US Administration "not really there" for Conservation: so what's new?

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More US congressional interference in legislation intended to protect an endangered resource (Matthew Brown, Congress measure against wolves seen as precedent, AP 15th April 2010):

The endangered [species] act has long been reviled by conservatives who see it as a hindrance to economic development. Now, the administration's support for the wolf provision signals that protections for even the most imperiled animals, fish and plants are negotiable given enough political pressure, experts said. Officials in Montana and Idaho already are planning public hunts for the predators this fall, [...]. "The president could have used some political capital to influence this and he didn't," said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law from the Vermont Law School. "The message to the environmental community is, don't count on the administration to be there" for the protection of endangered species.

How much have they ever been really "there" for the preservation of the archaeological heritage, both in their own country and that abroad endangered by the activities of unprincipled US dealers and collectors?

Vignette: Perhaps there are some US lawmaker just itching to get an invitation to get their guns out and take part in those public hunts to slay some wolves. They'd be the ones who support those who collect dugup coins buying them from dealers who don't care too much for paperwork documenting legal export from the source countries, I guess.

Collectors' Vandalism of Islamic Art,

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Souren Melikan has a piece in the New York Times (Century-Old Vandalism of Islamic Art, and Its Price, April 15, 2011) about the way so-called cosmopolitan ("cultural property internationalist") collectors dismember unique handwritten manuscript books to separate the attractive pictures from the text which does not interest them and call it "Islamic art". To me, this is a very precise parallel to the way that so-called cosmopolitan ("cultural property internationalist") collectors encourage the dismemberment of unique archaeological sites and the separation of the attractive objects from their context which does not interest them and call it "Ancient art". Its the same thing, the same vandalism. This is how Melikan's article begins:

A chorus of praise greeted the “record for an Islamic work of art at auction” achieved when a painted page torn from a royal Iranian manuscript, the Shah-Name or Book of Kings, brought £7.43 million at the Sotheby’s auction of the Stuart Cary Welch collection on April 6. Little was said about the destruction of the greatest manuscript from 16th-century Iran, intact until 1957 when the French collector Maurice de Rothschild who owned it died.

The extraordinary manuscript commissioned for the library of Shah Tahmasp (1524-76) was acquired by Arthur A. Houghton Jr., a bibliophile whose interest lay in rare English books. He was presumably advised by Mr. Welch, who had long been buying manuscript paintings from Iran and Moghul India. Soon after, Mr. Houghton began breaking up the manuscript. In November 1976, seven pages appeared at Christie’s. Many more would follow, sold through art galleries and at auction, notably at Christie’s London on Oct. 11, 1988.

This astounding example of calculated vandalism perpetrated by a cultivated man is perhaps the most extreme where Eastern art is concerned. But it was by no means unusual. Ripping apart the thousands of precious painted manuscripts removed from Iran, India or Turkey and taken to Europe in the 19th and 20th century was routine among Western dealers. It allowed them to make a bigger profit[...]

Manuscripts from Moghul India, where Persian was the language of literature and administration, suffered a similar fate. In the Sotheby’s sale, a page painted with a scene featuring a ship sailing in choppy waters had been cut from a manuscript. The upper line reproduces a couplet by the 14th-century poet Hafez (not identified in the catalog) and the lower line has a couplet by another poet that does not rhyme with the former, which Sotheby’s does not mention. This botched assemblage, carried out in the 20th century, would be unthinkable in a manuscript of Persian poetry. Pompously dubbed “a page from the Salim [the future emperor Jahangir] album,” the beautiful but mishandled painting brought an astonishing £193,250.

The late Mr. Welch, who studied neither Persian nor Arabic, used to say that it is not necessary to know the languages to look at the paintings. To look perhaps, but to see, and to understand their meaning, it is. Had he mastered a reading knowledge of Persian, the American collector might have realized how intricate the connection is between the image and the written word.

I think the same goes for the commercial dismemberment of the archaeological record, it is clear that the dealers and collectors one talks to about it have not the foggiest idea about how the 'text' of an archaeological site is 'read'. They think its all about who gets to hold the 'pictures'.

In the context of this discussion about destroying archaeology to get out the geegaws, I was struck by the juxtaposition of the names Houghton and Wel[s]h. I assume that the Arthur A. Houghton ("junior" - this one?) is not related to the Arthur A. Horton of CPRI, but who knows? One ripped up manuscripts to sell the dismembered bits on the international market, the other has misgivings about the CCPIA intended to curb the treatment of foreign archaeological sites in the same way, the distinction seems to me to be a fine one. (There is a Corning glass connection).

Melikan talks of the effects of the way foreign collectors treat this cultural property in the following terms:

Detached from their volume and framed as “Persian miniatures,” book paintings are reduced to an arbitrary construct suiting the desire of collectors unaware of the nature of the art. The artificial construct fits into the overall reinvention of the Eastern world by the West.

