Egypt: Lee Rosenbaum on Credibility of Reports

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In a post yesterday (so before the latest revelations from Cairo Museum) Lee Rosenbaum (One-Armed Tut: Hawass Issues Detailed Report on Damage at Egyptian Museum, Feb 11th 2011) discusses the reports emerging from Egypt's new Ministry of Antiquities in the last days of the Mubarak regime and Zahi Hawass' soothing status reports:

Perhaps his upbeat reports about other sites, including Saqqara, were [...] based upon incomplete, fragmentary reports. The fact that Hawass may have lacked full, reliable information during the past two chaotic weeks is completely understandable. But his misleading previous assertions about the Cairo museum break-in, where, in some instances, his own knowledge must have differed from his public pronouncements, is less excusable. Similarly problematic were his strong "factual" pronouncements regarding the "safety" of antiquities sites, about which he lacked complete and reliable information. If Hawass didn't know the full extent of the vandalism and looting, he should have acknowledged that, rather than giving blanket assurances that all was well. Those assurances, of utmost importance to Egyptologists, conflicted with some accounts from people in the field (such as archaeologists who work at Saqqara). As with the rest of Egypt's governance, we need more candor and transparency from its Ministry of Antiquities. Minimizing the problems undermines the credibility of the minister.

To be fair to the man, he was placed with no prior notice at the head of a new ministry which he then had to organize (in the logistic sense), was made a full cabinet member at a time when the government was falling, had to deal with foreign press and foreign archaeologists and the general problems of getting about and living a normal life in Cairo. Hawass is not Director of the Museum (that is Dr. Tarek El Awady) and while he obviously visited a number of times and spent some time there trying to work out what had happened (and perhaps indicate what should be done in future), it seems possible that some of the details may have been deliberately hidden from him by the museum staff. (Let's face it, we've seen his rather strong personality expressing itself on TV, would you tell him to his face that you'd failed to carry out your job correctly?). A few days ago he wrote:

Yesterday was the first time, since this crisis began, that I was able to take the time to closely examine each item that was damaged during the museum’s break in on Friday, 28 January, 2011. I also took time to speak to the commanders of the police and army stationed at the museum, and I asked them to update me on their investigations. I have heard so many differing stories about how the break in occurred, so I felt it was necessary to confirm the details with the police and army.

But then of course the police and army do not know the full story either. What is needed is a full investigation, perhaps by an outside body, followed by a proper report, detailing exactly what went wrong and making formal recommendations on how to avoid this sort of situation in the future, both in Egypt and in the case of other museums.

Vignette: Lee Rosenbaum.

Cairo Museum Looting: One Looter was looking for "Red Mercury", the Rest...

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So despite all the attempts to play down the news of the looting of the museum, it now turns out (Zahi Hawass, 'Sad News') that thieves got away with several items. As I earlier suspected one of the Tutankhamun figures is missing, in fact two were taken. The missing items known at present are listed below. Dr Hawass gives a list on his blog, without the museum accession numbers which makes it difficult to identify which of a number of objects that could fall under the same description (numbers 4.5.6) he is talking about. Dorothy King on her blog has attempted to provide pictures of all of the missing objects, though it still is not clear which items are actually meant in some cases, so for now I reserve judgement and refer readers to her efforts, UPDATE 13th Feb: The Eloquent Peasant blog owner has found some much clearer and more attractive photos of the missing items):

1. STOLEN: Gilded wood statue of Tutankhamun being carried by a goddess (photo below),


2. STOLEN: The upper part of the gilded wood statue of Tutankhamun harpooning - broken off at the legs, it seems that it is not just the "torso and upper limbs" missing. (photo below),


3. STOLEN: Limestone statue of Akhenaten holding an offering table (photo below),


4. STOLEN: "Statue of Nefertiti making offerings"

5. STOLEN: "Sandstone head of an Amarna princess",

6. STOLEN: "Stone statuette of a scribe from Amarna",

7-17 Eleven wooden shabti statuettes of Yuya, since I have seen the second newspaper report today saying "eight objects" were stolen, let's do this properly:
7. STOLEN: wooden shabti statuette of Yuya ,
8. STOLEN: wooden shabti statuette of Yuya,
9. STOLEN: wooden shabti statuette of Yuya,
10. STOLEN: wooden shabti statuette of Yuya,
11. STOLEN: wooden shabti statuette of Yuya,
12. STOLEN: wooden shabti statuette of Yuya,
13. STOLEN: wooden shabti statuette of Yuya,
14. STOLEN: wooden shabti statuette of Yuya,
15. STOLEN: wooden shabti statuette of Yuya,
16. STOLEN: wooden shabti statuette of Yuya,
17. STOLEN: wooden shabti statuette of Yuya,
(the cultural property "internationalists" will delight in pointing out no doubt that the others are "safe" in New York - here's the Cairo ones) [UPDATE 14/2/11: one of these shabtis was found a day later lying outside the Museum].


(Photos from William Max Miller's The Treasures of Yuya and Tuyu website)

18. STOLEN: Heart Scarab of Yuya (oddly enough I cannot find a good photo of that online, I guess now it's been stolen, there's not much hope that there ever will be now). [UPDATE: Eloquent Peasant attempts to untangle the identity of this object, see her account here UPDATE 14/2/11: this scarab was found a day later lying outside the Museum].

