Assault on collecting

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Here is more (shocking!) information posted (not by me) on the Moneta-L list. You really need to sign this petition! ("Coming soon to a theater near you!")

Dear List,

to better inform your discussion, and counteract the apparently massive misinterpretations, here my understanding of the announced law (disclaimer I am not a lawyer, but I spoke to many):

this new law is announced to go by the grand coalition of Angela Merkel to the German Parliament after August 26th.

Part 1 = Import / Export:
Objects are illegal to import into Germany without the export license of the "country of origin" which is not the last country that traded for example the coin but a hypothetical country. Maybe where the coin was minted, the place a coin was found, or any country claiming to be in the footsteps of i.e. Rome. No lower limit of value for coins or archaeological objects. For the export license of another country 'of origin' their local law is used, i.e. some 150 or more different foreign culture laws become also binding law in Germany.

Objects are illegal to leave Germany without an export permit

Part 2 = Trading/Dealing "Inverkehrbringen"
The law is affecting private collectors for any archaeological object including coins with a value starting from zero, i.e. no lower limit of value. Collectors and Dealers have to prove retrospectively that the object was
1) not stolen or lost ,
2) not imported into Germany without the export license of the "country of origin" which is not the last country that traded the coin but a hypothetical country which for coins could be the mint, the place a coin was found, or any country claiming to be in the footsteps of i.e. Rome)
3) not of an illegal excavation
There is no - repeat- no lower value limit, and also no time limit, and it is retroactive. The collector/dealer has to prove.
Penalty is risk of confiscation of the object and it cannot be sold/traded anymore. Plus up to 5 years prison

A second part affecting coin collectors is introducing additional documentation for dealers:
1) document the identities of seller and buyer and prices
2) document the object with photo
3) do intense provenance searches and document them
4) make all above available to anyone interested to buy
5) to store all above for 30 years
If an object is an archaeological object or coin, and is valued below 100€s only activities 1/2/4/5 are needed. If any other object is below 2500€ the same, no provenance search is needed. If an object is affected by an ICOM red list no lower value and reduced activities (and as you may know or could google the ICOM list for Syria lists any Roman coin with an emperor on one side and 'SC' on the other)
Penalties for noncompliance is up to 5 years prison and up to 100.000€.

An additional part is for third party countries claiming that an object in Germany is their cultural property. Essential if an object cannot be proven to have been in Germany before 31.12.1992 for EU member states or before April 2007 for UNESCO member states it can be claimed back. Complex paragraphs dealing with that.

A copy of the planned law was made available to the press last week, but was never posted so far on a government website.

 

That is... word fail me. Devastating, for sure. A dangerous precedence, definitely.

Please please please everyone, sign this. Get friends and relatives to sign it as well. The volume of signatures required seems to be far greater than the number of signatures I've seen for other such petitions. Gathering that many signatures is going to be a tremendous challenge.

 

All that's going to accomplish, like so much other intense regulation, is create a black market. Do politicians ever learn?

 

I find it astounding how the state increasingly wishes to remove from the hands of the people anything it deems to belong only to the state. The movement is gradual but inexorable.

 

Umm, openpetition.de is a third party platform, nothing official, and the 120,000 quorum is set by the person who initiates the petition - in this case, Ms Kampmann - or maybe the platform, dunno. Another third party petition site is change.org for example.

The official petition portal of the federal parliament (Bundestag) has a much lower threshold: 50,000 until the petent is invited to a parliament hearing.

Christian

 

Oh. Thank you for that clarification! With that in mind, what is the purpose or value of the petition being pushed by ACCG, CNG, and various other auction houses (link provided in the OP)? What impact will it have?

 

Signed.

 

Honestly, the fact that dealers don't keep prominence is a massive problem. It makes it impossible to tell if your coins were from an illegal dig or not. If coin dealers themselves won't solve this problem on their own, what choice to governments who want to stop illegal excavations have? If you want to stop this stuff from happening, document your coins, insist that dealers do the same, and avoid dealers who are selling stuff they obvious just got from the ground without documentation. I have not nor will I sign this petition.