He refers to the "misapprehension of historical reality that goes together with this reinvention", which again seems to me a perfect parallel to what happens when artefact collectors (such as the coineys) set out to rewrite history on the basis of a few decontextualised and visually attractive "pieces of the past" in their grubby hands.

Collectors of ancient dugups claim a special and privileged familiarity with ancient cultures which somehow magically infuses into them from possession, but Melikan highlights a number of examples of complete ignorance of these matters exhibited by both collectors and the cataloguers of the auction houses which sell these decontextualised "art works".

More on the Shahnameh:
Metropolitan Museum NY: 'The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp',
and its destruction here - Thomas Stone: 'The Houghton Shahnameh, The Whole Is Greater Then The Parts but Sometimes the Parts are more Marketable--Book Destruction for Profit'

Vignette: Decontextualised and put on sale: a framed page of the sixteenth century folio 'Faridun in the Guise of a Dragon Tests His Sons' attributed to Aqa Mirak "part of the scholarly collection of Islamic and Indian Art assembled by the late Stuart Cary Welch" (REUTERS/Toby Melville)

A Different Story...

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A notable feature of the return of the four objects to the Cairo Egyptian Museum was that some people initially refused to tell the story of how they were recovered. This is despite it being given out at the press conference. The official version them was that they were found in a big black bag in a Cairo metro station where they were picked up by Salah Abdel Salam, an MSAA employee. This is the story reported for example by Nevine El-Aref, 'Missing artifacts from the Egyptian Museum retrieved', Ahram Online, Tuesday 12 Apr 2011, and also recounted by Tarek El-Awadi at the press conference.

Notably, however, one of the people who did not repeat this story was Salah Abdel Salam's boss - Dr Zahi Hawass. Despite the sensational - one might say fantastic - manner in which these items were reported to have been found, on Zahi Hawass' blog, initially there was not a peep about how these objects were retrieved (Press Release - Four Objects Return to the Egyptian Museum, April 12th). Until now... Lo and behold ANOTHER story emerges (Objects Returned to the Museum, Zahi Hawass blog, 16th April 2011):

[...] It seems that the people who entered the Museum on the night of January 28th knew they could not do anything with these objects. They cannot sell them because no one will buy them, they have been publicized. They also cannot keep them because of the penalties. However, one of them had a conscience, because he took a bag and put it in a metro station, and by accident a person opened the bag and saw artifacts inside. At 9 am I found this person on the steps of my office with the bag. I opened it and was amazed to see these missing objects!

"A person", "this person". Unnamed, well, one might have thought the gratitude of the Egyptian people for this guy's honesty and civic spirit would have at least merited Dr Hawass naming him and saying a very public thank-you. In fact, he should get a medal. If I were the Minister, I'd have shown him at the press conference, wouldn't you? How was it ascertained that this now-unnamed person was not one of the thieves? Was he in fact questioned by the police about the precise circumstances of finding the objects? I'd also like to see the bag.

Another interesting snippet from the same source:

The people who were caught with antiquities from the Egyptian Museum were sentenced to 15 years in jail and fined heavily. I hope through these strict punishments we will deter people from dealing in antiquities here.

Which "people", how many "people"? The one man (with the injured leg?) who was apparently caught in the Museum just after the theft? The guys who were caught in the 'sting' when they tried to sell the objects in the Internet/ by mobile phone messages? The guys that naively walked into the Khan El-Khalili market to try and sell some to tourist-tat salesmen? All or none of these? Also what about the guys who broke into the Museum shop and were caught? Were these trials public or not? What emerged from their interrogation and cross examination? Did any leads emerge that will lead police to the other people involved (like the one who is obviously still at large and frequenting an underground station with a big bag of stolen antiquities)? These trials took place when, precisely?

There are a lot of people who were extremely distressed and extremely concerned about what happened in the Egyptian Museum on 28th January. People who are on the same side as the Egyptians, who want to see the archaeological heritage of Egypt safe and will do anything they can to help that aim be achieved. The Egyptian authorities do in fact owe these people a bit more information than we are getting - in dribs and drabs some of it conflicting with other information. When are we going to get it? Under this regime, or when there is a change of government?

Dr David raises an Eyebrow

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Dr David Gill expresses surprise about the collecting history of a fish plate sold recently which apparently has the ability to have been in two places at the same time. This either raises the possibility of a parallel universe from which non-looted artefacts materialise into ours (a high-tech version of the coineys' "coin elves" myth), or as Gill surmises the difference between what he calls "creative collecting histories" and those verified by proper due diligence.

Vignette: Dr David Gill raises an eyebrow.

Ancient Treasures as Fashion Accessories

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Harrods apparently have a new line in menswear: It's named after a famous TV Egyptologist and got a mutant four-legged dung beetle in the logo. The blurb announces:

Rich khakis, deep blues and soft, weathered leathers give off a look that hearkens back to Egypt’s golden age of discovery in the early 20th century.

That's Egypt's golden age, or the European golden age of digging up Egyptian stuff? I rather think the Egyptians working for the European explorers in the early twentieth century wore something else... they only started adopting European dress styles later in an attempt to shed their identity as an 'other'.