Several people are suggesting this may not close the list of missing items. I fear their pessimism might turn out to be well-founded.

What is clear is that this missing material is not just any old rubbish, but 18 collectables (more than will fit into one knapsack) which will fetch top dollar from some unscrupulous collector who may have ordered their taking and already have them in his hands. The scattering of the other objects on the museum floor (by somebody acting as a decoy?) may have been deliberate in order to slow down the process of assessing what was missing, allowing time for the stolen items to disappear into the murky world of the no-questions-asked antiquities market. Hawass announces:

An investigation has begun to search for the people who have taken these objects, and the police and army plan to follow up with the criminals already in custody.

("begun"?). How about also investigating why - according to Hawass - there were only three museum guards in the place, and how it is possible that, according to reports, the thieves had AN HOUR to do what they had come into the museum to do, when the sound of the smashing glass would have been echoing around the Museum loudly enough to hear above the noise of the mob outside. The head of the SCA and Minister of Antiquities had been gleefully telling the world how "ignorant" the thieves had been, even though it must have been obvious that the upper part of the harpooning figure was not among the pieces collected together for conservation more than a week ago, despite the fact that the Akhenaton statue was mentioned as "damaged" in an earlier communique. The varying conflicting messages given out concerning this break-in has given the people who have these priceless antiquities in their hands a full two weeks to get them out of the country, very probably facilitated by the general chaos at the main exit airports. It is clear that there needs to be a wider enquiry into the manner in which this crisis was managed and the precise circumstances surrounding this theft, arguably one of the biggest and most audacious art heists of all time.

Who (that is a plural by the way) is responsible for the criminal lack of security in the museum that night and the subsequent concealment of the information about what was initially suspected as missing?
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Egypt Looting: Dashur Magazine Robbed, How?

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Over the past two weeks attempts have been made by the Egyptian authorities to play down the news of the looting of archaeological sites and archaeological storerooms Zahi Hawass today announces ('Sad News') that

in another terrible turn of events, last night a magazine in Dahshur was broken into; it is called De Morgan’s. This magazine contains large blocks and small artifacts.

Have a look at Dashur on Google Earth, the reason why this site was felt to be one of the safest in the pyramid fields is that there is a huge army base right next to it. We've been assured that the army has been protecting sites and magazines since the beginning of February. So why was it possible to break into this site last night? Some commentators have raised the question of when the break-in actually occurred and whether there are reasons why its looting is only now, the day after Mubarak 'abdicated', this news becomes public. Is the underlying message that the army is unable to look after these sites by itself?

Vignette: Dashur, bent pyramid, after EgyptTourInfo

Depth Advantage

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The conservation group Heritage Action has sent an open letter to the UK's Archaeology Forum,* concerning 'artefact hunting using “deep” metal detectors'. They suggest that the growing popularity of new metal detectors with greatly increased “depth” capabilities represents a new and significant danger to the buried archaeological resource. They indicate that they have in mind ground-penetrating metal seeking tools like the Minelab GPX 5000 (which "is claimed by both the manufacturers and the growing number of users to be capable of consistently detecting small targets at depths of 17 -22 inches, far below the level of most UK plough soil and hence into underlying undisturbed archaeology"). They argue that the increasing popularity of these models has major implications for policies concerning artefact hunting in the UK.

For many years policy towards recreational and commercial metal detecting has rested upon the assertion that the activity was not particularly damaging if carried out within disturbed plough soil but clearly the use of machines capable of detecting much deeper invalidates such a claim (other than by assuming the users are prepared to exercise superhuman restraint upon the depth to which they dig in response to a signal). Despite claims the machines are too expensive and of limited use in the UK there is evidence that an increasing number are now being purchased, including for shared use by club members. In our view therefore it follows that urgent revisions are required to the Code of Practice for Responsible Metal Detecting in England and Wales, the Guidance for Organisers of Metal Detecting Rallies , DEFRA’s rules for detecting on Scheme land, the conditions laid out by all public landowners and statutory guardians and indeed all advice issued to detectorists and landowners by archaeologists.

They point out that the growing popularity of these machines means the PAS may well find itself increasingly often in the invidious position of attending a commercial artefact hunting rally (bad enough) "and having to record numerous finds taken from below the plough soil right in front of them". HA suggest that this is something that ought to be condemned as irresponsible use of the finite and fragile resource that is the archaeological record.

HA do not mention the other point, that artefact hunting is officially condoned these days on the grounds that it is (sic) "rescuing" objects that are under threat of being damaged by agricultural activity in the ploughsoil, the fact that growing numbers of artefact hunters given a change eschew this activity in favour of getting their hands on the "less damaged" artefacts from below the ploughsoil rather scuppers that argument. Perhaps the reasons why the UK archaeological world finds itself able to "partner" artefact hunters rather than discouraging them need to be re-examined. The arguments offered a decade or so ago may not be so applicable to the current situation or that in a decade's time - and yet the despoiling of the archaeological record to fill scattered and ephemeral personal artefact collections goes on, largely unmitigated, year after year.

