Markus Spreads the Word

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Portable Antiquity Collecting and Heritage Issues is currently a "featured blog" on Markus Millington's ArchNews web portal. ("It's proving to be very popular", I am told). It used to be featured on the CBA website (I only found out about it by accident, nobody had actually asked if they could) but I think I criticised them once too often for not doing something-or-other and they stopped, or perhaps the metal-detectorists complained. There is something called the Maia Atlantis Ancient World Blogs which also re-publishes posts from this blog among other bits and pieces (I really can't see why to be honest as I am not really discussing "the ancient world" as such).

Anyway, it is nice to know the word is being spread, all the better to get more and more people questioning the tenets behind the type of collecting and trade which is criticised here.

Dealer: "the USA Comprises Roughly 50% of the International Market for Antiquities"

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Coin dealer Dave Welsh commenting on Candice Jarman's anti-Barford blog writes of the "sinister efforts" of "the AIA and its academic allies" in collaboration with "anticollecting officials in the US State Department", pursuing "their common goal of closing down the presently licit international antiquities trade". Here we note the different meaning accorded the word 'licit' in US and UK English. We all know that taken as a whole the international antiquities trade is very far from licit. That is not the point however which caught my eye in this diatribe:

Since the USA comprises roughly 50% of the international market for antiquities, if these anticollecting activists succeed in isolating the USA from the rest of the market, there would be profound disturbances for everyone wherever they may reside.

Is that really so? Is the US market that much of a drain on the world's archaeological record? If so, shame on them, shame on them with their shammy shoddy approach to regulating the market (the CCPIA) and their pro-looting members of congress and the judiciary.

What on earth is Welsh presaging when he writes of the "profound disturbances for everyone wherever they may reside" if the USA is "isolated from the rest of the market"? That the market would collapse? Or something more sinister? Is Mr welsh implying that we should consider US participation in the no-questions-asked antiquities market as in some way America's gift to the world, preventing more sinister events occurring? The mind boggles.
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Another Griffin like the Crosby Garrett one?

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Two people have drawn my attention today to Tony Henderson's article "Vindolanda excavators close to hitting jackpot", The Journal Jan 14th 2011.

EXCAVATORS at a Northumberland Roman fort have come tantalisingly close to hitting a cash jackpot. They unearthed a bronze griffin figure, identical to that which features on the peak of a helmet found last year at the north west Cumbrian village of Crosby Garrett by a metal detectorist [...] The latest find was made at Vindolanda fort near Bardon Mill in Northumberland, where 500 volunteers work over the excavating season. Robin Birley, director of research at Vindolanda, said: “The griffin is exactly the same as the Crosby Garrett helmet and has been made by the same craftsman. [...] This has been made for a pretty posh bunch of cavalry and we had cavalry at Vindolanda from time to time.” The discovery is one of several hundred finds made during the excavating season.

The find of two identical bronze griffins made by the same craftsman would be significant. The findspot of the Vindolanda one is certain, the Crosby Garrett find however was undocumented for three months and remains unconfirmed and doubts have been raised about whether the helmet had indeed originally been buried there. This new evidence cvould raise the question whether the Crosby Garrett helmet had been used by a cavalry unit at Vindolanda (a scheduled site)?


While it's a nice story, the truth of the matter is that there are quite considerable differences between the Vindolanda and Crosby Garrett griffins. The former has a flat base, nothing in front and no loops, it's also much smaller than the Crosby Garrett one. It's just a griffin like any griffin. The archaeologists' enthusiasm is getting the better of them.

Note also the way in this story that the current damaging emphasis placed on cash rewards for Treasure by British archaeology's largest outreach scheme has misinformed the journalist that what archaeologists are digging for at Vindolanda is "hitting a cash jackpot".
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Vindolanda griffin.

