ACCG own goal: With 'friends' like these ...

Original research - ACCG style

An American coin dealer recently called my attention to an old paper that he helped to compose on behalf of the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild (ACCG) and challenged me to examine it on my blog, apparently under the impression that the paper was pretty much unassailable. He confidently assured me that it "was received with respect and interest by the Council for British Archaeology". I have now had time to read through it and my first comment is that the Brits can be disarmingly polite.

I note that this American "Newcastle Paper" was presented by the ACCG at a UK conference hosted by the Council for British Archaeology in March 2010 and has been reviewed previously. Even before slogging through its excessively exhaustive (and exhausting!) text, my first impression was not good. Its very title ("Coin Collectors and Cultural Property Nationalism") was ominous. The subsequent text deviously conflates two largely separate issues: a worthy struggle to seek a sensible and balanced solution in the sharing of international culture on the one hand, and a campaign to prolong a cavalier attitude to the destructive exploitation of foreign archaeological resources for commercial gain on the other. Disingenuously using the former to excuse the latter is not a great start.

Is the paper actually on behalf of "coin collectors" or is that term basically a euphemism for something else? Certainly, despite laboured assertions that the ACCG "is a collector organization, not a trade lobby" (p.44), its aims seem far more geared towards the mass acquisition of stock than the concerns of ethical individuals buying one or two coins. This is the organisation that declares its members "will not knowingly purchase coins illegally removed from scheduled archaeological sites" (p.45) while failing to admit the irony of simultaneously fighting against any measures (even self-regulatory ones) that would help ensure the stock of the dealers who supply them was not.

An early unwitting admission by contributor John Hooker that he hasn't got the vaguest clue what the full extent of "cultural heritage" actually is (p.5)¹ sets the tone for much of the paper. It includes some valid and significant points but any overall case it tries to make to a naively miscalculated demographic is so compromised by a litany of schoolboy flaws - ranging from verbosity, waffle, repetition and tedious irrelevancies to shallow blame-shifting, inadequate denial (p.15), arrogant presumption (p.32), cringeworthy unawareness and stunning miscomprehension resulting from object-centric myopia, no conception of moral responsibility beyond the bare legal minimum, a long unsourced² section plagiarised verbatim (!) from Wikipedia (pp.49-50), manipulated conflation, selective sycophancy and a plethora of glaring logical fallacies - that it tends to greatly diminish rather than enhance any perception of the trade as a worthwhile contributor in serious academic discussion.

A statement that "The collectors [read: US coin dealers] rights movement does not seek a confrontation, it seeks a solution" on the final page (p.61) begs a question: the "rights" to do what? To henceforth acquire stock responsibly by ensuring it does not conflict with archaeological concerns or to continue to acquire stock in the same cavalier way dealers did in the past and carry on encouraging looting until every last archaeological resource on the planet has been obliterated? The paper gives every indication that "rights" means the latter.

The paper includes not the slightest hint of compromise, not the vaguest trace of a realistic proposal to meet anyone halfway. Characteristically, it attempts to shift responsibility. An eager but wildly autoschediastic suggestion that a PAS-like scheme is a "viable model" (p.49) in countries that are incredibly rich in ancient sites reveals a simplistic object-centric approach oblivious to any potential for an archaeological catastrophe. Crucially, the paper includes not even, despite lip service (perhaps also cribbed from Wikipedia?), a real sign that the root problem is properly understood. Quite the contrary ...

The American coin dealer who brought the paper to my attention pointed out that "it was a statement of the pro-collecting point of view of the collectors' rights advocacy movement, rather than a completely impartial academic survey paper".

Fair enough, but it's one thing to display a certain amount of partiality. It's quite another to come out with daft nonsense such as holding an archaeologist up to ridicule for comparing ancient coins to "an endangered species" and then wordily pointing out how common they are (p.16) when it was blatantly obvious even from the quotation that he was talking only about coins that remained undisturbed in their context. Such silliness has a tendency to backfire - especially to an audience containing informed academics - and, instead of having the intended effect, implies that the person giving the presentation is either too thick to understand simple English or too ignorant to grasp even the most basic principle of archaeology. That impression is hardly helpful in promoting "the pro-collecting point of view".