The "Karnak Shirt" has been "hand painted (with grime?) washed and repaired to recall (sic) the rugged experience of excavating the ancient tombs of Egypt". In "Karnak" that is, the Egyptians are apparently keeping the lots of "tombs" there a secret from the rest of us, but hey, if we buy one of these shirts, we can "recall" excavating them.*

An Egyptian blogger writing in English has however picked up the discussion going on about this (Zeinobia: 'Our ancient treasures are not accessories ya Doc !!!', Egyptian chronicles - the Egypt that you don't know, April 15th 2011). It is referring to a November 2010 photo shoot which James Weber a NY photographer did in the visiting Tutankhamun exhibition in New York in connection with the promotion of this new line. She seems not to be very pleased about it, but clearly seems to be confusing the director of the New York museum with the director of the Cairo Museum. She also seems to think that the antiquities used as props and to provide background are ALL real (they clearly are not).

I see Kate Phizackerley has picked up the story Zahi Clothing Line - Shocking Photos). Kate raises the question of the destination of royalties for those photos in association with the new law in Egypt about such matters.

Apart from the general laughable premise of the collection itself (surely though just a bit of fun and not worth getting worked up about) and effect of the whole project, I am not sure there really is so much of a problem using antiquities in product promotion. It actually happens quite frequently - in fact is it not a sign that these "things" actully mean something even to the consumerist materialist fashion junkie? Frankly it does not seem particularly worrying that an archaeologists should have a brand named after him, it happens to sportsmen and actors, I do not see why astronauts and astronomers or archaeologists should not have the same status. Perhaps we should be grateful that Ms Flaugh did not decide to do a Simcha Jacobovici line, or a Mick Aston/Phil Harding line.


* Actually if they are to depict what a shirt looks like after exploring the West Bank tombs, my fashion advice to Lora Flaugh is they should have a long rip down the back and smell vaguely of bat excreta.

Vignettes: Egyptian explorers of the Valley of the Kings in the 1920s, below, non-Egyptian explorers of the Valley of the Kings in a slightly earlier 'golden age'. Ties and jodhpurs seem to be in order for the men, can't see Lara Croft (perhaps the fashion-house's next project) in a dress like that though.

A Numismatic Collecting History

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The current catalogue of the Baldwin's sale of British coins reveals that many of them are being sold with the collectors' tickets which in some cases reveal a collecting history going back to 'pre-decimal days'. One coin in particular, lot 602 London mint halfgroat of Richard III has what the auctioneer describes as "a fantastic provenance":

ex Samuel Tyssen collection, Leigh and Sotheby, 6 December 1802, lot 213, sold for £3/4/- to Dimsdale
ex Thomas Dimsdale collection, Sotheby, 6 July 1824, lot 482, sold for £13/5/- to Rev. Martin
ex Rev J W Martin collection, Sotheby, 23 May 1859, lot 128, sold for £2/19/- to Capt Murchison
ex Capt R M Murchison collection, Sotheby, 27 June 1864, lot 105, sold for £13/16/- to Addington
ex Samuel Addington collection, purchased en bloc in 1883 by H Montagu
ex Hyman Montagu collection, Sotheby, 7 May 1888, lot 159, sold for £15/10/- to Rostron
ex Simpson Rostron collection, Sotheby, 16 May 1892, lot 99, sold for £11/15/- to dealer Webster
ex John G Murdoch collection, Sotheby, 31 March 1903, lot 380, sold for £9/2/6 to dealer Ready
ex Bernard M S Roth collection, Sotheby, 19-20 July 1917, lot 232, sold for £10/10 to dealer Spink
ex J Shirley-Fox collection, died 1939, sold in a private transaction before this date
ex George R Blake collection, sold through B A Seaby Bulletin, June 1956, item BL75 for £30
ex Raymond Carlyon-Britton collection, portion sold to B A Seaby c.1958
ex B A Seaby Bulletin, January 1959, item X161 for £42/10/-
ex B A Seaby Bulletin, September 1961, item H427 for £62/10/-
ex B A Seaby Bulletin, January 1963, item H1423 for £95. accompanied by ticket at this price
ex Eric J Harris collection, sold to A H Baldwin & Sons Ltd in 1995

Of course with something like that, there is no need for the current dealer to pretend he does not know where it comes from, it has a verifiable collecting history which gives it a respectable enough pedigree. Nothing to hide.

Several of the other coins have interesting collecting histories - which rather begs the question why other collectors of dugups are so lax in retaining this sort of information (see above).

Lot 754 has some interesting marketing material, linking it to the recent box-office success "The King's Speech" for those unable to make the connection themselves... (AND the upcoming Royal Wedding).

BHL, DjVu, and reading the f*cking manual

One of the many biggest challenges I've faced with the BioStor project, apart from dealing with messy metadata, has been handling page images. At present I get these from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. They are big (typically 1 Mb in size), and have the caramel colour of old paper. Nothing fills up a server quicker than thousands of images.