The demise of phthiraptera.org and the perils of using Internet domain names as identifiers

When otherwise sensible technorati refer to "owning" a domain name, it makes me want to stick forks in my eyeballs. We do not "own" domain names. At best, we only lease them and there are manifold ways in which we could lose control of a domain name - through litigation, through forgetfulness, through poverty, through voluntary transfer, etc. Once you don't control a domain name anymore, then you can't control your domain-name-based persistent identifiers either. - Geoffrey Bilder interviewed by Martin Fenner

Geoffery Bilder's comments about the unsuitability of URLs as long term identifiers (as opposed, say, to DOIs) came to mind when I discovered that the domain phthiraptera.org is up for sale:

This domain used to be home to a wealth of resources on lice (order Phthiraptera). I discovered that ownership of the domain had expired when a bunch of links to PDFs returned by an iSpecies search for Collodennyus all bounced to the holding page above. Phthiraptera.org was owned by the late Bob Dalgleish. After his death, ownership of the domain lapsed, and it's now up for sale. Although much of the content of Phthiraptera.org has been moved to phthiraptera.info, URLs containing phthiraptera.org still turn up in search results, especially ones that have been cached (for example, in iSpecies). Given that much of the content is still available the loss isn't total, but anyone relying on links containing phthiraptera.org to point to content (such as a PDF), or to identify that content (such as a publication) will find themselves in trouble. Although ideally Cool URIs don't change, in practice they do, and with alarming frequency. Furthermore, in this case, because ownership of phthiraptera.org has lapsed, there's no opportunity to create redirects from URLs with phthiraptera.org to the equivalent content in phthiraptera.info (leaving aside the issue that phthiraptera.info is not a mirror of phthiraptera.org, so exactly what the redirects would point to is unclear).

Identifiers based on domain names, such as URLs and LSIDs are attractive because the DNS helps ensure global uniqueness, and HTTP provides a way to resolve the identifier, but all this is contingent on the domain itself persisting. For more on this topic I recommend reading Martin Fenner's interview of CrossRef's Geoffrey Bilder, from which I took the opening quote.

Response to the Wisconsin Twelve: "Not even "for" Secretary Clinton

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Coin dealer Wayne Sayles on his coiney-moany 'Ancient Coin Collecting' blog lectures his readers (somewhat ponderously) on 'How Government Works'. As we know at the end of last year twelve congressional representatives signed a letter (Sayles calls it "the Ryan Letter", I call it a scandal) to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton asking for a review of actions by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs regarding import restrictions on illegally exported coins from Cyprus and China. We learn from Sayles (though there is no link to where we can see this response) that:

the DOS response, signed by the Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs (not even "for" Secretary Clinton), was telling in that it parroted the party line of ECA and ignored the stated congressional concerns.

So failure for the coineys. Probably best all round. Which congressman would like to be tied to attempts to facilitate illegal exports of antiquities from other countries because he did not pay sufficient attention to the context of a request by a lobbying group? I presume that by "parroting the party (sic) line of ECA", Sayles means that in the face of Congressional philistinism, the State Department expressed its commitment to helping cut down the illicit trade of artefacts. Instead of accepting this is about ethical business practices, Sayles adopts the highly-charged blazing-torches-and-pitchforks political language that led to last week's Tucson tragedy, warning:

Coins may well be the straw that broke the camel's back in a growing milieu of over-regulation, restriction of personal freedoms, repression of property rights, and the loss of constitutional guarantees like the presumption of innocence. Where do our elected representatives take a stand for freedom?

What stand do elected representatives of the US people take on the trade in illegally exported cultural property? Will Paul Ryan decorate his new office with looted art because "free" to do so?

Vignette: Congressman Ryan gets a tinny wall plaque from the ACCG and in return apparently is prepared to lend his support to their efforts to secure a supply of ancient dugups whether illegally exported or not.

UPDATE:
In a post called "Dealing with the inconsequential" Sayles shrugs off the reaction to his posts:

every word that I utter publicly, and particularly on this blog or other internet venues, has been jumped on with a vengeance by those archaeobloggers espousing a contrary point of view.

It's what is called "discussion" isn't it? You know, airing different points of view. Is that wrong? Unless one side feels they are losing ground in the public discussion.

Actually I do not think the doings of Mr Sayle's organization, the ACCG is at all "inconsequential". I think the few individuals behind it are doing an enormous amount of harm, and that should be highlighted and questioned.

Neither therefore do I think it is at all "inconsequential" to draw attention to the damaging attempts made by elements in the international artefact trade to bamboozle (or whatever) lawmakers into putting pressure on the State Department to allow the continued import of illegally exported antiquities into the US market. That is not what I would call an inconsequential act, it is a very revealing one though.
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Listen, Can you Hear Anything?

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Central Searchers yet again offering the chance to metal detect where no-one except them and their self-selected set of intellectually challenged customers think is right. The excuse for running a commercial mass grab event on ridge and furrow at last year’s “Crassfest” was ”we have now run out of cropped land to search”. This time (at next Saturday’s event near Keyston, Cambridgeshire - click on Club Digs here) it’s the weather – as it will “make a pleasant change from all the mud”.