 

Dealers don't keep provenance? Then explain why I spend so much damn time researching it in old sale records.

 

I'm not saying it never happens (and I appreciate the work you put into this), but I've very rarely been given any information on a coin beyond where I immediately purchased it from, whether it's been Ebay, VCoins, or a dealer I interacted with in person. I think I have 2 or 3 coins in my collection that have any such information. And I'm not counting the uncleaned ones that were only described as "Spanish," as if that tells me anything. There's probably a divide between high end stuff and what's in my price range, but no documentation beyond an attribution has been the norm for me. And archaeological sites that provide us with bargain basement antoniniani are no less valuable than the ones that give us decadrachms.

The easiest way for the coin collecting community to prevent these laws from happening is to make them unnecessary. If I had the influence to change the community, I'd pressure dealers to adopt a code of ethics stating that they would refuse to sell coins they couldn't account for in 2015 or earlier and to provide some sort of documentation for where they were then. Everyone would still be able to sell their current inventories, so it wouldn't instantly ruin anyone's business, but it would hinder sales of coins from future undocumented digs. It wouldn't stop everyone from doing it, but it would help, and it would give us something to point to when legislators question our activities.

 

I fail to understand how documentation can separate the coins I paid $1 for in 1963 but have no receipt for, from the coins I have from the John Quincy Adams collection bulk lots (not illustrated or minutely described), from the ones I bought yesterday from an old bag including paper envelopes older than am but many coins loose in the bottom having fallen out over the time they were considered so much junk by the heirs of their last owner and the shop owner who bought them as a package with the things he wanted from grandpa's estate. In any event the only part of the hobby that will survive will be the high end slab sellers who can pay the additional $50 a coin needed to do the paperwork. All ancient coins are lost or stolen since none we have were dug up by the guy who buried them. Most of us with cash in our pockets have traces of cocaine:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/14/cocaine.traces.money/
We are all criminal drug possessors and traffickers in stolen merchandise if you follow the politically correct extremists. The question is whether eventual laws will be crafted out of reason or result from the need to pass something that looks good whether it does good or not. Any law that assumes guilt unless innocence can be proven destroys a great deal more than a hobby enjoyed by too few people to matter to politicians.

 

My concern is more for the destruction of archaeological sites and context than it is with who legally should own what. Once this information is gone, it's gone. And the Frome Hoard has taught us that even where a coin is located within a vessel can tell us quite a bit of information. And like it or not, a lot of this destruction is by people with metal detectors who sell to modern dealers or throw them right on Ebay, and such people easily being able to make money by doing this encourages the practice. It's quite reasonable for governments to pass laws to discourage this practice, for this and other reasons.

Are these laws often poorly thought out by people who don't really understand coins? Yep, and it sounds like this law isn't an exception. The problem is that the coin collecting/dealing community, at least from what I've seen, only seems to care about this problem when it comes to effect their business/hobby. If you want this to stop, we need to actually be proactive. We* should be the ones proposing laws to governments that actually make a difference to illegal digging. We should be refusing the sale of coins that we simply know can't have been legally obtained (i.e. the Antioch Hoard of Gallienus almost certainly came from a country that would not have allowed its sale or export, and we know that nothing was preserved beyond the makeup of the hoard, yet major dealers, like Forvm, seem to have no problem with selling coins from it). We should be telling new collectors why they shouldn't buy from Eastern European sellers on Ebay who clearly just dug this stuff out of the dirt. Most of us are here because we love history, so we need to show that we care for the preservation of it. If we don't give everyone else a good reason to think laws like this are unnecessary, then enough of these poorly thought out laws are going to pass to completely screw up the hobby.