A while ago started playing with ImageMagick to resize the images, making them smaller, as well as ways to remove the background colour, leaving just black text and lines on white background.

I think this makes the page image clearer, as well as removing the impression that this is some ancient document, rather than a scientific article. Yes, it's the Biodiversity Heritage Library, but the whole point of the taxonomic literature is that it lasts forever. Why not make it look as fresh as when it was first printed?

Working out how to best remove the background colour takes some effort, and running ImageMagick on every image that's downloaded starts putting a lot of stress on the poor little Mac Mini that powers BioStor.

Then there's the issue of having an iPad viewer for BHL, and making it interactive. So, I started looking at the DjVu files generated by the Internet Archive, and thinking whether it would make more sense to download those and extract images from them, rather than go via the BHL API. I'll need the DjVu files for the text layout anyway (see Towards an interactive DjVu file viewer for the BHL).

I couldn't remember the command to extract images from DjVu, but I did remember that Google is my friend, which led me to this question on Stack Overflow: Using the DjVu tools to for background / foreground seperation?.

OMG! DjVu tools can remove the background? A quick look at the documentation confirmed it. So I did a quick test. The page on the left is the default page image, the page on the right was extracted using ddjvu with the option -mode=foreground.

Much, much nicer. But why didn't I know this? Why did I waste time playing with ImageMagick when it's a trivial option in a DjVu tool? And why does BHL serve the discoloured page images when it could serve crisp, clean versions?

So, I felt like an idiot. But the other good thing that's come out of this is that I've taken a closer look at the Internet Archive's BHL-related content, and I'm beginning to think that perhaps the more efficient way to build something like BioStor is not through downloading BHL data and using their API, but by going directly to the Internet Archive and downloading the DjVu and associated files. Maybe it's time to rethink everything about how BioStor is built...

The theft of the golden mask

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Zahi Hawass has a new book coming out, about the theft of antiquities from Egypt which should be a good read and is bound to have some stunning photographs. It will deal with "how such antiquities were smuggled out of the country, as well as how they were returned, following conflicts and deliberations with those who found themselves in possession of stolen artifacts" (Zahi Hawass , 'The theft of the golden mask', Asharq Alawsat 15/4/2011).

After denouncing those who use the recent thefts and looting to claim that returned objects are not as safe in Egypt as in other countries, he then discusses the St Louis Ka Nefer Nefer mask which is "a vivid example of the conflict between those who claim that our stolen antiquities should remain abroad, and the broad range of archaeologists who call for these antiquities to be returned to their native Egypt".

Dr. Mohammed Zakaria Ghoneim, may he rest in peace, discovered this beautiful mask in [1950 at the Saqqara pyramids near Cairo]. It remained in storage until 1966, when it was on its way to the Egyptian Museum, where it was scheduled to be shipped to Japan to feature in an exhibition when it disappeared. Official records confirm that the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask was in Egypt until at least 1966, and evidence suggests that it was stolen en route to the Egyptian museum. The mask never arrived at the museum, nor was it registered in the museum's records, but the question remains: Who stole the mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer? And how did it leave Egypt?/

Hawass answers his own question with the following statement:

It seems that this was the work of an organized international gang smuggling antiquities from Egypt, and one of its most prominent members was well known to the FBI and the Egyptian intelligence services. This thief was able to steal many artifacts from Egypt, and was heavily involved in the case known as the "great artifact robbery". This thief stole the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask and sold it to the Saint Louis Art Museum in America.

That is a pretty transparent allegation. Although the object ended up with an international dealer, any evidence the Egyptian intelligence service may have linking them directly with the actual theft has, I think, never been made public. Hawass goes on to say:

a formal request was sent to the Saint Louis Art Museum in order to recover the mask, and later a formal request was sent to the US Congress and the St. Louis Senator. When we did not receive a positive response, we turned our attention to civil society, contacting school students in the city asking them not to visit the museum, because it was in possession of stolen Egyptian artifacts. We did not try to raise the issue in U.S. courts, given the high financial costs that are unfortunately associated with these types of issues. It is Egypt's antiquities that are in most need of these funds, for their restoration and care. After thinking long and hard, the file was sent to the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S., and they conducted a series of measures to get the mask and return it to Egypt. However, the museum quickly filed a lawsuit against the Department, to stop the process. The museum management claimed that Egypt had donated this mask to the late Zakaria Ghoneim, but these words are lies and cannot be believed.Soon, we will send Egyptian archeologists to America to testify in this case, in order to ensure the return of this mask to Egypt after its long absence.

Well, it's no use contacting US senators, I don't think many of them care. As it seems is the case with the citizens of St Louis whose schoolkids still go and gaze on stolen property.