No doubt it will. “Nearly 200 acres of Ridge and furrow” will be something their particular type of customers will be very pleased with. As the self-proclaimed "Ridge & Furrow Master" Craig Slater, the Chairman of the Wakefield District Relic Hunters ("the Yorkshire Raiders") and their Detectorist of the Year 2009 commented to Heritage Action who wrote an article about this fiasco:

“I go on Ridge and furrow regular and make no opologies (sic) for doing so, So shove your morals where the sun dont shine you set of do gooders.”

So it’s clear, Central Searchers and their customers feel free to (and are free to) ignore official guidelines on running metal detecting rallies and to carry on detecting on permanent pasture and ridge & furrow ad infinitum.

It seems that it isn’t just any old ridge and furrow they are targeting. The Keyston Conservation Area Character Statement section 7.6 says

“The parish contains some 285 acres of visible ridge and furrow remains, and has been identified by the recent Midland Open Fields Survey as being of regional or national significance”!

Just two things remain to be clarified: Will PAS be there on Saturday to witness it and will they or CBA or any other of the bodies that signed the Guidance on Metal-detecting Rallies say a single solitary word against it?

Can you hear a pin dropping? Or was it the sound of a completely indefensible national conservation strategy shuffling its feet while allowing these people to make money out of wanton acts of cultural vandalism?

See also my earlier post on the events subsequent to the 2010 crassfest: Wednesday, 9 June 2010 Central Searchers Dislikes Breeches and Will Avoid Them in Future. They prefer Gortex apparently.
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Vignette: How likely is it that British archaeologists will speak out?

Not everybody loses sleep about these things

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Fabio Isman in Il Giornale dell'Arte 305, gennaio 2011 raises again the question of: "Un caso delicato turba il mercato d’arte internazionale delle antichità e toglie il sonno a qualche importante museo: quello delle fotografie sequestrate a Giacomo Medici e Gianfranco Becchina". Well, not everybody is losing sleep about the current location of the estimated million archaeological artefacts which suddenly surfaced (from underground?) on the market in Italy between 1970 and 1995 through the agency of «predatori dell’arte perduta». Some dealers of repute are apparently selling them quite openly; though somehow their reconstruction of their collecting history seems a bit lacking (see Looting Matters, 'Toxic Antiquities: Concern for Dealers').

This photo is published by Isman as an example of the sort of material recorded in the Symes archive in Rome. So one might ask where might one find this little naked boy if a collector interested in that sort of thing were to look for him. Where, oh where, would an afficionado of little statues of well-developed but modestly endowed naked boys find themselves an "Etruscan bronze nude athlete" just like this one? Maybe Mr Google knows?

See also: David Gill, 'La "Grande razzia": Photographic dossiers revisited'.

Rigged Poll on "Metal Detecting"

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David Connolly is a Scottish archaeologist who gets warm huggy feelings when he thinks of artefact hunters. He read a le Monde article written by a French archaeologist calling for a European initiative on metal detecting and decided a poll was needed on his archaeological forum. Somehow though I do not think he is thinking in "Europeen", there seems to me a couple of options missing.

Poll: (Multiple answers allowed) In terms of the French call do you -

* Agree that all detecting should be banned - that will solve everything
* Agree that all detecting should be banned - but sites will still get nighthawked
* Disagree as it will only make nighthawking worse
* Disagree as it will ruin years of hard work and liason (sic)
* Don't know - but I feel that they are on the right lines
* Don't know - but I feel that they are not dealing with the real issues

For the record, I personally would not vote for any of those options, which seem intended to polarise the debate rather than furthering it.

Cypriot antiquities law on looted artefacts and private collections

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Prompted by recent discussions on this blog and elsewhere, archaeologist Sam Hardy has put up a monumentally helpful post on his blog called 'Cypriot antiquities law on looted artefacts and private collections'. It explains very carefully how at different times there were various mechanisms by which antiquities could be licitly obtained, owned and bought and sold. It also deals with illicitly-obtained antiquities. The conclusion is significant for those opposing the application of the recent Cyprus-US bilateral cultural property agreement requiring imported antiquities to be accompanied by one of two types of paperwork showing export was legal:

It is abundantly clear from this review of Cypriot legislation on excavating, finding, looting, collecting and dealing antiquities that there is a legal source for the antiquities market. More importantly, it is abundantly clear that antiquities without find-spots and acquisition dates (and, indeed, find-methods) are very probably looted.