And that's just one example of countless other faux pas in a long-winded but essentially slapdash paper that utterly drowns any valid points in a garrulous sea of uninformed blunders, contrived deceptions, plagiarised waffle and entrenched ignorance. Predictably, the end result paints an overwhelmingly negative picture of those engaged in the US coin trade.

I could very easily dismantle the "Newcastle Paper" through detailed analysis in another post but I post very seldom on my blog these days and I've already dealt with the ACCG earlier. Calling further attention to their inept propaganda merely highlights the worst aspects of a hobby I wholeheartedly support if carried out responsibly. In the interest of a balanced 'middle ground', if I post anything at all nowadays it is more likely to focus on some of the views expressed by those who oppose it. In the meantime, here's a gentle plea to the ACCG: either get your act together next time or do the collecting world a favour and give it a miss.

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¹  In this alarming paradigm of tunnel vision, "cultural heritage" applies to objects that can be "distributed" but not to the once intact archaeological sites they are "distributed" from.
²  Wayback Machine reveals that the footnote given is just a deceptive red herring and not the real source. Perhaps the authors hoped no one would ever bother to check. Should we place a similar trust in any provenance they may give for a coin?

Art vs Artefact: a deceptive distinction in approach

I note a rather sumptuous guide to the treasures of the al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait (billed as "one of the world’s most spectacular collections of eastern Hellenistic and pre-Islamic precious metalwork") has recently been published under the title Arts of the Hellenized East (Thames & Hudson, December 2015). I also note that the collection has received some criticism for the lack of attention to its provenance. Perhaps that flaw is reflected in the title of the guide.

I do cringe at the use of the word "arts" to describe ancient objects. The word can have a wide meaning but it is popularly associated with fine craftsmanship and is much beloved by certain museums that restrict their holdings to only the flashiest examples of any type, perhaps because it is well suited to that pompous, selective and superficial approach to history. By definition, it focuses attention on the objects themselves - almost as if they existed in a vacuum to be admired for their beauty and artistry alone - and thus tends to sideline their deeper historical and social significance. In such "arts" centric frameworks, the objects are very often presented as though even their wider context were worthy only of a mere label or footnote and their immediate context were of no interest at all.

Small wonder then that, unless it entails the name of an impressive former owner, the concept of provenance typically holds little meaning to the people who form collections largely predicated on treating objects in that manner: primarily as "arts" in its narrowest sense rather than their role as artefacts in a much broader picture. The production of a scholarly guide comes a bit too late to rectify that concern; the objects have long been divorced from firm contexts which could have told us so much more than retrospective conjecture or how "spectacular" they are.

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* Hat tip to Paul Barford for drawing my attention to the guide,

Simples! A quick response to a response to a response ...

Dave Welsh, an American coin dealer and member of the ACCG, remarks that 'decontextualisation' is "an obviously coined word that, along with many other coined words which are employed in a sort of archaeocentric doublespeak, has repeatedly been uttered ..." and suspects the whole subterfuge is all part of some sinister Marxist plot hatched by evil commies. (Before 21st-century readers pinch themselves to check what era we are in, I think it only fair to suppose that his part of California may be trapped in some sort of 1950s McCarthyesque time-warp beyond his control.) At any rate, his blog post ("Decontextualization", Ancient Coins, 4 March 2016) is a response to Paul Barford's response to a blog post by another ACCG member.

Yeah, these little reciprocal blog posts can go back and forth like farmhands slinging pats in a cowshed sometimes. But, never one to be discouraged, I thought it might be worthwhile to add a few pats ... er, words ... of my own. I'll address them to Dave Welsh ...

