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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 8207963, member: 74282&quot;]People on both sides of this argument need to be honest. Archaeologists need to admit that the market will always exist in some forms. The UNESCO agreement was passed 50 years ago and the fact that they&#039;re still complaining about looting&nbsp; suggests it was an abject failure. Archaeologists suggesting policy points often describe the market as if it&#039;s a one way flow of items from source countries to countries like the US, when in reality there are large numbers of collectors in many of those source countries too, they&#039;re just not as willing to share as those of us in the US because of the policies of their countries. Some of these collectors go through great lengths to keep their collections out of their home countries, storing them in banks and vaults in other countries with better policies, only because of the danger of keeping them nearby.</p><p><br /></p><p>Collectors, on the other hand, need to admit that there are tons of recently dug up coins on the market. It is intellectually dishonest to suggest otherwise. Some venues are worse about this than others, and it is easy to avoid the obvious ones, but it should be obvious to anyone who pays attention. Some of these fresh coins just show up with 1000 similar-looking, similarly cleaned coins from a given time period and are obviously not just the accumulation of a single collector. Sometimes these groups are mysterious and there&#039;s never any information accompanying them, and we as collectors should not prefer this. Other times they come described like the coin below which is in a current CNG Auction and which, in my experience, tends to elevate a coin&#039;s interest and value above a similar but unprovenanced example:</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1439012[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>I personally think the PAS and similar systems are the best frameworks for balancing both the well-founded concerns around loss of context and information, and the fact that the market and collectors will always exist. Any system that does not fairly compensate finders for the value of their finds will always be weighed by finders against the incentive of simply dumping the coins unreported on the market, whether those finders are actual people looking for objects with metal detectors or just people who occasionally come across a coin while plowing their fields. Likewise, as England shows(and even other countries like Italy and Spain if one looks for foreign language forums), there are a number of people whose interest is solely in finding coins for their own collection and if their coins will be seized and they&#039;ll go to jail for reporting them, they&#039;re going to get socked away in a drawer somewhere and never reported. Even if an heir decides to turn them over to the state, all that information is already gone. A system like the PAS simply aligns the priorities of the archaeologists(and really, all of humanity) by prioritizing recording and documentation, with that of the market by giving clear and unambiguous title to the coins to the finders and landowners and clear provenance should they decide to send them to market.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ll also point out that while year after year more and more source countries like Italy, Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, etc. are asking the US for more and more restrictions on imports of items they consider their cultural heritage, the UK has, to my knowledge, never asked for such restrictions. The success of the PAS is borne out by this. The UK has its looting problem under control far better than any of these countries and as such, does not need to ask the US to help enforce UK laws.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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