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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Gao, post: 2974734, member: 19409&quot;]So I&#039;ve been slowly working to accomplish a few goals with my collecting.&nbsp; One is to get at least one nummus from the first tetrarchy from each mint.&nbsp; Another is to get every reverse type I can for the reign of Gordian III.&nbsp; I&#039;ve also been trying to get every non-gold imperial denomination from his reign.&nbsp; Haven&#039;t been able to find a dupondius in my price range for that one.&nbsp; None of them are complete, and given my low budged and sporadic ability to collect, they won&#039;t be completed soon.&nbsp; But as I&#039;ve been searching, I&#039;ve learned quite a bit about the histories of this period and about these coins through researching them.&nbsp; Like I&#039;m at the point where I can guess a mint for a nummus correctly just from seeing the bust more often than not.&nbsp; So what have I learned from this that I couldn&#039;t learn from reading books or looking up information online?&nbsp; And what will completing any of these add our shared numismatic and historical knowledge?</p><p><br /></p><p>Nothing.</p><p><br /></p><p>Don&#039;t get me wrong, there are certainly people who collect ancient coins who are doing their best to accomplish something meaningful, and several are on this board.&nbsp; But those just trying to collect a complete emperor portrait set?&nbsp; To collect the Twelve Caesars in silver?&nbsp; To collect something in some narrower range like me?&nbsp; We&#039;re all just trying to collect trinkets they like to fill holes in an arbitrary list, and we&#039;d all probably contribute exactly as much to the field of numismatics if we instead collected Magic: The Gathering cards.&nbsp; I don&#039;t think there&#039;s any sort of survey taken of coin collectors about this (and doing one on a forum like this isn&#039;t really going to be a random sample of collectors), but I&#039;d be willing to bet you&#039;ll have at least a hundred of hole fillers for each person who will even try to find anything meaningful from all the coins they handle.</p><p><br /></p><p>And in a vacuum, there&#039;s nothing wrong with that.&nbsp; However, I feel like the debate about how to handle coins tends to be framed as &quot;numismatists vs. archaeologists&quot; and who will take better care of coins and get better, more valuable information, etc..&nbsp; But I&#039;m not a numismatist in any sense other than being a collector for what I&#039;ve done than I was a scientist for reading Discover Magazine every month as a teenager, nor are all those other people just trying to fill empty holes.&nbsp; Like it or not, these are most of the people who are involved in the ancient coin trade.&nbsp; Some who do meaningful numismatic work like them, some want them to stop, and some have views in between.&nbsp; In the grand scheme of things, any debate about ethics or laws about the ancient coin industry is primarily about whether it&#039;s worth the cost for us hole fillers to keep buying our trinkets the way we&#039;ve been doing it, not the study of numismatics.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>So are dealer and hole fillers good custodians of these artifacts?</i></p><p>According to this very thread, I was overestimating the value dealers and collectors had of keeping any kind of paperwork or evidence of the country of origin for ancient coins until recently.&nbsp; And let&#039;s be clear; keeping a piece of paper in a file folder or at least writing down where something came from on a flip is something that takes very little effort.&nbsp; So is a dealer adding a line saying &quot;this coin came from...&quot; to a receipt.&nbsp; To be frank, we&#039;ve been lazy and neglectful of preserving basic information about the objects we say we love.&nbsp; And yes, I included myself in this.&nbsp; These are pieces of history.&nbsp; We&#039;re allowing a lot of that history to be stripped from them for really seemingly no reason, and it sounds like the only thing that&#039;s making some people change is worry about law enforcement taking actions that collectors don&#039;t like.&nbsp; Honestly, if it takes the threat of possibly losing part of a collection or having a sale seized to make us do the bare minimum we should have been doing the whole time, maybe that threat really is necessary.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>On laws</i></p><p>So I think there are really two different issues that are being conflated:</p><p><br /></p><p>1. Are laws like the ones I brought up good?</p><p>2. Should I break those laws?</p><p><br /></p><p>With regards to 1, I don&#039;t disagree that extremely strict rules that block all ownership or trafficking of artifacts tend not to help.&nbsp; Even one of the articles I linked from UNESCO pointed out that an open, regulated market tends to cause less harm than if there&#039;s only a black market.&nbsp; However, it can be more complicated than that.