No, Dave. No matter how you want to spin it, conservation of archaeological resources has nothing whatsoever to do with Marxism nor even solely with decontextualisation. ('Decontextualisation' - yes, it is a proper word - mainly concerns only the divorced objects themselves; the notion of conservation involves preserving entire sites, where those objects come from, so the totality of evidence can provide a means of interpreting history.) Conservation is just a matter of having respect for the rest of society. Most people don't collect ancient coins but most people do have at least a basic interest in history.

A genuine provenance is a guarantee that an item was not recently looted. Every time you deal in an ancient coin with no regard for where it came from, you are encouraging others to do likewise and encouraging looters to continue destroying the evidence on which history is built in order to supply more of them. That continues in a never-ending cycle until every undisturbed site has gone. It really is that simple!

No amount of fluff and no amount of flannel can alter that fundamental fact. It really is that simple!

If Dave Welsh seriously wants to protect the future of ancient coin collecting as a socially-acceptable hobby, I suggest he opposes those who would ban it altogether with sound arguments and rational compromise rather than expose the trade to ridicule by consistently flying in the face of common sense. As it stands, he is in danger of being one of the coin trade's own worst enemies.

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Note: For those outside the UK, I should clarify that the image refers to an old British TV ad in which a rather bright meerkat exclaims "Simples!" (he has a theatrical Russian accent) after he explains an obvious truth.

Why do museums hoard?

A resentment of museums* apparently stockpiling thousands of "surplus" artefacts rather than selling them and allowing private collectors to buy them is a recurring theme in the world of collectors of antiquities. It seems a valid concern at first glance but much of it is rooted in what I term OCM (object-centric myopia), thinking of artefacts merely as art objects rather than as part of a far wider picture, as research tools in understanding our past.

The following question asked recently on a forum is fairly typical and I'll try to answer it very briefly:

"I think any piece is better off in private hands if fairly insignificant, what would they do in museum warehouses, gather dust?"

In most cases the artefacts not on display do metaphorically just gather dust but they are normally available on request and, in theory at least, they are preserved (much like evidence from a crime scene) in case further research in the future may shed fresh light. Methodology and technology are constantly improving and, for instance, a present-day re-examination of pottery sherds kept from an excavation in, say, the 1930s may result in entirely different conclusions from the original ones. What may seem "minor" or "insignificant" now might well prove to be extremely valuable to future generations.

Nor is the fact that many of the artefacts are apparently "identical" a reason to dispose of "surplus" examples. The notion of a "duplicate" is just 'baseball card mentality', entrenched in thinking of artefacts as mere art objects to fill gaps in collections. There is no such thing as a "duplicate" in the conduct of archaeological inquiry. In the world of academic research, the very fact that many of the artefacts are seemingly alike can be invaluable in studies such as cultural development investigation or quantitative analysis.

For a very basic example, let's take a "minor" and "insignificant" artefact found in huge quantities. A study of Firmalampen (a type of Roman lamp) a few years ago (Schneider 1993) shattered some earlier theories, set new standards in classifying the type, and enabled far more accurate appraisal of those found in excavations (and thus the site itself). The study was based on an examination of hundreds of superficially similar lamps (both complete and bare fragments) kept in the storage of museums throughout parts of Western Europe. Verified knowledge of their findspot played a vital role and, since chemical analysis was involved, mere photographs were not sufficient. Of course, such a study would not have been possible if the lamps had been dispersed to the market decades ago.

Police forces store evidence, paleontologists store fossils, mineralogists store meteorites, archaeologists store sherds, and so on. It would be rather simplistic to assume they all do so out of a childish resentment of non-professionals or an addiction for compulsive hoarding. Who knows what fresh insights into our past those dozens of identical pots currently gathering dust may reveal in a few years time? But one thing is certain: future generations will not thank us for squandering them away just to please a few people today.

There may be room for museums deaccessioning in some cases but we do need to understand some of the reasons why they may be reluctant to do so. And in the meantime, it's worth bearing in mind that there are literally millions of artefacts already on the market or in private collections.

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*For the purpose of this post, the term "museum" refers to any public institution which includes the storage and preservation of archaeological material as part of its objective, and is thus distinct from those which function purely as a form of art gallery.