*[ The Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers, The Association of Regional and Islands Archaeologists, The Council for British Archaeology, The Institute of Field Archaeologists, The Institute of Historic Building Conservation, The National Trust, The National Trust for Scotland, Rescue: the British Archaeological Trust, The Society of Antiquaries of London, The Society of Museum Archaeologists, The Standing Conference of Archaeological Unit Managers.] Vignette: borrowed from Glasgow University.

Museum Raid an Inside Job?

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Egyptologist Kara Cooney on Craig Ferguson (Feb 8, 2011) states that there are many Egyptologists who suspect that Mubarak ordered his men to destroy items in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to make the pro-democracy protestors look bad.

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Munich Dealer Loses Some of his Stock

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Over in Bavaria, apparently the 'Lootier Land' of Germany where the Minister of Economic Affairs, Infrastructure, Transport and Technology boasts of the free trade in antiquities obtaining there (see here and here), one of the dealers has lost a bit of his stock. According to 'Monsters and Critics', when challenged, it turns out he was unable to show how a Mesopotamian item he was in possession of in 2004 had left Iraq ('Germany returns antique battleaxe to Iraq', Monsters and Critics, Feb 9, 2011). The dealer's name is not given.

The item in question, a decorated axe was found by police in 2004, and after the dealer was unable to produce any document confirming legitimate origins, was sent to the Roman-Germanic Museum in Mainz for evaluation. The Museum pronounced it 'typical of the military equipment used by early Mesopotamian city states'. The object was accordingly returned to Iraq on Wednesday following several years of legal limbo. The Iraqi ambassador Hussain Mahmood Fadhlalla al-Khateeb accepting the object said it was "important to crack down on trafficking in stolen goods, as this was an income stream for terrorist groups".

How Many Looters did you Think Were Caught? Down to "One Looter" now...

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Latest news from Cairo Museum, this time (and I think for the first time) the museum director speaks out for himself. Well, now we are being told that there was "only one looter" - honest. (Dr Hawass on his blog said "nine" which by yesterday had been altered to "ten", and he says he interviewed these 'criminals'). Obviously if there was only one, the fact that there were only three guards watching over the priceless collections that night of anger might by some be seen as (I presume the smiling museum director wants us to agree) somehow less reprehensible. And of course it was awfully dark, the Museum staff Zahi Hawass spoke to the next morning could easily have confused the number of men they caught.(Was this the one that "asked for water"?)



We are shown the conservation lab where the restoration work is being carried out. Note all the objects are lying loose and higgldy-piggledy on a table, none of them with any kind of label or documentation nearby. The two Tutankhamun statues are nowhere to be seen, neither are the smashed bits of the boat we saw in the Al Jazeera film. They might be in another (organics) lab I suppose.

In the shots of the museum galleries themselves, what is really intriguing is that none of the filming shown in this video seems to overlap with the damage seen in the Al-Jazeera video, which makes the former claim that only 13 (or 17) cases were smashed open a little wobbly. Also the Museum director vaguely indicates entry through the roof of the northern bay of the central aisle of the building. Is this really where the break-in occurred? This after all is the section of the building being filmed all the time by Al-Jazeera's cameras on that very night from the windows of the Ramsis Hilton overlooking the back of the Museum.

Why can't we be shown the hole in the roof? Why can't we see the actual case the looter smashed through (and if he cut himself so badly, where are the blood stains on the floor and the showcases he reached into with lacerated hands)? Why cant we see the bits of the Tutankhamun statues being worked on? Where are the mummy heads now? Why don't the Egyptian authorities stop thinking up variant stories, cut through the confusion, get a grip on the truth and tell it how it was?

UPDATE 11th Feb:
A day after this the following video appeared on MSNBC which actually showed what the previous team had missed, answering some of the questions posed above:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

We see the smashed boat, the Tutankhamun statue, the skylight, smashed case and bloodstains. We also hear a different version about the size of the gang. One guy in the museum (smashing glass "for an hour" before somebody heard him - we are told he was arrested by soldiers, so not the Museum's own security guards, where were they all this time ?). There were also three guys on the roof, presumably waiting to haul him up. Now we hear they were after "gold and red mercury".
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No More Mucking About: the Jefferies Affair

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I'm putting this here as much as a public record than anything. Since December there has been an unnecessary and unpleasant fuss generated about a text I was commissioned to write and wrote yonks ago about a project I was involved in, the excavations and post excavation work of a site at Mucking. I discussed it here, here and here, and it seems quite a lot of people - for reasons that are unclear to me - took a interest in it. Anyway the end(?) of the matter is that I have now signed a new copyright agreement with the publisher which sorts out the matter of responsibility for the wording of my text. Rosemary Jefferies has further been informed today by the publisher, which she is reported to have been threatening with legal action, that should she still want to influence the wording of my text she may contact the author (not the publisher) with her queries, criticisms and complaints. As part of our agreement, the publisher obliges itself to introduce any changes the author requests free of charge (normally when it gets to such an advanced production stage, author's changes are charged to them). But time is running out. Funnily enough, it turns out I am not the only one having trouble reaching Ms Jefferies, the publisher has not got her address to send her an official letter, but I understand they have discussed the matter by telephone today. Anyway I thought I'd put this announcement up on my blog. Anyone who knows Rosemary Jefferies is asked to draw her attention to this, so she can't say she did not know. Oh, and tell her I am looking forward to hearing from her (probably more than she is looking forward to actually confronting me with what I have learnt at second hand she wants me to change and the reasons why she feels such changes are required).