Four Years on, a Dallinghoo Decision (the "Wickham Market Hoard")

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Readers may (or may not) remember the story about the two metal detectorists who fell out over how to divide the reward money from a Treasure find dug out from two feet down in Dallinghoo near Woodbridge, Suffolk (aka "the Wickham Market Hoard"). The £300,000 reward (Daily Mail calls the money "spoils") will be split three ways. Half will go to the landowner, farmer Cliff Green, 69.

But metal-detecting enthusiast Mr Darke, 62, who found the treasure, is furious that he has been awarded £75,803, while Mr Lewis, 56, who was drafted in to help later, will receive £74,196.

Life's just not fair is it Mr Darke?

Mr Darke has already appealed the ruling, but the decision was upheld by Culture Minister Ed Vaizey. ‘I trusted him (Mr Lewis) as a friend,’ he said. ‘I was totally gutted. It should have been exciting and interesting, and something to look forward to.’

The coins will be bought by Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service, which has launched a fundraising drive, so its the good people of the area who want to see these items in their museum who will be forking out the money which Mr Darke is "looking forward to" and wants even more of. I'll ask my Mum and sisters over there not to give a penny.

[I am also a bit confused about the chronology and sequence of events connected with reporting this Treasure. It seems from the earlier reports cited in my previous text on this that it was not reported by one of the finders at all, but the landowner (when? Why?). But earlier four coins reportedly had been separated from the group and presented to Lewis. By what right did Darke do this before they had been declared? (Or was it Darke who gave them to him?). Only later (?) did the four separated coins reportedly get handed in, at the same time as Lewis laid claim to be an finder too. So was there an initial attempt to conceal some of the coins? How does what happened square with the Code of Practice of the Treasure Act? If it doers not, why are these two guys getting a full reward (again)?]

How many other artefacts has Mr Darke taken from the archaeological record in his 25 years of "metal detecting" and how many of them are reported (by him or the landowner) to anyone? And Mr Lewis?

Vignette: Suffolk "researcher" Michael Darke.

A "Researcher" Learns Something From A Dealer in the UK

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The Searcher December 2009:

When Essex researcher Stuart Silvey dropped into TimeLine Originals offices with some recent finds, we little expected to see, among the modern milled coins, a remarkable gold pendant he had found while detecting near Bursted, near Billericay.[...] we naturally congratulated Stuart on his sensational find and advised him about the legal procedure for reporting it to Essex FLO. Stuart is now waiting to hear back from the PAS.

(see also Coin News November 2009 ) So the first stop in London of this Essex "researcher" with such a find was not the Portable Antiquities Scheme, but the antiquity dealers' Timeline Originals. What a surprise eh? Why call him a "researcher" then, and not a treasure hunter? A plunderer looking only for saleable items? So do Timeline Originals often buy things from local "researchers" who do not know the law?

Metal Detector treasures: "Get A New Site"

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It does not really say outright who is behind it (of course) but there is a new blog called "MetalDetectorTreasures" (seems to have started in January 2011) with some gems of information about the hobby. Such as this one which relates to the "depth advantage" question I was discussing a while back. This author has a different approach:

New Metal Detectors v New Sites – NO CONTEST
March 30, 2011 | Author Bill mc Cullough (aka: Peace Havens)
These days we are bombarded with new super metal detectors which promise to fulfil you hearts desire. SORRY to burst your bubble but the best-est, deep-est, latest LCD-est, Multicoloured-est detector will be virtually useless if you try detecting on one of my old sites. My sites are cleaned out, as are thousands of others throughout the country. Which is why eBay is full of metal detectors for sale that have been used once or twice. BUT all is not lost. If you want to find anything these days you need a NEW SITE not a new detector. Give me a standard detector with minimum discrimination and a 6″ depth PLUS a new never visited site and I will beat any fancy expensive machine who is trying to find something that has been missed on a cleaned out site. SO … find yourself a new site and save yourself some money…

Thousands of cleaned out sites all over the UK. that is the legacy of current policies towards artefact hunting. Of course as more and more of the thousands of artefact hunters move away from the thousands of cleaned out sites, the number of intact archaeological sites year by year decreases at a rate that can only be guessed - because of course nobody interested in maintaining the status quo is going to measure it.

More Museum Shambles

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Vincent Brown looked a little bit more carefully at the shabti found in an underground station in the Cairo Metro than hapless Museum Director Tarek El-Awady, and finds the latter has wrongly identified the object (see here for his text on the topic, the one found is pictured on the second-horizontal version of the missing-objects list on page 28/42). This is the second time this has happened, a while ago the sceptres on the original list were mixed up too. I guess we can explain the Director's lapse by the fact that he must have been nervous about appearing at a news conference and having to answer questions about how these four items were - in Hawass' words - "received this morning". He must have realised that the story he had to tell was going to be difficult to believe...

So as Vincent notes: "This of course means that shabti JE 68984 has NOT been returned and is still out there somewhere".

UPDATE (A few minutes later):
This has just appeared on Facebook from Lana Jean Higbee Hill:

Um, also, the fan stock that appears in the official report list of missing objects (JE 62006) is still missing, according to Hawass. The damaged fan stock that got returned (JE 62003) is not even in the official list of missing items as far as I can tell...

