Saving history?

Someone named James Warr has made a frighteningly uninformed comparison of Archaeology vs. Metal Detecting on his sadly-named TonyRobinsonsPants blog. After stressing the tedious and lengthy procedure of archaeological excavations, he trumpets metal detecting as the winner since it is simply a matter of "Find history. Dig out history. Save history."

He then comes to the equally simple conclusion that "This, is why the brats [archaeologists] have a problem with detectorists" (followed by a link to a recent criticism by archaeologists of the way some detectorists obliterated the context of a find).

No, James Warr; the reason the "brats" (and indeed anyone with more than a single brain cell) have a problem with some detectorists is that so many of them share your total incomprehension of what history really is and are actively engaged in destroying it.

Contrary to that emotive Hollywood soundbite, when you hold an ancient coin, buckle or whatever in your hand, you are not literally "holding history". You are holding a tiny component of an assemblage that may have the potential to reveal history if the whole assemblage is meticulously recorded and investigated within its wider context - and in the modern day that involves a team of trained people.

An object in itself is not "history". And "history" is certainly not an insane grabfest of finding, digging out and "saving" as many objects as you can get your hands on, sticking them in museum cabinets and then drooling over how pretty they are.

"History" is briefly defined as "the study of the past" and the word stems from the Greek historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation". Note the words "study", "inquiry" and "investigation". History is a cerebral concept. Apart from a book or document recording that concept, you cannot hold it in your hands. You can find, dig out and "save" ancient objects until the cows come home and stuff them into museums up to the rafters but unless the sites where those objects lie are properly excavated (and yeah, that can be tedious and lengthy), you are typically destroying contextual evidence and obliterating any chance of seriously adding to our knowledge of history. And that tends to annoy any person with the intellect to appreciate what history really is, not just a few archaeologists (or "brats").

Archaeology for non-archaeologists

An interesting view of archaeology by Marc Balcells, a criminologist (December 2013). It compares the Hollywood version of archaeology ("treasure hunt") and the real thing ("study of remnants"). Naturally, real archaeology shares a vital component with criminology: the importance of evidence.

Complacency, Arrogance and Contempt

I recently commented on a recent attack on the credibility of archaeology by Peter Tompa, a lawyer associated with a coin dealers' lobby group (ACCG). Another comment, by an anonymous "wise collector friend from Chicago", included that hackneyed sentence:

"I have never looted or stolen a coin or acquired one, to my knowledge, that was looted or stolen."

I naturally pointed out that the phrase "to my knowledge" was merely a 'see no evil' attitude, a convenient means of salving his conscience while admitting that he really hadn't got the foggiest idea where the coin originated. Not many coin dealers include the words "looted" or "stolen" in their descriptions. Rather than sniping at archaeologists who want to prevent looting, the coin collector's energy would be better spent on nagging dealers to provide proper collecting histories for the things he bought.

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My comments spawned a subsequent blog post by Peter Tompa on what it means to be an "ethical collector". He set up a false hypothesis that a collection can only be ethical if it meets the same standards that museums have adopted and is limited to items with a secure pre-1970 provenance. He postulated a flimsy claim that items recorded under PAS would not be acceptable and threw in a red herring (nothing to do with ethics) by questioning why objects legally available in other countries are not available in his own.

While expressing my support for private collecting, I pointed out that a collector should be ethical for its own sake, to avoid contributing to modern looting, even if their cut-off date for acquiring artefacts without a documented collecting history does not strictly adhere to the 1970 watershed advocated by the AIA and others. All I asked was that dealers provide a clear collecting history (provenance) for items so that buyers could distinguish between artefacts from old collections and those from fresh looting. I honestly think if I was any more laid back than that in my attitude to being an "ethical collector", I'd fall over!

My plea was based on ...

"Dealers and collectors need to adopt a serious Code of Ethics for its own sake, even if it is only offered as a compromise, regardless of whether it pleases the AIA or not. Continue to arrogantly ignore the rest of society and contribute to wiping out the evidence of their history in a selfish pursuit of your own hobby without even a vague attempt to meet them halfway, and you will end up pissing off not only a few archaeologists but every thinking human being on the planet.

"I genuinely do support private collecting - and I really don't want to see its future wrecked by arrogant intransigence. We're not in 1950 anymore. The world has moved on."

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Sadly, my attitude was met with ill-informed and tangential responses. Although the blog frequently attacks and attempts to discredit archaeology, the replies to my comments strongly suggested that the blogger has no idea what archaeology actually is (clue: it's the whole site, not just objects). The final comment by him sums it up ...

"The use of coins to date sites is limited given the long periods coins circulated and the fact that only coins from secure contexts have any value in dating artifacts."

Huh??? "The use of coins to date sites is limited given the long periods coins circulated ..." Really? Exactly how does that stop them providing a terminus post quem for a site?

"... and the fact that only coins from secure contexts have any value in dating artifacts."