In light of all this evidence, what may be more surprising is how blatantly illegal collections of looted antiquities have continued to be legalised by the Republic of Cyprus Department of Antiquities. Nevertheless, in order to avoid any collector's confusion over the implications of the problems in Cyprus, it is important to be clear: this disastrous policy was a product of the local community's desperate attempts to minimise the harm done by international art dealers' and antiquities collectors' direct and indirect funding of the looting of the island.

This is the kind of thing I have been proposing collectors' lobbyists should be doing systematically for all the so-called 'source countries' to help fellow collectors understand the legal context in which collecting antiquities takes place, but they prefer their own mythologising to real facts.

Of Obelisks and Obstructionists

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I was interested to see the connection David Gill made between the fuss made by antiquity collectors about the unfortunate collapse of buildings in Pompeii.

There have been suggestions by some that it demonstrates that Italy does not care for its cultural property: indeed, that 130 or so antiquities should have remained in their North American public and private collections rather than going back to Italy.

and that "North American commentators who hold such views will have been chastened to read the text of a letter that Zahi Hawass has written to the president of the Central Park Conservancy and Michael R. Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City. It concerns the current state of preservation of the obelisk of Thutmose III (mislabelled “Cleopatra’s Needle,” and stuck out in all weathers in Central Park since 1880). Quick as a flash Cultural Property Observer retorted...

Apples and oranges. It's hard to protect monuments from weathering in cold places like New York and London. What does Hawass expect? Encasement in glass perhaps? Anyway, New York isn't asking for repatriation of its cultural heritage from Egypt or anywhere else as far as I can tell. In contrast, Egypt and Italy are and should be held to account for it. By whom? Mr Tompa sugests that the obelisk (a single and as we see movable object) cannot be protected from the effects of New York weather but expects the Italians to think of a way to stop the rain falling on Pompeii.

Vignette, obelisk of Tuthmosis III from Heliopolisin in its original setting in Alexandria, it probably would have done much better to leave it and its pair now in London there in its original setting (from Wikipedia).

Why won't The Plant List won't let me do this?

In my last post I discussed why I thought the decision of The Plant List to use a restrictive license (CC-BY-NC-ND) was such a poor choice. CC-BY-NC-ND states that

You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

To make this point more concrete, I've created this site:

Experiments with The Plant List

to show the kinds of things that The Plant List's choice of license prevents the taxonomic community from doing. As a first step I'm exploring linking the names in the list to the primary scientific literature, as this video demonstrates:

The Plant List from Roderic Page on Vimeo.

For example, we can take a name like Begonia zhengyiana Y.M.Shui, parse the bibliographic citation provided by The Plant List (via IPNI), and locate the actual paper online, in this case it's freely available as a PDF:



Now we can see a drawing of the plant, and instead of simply trusting that the compilers of The Plant List have correctly interpreted this paper, we can see for ourselves. Down the track, we could imagine mining this paper for details about the plant, such as its morphology and geographic distribution. This requires the link to the original literature, which The Plant List lacks.

A good chunk of the recent plant taxonomic literature has DOIs, for example journals such as the Kew Bulletin and Novon. Playing with some scripts I've managed to associate nearly 9000 accepted names with a DOI, and that's by looking at only a few journals. There are lots more DOIs to be found, but because of the way botanical nomenclators record references (see my post Nomenclators + digitised literature = fail) it can be something of a challenge to find them. This task isn't helped by the fairly lax way some publishers enter data in CrossRef (Cambridge University Press I'm looking at you). The other obvious source of digitised literature is, of course, BHL, and that's next on the list of resources to play with.

Experiments with The Plant List is very crude, and I've barely scratched the surface of linking names to primary literature. That said, given that there are exactly zero links between names and digital literature in The Plant List, I'd argue that my site adds value to the data in that The Plant List. And that's my point — by making data available for others to play with, you enable others to add value to that data. By choosing a CC-BY-NC-ND license, The Plant List has killed that possibility.

So, my question for The Plant List is "why did you do that?"