What a palaver about a text about a hole in the ground. What next?

Two Minute Due Diligence

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Californian dugup artefact dealer Dave Welsh posted on his blog (4th Feb 2011) a text aiming to enlighten his readers on 'The Logistics of Provenance' ("I wanted to introduce some relevant information into this discussion"). Welsh is concerned to present some details "to illustrate what is feasible regarding the amount of time that can practically be spent evaluating a coin at a show, the cost of certification and its dependence on turnaround time". He tells us:

Yesterday I visited the Long Beach show on a buying expedition. In the course of about two hours I examined several thousand ancient coins and acquired many hundreds of them, all individually displayed in “flips” or 2x2 coin holders. The examination process allocated perhaps two minutes for each coin, including discussing its value with the seller. I expect to sell most of these coins for less than USD $100 each...

He then points out that commercial coin-grading services (a largely American aberration) may charge about $125 per coin for a "walk through" certification (of coin grade). Welsh considers that:

"It would presently be technically and economically feasible to document acquisition of a coin at a cost of between $10.00 and $17.00 per coin in a manner which should satisfy any reasonable provenance requirement, with traceability to its particular date of acquisition. That documentation would add perhaps two to three weeks to the acquisition process".

As an illustration of what he has in mind, Welsh indicates that his own antiquity sales outlet, Classical Coins, "offers a Certificate of Authenticity for coins we sell which I believe should satisfy any reasonable provenance documentation requirement, with traceability to a particular date of acquisition. The charge is $10.00 per coin. The sales spiel for this item on the page indicated reads as follows:

Add to the impact of your ancient coin gift by including a Certificate of Authenticity. This impressive 8.5 x 11 inch certificate is ready for framing or laminating, and attests to the inspection and authentication of this coin by an expert professional numismatist.

I really do not see the point of framing and hanging on the wall a printout detailing due diligence, the documentation should be kept with the collection, not hung on the wall as decoration. Welsh shows a picture of one, and I am sure he will not mind us discussing it here as a contribution to the discussion he started. I show the whole certificate (I assume the reverse is blank) and an enlargement of the "working bit".

This picture is a bit fuzzy in details, but you can see it has a picture of the coin and its weight, and it tells you it was bought from Classical coins on a certain date. But that's about it. The main aim of the certificate seems self-advertisement by the aforementioned "expert professional numismatist" whose shop it is and whose scrawly signature fills the bottom of the page. It also tells us he's a member of the ANA and ACCG (the latter should set alarm bells ringing for those who know what that group stand for). In the middle are two columns, on the left are the references to the typology according to standard numismatic works (though the abbreviations are not expanded upon - in a document of record intended to travel with the coin into subsequent collections in subsequent centuries they should be). Underneath is a rather simplistic "historical background" (but not to the authenticity and "licitness" of purchase of the coin, but its minting). ALL of this, the photo, the weighing, the blurb about what it is is part of the typical sales spiel. In other words this is what would be on the webpage of the seller already. Putting it up there Welsh estimates takes about twenty minutes a coin. So in a five day week of an eight-hour working day a coin shop employee can in principle put 120 of these descriptions on the website. That is of course largely what the retailing part of being an online coin dealer entails, putting the objects on sale and packaging them in an attractive manner.

With a little not very sophisticated application, the same data can be fed into the relevant boxes of the template for the data to be printed out in the form of an A4 sheet. I really do not see any grounds for charging anyone ten dollars to press the "import" button and getting up out of their chair to take the printed sheet out of the laser printer. That seems to me a coiney rip-off. By the same token then, I really do not accept that this ripoff price should be taken as justification for saying it is not "feasible" to make printouts like this for coins worth less than 80 dollars or whatever.

But let's have a look at this collecting history of Mr Welsh's offered exemplar. Its in the right hand column in the centre of the sheet. Well, the picture on Welsh's website is incredibly fuzzy. I can't make out the top line (it looks like it could be in Cyrillic - Bulgarian?). Then there is something that looks like 'Acquisition date'. Below that seems to be another number. Then there is the date the certificate was made (seems superfluous) then something which seems to give the name of the previous owner "(if known)". The name looks like S. Ahmadinejad. Other artefact sellers at least try to add details like "the Ahmadinejad collection was put together in the 1960s and early 1970s". Whether these stories can be verified is of course another question.

This apparently is what Welsh expects us to consider fulfils "any reasonable provenance requirement". Well, it does not. That coin could have been metal detected at night in 2004 from a south European archaeological site protected by law, smuggled into Munich to a dealer from whom Mr Ahmadinejad bought it online, it could have been shipped to him in the US in a padded envelope declared as containing "metal stampings" and without going through any customs formalities. It could then have been acquired with a whole bunch of Parthian, Bactrian and Greek coins by a Long Beach coin dealer from whom Dave Welsh bought it as part of a bulk buy after looking at it for about two minutes, including haggling about the price. There is nothing on the "certificate of authenticity" like this to show that a given coin was otherwise obtained. This is clearly not satisfactory. The mere fact that Mr Ahmadinejad had the coin in 2007 really does nothing to assure us it was from a licit source, a more fundamental question is where Mr A. got it from.