Well, that's an own goal! It only reinforces the point I was making. Unless the collecting history (including precise details of findspot and excavation) of the coin is revealed, we will never know if it came from a secure context or not. The clandestine nature of looting destroys that information and looting itself destroys the context. And please try to understand archaeology. It is not the "artifacts" as such that we are trying to date; it is the stratigraphy of the site.

After suggesting that the bureaucracy in Bulgaria is extremely corrupt, he then makes the astonishing statement: "But the fact remains, ancient coin collecting is quite legal there. So why should we be holier than the pope [so] to speak?"

Er, I thought we were discussing ethics?! I accept that the blogger has little comprehension of archaeology but I was kind of hoping he would have at least a basic understanding of ethics.

Finally, the blogger compared furniture and coins, and their status as "cultural property". He does not appear to have grasped the fact that although the legality of respecting the claims of cultural property and the ethics of preserving the archaeological record may sometimes coincide, they are actually two very different things. The primary concern of an "ethical collector" is to avoid contributing to the destruction of the latter. It matters not an iota that ancient coins were "struck in multiples with thousands upon thousands and even millions of some issues still extant". It is not their quantity that poses a threat to the archaeological record; it is the fact that every time an ancient coin or other artefact is brutally dug out of its context (and the site typically trashed), the whole of humanity has been denied a rare chance to explore its history.

My plea that dealers provide a clear collecting history for items so that buyers can distinguish between artefacts from old collections and those from fresh looting continues to fall on deaf ears. Complacency with the current destructive status quo, arrogance against those who dare to challenge it, and contempt for the rest of society appear to be the hallmarks of many in a trade that seems determined to self-destruct.

Still waiting ...

Paul Barford has recently mentioned my draft proposal for an International Antiquities Registry (IAR). As he points out, it has now been over four years since I made the proposal. It was quite widely publicised at the time but there was no response from the antiquities trade.

To pre-empt a possible objection, I should point out that the scheme was never intended to satisfy (or replace) the demand for a cut-off date based on the UNESCO Convention 1970, the year accepted by most museums and archaeological organisations as the date beyond which no antiquity should be acquired without an Export Licence from the country in which the antiquity was found. Neither is the scheme intended as a carte blanche amnesty.

The scheme is designed as a goodwill gesture that will accomplish three objectives ...

1. Being able to distinguish between artefacts that have been circulating for years and those that have been freshly dug up
2. Diminishing the destruction caused by ongoing looting by being able to avoid making any contribution to it
3. Public Relations: dealers and collectors would be seen to be actively doing their part to preserve the archaeological heritage – a far better image than the current one of being perceived by many as selfishly contributing to its destruction

In other words, the scheme is a start in the right direction. And who knows what the situation will be in twenty or thirty years time? Certainly, an artefact that has been conscientiously recorded in the database is likely to be far better regarded than one whose owner didn't bother and left it without any demonstrable collecting history at all.

But the response from the antiquities trade (both auction houses and dealers) has so far been unanimous in one respect: the silence is deafening. I summed up three consequences of that cavalier attitude. It might be worth pondering them - particularly my third point. Time is running out.

Antiquities Collectors - An Endangered Species?

Dorothy King has examined an apparent dearth of antiquities collectors - or at least those who are willing to come forward - in the modern world: "In Search of the Modern Antiquities Collector".

Perhaps it is high time for a truce between those preservationists who want to protect the archaeological record and those collectors who also fully endorse that view. Not ALL collectors are thoughtless and unethical. Many of them are deeply passionate about history and collect old objects as an emotively physical and intellectual way of engaging with it, while fully recognising the vital importance of the archaeological record and scrupulously shunning any acquisition or action that may damage it. Tarring ALL collectors with the same brush - stereotyping them to the lowest common denominator - and demonising them will only serve to alienate or even decimate a section of the population that traditionally has been one of the greatest supports for museums and archaeological research.

Get the message about preserving the archaeological record across by all means but let's bear in mind that a thoughtful and ethical collector can be an ally, not an enemy.

Changing world

Whether we like it or not, the world does change. Our attitudes to life and society tend to evolve with the passage of time but I find that some people are more reluctant to adjust to change than others. In particular, there are many collectors of antiquities who look back fondly at a time not too long ago when their hobby was widely regarded as a contribution to scholarship and sometimes openly encouraged by academia; they cannot understand why nowadays that same hobby may provoke an atmosphere of hostility.

My own love of the past was first expressed through handling and collecting 'normal' antiques such as antiquarian books; my only childhood contact with antiquities was the odd Roman coin or lamp. There is a fundamental difference between antiques and antiquities. The former tends to be handed down through the generations; the latter tends to be dug up out of the ground. It is therefore the unbridled acquisition of the latter which poses a special threat to a finite and fragile resource: the archaeological record, that very fabric which can reveal history if treated with respect and interpreted skillfully.

