Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 8208255, member: 110350&quot;]I agree. Being realistic, it&#039;s pretty clear that the vast majority of the millions of ancient coins in private hands and on the market -- whether they&#039;ve been in private hands for 2 months, 2 years, or 200 years -- are already completely divorced from any information on the context in which they were found. Not the country, and not the location within that country. As such, they are of minimal archaeological importance (never mind the alleged importance of the cultural heritage they supposedly represent). They have value only as individual objets d&#039;art and for whatever can be learned from them as individual objects and/or by comparing them to other coins of the same or similar type. Furthermore, they&#039;re almost certainly more available for such study if they&#039;re in private hands, and photos are circulated on the Internet -- whether by dealers, in auction catalogs, or on sites like this one when displayed by the collectors who purchase them -- than if they&#039;re put in storage and largely ignored thereafter, as would happen if&nbsp; they ended up in all but a handful of museum collections.</p><p><br /></p><p>I know that there&#039;s an argument that prohibiting or severely restricting the international trade in ancient coins (and antiquities, although the issues are somewhat different given, among other things, the sheer volume of ancient coins on the market), would serve as a deterrent to looting and smuggling. Not that anything like such a prohibition is likely ever to come to pass, but if it did, then what would one do with the millions of coins already on the market, with their archaeological context already lost? Pretend that they don&#039;t exist? Lock them away? Melt them all down? Refuse to allow their study, as some archaeologists and academics would prefer? I decline to believe that the (dubious) potential deterrent effect of such theoretical prohibitions or restrictions would be a net positive when weighed against the loss of information that would result from imposing them. Even simply requiring proof of a long provenance would have a similarly negative effect, I think, given that especially for common coins, it&#039;s usually impossible to establish a provenance longer than a decade or two, if any provenance at all is available.&nbsp; Not because such coins were necessarily looted or smuggled in recent years (or ever), but because most coins in private hands and on the market weren&#039;t ever photographed until relatively recently. And I suspect that even for those that were photographed, it will be a long time before there&#039;s any sort of single database of old auction catalogs and retail listings in which one can look up all examples of, say, a particular type of coin within a range of weights.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in