What possible kind of due diligence and verification can Welsh be doing in his buying if at his own admission he buys hundreds of coins in a two hour period in such conditions? I really refuse to believe in the efficacy of two minute due diligence.

There is a second point arising from Welsh's discussion of the "feasibility" of producing documentation of origins of the coins he is selling. By a somewhat convoluted line of argument he establishes that "The current value threshold at which the cost of provenance documentation would be accepted by large numbers of collectors is roughly $85.00 per coin". This of course raises the question whether it is the client that should be bearing the costs, or the person making the profits from selling archaeological material, I cannot recall any retailer of electrical goods who makes me pay extra for including a guarantee with my purchase. The problem Welsh seems to be driving at is that:

very large numbers of ancient coins are presently being traded at prices below $85.00 per coin. Classical Coins presently sells large numbers of coins at prices below $50.00 per coin, and I am not including “specials” (multiple coin lots) for which certification is not available. Clearly there is a “value threshold” that must be considered, and any demand that documentation be provided for a transaction to be licit becomes economically unreasonable below that threshold.

Well, first of all all that is being asked is that the purchaser gets a piece of paper outlining the results of the due diligence a dealer has (ostensibly) done before adding a dugup artefact to his stock - i.e., before he can responsibly sell it as legitimately obtained. I do not see why he should be made to pay for it.

More to the point, a moment's thought produces the question, where are these cheaper coins coming from? Mr Welsh's "specials" (I've discussed them several times on this blog) are uncleaned coins, in other words coins which are extremely unlikely to be cabinet toned items from old collections going back to the days of Petrarch. These are the very metal detected coins being sold in bulk lots and coming from goodness-knows-where that are the problem we are discussing. Many of these coins are the residues of the picking over of masses of metal artefacts produced by the metal detecting of archaeological sites all over the ancient world (the picking over which separates out the dealers' 80-dollars-or-more coins from the 'can be sold for less than fifty'). Vast numbers of these items entered the US market since c. 1990 from Bulgaria and other countries in the region of the Balkans. These are looted coins, looted and smuggled out of Europe by criminals. These are precisely the coins that should not be on a market which claims to be legitimate. It is this type of coin which, if of licit provenance, needs to have that demonstrated in a verifiable way, and - given the scale of looting and numbers of coins involved - the coins of this type which cannot demonstrate licit provenance should not be on any kind of legitimate market. That is what we need artefacts with documented collecting histories for, not to hang hand-signed 'certificates' decoratively on a wall, not to enhance some "gift" to a budding collector, but to put an end to the no-questions-buying of potentially looted archaeological material.

I think nobody, except cowboy dealers, is interested in something which only produces the superficial impression of a "legitimisation" of the antiquities market. We need a tool which adequately and effectively separates the legitimate market from the illicit one. One which differentiates the dealers in and collectors of items of licit provenance, and those who could not care less whether they are dealing in and collecting illicitly obtained material alongside other items. A scheme which will only document licit provenance for items over a certain threshold value, while the BULK of the items of this type on that market are sold for less than that value, will not clean up the bulk of that market.
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Collecting History a Dealer's Way Forward?

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Californian coin dealer has on his blog a second post on documenting collecting histories of sold objects. This one (posted Tuesday, Feb. 8 th, 'The Mania for Provenance') claims

Provenance to a find spot or origin predating UNESCO 1970 is prized these days, however critics of private antiquities collecting such as Paul Barford have urged that even if such a definitive universal standard is impractical, there is still significant value in documenting provenance to a date prior to that, which at the very least reduces uncertainties involved and could, over time, perhaps evolve into acceptable provenance.

I am not sure I recognise anything I have written in that. First of all, as dealers and collectors keep having to be told, I am not a "critic of private collecting" per se, but the way in which it is currently done. Secondly I think what the other blogger wanted to say would be better expressed if instead of using the words "prior to that" he'd written "posterior to that". Anyhow the point of his blog post was that Welsh announces gleefully that although in the past he was against proposals for recording schemes for collecting histories "on the grounds of feasibility":

I am pleased to report that there are now realistic grounds to believe that transition to a full disclosure of provenance so far as it is known can feasibly be provided to every buyer without a significant increase in the cost of online transactions. Over a long period of time that would presumably address nearly all licitness concerns. The question now becomes whether such incremental provenance documentation would be satisfactory. Feasiblity does not equate to zero cost. "Per transaction documentation" would not be free, though its cost might be reasonable. If it became apparent that incremental provenance documentation might become a rational basis for a settlement of differences, it would be possible to expand upon these observations.

Unfortunately it is a bit difficult for anyone to say whether or not what he proposes ("incremental provenance documentation" - eh?) would produce a "settlement of differences" (I guess he means between exploiters and preservationists) until he actually reveals what is meant! Who is it he expects to say whether what he proposes would "address nearly all licitness concerns"? On what basis if he is not prepared first to set them out and demonstrateo whether ethical collectors and other dealers will accept them too?

I wonder if this has not been prompted by the Hay-Patrikiadou affair to be discussed in the post above this?

Vignette: where does the 'meat' in a hamburger really come from?
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UK Antiquities Dealer to be Extradited?