The Heritage Action Artefact Hunting Erosion Counter is Back

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There has been much consternation in the artefact hunting world that somebody dared attempt an estimate of the degree to which the hobby is eroding the archaeological reord. It was something no official body has been prepared to do recently, and so it was a grassroots conservation organization which stepped into the breech and did it and drew upon itself the flak (Heritage Action Artefact Erosion Counter). Nobody wanted to accept the figures, nobody wanted to discuss their implications, nobody wanted either to say by how much they would have to be 'wrong' to be acceptable, still less produce their own figures. All the supporters of artefact collecting erosion could do was gripe and snipe. There was elation and jubilation when a few weeks ago the webpage carrying the counter vanished preparatory to it moving to a new website.

The good news is that it is back, the algorithm unchanged (though I now suspect even more than I did a while back that it is ticking slower than it should be). The bad news is it shows massive unmitigated depletion of Britain's archaeological record. There is now a new text accompanying it - as thought-provoking as the last.

[...] Why some say it "has" to be wrong [...], Why it can't be [...], Why it ought to be discussed [...], The words of both Dr Moshenska and Mr Austin illustrate the need for a debate that doesn't start from an unquestioning perception that PAS is a success irrespective of the amount of information being lost or destroyed. That defies logic. Yet somehow that is exactly the situation that has arisen. The number of recordable artefacts that are being taken by artefact hunters is the essential information required before PAS and the whole of Britain's portable antiquities strategy can be sensibly evaluated. An entirely unsupported and highly dubious account of that number seems to have been put about. But then, artefact hunters and collectors can be perfectly adequately characterised as at war with archaeological guardians over the disposition of part of the buried archaeological resource and everyone knows what is the first casualty in war particularly if, mid-battle, some of the cavalry forget which side they are on. The Counter should be treated seriously. The depletion and information loss due to legal artefact hunting appears to be on a far larger scale than the public is being told.

No matter how much supporters of artefact hunting erosion of the archaeological record wish to dismiss the existence of this counter the questions it raises can be neither dismissed or ignored.

Since the start of the Portable Antiquities Scheme:4,088,696
Overall Total since 1975:10,960,489

Today the PAS website reports:

422,721 records of 673,041 objects

according to the HA model, nearly 90% of the recordable items taken out of the soil by artefact hunters since the PAS began were removed with no record surviving; where are these four million pieces of lost archaeological evidence now? If these figures are true (and I see nobody advancing any serious reasons why they are not), by what twisted logic can such a massive archaeological heritage "management' botch-up be so widely lauded as a "success"?

Vignette: PAS, road sign to resource conservation success?

The Basis for a Rational Public Discussion is... Rationality

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US Antiquity dealer Dave Welsh is apparently miffed that the world did not fall fawning at his feet over his suggestion that "source nations" should be given "quotas" of "redundant artefacts" to fill the market so a controlling clique of licenced dealers can sell them to a clique of licenced collectors. In a post he calls (in jest I hope) "A Rational Public Discussion" he complains:

It is, to say the least, very difficult to have a rational public discussion with anyone who is identified with the radical anticollecting or "archaeology" lobby.[...] Nowhere in the far-out views of that fringe can anything more unrealistic or extreme be found than this.

Well, I do not know if we are looking at the same text here, it seems to me that I took a very realistic hard look at Welsh's pie-in-the sky gimme-gimme "proposal". I think I raised some hard realistic questions that would have to be addressed by its proposer before he submits it to further rational public discussion (a discussion which in its present state I do not exactly see anybody else tripping over their own feet to engage in - even collectors like Candice Jarman consider it unacceptable in its present form). Welsh says:

Any archaeologist who imagines that a solution to archaeology's problems can be unilaterally dictated and enforced without the participation, cooperation and ultimately the consent of the collecting community is significantly detached from reality.

The sooner no-questions-asked collectors and dealers recognise that the ongoing destruction of the past by commercial artefact digging is not just an archaeologists' problem the better for them and everybody else. The reality is that it is not archaeologists that will get laws changed, but public opinion. Welsh goes on:

If archaeologists will engage the collecting community in a good faith discussion of how to do this, they would in my view be pleasantly surprised by the understanding and thoughtfulness of the reception they would receive.

yeah, like from Candice Jarman, and Dave Welsh? The PAS is busily engaged in doing this, and we all know just how much "understanding and thoughtfulness" they are getting from artefact hunters in England...