(it is pictured there, on a page which shows two different objects, p. 24/42). They took a month to list fifty objects, and two months after the theft it still contains fundamental errors like this. What the blazes is the Museum playing at?

Loony Antiquitism: "These are The Nails", No they are Not

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Some people just do not give up... Simcha Jacobovici, "the naked archaeologist" apparently has now made a film about two nails which he says are The Nails used in a crucifixion, indeed The Crucifixion of Christ (Reuters, Film claims discovery of nails from Jesus's cross, Jerusalem Post 12th April 2011). Along with about thirty other 'serious' competitors for that title. But no, these are very likely the real, genuine absolutely authentic nails from Christ's Cross, because.... they were found in the tomb (thought to be) of the Caiaphas family (you know, the High Priest who handed Jesus over to the Roman occupiers). The logic is twisted:

"If you look at the whole story, historical, textual, archaeological, they all seem to point at these two nails being involved in a crucifixion," he said. "And since Caiaphas is only associated with Jesus's crucifixion, you put two and two together and they seem to imply that these are the nails".

Eh? "Caiaphas is only associated with Jesus's crucifixion"? Well, I presume he did one or two other things in his life too. Also quite a few other people around Jerusalem at the time were "associated with Jesus's crucifixion", some much more directly than the Jewish High Priest. Would a crucifixion nail or two have been considered a suitable grave offering for such a person? I am also at a real loss to understand what the woolly-hatted-one means by the "historical and textual" evidence associated with these two nails shows that they were "involved in a crucifixion", let alone the "archaeological evidence".


The photo accompanying the Jerusalem Post article shows two corroded handmade nails, we are told they are "two inches long" (5 cm to you and me) and they have different corrosion products on them, which at once begs the question whether they were deposited in the/a tomb together. That is by-the-by. They are bent over, what we in the trade call clenched. Let us say it is the length of the shank between the head and the point at which it was clenched over which is five centimetres long. That's far too short for a crucifixion nail. I'm pretty slender build, maybe Jesus was too. The place where a nail would be driven in my wrist to crucify me (lots of published experiments on this from the devotees of the Turin Shroud) is about 38mm thick. But then the shroudies point out that a body would tear a hole if the nail did not have a very broad head (the Jacobovici ones do not) or there was not something used as a "washer" - like a piece of wood through which the nail was driven (see the Givat Hamivtar burial). Even without this though, it means that the piece of wood to which the hypothetical victim was nailed was 50-38mm = 12mm thick.

OK, the True Cross of Christ might have been twelve milimetres thick - makes it easier to carry. The point is though that a 70mm nail, with a shank maybe 5 or 6 mm diameter would be pretty difficult to clench over to that degree (90 degrees as it seems) stuck through a piece of wood 12mm thick (the human flesh on the other side of the wood has no resistance to bending). I've not seen the film, and am unlikely to, but I bet the naked archaeologist does not do carpentry and does nail a bit of t-bone steak to one side of a twelve milimetre thick plank and bend the other short end over with a lump hammer to show it can be done. I do not think it can.

The other point is of course that to get the body off the Cross (which the "texts" to which Jacobovici refers tell use was done in the case of Jesus) the burial party would (unless they cut the victim's hands off) have to unbend the nails (or cut the ends of the nails off with a cold chisel) to get them out of the wood. These nails were buried still clenching whatever it was they clenched when they were used. There is no evidence whatsoever from the form of the artefacts that the something they were used to secure was a human being nailed alive to a cross, and it beats me why anyone who's ever banged a nail into a piece of wood would say anything different.

The form of these nails is typical of those used for light timberwork throughout the ancient world, and they got into the tomb either incidentally or were parts of timber elements of the grave furniture, chests, or maybe biers (or a door used as a bier). I'm not buying the DVD, even for a laugh.

Here's somebody who makes Crucifixion nails.

Yuya Shabti "not damaged"?

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The shabti of Yuya (JE 68984) found lying in a bag at Shubra metro station was said to be undamaged. In the Luxor Times photo however a very large split in the wood can be seen on the front of the object going through the upper part of the ten lines of inscription. This split is not visible in the photos in the second [horizontal format] version of the (undated, untitled) list of objects missing from Cairo Museum* (on page 30/42). While this is heavily pixilated, no trace of such a split can be seen there. It would seem that the object has been subjected to a change of environment (humidity) since it was last photographed in the Museum and has suffered accordingly. The question is does this mean that it was hidden in a changed environment (like being buried, or stuffed in a humid cellar for example) or even that it was removed from Cairo? The object has also lost the base on which it was displayed in the case. I personally would say it is extremely reckless to put this object back on display immediately (which is what the Museum's director announced is what he planned to do) instead of taking it into the conservation lab and putting it under close observation and studying it to see what has caused the change in its condition and whether this is an ongoing process. Once it is in a showcase the possibilities of doing this are lessened.