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Malcolm Hay, 60, who has sold antiquities to museums worldwide, was described by Richard Falkiner, member of the Treasure Valuation Committee administered through the British Museum as a "reputable and responsible" antiquity dealer. Hay, who read classics at Oxford, is described by the Guardian as "a leading expert on ancient coins", who:

has sold to institutions such as the British Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. A British Museum spokeswoman confirmed yesterday that its coins and medals department had acquired Greek, Roman and Oriental coins from Hay, and that its prehistory and Europe section purchased a brooch, among other artefacts, from him.

Mr Hay however faces being deported to Greece where he has apparently been sentenced to four years in prison due to claims that he sold stolen ancient artefacts to an Athens dealer (Dalya Alberge, 'D-day looms for antiquities dealer facing jail in Greece', The Guardian February 7, 2011). I have earlier discussed this case here and here.

The other dealer involved has been named as Anna Patrikiadou ("Dealer facing four years in a Greek jail appeals over lack of evidence", Antiques Trade Gazette November 22, 2010), who it is reported was a regular client of Mr Hay.

The matter turns apparently on the documentary evidence of a single invoice. Hay admits that when Ms Patrikiadou visited him in London in 1999, he sold her for £1,880 "hundreds of sherds of broken pottery" [apparently unprovenanced] which he had bought fairs and described as "junk" , invoicing them as "550 pieces of terracotta" . He says that the woman used this invoice falsely as "whitewashing" for other more valuable unprovenanced items that were later found in her shop by Greek police, antiquities which under Greek law belong to the state. The items seized from the trader in 2000 included unbroken pots and figurines were worth nearly £200,000. The dealer was later acquitted after claiming that she bought them from Hay, a charge he disputes (Richard Edwards and Jackie Williams, '"I sold junk. Now I face four years in Greek jail, says antiques dealer', The Daily Telegraph August 28, 2010)


When the Athens dealer was initially investigated in Greece for illegal artefact trafficking, Hay had been questioned as a witness. He then heard nothing else about the matter (really? he did not enquire about his regular business partner?) until he was arrested when he flew into London City Airport in 2007. It turns out he had been tried in absence by a Greek court for involvement in the case and as a result was the subject of a European Arrest Warrant ("Greek courts use anti-terror rules in bid to have dealer extradited", Antiques Trade Gazette February 18, 2008; "Greek court gives UK dealer three years in prison", Antiques Trade Gazette March 23, 2009). He said: "I had never been notified, accused or summoned by the Greek courts in the intervening years, and this came like a blow." Hay was handcuffed and taken to Stratford police station. There he was held for two days in the cells and then taken before an extradition tribunal, and the case has been appealed. Hay is expected to learn his fate within the next fortnight.

The British media are using the story to ridicule the idea (or rather application) of European Arrest Warrants, nobody is asking what else Mr Hay had sold this woman ('a regular client') over the years. Hay is claiming he was 'framed'. Alberga informs us that:

His plight has shocked the antiquities world and has led dealers to attach photographs to invoices.

That seems a bit of a no-brainer when the invoice serves the purchaser as a form of guarantee. When you buy a TV or electrical equipment, the serial number should be written on the guarantee, so you cannot use that document to claim money on another device of the same model. The chassis number is on the car registration documents and purchase invoice. Some form of linking the documentation of a licit transaction with a particular item or group of items surely is obvious in the legitimate antiquities trade. I cannot see why dealers would be "shocked" by the consequences of the failure of one of their number to follow this simple business principle.

Let us note also the significance of the facts of the case, despite the biased (and I suspect incomplete) reporting, it seems clear that Mr Hay and Ms Patrikiadou did this particular deal involving Greek antiquities in London (but within the EU). Now Mr Hay has been sentenced by a Greek court for an offence against Greek law and is apparently facing extradition to Greece on this account. I suspect this, rather than Hays' careless business documentation practices, is the reason why the international antiquities dealers (and I bet collectors) are "shocked" and why certain quarters would have an interest in arousing public opinion against such an "injustice". A case to watch.

Photo Malcolm Hays (what's under the draped rag Mr Hayes?) [Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris, Guardian]

IADAA Statement on Looting in Egypt

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The International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art (IADAA) has issued a statement about the alleged looting of museums, archaeological stores and archaeological sites in Egypt, condemning "the looting of Egyptian antiquities and offers help". The Association characterises the problem as due to "poorly protected museums, magazines and excavations". This seems hardly fair in the circumstances, tourists and academics in Egypt cannot fail to observe despite the endemic poverty of the country the number of personnel guarding sites and museums around the country. The problem we observed only arose with the (temporary) crisis of government last week.

The IADAA goes out of its way to mention that it "deplores the reports that the necessary security is lacking". This of course is the same old collectors' mantra, according to them to stop looting and the illicit trade in artefacts you have to run a police state with guards posted 24/7 at every site across the country containing finds that can be looted.

IADAA wants to point out emphatically that the most effective protection of cultural property happens on-site. For this reason we consider it imperative to intensify and organize surveillance on-site.

Well, until two weeks these sites were pretty well guarded, certainly better than any in the UK or USA and yet David Gill points out case where an IADAA member has stuff in their stocks which seem to have come from them from the period before the current security crisis. ("It should be noted that a former (temporary?) IADAA Spanish member currently appears to hold material listed on the SCA's website"). So how does the IADAA model fare then?