&nbsp; An article I stumbled onto the other day (which I can try to find again if anyone&#039;s interested) was arguing that Lebanon&#039;s 1933 law was actually pretty good, with the government getting first pass at antiquities, paying a fair price for them if they&#039;re acquired, and letting them go for sale if they don&#039;t want them.&nbsp; It sounds similar to the English law.&nbsp; But the problem is that people in Lebanon generally don&#039;t trust the government to pay them fairly, so they immediately go to the black market.&nbsp; That&#039;s a complicated issue that can&#039;t be solved simply by making the law more or less restrictive.</p><p><br /></p><p>As for the second, let&#039;s assume that in the next few years, US military memorabilia becomes really popular overseas.*&nbsp; Ebay gets filled with medals, uniforms, etc. whose prices keep going up and up as buyers from Lebanon and Turkey and Egypt buy up as much as they can.&nbsp; Because of this, looting breaks out in military cemeteries across the country.&nbsp; Everything from grave clothes to grave markers gets taken, thrown up on Ebay or V-Soldiers with no provenance given for their origin.&nbsp; Rarely a day goes by when another grave at Arlington is emptied or another veteran&#039;s home robbed.</p><p><br /></p><p>So after this has been going on for like a decade, you take a vacation in Lebanon.&nbsp; By this point, let&#039;s assume they solved all the issues they had with the antiquities market, and you&#039;ve heard that this curio shop has some ancient coins for sale.&nbsp; You head in, and half the shop is filled with this US military memorabilia.&nbsp; There&#039;s medals, uniforms, grave markers, and full on headstones.&nbsp; You ask him if those are real, and he assures you that he guarantees authenticity of all items for life.&nbsp; So you ask him where it all came from, and he says that he bought it all from private collectors and dealers, but it&#039;s really impossible to tell the exact origin source of any of these items due to how many times they changed hands before it came to him.&nbsp; You bring up that the chances that a headstone of a Civil War veteran was legally exported is pretty slim and you&#039;re uncomfortable with him selling that, but he assures you that he isn&#039;t knowingly selling anything that was looted.&nbsp; Besides, he goes on, US law is hardly helping looting matters.&nbsp; He explains how a more regulated market would help deal with the problem instead of just straight up banning the sale of items from military graves.&nbsp; Besides, he&#039;s not the kind of guy who&#039;d sell the actual bodies of US soldiers like they do in Egypt.&nbsp; And it&#039;s not like the culture or people from back then have much to do with who&#039;s living in the US today.&nbsp; You&#039;re probably not even related to the soldiers these things originally belonged to.</p><p><br /></p><p>Would you be OK with that?&nbsp; Or would you be a tad upset with this guy knowing full well that at least a large chunk of his inventory was your country&#039;s looted heritage?&nbsp; Would a discussion of exactly how US law should handle this change your mind?&nbsp; I&#039;m thinking for most people, at least in the US, the answer would be no.&nbsp; The United States has sovereignty over American land, and a I&#039;d consider someone who violated that, who violated our laws to fill out their collection of pieces of our history to be at best an asshole.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m not saying that digging up coin hoards is usually grave robbery (though that certainly is part of the illegal antiquities trade).&nbsp; But think about how you&#039;d react to the above scenario, the demographics of ancient coin collectors, and the countries with laws to protect what they see as their cultural property.&nbsp; Most of us are white guys of Western European decent.&nbsp; To treat the sovereignty of what are often Middle Eastern and African countries over their own land and their own historical legacy as irrelevant when it comes in the way of filling holes in your trinket collection is pretty much peak white privilege.&nbsp; It&#039;s massively disrespectful, and for most of us, born out of pure selfishness and disregard for those who aren&#039;t in our in group.</p><p><br /></p><p>That said, while most of us are hole fillers, people doing actual, meaningful numismatic study do exist.&nbsp; And it&#039;s quite possible that something comes on the market from a shady source, but there&#039;s something is unusual about it that should be studied by a numismatist.&nbsp; Is it worth putting money into the grey (at best) market to get it studied?&nbsp; That&#039;s a complicated enough issue that at best, I feel like it should be judged on a case by case basis.&nbsp; Like if you think that Malloy was justified in buying this hoard to do a proper study of it before it got broken up further even if its legality is at best ambiguous?&nbsp; I&#039;m not sure I&#039;d call you entirely wrong.&nbsp; But keep in mind that such a justification only goes up to such a study.