It is worth noting that some of the fragments of the gesso facing of the wooden fan stock (JE 62006) are reported not to have been in the bag when it was recovered, suggesting that the fragmentation of the object also occurred in storage in its hiding place. This suggests that the longer the rest of the objects are in the hands of the thieves, or whoever has them now, it seems the worse will be the condition of some of them if and when they return to the Museum.

Forensic examination of the big black bag they were found in might reveal something about the thieves. Is it already in the hands of police scientists, like the rope on which the thieves reputedly entered the Museum?

UPDATE: OK, I admit I failed to look at the photos of all the missing shabtis, just took the Museum's word for it which object it was - see Vincent's comments below and the resultant blog post here. Now I look again, the hieroglyphs don't match the Museum's proposed 'identification'.

*Let us hope the third version of the "objects missing" list produced by the Cairo museum will have a sequential numbering of objects (or proper pagination), and have a proper title page with the date it was published on it.

Vignette: how many other museum-worthy finds in private hands are cracking up because they are kept in unsuitable environmental conditions (photo: Luxor Times magazine)?

Egypt: Renewing the Antiquities Police?

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The way this has been announced leaves me confused (Associated Press: Egypt to form special force to protect antiquities, April 12, 2011) Zahi Hawass, Minister of Antiquities is quoted as saying on Tuesday:

a special police force will be set up to protect archaeological sites and museums around the country, following a wave of vandalism and looting. [...] authorities have been unable to protect antiquities because police personnel guarding the ancient sites were not armed.

Well, actually Egypt already has such a police force (and an army unit), and when I was in Egypt last month they were back at their stations (sort of - their vigilance was noticeably lessened compared to last year). They also have weapons, some of them admittedly a bit the worse for wear. So what this announcement means is anyone's guess at the moment.

Anyhow, if site guards in Egypt start shooting at armed gangs of looters, I wonder how collectors will feel buying antiquities bought with men's lives? Will they just shrug shoulders at more blood antiquities on the no-questions-asked market?

Harpooning Tutankhamun Statue Recovered

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Well, to be honest, for a number of reasons, I was really not expecting this to happen (Mahmoud Kassem, 'Missing King Tutankhamun Statue Returned to Egyptian Museum' Bloomberg, Apr 12, 2011, based on Hawass' press release). I thought some more of the other stuff would turn up, but not the Tutankhamun statue fragments.

Zahi Hawass announced that the missing statue of King Tutankhamun harpooning on a papyrus skiff (JE 60710.1) has been returned to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, along with three other objects lost during the looting at the end of January. It is damaged, a small part of the crown as well as pieces of the legs are missing. The photo also shows damage to the gesso on the leg, arms shoulder and back (mechanical damage or due to damp?). The statue is now restorable however.


I am really happy, these statues were among my favourite items from the tomb, I saw them (or was it their doubles?) in the 1972 Tutankhamun exhibition in London and they made a great impression on me.

The other objects recovered were:
- the trumpet of gilded bronze and wood (JE 62008 - "which is in excellent condition and will be returned to its display immediately"),
- the stolen fan from the same case (JE 62006 "One face is in good condition while the other has been broken into 11 pieces" - one part is still missing) AND...
- one of the ten missing shabti statues of Yuya/Thuya (JE 68984 - which will "be placed on display again immediately").

Nothing is said of the circumstances of the recovery of these items and arrests - that will hopefully follow in the next few hours (?).

In the meanwhile it would seem I was wrong postulating on the basis of the information available before this latest turn of events that the statue fragments were taken by a different group from those that took the Yuya and Thuya stuff (or if I was right they've caught two groups at the same time). So what is the connection between these looted items and the guys who had taken the figures of divinities and jewellery from the other side of the Museum?

There is an excellent but short slideshow in La repubblica.

UPDATE 12/4/2011 (two hours later): This Museum looting story gets weirder by the minute. The last lot were reputedly found when some bloke wandered into Cairo's tourist-tat dealer emporium and offered them the antiquities. That story takes some beating, but what about this? (Nevine El-Aref, 'Missing artifacts from the Egyptian Museum retrieved', Ahram Online, Tuesday 12 Apr 2011):

Salah Abdel Salam, a public relation personal at the MSAA, came upon these objects during his daily trip to work on the Metro. He related that he accidently found an unidentified black bag placed on a chair in the Shubra Metro station. Doubtful that the bag was concealing an explosive, Salah opened it and found the Tutankhamun statue gazing up at him. He took the bag and handed it over to the MSAA. Hawass told reporters that he is calling on all Egyptians to return any objects that they have found. He emphasised that the MSAA will not file any law suit against them but instead will compensate them. “If anyone is afraid of handing over such objects they can put it at the MSAA entrance gate or the Egyptian Museum’s door and we will take care of them,” announced Hawass. He also stated that now, following the return of these objects, the number of missing pieces from the museum has reached 33 objects out of 54.