IADAA says it would like to help out, but:

In order to recover stolen goods it is vital that detailed information as to damage and losses in Egypt are disseminated as fast as possible. [...] the most detailed descriptions possible and photographs of all lost objects are necessary. The best, least expensive and most efficient form of cultural property protection is an internationally accessible picture library of lost art works, which has to be clearly structured and available online.

"Art works" - we are of course talking about archaeological material, dessicated human cadavers for example are not "art". IADAA seems to ignore the fact that its not just storerooms that were opened, but there was digging on archaeological sites. How are the Egyptians supposed to produce for the convenience of the IADAA photos of the freshly and clandestinely dugup material?

I think a point worth notying here about "least expensive", it is not the Egyptians that are making a profit on storing archaeological material as an archive in museum stores or in leaving it in situ in the ground as a resource for future generations. It is however the members of the IADAA that are making a tidy profit selling this sort of stuff. Who should be bearing the costs of cleaning up the global antiquities market, the Egyptian people, or the international trade? As David Gill points out, a much cheaper method for all concerned would be for "IADAA members [and all handling such material] to insist on documented collecting histories for Egyptian material". Trying to shift the blame on the Egyptian people at the moment seems at the least ungracious.

Getting the Minelab Depth Advantage, £100 quid down and £160 a month for two years...

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On a metal detecting site near you, some guys are talking about how to do some metal-detecting-not-in-accord-with-the-UK-Code-of-Practice-for-Responsible-Metal-Detecting. Anonymous metal-detectorist Peeler, apparently from the Isle of Man, begins a thread called "GPXs On Mineralised Pasture ?":

I have a site where viking objects come from and its pasture ,,but its heavy mineralised and none of the top machines can touch it but my mate with the older GPX 4500 is getting Viking objects way beyond the first few inches that other detectors are getting but still within the top soil... He has learnt the machine and tweaked it up but he can tell iron and smaller coil is the best.....I was in Lincolnshire for a few days and the number of damaged artefacts recovered were disappointing.....We had no GPX and we had ancient pasture which has produce lovely finds but its has deep top soil..Three mates with me are thinking of investing in the latest GPX 5000....Yes we are mad

Mad? Downright irresponsible. Sites on pasture (especially that pasture long enough for mineralisation to build up within the soil structure) should be left alone. Note the excuse offered for going even deeper into unploughed land, that finds are "damaged" higher up - what's happened to the PAS-fluffy argument that by digging them out willy nilly detectorists are "saving" artefacts from further destruction? Anyway, if one thought that the cost of a GPX site wrecker machine was too high, J.C. Malony informs the wannabe site-wrecker:

£100 odd quid down and £160 a month for two years... split three ways. Job done. Still learning mine which has been bought for a job and if it goes to plan I`ll understand the machine by the time the site is ready and its paid for. Loads of helpful folk around that can shorten the learning curve but if your mates used one before your most of the way there.

("bought for job" on a site that's not ready?). How long before this type of machine is used to add yet another unknown to the question of what damage metal detecting is doing to the archaeological record of Britain and on what scale?


Photo: the new model of the GPX-5000mp3. For an extra couple of quid, this model has a built-in mp3 player with prerecorded classical music tracks to relax searchers in the long dark hours when they are finding nothing (An optional extra are lessons on how to use the apostrophe which many detectorists both sides of the Atlantic seem to find a challenge).

Findspot, here, really, honest!

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It seems that US detectorists sometimes have doubts whether a fellow artefact hunter really found what he says he did in the place he says he did. The TreasureNet Forum has a series of rules concerning "authenticity" which are very interesting. the forum moderators insist: All finds posted are presumed to be genuine, and those who post them are to be respected. But:

Occasionally a member may have doubts about the authenticity of an item posted by another member. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
1. It is NEVER appropriate or permissible, regardless of proof, to state or suggest in an open forum that another member's find may not be genuine— unless, of course, he has raised that possibility himself, or there is an obvious issue that cannot be disputed or ignored (for example, if the word "COPY" is clearly stamped on a coin).
2. It is NEVER appropriate or permissible to suggest that a member may not actually have found the item which he has posted as a find.
3. [...] Failure to follow these guidelines may result in censure, loss of privileges &/or access to certain forums, or outright banning from TreasureNet.

Interestingly what it does not seem to say in this section of the forum rules is that persons found misrepresenting objects as genuine finds will face censure, restrictions or banning.

Metal Detecting (and Digging) Colonial Sites in the US

* Here we see US artefact hunters getting excited about some post-medieval finds, including coins of Elizabeth I (clunked with the spade or plough?) and James I. What is interesting is that they were found with a "depth advantage" machine, a borrowed GPX 4000. These thin hammered coins were reputedly found at a depth of "22 inches". The photo shows that this is below the top humic layer of shallow ploughsoil. The machine costs about 5000 dollars, but as dealer Woodland Detectors 4-H says in this thread:

Just like everything else...You get what you pay for. That was my initial thought, "who is going to buy these machines at those prices?" But amazingly, I sell 3 a month, and the phone is ringing for them I've got them on payment plans. They are moving. They are finding gold and relics that are paying for the machines within the first Month. [...] I think if finding lucrative relics/coins or Cache's were my goal, I'd definitely consider it. Just like a car, you get what you pay for. Look how deep this find was. [...] And these types of finds are coming like that from all over the World now.

