MORE DEBATE ON LOOTING AND COLLECTING

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V17 2014 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 17, Number 28, July 6, 2014, Article 11

Regarding last week's item on the debate on looting and collection, I quoted Paul Barford's blog post Dirty Old Coin Dealings. Paul writes:

You may see nothing wrong with sales of bulk lots of apparently freshly-surfaced paperless dirt-encrusted coins. Nevertheless, when you come across somebody who states why they are an issue, perhaps you could treat it a little more fairly and (a) indent the texts you are quoting, instead of your own "comments" on them to make it clear whose text is where, (b) source the quoted texts properly, giving the author's name by their text, not under your own, (c) NOT sandwich two chunks of somebody else's text together missing out a passage 730 words long with no sign anything has been removed in an effort to make it appear "snarky" and disjointed.

Finally if you are going to tell your readers "what the PAS is" it might be an idea for YOU first to find out what the PAS is and what it is not, what it does and what it does not do. Otherwise you contribute to the superficial and misinformed mythology that passes in US numismatic circles for knowledge. We have more than enough examples of that from the ACCG et al. to welcome any more.

I apologize for confusion regarding the quoted text. The E-Sylum is a hastily compiled informal publication. When we insert quoted text within an article it's usually highlighted and indented as Paul's comments are above. When an article is ALL a quote I often don't bother, highlighting instead only my editorial additions.

I never said there's nothing wrong with "sales of bulk lots of apparently freshly-surfaced paperless dirt-encrusted coins." That would raise my eyebrow, too. I said the problem is "the push to assume guilt on the part of a collector who can't prove that his coin WASN'T looted at some point in its 2,000 year history."

I'm not an ancient coin collector, dealer, or metal detectorist, and I don't live in England or Wales, so no one should take my word on the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) as gospel. The web site was our Featured Web Site last week. Readers are again invited to visit it to learn more, straight from the source. Here's the link again: http://finds.org.uk/

In his blog post Paul highlighted how coins unearthed in the UK are handled much differently than elsewhere in the world. Referring to Raz Suarez' Dirty Old Coins web site, Paul wrote:

What are missing from their offer are coins from the UK, where detecting on archaeological sites is legal, objects reported by responsible finders to the PAS and exported (as the law requires) with a UK export licence.

My thesis (which I thought Paul would agree with) is that if the rest of the world were regulated like the UK is, then the illicit looting that neither of us likes would dry up, and dug coins would have a standard, legitimate paper trail through the complete supply chain from the hole in the ground to the holder in a dealer's inventory.

Unfortunately, that would still leave the world with the quandary of how to treat coins that have been in collections for years and never had such a paper trail. Branding them as illegal would be ridiculous.

Through subsequent email exchanges with Paul (a British archaeologist living and working in Warsaw, Poland) it seems he and I can agree on the latter point. He said no one on the archaeology side has proposed that and calls it "yet another of those pernicious straw man arguments coin dealers and their lobbyists throw out to deflect attention from the issues."

I knew I'd be stepping into a buzzsaw by touching on this issue, which I usually avoid like the plague. I was mainly commenting on the tone of the discussion on the archaeology side. In the professionally written Science Daily article Nathan Elkins came across gentlemanly, but 'snarky' was the kindest word I could find to describe Barford's blog, which came across my desk the same week.

Barford's been more reserved in our email exchanges, and I hold out hope that we can one day find some common ground between the two camps. I did have to laugh at the great headline for his follow-up post shredding my lack of editing style, but his tone is unchanged. Good thing I have thick skin. I told him I didn't need to quote selected segments of his post attacking Raz Suarez to present it as snarky. In my opinion, the whole thing was, from start to finish.

To read Paul Barford's blog post, see: "Wayne's Words", or Somebody Else's? (paul-barford.blogspot.com/2014/06/waynes-words-or-somebody-elses.html)