*I should probably clarify that I'm not intending any sort of moral judgments on an individual collectors here. Whether or not one person buys a denarius or something has virtually no impact on the underlying problem. Issues like this have to be dealt with collectively to have any sort of impact.

 

I am not necessarily a conspiracy sort, but by signing the petition gives the powers that be your name, and thus a person who has an interest in the matter. It would not take a genius to figure out that you are probably a coin collector, and you have the type of objects they are trying to regulate.

When I read Doug's post I had to smile. I have exactly the same kind of old envelopes that lower grade coins have fallen out of over the past 50-60 years or so. Less than 5% of my collection has any provenance what so ever, thus 95% of my coins could conceivably be subject to forfeiture.

I'm leaving this issue to the big boys, CNG and the other auction houses who have a direct business interest in this. They have the money to hire the legal talent necessary to straighten this out. Signing my name only makes me a target, and I am going to try and fly under the radar.

 

Sorry, don't know. Here in Germany the debate so far has primarily been about works of (modern) art such as sculptures or paintings by Max Beckmann or Georg Baselitz. In both cases, the artist or their heirs have said they would cancel the permanent loan agreements that they have with various museums.

From what I have read about the plans of minister Monika Grütters, the government's initiative is well meant but not well done: It certainly makes a lot of sense to make illegal exports of ancient objects impossible or as difficult as possible. What Ursula Kampmann (the initiator of this petition) emphasizes, however, is that many ancient coins are mass products - think of a Beckmann reprint, not a unique original. That is not her only point (Münzenwoche article in English) but a view that I certainly share.

Whether it was a good idea to end that article with a reference to "fanatic archaeologists", I don't know. Maybe you are heard better in these days of social media like Facebook and Twitter if you are shrill. The German Numismatic Society puts it a little differently, a little more conciliatory maybe (DNG media release, German) but the concerns are the same.

Christian

 

If the objective is to preserve archaeological information then suppressing collecting is a misguided approach that will inevitably fail. Furthermore, it will have negative unintended consequences that will far outweigh the potential (but illusory) positives. After paying attention to this for a long time I still wonder why very intelligent people in the archaeological information game remain PC and don't risk saying the obvious "This approach won't work!"

Here are just a few points I could expand upon:

There is an assumption that laws somehow force behavior to accord with the laws. You might as well pass laws against pre- and extra-marital sex (or alcohol). Perhaps a good idea, but it goes on anyway.

In non-communist countries most people believe in private-property rights. Do governments have the "right" to dictate what their citizens may or may not buy when the negative side of such purchases is of such minor concern?

In the chain of economics from looter to collector there are already strong laws agains looting.

We, in the US, would like to think that a person is who he is, which is not determined by his father, mother, or fore-bearers. The creators of ancient coins are long gone. Cultural patrimony belongs, not to the state happening to occupy certain territory (often of an unrelated culture), but to the world. (Recall that Turkey claims Greek coins found on its soil, and Greece claimed an EID MAR denarius arguably found on its soil. Claims of cultural patrimony are hypocritical. Governments regard coins as having value and are as greedy as any collector.)

People have sought treasure and defiled archaeological sites for thousands of years--long before there was a market in antiquities and numismatic coins.

Information that hoards have beyond just the existence of the coins may be lost--not because coins are found by treasure seekers, but because governments claim ownership and do not adequately reward finders. Only England, with its rational Treasure Trove law, has many well-recorded hoards. For example, Italy, with it's draconian laws about hoards, has few well-recorded hoards. (Duncan-Jones, in an article on the mobility of coins from place to place, stated he had to leave out Italy because there were too few recorded hoards!)

Some hoards have information that would be lost if they were not "undisturbed", but most do not. Mostly the information is simply in the existence of the coins. One member mentioned the Frome hoard from England as a case where archaeological information was preserved because the hoard was undisturbed. I invite you to read about the Frome hoard with the intent of seeing how much information was gleaned because it was an undisturbed hoard, as opposed to the information in the existence of the coins themselves. The answer is -- virtually nothing! Furthermore, it was not from an established archaeological site to begin with--it became a site only because it was discovered because of treasure-seeking. So we could argue that collecting brought to light any information that there was in that hoard! What it did bring to light was the coins. If we were to use the anti-collecting logic, we could say the market makes the coins valuable and helped to discover the Frome Hoard and its information.

