Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Ed Snible, post: 2970954, member: 82322&quot;]Gao, you and I have similar goals, but disagree on the methods that will get us there.</p><p><br /></p><p>If we hold everyone to a difficult standard, such as only collecting coins with pre-1970 (or pre-1869!) provenances, few will be able to collect.&nbsp; Sort of like a 45 MPH highway.&nbsp; Such a policy incentivizes the manufacture of false documentation and purposely losing information such as provenance to a 1990s hoard.</p><p><br /></p><p>You are probably right about the letter of the law.&nbsp; You make an analogy to goods stolen from a house.&nbsp; A better analogy might be stealing an apple off a tree.&nbsp; And I agree that we shouldn’t do that!&nbsp; The problem is how to tell the difference.&nbsp; The diamond people have worked out a protocol.&nbsp; The ivory people also worked out a protocol but theirs isn’t working.</p><p><br /></p><p>Some countries are not tolerant of their ethnic and religious minorities.&nbsp; National governments declare themselves the owner of everything in the ground.&nbsp; Think about what you would do if you were an ethnic minority and found a coin hoard.&nbsp; Would you, Gao, prefer to turn it over without reward to the national government or sell it to smugglers connected with your group’s independence movement?&nbsp; Why?</p><p><br /></p><p>I don’t need to remind you that the Turkish speaking people arrived in Turkey in the 11th century and the Greek speaking descendants of the people who minted the coins left Turkey in the 1920s.&nbsp; Solve the ethical equation for what an American should do with a coin that was possibly smuggled out of Turkey or Syria during the 20th century.</p><p><br /></p><p>I suggest source countries change the law so that coins found on private lands are partly owned by the land owner.&nbsp; Antiquities on public lands could be owned by the school board of the region they are found rather than by the central government.&nbsp; I realize it is not my place to demand other countries change their policies — but this is a “collective action problem” and thus requires collective action.</p><p><br /></p><p>It is good to ask for documentation and preserve it when it is provided.&nbsp; As collectors the best we can to study and publish coins as Alex Malloy and Dr. David W. Sorenson did with this hoard.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in