&nbsp; Any further sale of the coins, unless it&#039;s to someone else for meaningful numismatic study, is just buying a coin of dubious legality to fill a hole in your collection.</p><p><br /></p><p>*If you&#039;re outside the US, pretend I&#039;m using references to your home country.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Revising my judgement on the legality of the Antioch Gallienus Hoard</i></p><p>It looks like I was overestimating how much paperwork was valued back then, and we have at least one example of a hoard hanging around for a surprisingly long time in private hands after being dug up.&nbsp; Those are definitely factors to account for when we&#039;re trying to figure out whether this hoard was exported legally.&nbsp; Another important factor I hadn&#039;t brought up is that Lebanon had a civil war from 1975-1990, and during that period, there was a massive surge in illegally exported antiquities.</p><p><br /></p><p>So what we have is a hoard that is likely from Syria or Lebanon, though Turkey is still possible.&nbsp; It came on the market right after a long surge of illegal antiquities exports from Lebanon.&nbsp; The Lebanese system of licensing antiquities dealers sounds like it collapsed in the early 80s as well, so it can&#039;t have been legally exported from that country after then.&nbsp; As for the other countries, Syria still limits its exports quite a bit, and it sounds like Turkey just doesn&#039;t allow them.&nbsp; Looking at that I still have to say that it&#039;s more likely than not that this hoard was exported illegally, and if I had to put money on it, I&#039;d say it was probably one of the many, many items that was smuggled out of Lebanon during that civil war.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>On ethics, laws, and individual collectors</i></p><p>So it seems a common response is something along the lines of &quot;change the laws.&quot;&nbsp; While I agree that many of these laws need revising, that&#039;s kind of an odd response to bring up to someone who does not live in those countries and doesn&#039;t have the slightest way of influencing those laws.&nbsp; As far as I know, we don&#039;t have anyone in those countries on the board.&nbsp; It&#039;s probably not on purpose, but all this does is divert the question from what, if anything, an individual collector outside of those countries should do.</p><p><br /></p><p>So how much influence does one collector have?&nbsp; Unless you&#039;re buying and selling huge amounts, not much.&nbsp; None of us on our own are going to stop these problems.&nbsp; But no big changes come from just one individual.&nbsp; It&#039;s about enough people taking actions, and that requires the actions of us individuals.&nbsp; Each one of us who stops buying questionable coins moves the demand curve for such things ever so slightly to the left, and the less lucrative we make this part of the market, the less incentive there is to loot.&nbsp; We&#039;re not going to stop it completely, but that doesn&#039;t mean we shouldn&#039;t each use that tiny amount of influence we have to do what we can.</p><p><br /></p><p>What I&#039;m primarily asking is that we think about what we buy.&nbsp; Like if you see a dealer with nice coins on Ebay, but he only occasionally gives provenance as something like &quot;the Balkans&quot; and has a handful of random artifacts that it sometimes identifies as being Bulgarian?&nbsp; Ask yourself what the chances are that he&#039;s getting these legally.&nbsp; And think about the coins themselves and their circulation.&nbsp; There are certainly coins that had circulation so wide that there&#039;s almost no way to figure out a likely find site from the coin itself, like Roman denarii.&nbsp; But, say, a provincial bronze of Pisidian Antioch?&nbsp; How many of those do you honestly think ever made it out of Pisidia let alone the modern border of Turkey before modern times?&nbsp; It&#039;s probably not zero, but do you honestly think those few are what you&#039;re seeing all over V-Coins and Ebay?&nbsp; There are plenty of coin types where you can show that the vast majority were traded over a small area.&nbsp; If you see one of those, and you know that country it was likely found in has had strict export laws since before metal detectors were common, are you sure you want to buy it?</p><p><br /></p><p><i>On noobs and how we introduce the hobby</i></p><p>So I don&#039;t feel like I was making informed decisions when I bought most of my coins, and I&#039;m wondering how many other people feel the same at this point.&nbsp; Like for all the intro sites and books I read, few mentioned smuggling at all.&nbsp; Like at most it would be acknowledged as a thing, but then followed up by noting that plenty of legally dug coins have been traded for ages, and then acted like there wasn&#039;t much to worry about.&nbsp; Strict export laws only came up when it affected US collectors, which made it sound like it was a new phenomenon.&nbsp; Don&#039;t get me wrong, I should have checked on this sort of stuff myself instead of naively following along with the community and not thinking about it too hard.