US Returns Ancient Coins to Greece

Discussion in 'Ancient Coins' started by Ancientnoob, Apr 26, 2015.

  1. Ancientnoob

    Ancientnoob Money Changer

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  3. chrisild

    chrisild Coin Collector

    Search the Coin Talk forums for Arnold Peter Weiss. Quite a few threads from 2012 will pop up. :) The guy pleaded guilty then - he had apparently bought those pieces knowing that it was against the law.

    Christian
     
  4. stevex6

    stevex6 Random Mayhem

    well, there goes that idea!!
     
  5. razorblaydesjr

    razorblaydesjr Active Member

  6. John Anthony

    John Anthony Ultracrepidarian

    "Weiss also was required to do 70 hours of community service and write an article about the problem of trading in coins of uncertain origin."

    I wouldn't mind reading that article. Aren't most of our coins of uncertain origin?
     
  7. Ancientnoob

    Ancientnoob Money Changer

    Yes! ...No.
     
  8. Gao

    Gao Member

    Yeah, and it's the thing that makes me uneasy about this hobby, as much as I love it. A lot of coins come from illegal eastern European digs that damage archaeological sites, and it can be very difficult to try to find ones with assurances about other origins. I wish it were the norm to at least get provenance of where a dealer directly acquired a coin from.

    What baffles me is when dealers specifically state that they're from a hoard of unknown origin (i.e. the Antioch Hoard of Gallienus). They're basically saying "We promise these were from an illegal dig" as if that were a selling point. I would never knowingly purchase one of these coins.
     
  9. Bing

    Bing Illegitimi non carborundum Supporter

    You know, I consider myself to be an honest, law abiding kinda guy; however, to be perfectly honest, I think I can take care of these coins as well as many of these country's governments i.e., lost coins/misplaced coins, war destruction, vandalism, etc. I will, quite honestly, buy any coin I can afford from any origin regardless of antiquity laws. One caveat to that is that I would never knowingly buy stolen merchandise even though it can be argued that the coins I buy were stolen from this or that country. It's an interesting conundrum.
     
    dlhill132 likes this.
  10. Ancientnoob

    Ancientnoob Money Changer

    So no illegal coin pile on thread...:muted:?
     
  11. Gao

    Gao Member

    Part of the problem is that it's not just what happens to the coins in the long run; it's about the destruction of context. Whether coins were found in a house, in the middle of nowhere, or in what was some sort of destroyed treasury tells us something about the site and its connection to these items and the ancient economy. Let's take that Antioch Hoard of Gallienus. It's assumed that it came from near the mint site given the state of these coins and their uniformity to that mint. But what if it turned out that they were dug up somewhere really unexpected, like near Alexandria? That would give us good reason to reconsider how these coins moved through that period. But since the source of these coins is clouded in mystery, we'll never know if anything unusual was going on.

    Even the relative positions of coins within a hoard can provide us with information. Consider the Frome Hoard. If those were just dumped on the market anonymously, we'd know that it most likely came from England due to the coins within, but it probably would have been assumed that they were just someone's savings thrown in a few jars and buried haphazardly. However, the archaeologists carefully kept track of where the coins were, and they discovered that there seemed to be layers of certain types. That combined with the shier weight of the single jar they were in (heavy enough where it would be extremely difficult to retrieve) has led to the conclusion that this wealth was from multiple families who each poured in their money, then buried it without the intent to recover it, probably as some sort of sacrifice. We'd have no way of knowing this without careful recovery and recordkeeping, and I have to wonder what other weird things we're missing from other coin digs.

    I'm not saying that coin collecting is ruining all archaeology forever or that it's doing more than a tiny fraction of the damage that the current Middle East conflicts are doing to archaeological sites, but the trade of ancient coins does have a cost. At the very least, we should try to buy coins with provenance when they're available and avoid buying coins when we have good reason to think their source isn't on the up and up (i.e. the Antioch Gallienus Hoard or those Eastern European guys on ebay who have small lots of things that they clearly just dug out of the ground). Ideally we'd have some way to pressure dealers to be better about providing us with provenance, but I doubt that's going to be easy to do. I'd also like to see VCoins have an option to search for coins with provenance the same way you can check off a box to show only Roman Imperial coins. Forvm now has a section for that, and I applaud them for it.
     
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  12. TIF

    TIF Always learning.

    I hadn't noticed Forvm's "search by provenance" feature and took a quick browse a few moments ago.

    Some examples of cited provenances from that browsing:

    "ex Andrew McCabe Collection",
    "ex Seaver Collection",
    "ex BCD Collection",
    etc.

    Nice, but that has nothing to do with where and by whom the coins were found so it doesn't really address your concerns.
     
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  13. Ancientnoob

    Ancientnoob Money Changer

    Ex TIF
    Ex Ancientnoob
    Ex Whatever it makes no difference and here we are.
     
  14. Gao

    Gao Member

    Yeah, it's far from ideal, but I still think it's better than nothing. If we can keep the chain of ownership known, we can help determine whether something came from a recent dig or not, and that's a start. I.E. if I saw a coin that looked like it fit right in that Antioch Gallienus Hoard, but I can trace it to a collector who sold his collection before that hoard became public, I'd know that I at least wasn't getting a coin from that particular illegal dig. Ideally, all dealers would at least list where they got all of their coins from, so we could chose a coin from "Joe Smith from Alabama" or "A wholesaler from Turkey who wouldn't give me further information." The former wouldn't guarantee that it's from a legal dig, but I'd still be more comfortable than the latter. And even if we can't get everyone to do that, if such documentation became the norm, we'd at least have an easy way of avoiding recent digs and hopefully lower demand for coins of unknown origin enough to discourage the practice of digging them somewhat. There is no solution that's going to completely fix the problem, particularly with so many coins with unknown histories on the market and in collections, but I do think we can try to help improve things a little bit.

    That said, I have done a rather poor job of keeping track of this myself. It was only recently that I started thinking much about this, and I probably couldn't tell you where half my coins came from, and only two have any provenance beyond the person I directly bought them from (and one of those just traces back to a store on VCoins). I'm going to try to do better in the future in general.
     
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  15. medoraman

    medoraman Supporter! Supporter

    Weiss is a snake. He wrote some holier than thou garbage preaching what not to do when he went out of his way. He intentionally knew the coin he personally was arranging to import was illegal. he was selling it as authentic, then when he was caught, claimed it was a counterfeit to get out of jail.

    Miserable human being masquerading as a medical doctor and a coin smuggler. No one who knows the situation takes him or any of his governmental imposed preaching seriously.
     
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  16. sgt23

    sgt23 Active Member

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