Viewing ancient coin collectors as criminals!

While most people (family/friends/fellow collectors) whom happen to come across your collection may find it cool and curious, there are certain groups that see you as a criminal who possess looted pieces of 'rare' artefacts that should only belong in a museum.
One similar post below that I saw on an ancient Roman forum on reddit puts it well.

What are your thoughts on this?

 

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Well, it is Equine droppings……….There we’re people in Roman times collecting too. We only look in our narrow time frame…

 

Hogwash.

 

Twaddle.

They seem to be bitter because they can't share their own research on Roman sites, for fear it may be used by looters, and have (for some unknown reason) decided to take it out on coin collectors...

 

Ignorance

 

You can't fix stupid.

 

I know how to fix the problem, remove yourself from the ignorance.
Tell Meta Twitter and any other social media that wants to cancel anyone where they can stick it.

 

So where do the coins hoards from Auctions houses come from? Do you think most are dug up and exported legally?

 

The Reddit person is giving his/her opinion.
I have a different opinion.
Ultimately, I don't know, if anyone can "win" such an argument, in a way that will convince everyone.
It seems like, it's just a bunch of people, giving their opinions.
And some people, will get angry.
And some people, will act self righteous.
Ultimately, it seems like, it just comes down to, what people want.
Do the majority of people, want to criminalize the ownership, of anything older than 500 years?
In a democracy, the majority wins.
I vote, not to criminalize the ownership, of anything older than 500 years.
It's not worth it, to me, to criminalize the ownership, of anything older than 500 years.
It seems like, anything in the ground, belongs to whomever owns the land.
In most countries, it is illegal to steal. Which means that, it is illegal to take something, which doesn't belong to you.
If someone digs, on someone else's land, and takes something out of the ground, without the landowner's permission, then that is stealing.
There are already laws, against stealing.
That seems enough, to me.
But, that's just my opinion.

 

People on both sides of this argument need to be honest. Archaeologists need to admit that the market will always exist in some forms. The UNESCO agreement was passed 50 years ago and the fact that they're still complaining about looting suggests it was an abject failure. Archaeologists suggesting policy points often describe the market as if it's a one way flow of items from source countries to countries like the US, when in reality there are large numbers of collectors in many of those source countries too, they're just not as willing to share as those of us in the US because of the policies of their countries. Some of these collectors go through great lengths to keep their collections out of their home countries, storing them in banks and vaults in other countries with better policies, only because of the danger of keeping them nearby.

Collectors, on the other hand, need to admit that there are tons of recently dug up coins on the market. It is intellectually dishonest to suggest otherwise. Some venues are worse about this than others, and it is easy to avoid the obvious ones, but it should be obvious to anyone who pays attention. Some of these fresh coins just show up with 1000 similar-looking, similarly cleaned coins from a given time period and are obviously not just the accumulation of a single collector. Sometimes these groups are mysterious and there's never any information accompanying them, and we as collectors should not prefer this. Other times they come described like the coin below which is in a current CNG Auction and which, in my experience, tends to elevate a coin's interest and value above a similar but unprovenanced example:


I personally think the PAS and similar systems are the best frameworks for balancing both the well-founded concerns around loss of context and information, and the fact that the market and collectors will always exist. Any system that does not fairly compensate finders for the value of their finds will always be weighed by finders against the incentive of simply dumping the coins unreported on the market, whether those finders are actual people looking for objects with metal detectors or just people who occasionally come across a coin while plowing their fields. Likewise, as England shows(and even other countries like Italy and Spain if one looks for foreign language forums), there are a number of people whose interest is solely in finding coins for their own collection and if their coins will be seized and they'll go to jail for reporting them, they're going to get socked away in a drawer somewhere and never reported. Even if an heir decides to turn them over to the state, all that information is already gone. A system like the PAS simply aligns the priorities of the archaeologists(and really, all of humanity) by prioritizing recording and documentation, with that of the market by giving clear and unambiguous title to the coins to the finders and landowners and clear provenance should they decide to send them to market.

I'll also point out that while year after year more and more source countries like Italy, Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, etc. are asking the US for more and more restrictions on imports of items they consider their cultural heritage, the UK has, to my knowledge, never asked for such restrictions. The success of the PAS is borne out by this. The UK has its looting problem under control far better than any of these countries and as such, does not need to ask the US to help enforce UK laws.

 

Why should only a select few be allowed to own ancient coins or antiquities?

 

The concern about the destruction caused by looting is valid. We want to conserve these ancient sites so that we can learn as much as possible from them. And that means excavation by professionals and not smash and grab thieves. We would certainly know more if every coin had a find site attached to it. That said, they are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
If ancient coins were not collected then they wouldn't get near the study that they do today. We would learn far less from history and not be using one of our best, untainted, sources if private collectors were no longer allowed to own them.
I did get a kick out of that pedantic posters second to last sentence. "It's distasteful and promotes criminality."
Kind of like how, once upon a time, people thinking that women voting or homosexuality was "distasteful" or when pot was illegal and certain groups lumped it in with blow and H. Breaking laws and "Criminality" are important for cultures and societies to learn and leave behind antiquated ideas.
And his last sentence, "Can we please ban showing off coins on this sub."
It's a question with a period at the end? Not sure I believe this person works on geophysical site finding. I don't know what they would lie about that but people online do all the time.
Here's a coin type that could still use study:

 

Even with ancient coin collecting historically allowed, I remember reading that there are an estimated 10 million uncatalogued ancient coins in the basements of museums in Rome and Naples alone -- many of which have probably been sitting there for a century or more. I suggest that if ancient coin collecting had been banned all these years, there would be tens of millions of additional coins sitting in museums around the world. And only a tiny percentage of those museums would have made the effort to examine and catalogue their coins, let alone make images of them publicly available for study. Furthermore, it's not primarily archaeologists who've contributed to the knowledge we have about ancient coins: without private collectors and their research, we wouldn't know all that much more than people did 100 years ago. Yes, university academics have authored many of the most famous ancient coin catalogues, but a lot of them historically were collectors as well.