Dave Welsh presented - he says for discussion - an idea as a panaceum to the problem of commercial looting. If he was at all sincere in his presentation of it as such, and actually believed in it, instead of moaning that somebody engaged with his ideas and suggested that some areas needed clarification and questioning the workability of some bits of it, he could address the issues raised. Iron out the wrinkles. The trouble is that I am perfectly sure that Welsh was not a bit sincere in proposing this. It was a smokescreen tactic, and was simply seeking an opportunity to blame somebody else for the failure for discussion to advance - thus covering up for the failure of the dealers to budge from their no-questions-asked stance. This is what is demonstrated by his reaction. But he'd have written the same if his proposal was met with silence wouldn't he? What is it he wants?

Mr Welsh then adopts a threatening tone:

Those who instead insist upon a totally confrontational, one-sided, irrational, and accusatory condemnation of [no-questions-asked] private collecting as the root of all evils are instead likely to be unpleasantly surprised by the strength and effectiveness of the opposition they encounter.

Nah, I don't think we'll be at all surprised, we all know what the nasties look like. The collecting blogs, especially the coiney ones, are full of nastiness: confrontational, provocative, one-sided, antisocial and wholly irrational junk written in accusatory tone. Its the good side of responsible collectors that tends to be lost in all this opposition to the perfectly common sense approach to no-questions-asked collecting of antiquities. Perhaps however it is collectors and dealers who have been allowing the ACCG to lead them by the nose and act as the spokesmen of the whole milieu who are in for an "unpleasant surprise" in coming months. I hope so.

On an Early Medieval Cemetery Trashed in Croatia

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I was notified about this by Richard "Sheddy" Lincoln, UK metal detectorist who has on many occasions shown himself to be a notorious trouble maker. His motives notifying me are as clear as his for putting it on his Facebook page (a few American history activists on there who would be very interested ... and bloody outraged!). Here's what he wrote there (note no name given, no indication which Museum was involved - or not):

From a friend in Croatia. He's a metal detectorist who does things the right way; for him it's about the recovery and preservation of artefacts from damaging non-contextual layers - i.e. ploughsoil and area's about to be developed. He has... an extensive record of every identifiable item that he has recovered and has written a few reference books to assist others in identification of finds. Here's what he has written about these finds:

Some of you will have been to Nuštar, the village where I do most of my detecting. Well they are making a new soccer field next to the park. they had scraped the surface level and i planned to go on when the freeze let up. Meanwhile, they dug the foundations for the stand and found a lot of regular dark shapes. They turned out to be g...raves. Instead of informing the museum or quietly bulldozing them, they told the mayor of the village who got the graveyard workers to dig them (this is of course illegal). they dug fifteen graves and cleared the goods out before I got to hear about it. I asked the workers and site officails what they had found other than bones and they said they thought the grave was from the first world war or just before. I insisted on seeing what was found and was directed to the Chapel of Rest in Nuštar cemetery. All the bones from the graves were mixed together in binbags. I asked if they hadn't informed the museum and was told the museum wasn't interested. Then I saw that they had a plastic carrier bag with some bronze objects. I was amazed to see that they were Avar culture, from the 7- 8th century. I photographed the material, then took the decision to inform the museum, or at least ask if they had heard anything.

The archie I spoke to couldn't look me in the eye of course, and I got the feeling that the museum knew, but were turning a blind eye. I handed over the photos, so now they have to move on it, but we'll see.

These are the remains of steppe nomads (like the mongols) who came here in the 6th-8th century. That large piece is actually a belt end. Now I know why the buckle is hinged, it's so the belt end can be passed through.

This story went up yesterday on a metal detecting forum. In reaction a metal detecting inarticulate called "simonthesearcher" ("trying to be a Valued Member") ejaculates: Disgracefull,,Barford,if your reading ,nice one,lets hear what you got to say about this then . It is unclear why he addresses his "nice one" comment to me.

Well, this metal detecting "friend" in Croatia turns out to be former soldier Steve Gaunt (Cibalia). In November last year Mr Gaunt was in court because of some conflict with the staff of a Croatian museum about his metal detecting. ("charged me with the misdemeanor of failing to inform the authorities of finding items of cultural value. I will be fighting even this minor charge and am well prepared for my day in court. It's an important day for Croatian detectorists!"). I missed whether the verdict has been announced.

It would be interesting to know whether the museum which is the subject of this complaint which Mr Gaunt is now egging his British metal detecting mates to publicise for him is the same one with which he is currently in conflict. It would be interesting to know more about the background to this.