As I said, the world has changed. The hardening attitude of academia towards the antiquities trade is not just a whimsical PC thing; it is largely a response to that change. Collecting unprovenanced antiquities has always been a threat to the archaeological record since it encourages looting but before the modern day it was a relatively minor pursuit and on a relatively minor scale. It was often regarded benignly since the advances in scholarship offered by studying the objects seemed to offset or even outweigh any damage done to the context.

But two concurrent developments have changed all that.

• Firstly, archaeological excavation has been hugely aided by modern techniques and with the increasing sophistication of site interpretation, object-based studies have been largely marginalised in the main thrust of archaeological field methodology. It has become increasingly accepted even among the general public that objects, while extremely important, are only part of the overall picture.


• Secondly, antiquities collecting is no longer the quiet backwater it was a few decades ago. It has become fashionable and popular. The ravenous hunger for yet more and more objects to be ripped from the ground is nowadays fueled by an increasing population with increased leisure. It is aided by modern technology such as metal detectors and by modern international marketing through the internet, and has escalated utterly out of control over the past two or three decades - far beyond anything our forefathers could have imagined.

The preservation of context has become paramount to anyone who cares about the past. It's no good trying to justify ignoring it by picking out the odd object or coin hoard where context may seem irrelevant in that specific case. Unless we know the context we will never know if it would have been important or not. It is far safer and more responsible to assume that in the case of most unprovenanced artefacts the context might have been important and, moreover and far more to the point, that a site may well have been irretrievably trashed to obtain that artefact.

I get a thrill from handling and studying old objects. We can safely collect antiques which have been handed down over the generations AND we can collect antiquities which have been dug up. It's just that if we want to be considerate of the rest of society, we should collect the latter thoughtfully. It's not too much to ask.

Object-based Universe - the danger of a blinkered view

First, a word about terminology. In general use the words 'provenience' and 'provenance' are synonymous, merely variant spellings of the same word. In speaking of artefacts however, it has become common to distinguish them as having separate meanings: 'provenience' is commonly taken to refer only to the actual findspot where an artefact was excavated; 'provenance' is much broader and includes the findspot but is more often used to refer to the history of an artefact after it was found, where it was subsequently kept, when it was sold, who owned it, etc. There is no absolute consensus but for the sake of convenience I will use the terms in those senses in this post.

In a post on an antiquities forum, a neophyte collector has mentioned the importance of provenance. A specialist collector of Celtic coinage and other artefacts (and editor of the ACCG Newsletter) has grabbed the chance to pooh-pooh the importance of "provenance" by replying with a few comments which belittle the significance of findspots - but completely misses the point.

A narrow perspective is all too common among many collectors, particularly it seems among those who collect ancient coins. In fact, the neophyte collector was discussing antiquities in general and my comments below address that broad overview.

Judging by posts on blogs and forums, there is a large number of collectors who cannot see the wood for the trees. They are so obsessed with the artefacts themselves (the trees) that they seem to think that the context (the wood) is only important if it provides more information about the artefacts. Their whole world revolves around the objects. Their concentration is understandable but it can easily become an extremely narrow "object-centric" universe.

The Celtic specialist shrugs that proveniences "can tell us only so much as this sort of material often traveled far from its origins". And goes on to say that "If there is no [provenience] and no archaeological context, much of this data can be reconstructed, functionally, from other types of data -- metallurgical analysis, typology, art history etc."

Well yes, I dare say it sometimes can - but that's not the point. The purpose of excavating an archaeological site is not just to provide information about objects found there.

It is not just what the site (provenience) could have told us about the object, it is what the object could have told us about the site.

Indeed, the objects themselves may be of comparatively minor importance. Archaeological excavation lies in carefully deconstructing and examining an ancient site, not just the objects buried in it but the site itself - the whole site, the way it was constructed, the way the finds were distributed, their relationship to the site, to structures, to features, to human remains and to each other, what they contained, and a million other tiny details. The finding of a foreign object (something that "traveled far from its origins") may also be significant. It is by putting all those details together that a meaningful story may emerge.

And when objects are looted, the tragedy is not only that the objects have lost their context (as the Celtic coin collector pointed out, the objects may still have some value anyway), it is that the context has lost its objects. In other words, the site has been robbed of the finds that would have helped to meaningfully interpret it. And in many cases, the site has been totally trashed to retrieve them.

The greed of a looter has destroyed a special opportunity to add to our knowledge of the past. A personal greed has trumped a rare and precious boon for all the rest of us.

That brings us to what the neophyte collector may have really had in mind about the importance of provenance, the record of an object after it was found. A provenance can reassure a collector that the object has not been excavated recently, and that by adding it to their collection they are not supporting a modern looter. A provenance gives the collector an opportunity to avoid contributing to the ongoing wholesale destruction of the archaeological record. There is a great deal of value in that - but only to a thoughtful collector who is genuinely interested in history rather than one who sees only the trees but not the wood.