 

People have been finding caches of precious metal coins for millennia. Most discoveries went right to the local village goldsmith to be melted.

Governments are not usually good custodians of precious metal coinage either. Older issues were routinely melted for recoinage. Even today, beautiful and significant coins suffer the same fate.



(Photo from PCGS website)

This is a gorgeous and historic gold coin issued by Iceland commemorating the 1000th anniversary of the adoption of Christianity in Iceland. The obverse depicts a medieval crozier, while the reverse shows the four guardian spirits of the land. Three thousand of these were minted, but because of poor marketing they did not sell that well. 1550 were melted. If you find one today (and good luck with that) you can thank a collector who saved it from the melting pot.

I maintain that without an active trade in numismatics, very few coins of any sort would be purposefully conserved, whether modern or ancient.

 

Brava, brava, brava. Thank you, Donna. I do not have sufficient thumbs to give you the thumbs up that this post deserves.

 

My "buck two fifty":

The definition of "looting" itself is vague. When my wife's family moved here as refugees from Tajikistan, they had to leave behind a lot of things. For example, they owned prayer centuries old books and rugs passed on from family members long forgotten.

They were literally forced to flee in the middle of the night. A neighbor stood guard that evening with a shotgun, in exchange for all the furniture and possessions in their house. Otherwise, they would have been killed like others they knew.

Had they taken these items to the US, it would have been considered "looting". This is despite the fact that they'd been in their family for centuries. This is despite the fact that the Bukharian community that manufactured them were persecuted and thrown out.

So, a few things they sold to Israeli collectors, who bribed border guards to let them pass. Was this looting? Or should they have stayed in Tajikistan, where they most likely would have been destroyed? Anything of value they attempted to take, even wedding rings, were confiscated at the border, then punished.

The rest of the things they buried. They took great care to bury things in a way that they may be preserved for some time, but they have no plans to return for them. Someday someone will dig them up. When/if they do, where will these artifacts belong? Should they stay in Tajikistan, which was barely a country when they left, and who's people have no connection to them? Should they be restricted to the Soviet Union, which no longer exists? Should they go to Israel, which shares a religion but nothing else? Should my wife's family, if they can be traced, have a right to reclaim them? Or should they just go to the highest bidder?

While I'm all in favor of protecting historic sites (and in most countries this is called "trespassing"), the bitter pill is that most definitions of looting are created by one set of people to protect what they previously took from another.

 

While I am in favor of museums and universities owning coins and antiquities, many of them obtained by what now would be regarded as questionable methods (during the 19th century for example), when European academics regarded their colonies as fair game for the conveyance of even large items, e.g., large statues and objects like the Rosetta stone back to Europe to be cataloged, studied, and exhibited - but perhaps the pendulum has swung back a bit too far with overly restrictive import laws.

So long as there is money to made in the antiquities trade enforcement will always be a step behind unscrupulous characters. Collectors who preserve, classify, and extend the provenance of coins are in fact increasing the body of knowledge surrounding these items. The U.K. seems to have struck a balance with the competing priorities involved in the discovery of treasure, something that other nations could emulate.

 

I 100% agree. Maybe I didn't communicate that well by starting with the counterpoint. But that's exactly what I was trying to say when I typed...

 

I was actually trying to express my agreement with you!

 

Banning the sale of "looted" coins would solve nothing. It is as if one were to command the ocean's tide not to come ashore. Over the centuries, to this day, coins and artifacts have been unearthed intentionally or unintentionally, putting the findings on the market for collectors and institutions to acquire.

It is part of human nature, I believe, especially in circumstances of poverty or war, or both simultaneously, to do whatever can be done to survive. If one were starving and subject to bombing and famine, and the possibility of finding coins and objects that would produce a little money is available, how could this opportunity be resisted? Of course, this could lead to the loss of any hoard provenance, as well as the disturbance a site with the potential loss of archeological information and objects, such as pottery shards.

I am not saying that all the coins entering the market are from individuals living in these circumstances, but the fact is that coins do flow out of countries and regions where conflict prevails, such as Syria or Yemen, or where poverty is widespread, such as Gaza, Egypt and Jordan. Now Afghanistan is on the verge of disintegrating, can be added to the list, if it has not been there for decades.

There should be preservation of archeological sites and significant artifacts - objects of major historical, cultural or artistic importance - for they do represent a global heritage. But coins are an animal of different stripes. Because of their very nature, they circulated throughout the ancient world, some more than others. That makes their discovery geographically disparate, often far afield from their origins. Attempts to restrict the flow of these coins is misdirected. It would be ideal if other countries adopted some version the UK's PAS, but in these turbulent times this is not a priority with nations and international bodies.

The flow of ancients into the markets provide a means for this coin to be purchased, studied, attributed, displayed, eventually passed on to future generations, and, who knows, perhaps even a return to its country of origin somewhere down the road.