As for Mr Gaunt's comment, while the material is of Avar style, there is no "steppe" in Nuštar, these belts were a symbol of being part of a certain lifestyle, and - in themselves - are no more ethnically indicative than the fact I am writing this in Levi's bluejeans. This Kossinnist fixation on ethnic labelling of artefacts is however common in the artefact-collecting world.

Mr Gaunt's 'Ex Preteritus' website is interesting and clearly deeply influenced by British justifications for hoiking it all out. It purports

"to be a register of accidental antique finds from the Danube region of Hungary and Croatia [...] Developments in farming technology and the growth of chemical use means that many unknown sites and artefacts are in great danger of completely disappearing before they are discovered. Items that have laid in the ground for a thousand years or more quickly deteriorate after they are disturbed and action must be quickly taken to save them.
At Ex Preteritus, we try to register finds from possible ancient sites under risk, usually recovered artefacts from the topsoil that would otherwise be destroyed. We also attempt to register casual finds made by individuals. This site features items recovered from plough soil all over the region. None of the artefacts came from registered or protected sites, or have been dug out of archaeological layers, but come from the surface of ordinary ploughed land.
Hopefully, these artefacts and coins will be of interest to the local museums of the region and we encourage them to make contact regarding the items catalogued on this site.

This artificial fertiliser argument is the usual standby for British detectorists too and - despite what artefact hunters and their supporters claim - has no basis in verifiable fact. The website may be an attempt at creating a 'register' of what he and his mates have found, but not a single location is given for the findspot of any of the items illustrated. That and asking (in English, not Croatian) museums to contact him if they see anything they fancy (rather than the finder reporting them) may raise a few eyebrows, and is not really what I would consider as "doing things the right way". Also I note that Mr Gaunt has several Avar style belt fittings shown on the website - obviously he has no problem with them being recovered by metal detecting, only when taken out of the ground by somebody else.

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UK Detectorists' Supporter's Mixed Loyalties Over Illicit Antiquities

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Candice Jarman, the supporter of UK artefact hunters against what he terms the "lies and distortions of the radical archaeologists", is adamant that the international antiquities trade is "largely licit" ("and laws to punish illicit trafficking exist already") [where have we heard all this before?]. Having stressed earlier that collectors buying from this trade are mainly interested in acquiring licit, well-provenanced antiquities, it is therefore odd to see him now attacking US antiquity dealer Dave Welsh's ideas about how the market can be supplied with more licit, well-provenanced antiquities. Candice is of the opinion that this type of scheme "has no place in a free society".

Mr Jarman's profile announces he is interested in "freedom" (capitalised). It is interesting to note the kind of freedom he promotes. After commenting on the "decline of the West" with "the balance of power and wealth now moving eastwards", Candice seeks symptoms of that in:

the treatment of Marion True, Getty Curator, and the continual repatriation of objects to Italy (whose museums and store-rooms must be over-flowing with stuff already!). Would a confident and assertive country act like this? If I was in the White House - I would have told Italy where to go - Italy needs America far more than America needs Italy surely.

(Besides the fact that I am sorely puzzled by what logic someone in the UK sees Italy as somehow "the East")... Marion True was being tried for her alleged involvement in the purchase of illicit antiquities (the antiquities were illicitly obtained, what was in question in her trial was her personal involvement and knowledge of that). The objects recently returned to Italy from US museums were not licitly exported, not a single valid export licence was produced for any of them. What Italy is now asking is for the USA to put import restrictions on (and ONLY on) antiquities illegally exported from Italy in the period covered by the CCPIA. I really cannot see why the USA (voluntarily a state party to the 1970 UNESCO Convention after all) should exert its "confidence and assertiveness" by "telling Italy where to go". What kind of talk is that from a self-proclaimed responsible collector? That's pirate talk.

More pirate talk - if the people labelled (falsely) "anti-collecting" succeed in curbing the no-questions-asked trade in illicit antiquities:

The anti's true legacy will be our cultural decline and impoverishment.

As if building collections of stolen and smuggled artefacts was in some way a symbol of cultural superiority and richness for this apostrophe-abusing British artefact collector. Candice reveals himself by this to be a collector no less the crypto-imperialist and neocolonialist than his US "Cultural Internationalist" counterparts.

So if Italy asked Britain for some freshly surfaced (from underground) recently stolen artefacts to be investigated and returned, antiquity collector Candice would expect Her Majesty's Government to exert its "confidence and assertiveness" by "telling Italy where to go"?


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Vignette: is antiquity collector Candice Jarman a British bulldog lover?