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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Curtisimo, post: 2971811, member: 83845&quot;]Nobody is arguing that people should despoil archaeological sites.&nbsp; They absolutely should not.&nbsp; However if the governments of those countries truly want to say that those coins belong to the state then they have an obligation to protect the coins and the site BEFORE it is disturbed! I have been to archaeological sites all over the world and I can tell you that from my experience the countries that have the strictest laws also seem to spend the least investment in protecting the actual sites, many of which were actually stripped centuries (not months) ago.&nbsp; Many government policies seem to want to push the problem onto the collecting community where looted coins are likely a very, very small minority of the market while taking no responsibility to protect the sites they claim to value so highly.</p><p><br /></p><p>By way of illustrating this point, if I leave my gold wedding band unattended in a public place I can assume that most people are honest and wouldn&#039;t take it.&nbsp; However, someone might, and its up to me to make arrangements to keep that from happening.&nbsp; If it is stolen then I will call the cops so they can look for the person that took it.&nbsp; I can&#039;t turn around and demand that anyone who buys gold bullion for the next six months in the whole country must produce proof that the gold they bought didn&#039;t come from my ring!&nbsp; That is not a reasonable deterrent.</p><p><br /></p><p>There is an easy fix though if governments don&#039;t want to invest in protecting the sites... adopt a British style law that encourages people to report finds!&nbsp; Make detectorist and collectors into allies, not enemies.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>This is the point where a post that starts out interesting begins to completely fall apart.&nbsp; You have no evidence that &quot;most&quot; of the coins on the market are looted from archaeological sites.&nbsp; In fact I would contend that that is nonsense.&nbsp; Everyone knows full well that there are coins found at archaeological sites but the balance of evidence is against you in your claim that most of the market is made up of coins looted from these sites.&nbsp; Sure, you can site a few anecdotal instances of hoards in an archaeological context (still not most!) but there is no proof that the lack of such at other sites mean they were stolen and sold.&nbsp; If you read &quot;Coin Hoards from Roman Britain&quot; as [USER=44316]@Valentinian[/USER] suggests you will clearly see that isolated hoards are much more likely to be the primary source of finds both historically and in modern times.</p><p><br /></p><p>Also, ancient coins have been collected and sold for centuries and it is unfair to assume that the majority of the market consists of new finds.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>My biggest problem with this and some of your other posts is that you seem very willing to make some HUGE leaps in interpretation of evidence so long as it fits your conclusion.&nbsp; Many of your arguments read like &quot;no information = confirmation of my conclusion&quot; or &quot;one possible explanation = absolute proof so long as it fits my conclusion&quot;.</p><p><br /></p><p>You can&#039;t know that the Antioch Hoard of Gallienus was not exported perfectly legally for all the reasons I stated in my previous post but you seem very much to want to think that it was not.&nbsp; In my opinion the documentation of this hoard constitutes a step in the right direction and the inclination to want to tear it down for giving you just enough information to come to wild conclusions is baffling.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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