Archaeology was developed to meet the desires of collectors. All the early famous archaeologists were, or were supported by, collectors who expected to (and did) take home the stuff. It eventually morphed into a scholarly subject, but it is still largely funded by (read "dependent upon") collectors and organizations supported by collectors. Without collecting, the interest of the wealthy people who make archaeology happen would wither. This would be a major unintended consequence of anti-collecting schemes.

Many scholars were first intrigued by collections. They might never have made their contributions without the interest provoked by collecting. Even Nathan Elkins, one of the foremost exponents in the anti-collecting camp, admits he used to be a collector. Would he even be studying antiquity had he not collected?

Without collectors the institutions that support scholarship would die. The ANS and RNS and major numismatic societies of Europe, which together publish most of the important information about ancient coins, would die without the support of collectors. There are far to few academicians to keep them going.

There are relatively few academics and a large number of amateurs (in the best sense of the word) making contributions to scholarship about ancient coins. Professional scholars are not able to deal with the volume of information and the amateurs who do are collectors and most would not be involved if collecting were not a motivation. (For example, It took academics over 50 years to publish the very limited amount of material in the Dead Sea Scrolls!)

A substantial percentage of the "scholarly" works on ancient-coins were written by amateurs who became experts because of their collections.

The information that could potentially be associated with any given coin is infinitesimal. The type may have some small amount of information, but so do other coins of the same type. The idea of keeping track of provenance is proposed to make collecting financially impossible, not because it matters in the slightest.

There may be the idea that academics are better stewards of artifacts than collectors. That is false. Anyone in the field of die-studies (which are essential to many PH.D.s in ancient numismatics) knows that commercial sale-catalogs provide more and better illustrations than all the museums put together. The commercial need to satisfy collectors' demand for photographs has the consequence that scholars benefit.

Google information about almost any ancient-coin topic. If information is the goal, you can see far more information on the web is provided by collectors and dealers than by scholars.

A large fraction of archaeological information gathered from professional digs remains unpublished twenty and more years after it was uncovered. I have read several articles where the author remarks that excavation began many years ago and bemoans that the work remains unpublished (and probably never will be). Had it been looted, the information left to posterity would not be much different. The archaeology profession is not entirely without blame.

Does anyone out there really think treasure seeking and looting won't continue unabated because of laws against collecting? Does anyone deny that collectors have been the greatest supporters of archaeology and scholarly organizations that promote interest in antiquity? Does anyone deny that collecting makes one care at all about antiquity?

The thought that anti-collecting laws will help is misguided, wrong, and ludicrous!

 

Well said!!!

 

Warren, that is by far the most eloquent and rational defense of collecting I have read. Thank you so much for taking the time to write and post it here!

 

The racism of these countries is encouraged by US officials who tend to forget that those of us on this side of the Atlantic have just as many Great-----Great Grandfathers from what was the Roman Empire as anyone in Italy or any other of these anti-collector countries. Perhaps they have claim on material property found on their land but they can not claim sole ownership of Cultural Property above the rest of us who are equally related to the persons shown on or who spent those coins 2000 years ago. The fact that we were not born over there does not change the fact that we are descended from and have every right to be interested in the coins of our forefathers. Does that mean that I should not be allowed to collect Indian, Chinese, Russian or whatever else there is? That attitude is just as racist as those who believe that only 'Americans' should be allowed to work in 'America'. The difference is that this Cultural Racism is supported by the politically correct administrations that run Western governments. Ask the 21 people currently running for US President where they stand on Cultural Racism. Not one will know to what you refer.