&nbsp; But there are a lot of purchases that I never would have made if I had been aware of, say, the fact that Turkey banned antiquities exports in 1869.</p><p><br /></p><p>How are new people supposed to make informed decisions about the hobby if we&#039;re not informing them?&nbsp; You don&#039;t have to approve the laws or anything, but shouldn&#039;t you be upfront and let people know that&#039;s a thing so that they can decide the ethics themselves?&nbsp; Why aren&#039;t we telling them this?</p><p><br /></p><p>For that matter, I&#039;ve never seen any store acknowledge this.&nbsp; They have obvious reasons not to want to, but shouldn&#039;t there at least be a disclosure like &quot;While I cannot guarantee that ever coin left its country of origin legally, as ancient coins change often hands many times without leaving records, everything I sell either comes from a US (or whatever country) collector or was exported by someone with a verified export license&quot;?&nbsp; Also, does V-Coins check export licenses of its sellers from countries where that&#039;s relevant?&nbsp; It&#039;s not not mentioned on the code of ethics.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>On the Frome Hoard and field finds</i></p><p><br /></p><p>I think this hoard is important, so I&#039;m going to more directly answer some comments.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>This isn&#039;t the first hoard that was probably a votive offering.&nbsp; <a href="https://www.le.ac.uk/lahs/downloads/2006/2006%20(80)%20197-208%20Score.pdf" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.le.ac.uk/lahs/downloads/2006/2006%20(80)%20197-208%20Score.pdf" rel="nofollow">The East Leicestershire Hoards</a> had clear signs of being votive offerings around a century and a half before the Frome Hoard (and itself is more evidence of how much context of a hoard can tell us both about the use of coins and history).&nbsp; And while the Frome Hoard certainly has more coins, nearly 10 times as many, we need to keep in mind what kinds of coins were in each hoard.&nbsp; The Frome Hoard was almost all heavily debased antoniniani, with a handful of nice denarii of Carausius.&nbsp; What was found and Leicestershire was all silver and gold.&nbsp; Most likely, this earlier collection of hoards represented more wealth than what was buried at Frome.&nbsp; So given that we know that people sometimes did make offerings of even greater amounts of money with no intention to ever recover them, that the vessel at Frome is one that they had to have known was far to heavy to recover without great difficulty (remember that they could have just buried multiple small vessels instead), and the strange order of coins inside indicating wealth from multiple sources being added at once, I&#039;d have to say that the ritual offering hypothesis is quite a strong one.</p><p><br /></p><p>But let&#039;s look at what you suggested.&nbsp; If the community was saving up for something big that they planned to buy, why did they put it all in one gigantic jar that they&#039;d have so much trouble recovering?&nbsp; It&#039;s not like pottery was that hard to make and they just happened to have that one giant jar around for some reason.&nbsp; In addition, significantly sized buildings cost a LOT of money. Could they really afford much with even this many debased antoniniani?&nbsp; Like it would probably have to be something small.&nbsp; And if a whole community knew where it was, why didn&#039;t any recover it?&nbsp; And if that many people knew about it, why were they even burying it?&nbsp; Like I guess forcing someone to use a shovel if they want to steal it would slow them down a little, but isn&#039;t the point to make sure people don&#039;t know about it? </p><p><br /></p><p>In any case, this would still teach us about the ancient world should a convincing argument for this hypothesis be offered.&nbsp; Like it would be pretty good evidence that a community got wiped out around this time.&nbsp; And it would tell us something about the community practices when it came to public buildings.&nbsp; And it might tell us that despite all the debasement, you could still built significant public works without significant amounts of precious metals.&nbsp; That seems like a lot of information we could find out if you made a good enough case for this interpretation, and all of it would be gone if the hoard weren&#039;t documented properly.</p><p><br /></p><p>So how about the warchest hypothesis?&nbsp; Again, we have the issue that this hoard was stored in such a way that it was very difficult to recover.&nbsp; Why would someone who wished to recover these coins at some point do this?&nbsp; And if someone was suddenly building up a war chest, wouldn&#039;t he keep it with him for easy access?&nbsp; Like why bury it if you have guards or you think you&#039;re going to use it soon?&nbsp; And he probably would have to use it soon given how unstable that period was.</p><p><br /></p><p>But let&#039;s assume that someone makes a good enough case to show that this was the likely scenario despite all this.