur you may not have noticed chan­ging times. This might explain bizarre claims like:

“Numis­mat­ists believe that all coins carry use­ful inform­a­tion about the polit­ical, mil­it­ary and eco­nomic situ­ation at the time they were issued. Indeed, numis­mat­ists derive their own con­text from the study of design devices used on coins, the num­ber and chro­no­logy of dies used to strike given series, and the metal­lur­gical con­tent of vari­ous issues. For that reason, numis­mat­ists cat­egor­ic­ally reject the claim that coins lose value as his­tor­ical objects if the cir­cum­stances of their dis­cov­ery are not preserved.”

Ok, how wrong is this? For a start a coin can con­trib­ute to his­tor­ical research by examin­ing its art and its con­text. Lose that con­text and you lose the data. You can­not tell what arte­facts a coin was found with purely from its inscrip­tions, no mat­ter how intensely you study them.

But that’s only half the problem.

At the week­end in the times there was a com­par­ison between antiquit­ies loot­ing and ivory smug­gling in the Times. It is an apt com­par­ison. The death toll in ele­phants can be dis­pro­por­tion­ate to the amount of ivory recovered. Sim­il­arly an increase in coin sup­ply from Bul­garia, sorry Thrace, ((Export­ing coins from Bul­garia, as well as Greece or Tur­key, the other two coun­tries which could be described as Thrace, is illegal. Unfor­tu­nately if you list the coin as Thra­cian then it’s extremely dif­fi­cult to find where the source is and hence can­not launch a pro­sec­u­tion. You’d have to be a pretty shady char­ac­ter to do that though so you wouldn’t expect to find any­thing if you check Ebay for Thra­cian coins would you?)) may be con­nec­ted with the bull­doz­ing of archae­olo­gical sites in Thrace Bul­garia. The fact that this sort of thing is illegal has led some people to con­clude that crim­in­als might be involved with the antiquit­ies supply.

It’s not a thought that occurs to all deal­ers, nor it seems all numis­mat­ists. The trade relies on deal­ers and law­yers who don’t think too hard about the con­text of their finds. Read David Gill’s thoughts on the sub­ject and laugh or cry.

1 2