Vignette: the Depth Advantage, digging down deeper and deeper to artefacts buried deeply below those "tough conditions" of the ploughsoil all over the world.

The effect of the Internet

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There is an interesting post on the English hammered coins discussion forum. Chris Wren writes about the effects of the internet on the coin market.

Before the computer/internet age, selling coins was done at fairs or by issuing printed lists through the post. Auctions in the old days were almost the sole preserve of dealers when it came to buying. Overseas buyers could almost never compete with natives due to the time it took before they received their copy of the list - the natives would have had theirs days before and, unless the foreigners were prepared to travel widely, they could not attend the fairs/auctions either. The internet has made it possible for anyone, anywhere to have a good chance of getting first in the queue. You can do it from the comfort of your armchair from anywhere in the world, even bidding in person in real time at most auctions. This has led to an expansion in the number of collectors across the world for ancient and hammered coins(many countries do not have native coinages extending back before the 19th century as they did not exist as states before then so they must look to the 'old' world to satisfy any interest in ancient things) and, remembering that the supply of available coins is finite, demand thus rises and hence prices do too [...]

The antiquities market today is completely different from that of the period up to the early 1990s. It is much larger and geographically unlimited, both in terms of numbers buying material and those now selling it. Objects move through it (and therefore across international borders) far more rapidly and more anonymously. The scope of antiquities these days being collected is far wider than that of yesteryear, far more 'minor' and fragmented antiquities.

More to the point, if the number of collectors and dealers has risen immeasurably since the early 1990s, a large proportion of the vast amount of dugup material now needed to sustain this market cannot be from the old collections and dealers stock. It must have been dug up in the last decade and a half to sustain the development of the trade in that period. A lot of it is currently being looted in the Old World to satisfy the 'needs' of dealers and collectors in the New World. It seems these people could not care less where it comes from though.

Vignette: Internet

Why is the Atlas of Living Australia is invisible to Google?

Jeff Atwood, one of the co-founders of Stack Overflow recently wrote a blog post Trouble In the House of Google, where he noted that several sites that scrape Stack Overflow content (which Stack Overflow's CC-BY-SA license permits) appear higher in Google's search rankings than the original Stack Overflow pages. When Stack Overflow chose the CC-BY-SA license they made the assumption that:

...that we, as the canonical source for the original questions and answers, would always rank first...That's why Joel Spolsky and I were confident in sharing content back to the community with almost no reservations – because Google mercilessly penalizes sites that attempt to game the system by unfairly profiting on copied content.

Jeff Atwood's post goes on to argue that something is wrong with the way Google is ranking sites that derive content from other sites.

I was reminded of this post when I started to notice that searches for fairly obscure Australian animals would often return my own web site Australian Faunal Directory on CouchDB as the first hit. In one sense this is personally gratifying, but it can also be frustrating because when I Google these obscure taxa it's usually because I'm trying to find data that isn't already in one of my projects.

But what I've also noticed is that the site that I obtained the data from, Australian Faunal Directory (AFD), rarely appears in the Google search results. In fact, there are taxa for which Google doesn't find the corresponding page in AFD. For example, if you search for Uxantis notata (shown here in an image from the Key to the planthoppers of Australia and New Zealand) the first hit(s) are from my version of AFD:

Neither the original AFD, nor the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), which also builds on AFD, appear in the top 10 hits.

Initially I though this is probably an artefact. This is a pretty obscure taxon, maybe things like rounding error in computing PageRank are going to affect search rankings more than anything else. However, if I explicitly tell Google to search for Uxantis notata in the domain environment.gov.au I get no hits whatsoever:

Likewise, the same search restricted to ala.org.au finds nothing, nothing at all. Both AFD and Atlas of Living Australia have pages for this taxon, here, and here, so clearly something is deeply wrong.

Why are the original providers of the data not appearing in Google search results at all? For someone like me who argues that sharing data is a good thing, and sites that aggregate and repurpose data will ultimately benefit the original data providers (for example by sending traffic and Google Juice) this is somewhat worrying. It seems to reinforce the fear that many data providers have: "if I share my data someone will make a better web site than mine and people will go to that web site, rather than the one I've created with my hard-won data." It may well be that data aggregators will score higher than data providers in Google searches, but I hadn't expected data providers to be virtually invisible.

Google isn't the problem
If a web site that I hacked together in a few days does better in Google searches than the rather richer pages published by sites such as ALA (with a budget of over $AU 30 million), something is wrong. Unlike the Stack Overflow example discussed above, I don't think the problem here is with Google.
If we search in Google for an "iconic" Australian taxon by name, say the Koala Phascolarctos cinereus, Wikipedia is the first hit (which should be no surprise). ALA doesn't appear in the top ten. If we tell Google to just search the domain ala.org.au we get lots of pages from ALA, but not the actual species page for Phascolarctos cinereus. This suggests that there is something about the way ALA's website works that prevents Google indexing it properly. I'm also a little worried that a major biodiversity project which has as its aim

...to improve access to essential information on Australia’s biodiversity

is effectively invisible to Google.