&nbsp; Then this is an important data point for figuring out the history of Carausius&#039; rule over Britain, which is something that&#039;s pretty poorly documented.&nbsp; If we can figure out which person was likely to have buried this (something that would take some work, but might be doable), we might be able to figure out how much he planned to pay his soldiers and get a rough idea of soldier pay in the area at the time.&nbsp; And I have a feeling that you&#039;d be able to get something out of Carausius&#039; coins being all in one layer, indicating that one person or one community worked with him, but not the rest.&nbsp; Basically, we&#039;d once again have a bunch of information that we would not have if we didn&#039;t have archaeologists record the find properly.</p><p><br /></p><p>In addition, I think it&#039;s important to note that even if all you have is the contents of a hoard and knowing that it was from an empty field, you can still learn a lot.&nbsp; <a href="https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:274169/FULLTEXT01.pdf" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:274169/FULLTEXT01.pdf" rel="nofollow">This article from COINS IN CONTEXT I New perspectives for the interpretation of coin finds</a> is worth a read.&nbsp; It&#039;s about medieval hoards in Sweden, which is something I don&#039;t think many of us have direct interest in, but the way the author analyzed the hoards is important.&nbsp; She showed that there were some interesting differences between those hoards in open fields than those buried elsewhere, and like the above two hoard locations, she suggests that these were also buried without intent to ever recover them, though this time for rather different reasons.&nbsp; But the important thing is that just because a hoard is found in an open field, it doesn&#039;t mean that it won&#039;t tell us important archaeological information.&nbsp; This paper could not have been written without those hoards being recorded.</p><p><br /></p><p>I think I should also be specific as to why I&#039;m bringing this up, as it&#039;s not really to justify the laws of these countries exactly as they are:</p><p>1. The destruction of context is a serious issue even for coins.&nbsp; Ever time someone digs up a hoard or even individual coin and doesn&#039;t record the circumstances of its origin, we lose a piece of information about the ancient world.&nbsp; The exact significance and amount of this information will vary depending on the find, but the above examples show us that such hoards can give us significant information about religious practices in the regions of the hoards.</p><p>2. Buying coins from smugglers who don&#039;t record find information properly is helping to support the loss of this information.</p><p>3. The intent of these laws is a good one that benefits anyone who cares more about coins as historical objects than as trinkets to collect, even if the execution of these laws is often very lacking.&nbsp; You should think carefully about whether you want to disrespect these laws, and if you do, how and under what circumstances you feel that it&#039;s justified.</p><p><br /></p><p>I should point out that the above is not a blanket condemnation of numismatic studies or collecting.&nbsp; Clearly plenty of good things have come out of those studies.&nbsp; But pretty much every field of study has had histories of methods that we&#039;d now find unethical, destructive, counterproductive, or just plain bad.&nbsp; Like do you want to know how not to do archaeology?&nbsp; Read up on Heinrich Schiemann&#039;s methods.&nbsp; Dude found Troy, but essentially also destroyed a huge chunk of it in the process.&nbsp; But archaeology has since looked carefully at what he&#039;d done, revised their methods, and did better.&nbsp; The next generation did the same, as did the next.&nbsp; Most likely, in a hundred years, they&#039;ll have a whole load of new methods and cringe at how we did it in the early 21st century.&nbsp; The important thing is that people did their best to preserve the good things they were getting out of archaeology and improve upon its negative aspects.&nbsp; I&#039;m asking that numismatists and collectors acknowledge that we&#039;re currently in a state where harm is being done along with the good, and we work to improve how we do things.&nbsp; We don&#039;t have to deny or abandon the good we&#039;ve already done to do that.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>On archaeologists</i></p><p>OK, look.&nbsp; If you think someone who had a long, hard education and then used that to get into academia is primarily motivated by money, then you either have some pretty distorted ideas about academic salaries or you there&#039;s a university you should be telling all the grad students about.&nbsp; That&#039;s all I&#039;m going to say about the weird conspiracy theories that are stating to come about here.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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