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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 3161274, member: 74282&quot;]The hypocrisy of the Cultural Property types cannot be overstated. At best, they are extremely misguided and seemingly willfully ignorant of the realities of the antiquities market. We are told that we must take steps to verify provenance, reject any material that might be &quot;illicit&quot;, whatever its expanded definition is this year, and make sure we&#039;re not contributing to the problem of looting and destruction of archaeological context. Yet, when collectors actually propose working solutions like implementing PAS-like systems across the world that&#039;s somehow a non-starter.</p><p><br /></p><p>If the &quot;Cultural Property&quot; movement is to be believed, England has treasure hunters running rampant and unchecked destroying their archaeological sites so they can find a few trinkets to flog off on eBay and yet England is not asking for any MOU and have really taken a fairly laissez faire attitude with respect to these issues. Many coin auction houses have offices in England and they proudly sell coins from recent hoard finds with details about the find and at least from my observations it seems like simple details such as find spot elevate interest and prices in rather ordinary coins in many circumstances, giving finders even more incentive to properly report their finds. eBay is another great example where you can go any day of the week and find coins being sold with finders proudly sharing find spot information with coins they themselves found, cleaned and are now selling.</p><p><br /></p><p>Because of what I see happening with the PAS I don&#039;t buy for a moment that countries like Italy or Greece are better off without such systems. Hoards are regularly being found and brought to market from these countries just as they are from the UK and we all see evidence of it but few will ever know about the find spots of these hoards or their full contents and often that knowledge will die with those people because it&#039;s rarely written down and published because of the current legal climate. Whereas their stated intentions are the protection of archaeological context and finds, the real consequence of these misguided policies is the destruction of information.</p><p><br /></p><p>The Cultural Property types may have hoped that these policies would curtail the market and make these objects less valuable and thus, lessen the reward for them but here almost half a century since the UNESCO 1970 Convention no one can pretend that these laws have had the intended effect: if anything they seem to have made things worse. It is at this time that we seriously need collectors, archaeologists, museum curators, scholars and everyone else with skin in the game here to be brave and admit that these policies don&#039;t work, that they won&#039;t work and that we can&#039;t keep going down this road if we have as a goal the preservation and expansion of archaeological information. If you&#039;re a collector and that&#039;s not your goal, I don&#039;t know what I can tell you to change your mind at this point and if you&#039;re an archaeologist and that&#039;s not your goal it seems like you probably need a career change, but I think most people here can agree that that is a good goal to work towards and one that few can disagree with.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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