The Shubra El Kheima metro station (30° 7'25.60"N 31°14'37.00"E) is the furthest from the centre on line 2 (Shubra- El Mounib). The Cairo Metro carries 1.4 million passengers a day. Rather a coincidence that Mr Abdel Salam (apparently) happens to live there and be in the habit of opening unattended luggage on his way to work, and it was he who got to this bag first in the rush hour... (like a 1:1400000 chance that the public relations staff member of the Ministry would be the passenger to take note of this bag). Gosh, what luck eh? It's like one of the tales of a Thousand and One Nights. Why do I have the feeling that there is a fair chance that the next batch of these artefacts to surface are not even going to need any more scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel cover stories, but are just going to be found abandoned in doorways (duh: to get them to the "Egyptian Museum's door", they'd have to go through two bag-checks). Let us recall that this is the way the first of the stolen items returned. So there will be no more arrests then?

More photos here: Four of the Egyptian Museum missing objects were found at a subway station

UPDATE 12/4/2011
The Telegraph seems to be sceptical about the reported manner of recovery of these items ("have been were found "by accident", the government says", "which had apparently been stumbled upon accidentally in an underground metro station") and has an interesting video of the objects being waved around and being stuffed in cotton wool. Note that it is Tarek El-Awadi the Museum director who tells the reporters who found the items and where:




Vignette: Looking a bit worse for the experience, but back in the Museum (Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities via Bloomberg). Plan of Museum showing where these items came from, the Tut statue in the long gallery to the right, the fan and trumpet in the case at the top in the middle, the shabti the case at the bottom in the middle.

Red faces in the Heritage Sector?

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Heritage Action, who can spell, on those that collect antiquities and can't: The Heritage Sector’s rouge element. There is nothing new in collectors accusing archaeology of harbouring both "rogue elements" and "reds" of course. The point is, of course, that the problem with "metal detecting" is not that there are "nighthawks", the problem is with the destruction of archaeological evidence that accompanies both legal and illegal artefact hunting. The "nighthawks are the only problem" myth is just that - a convenient untruth.

Dark taxa: GenBank in a post-taxonomic world

In an earlier post (Are names really the key to the big new biology?, I questioned Patterson et al.'s assertion in a recent TREE article (doi:10.1016/j.tree.2010.09.004) that names are key to the new biology.

In this post I'm going to revisit this idea by doing a quick analysis of how many species in GenBank have "proper" scientific names, and whether the number of named species has changed over time. My definition of "proper" name is a little loose: anything that had two words, second one starting with a lower case letter, was treated as a proper name. hence, a name like Eptesicus sp. A JLE-2010" is not a proper name, but Eptesicus andersoni is.

Mammals

Since GenBank started, every year has seen some 100-200 mammal species added to the database.


Until around 2003 almost all of these species had proper binomial names, but since then an increasing percentage of species-level taxa haven't been identified to species. In 2010 three-quarters of new tax_ids for mammals weren't identified.

Invertebrates

For "invertebrates" 2010 saw an explosive growth in the number of new taxa sequenced, with nearly 71,000 new taxa added to GenBank.



This coincides with a spectacular drop in the number of properly-named taxa, but even before 2010 the proportion of named invertebrate species in GenBank was in decline: in 2009 just over a half of the species added had binomials.

Bacteria

To put this in perspective, here are the equivalent graphs for bacteria.
Although at the outset most of the bacteria in GenBank had binomial names, pretty quickly the bulk of sequenced bacteria had informal names. In 2010 less than 1% of newly sequenced bacteria had been formerly described.

Dark taxa

For bacteria the graphs are hardly surprising. To get a proper name a bacterium must be cultured, and the vast majority of bacteria haven't been (or can't be) cultured. Hence, microbiologists can gloat at the nomenclatural mess plant and animal taxonomists have to deal with only because microbiologists have a tiny number of names to deal with.

For mammals and invertebrates there's clear a decline in the use of proper names.It would be tempting to suggest that this reflects a decline in the number of taxonomists - there might simply not be enough of them in enough groups to be able to identify and/or describe the taxa being sequenced.

However, if we look at the recent peaks of unnamed animal species, we discover that many have names like Lepidoptera sp. BOLD:AAD7075, indicating that they are DNA Barcodes from the Barcode of Life Data Systems. Of the 62,365 unnamed invertebrates added last year, 54,546 are BOLD sequences that haven't been assigned to a known species. Of the 277 unnamed mammals, 218 are BOLD taxa. Hence, DNA bnacording is flooding Genbank with taxa that lack proper names (and typically are represented by a single DNA bnacode sequence).

There are various ways to interpret these graphs, but for me the message is clear. The bulk of newly added taxa in GenBank are what we might term "dark taxa", that is, taxa that aren't identified to a known species. This doesn't necessarily mean that they are species new to science, we may already have encountered these species before, they may be sitting in museum collections, and have descriptions already published. We simply don't know. As the output from DNA barcoding grows, the number of dark taxa will only increase, and macroscopic biology starts to look a lot like microbiology.


A post-taxonomic world
If we look at the graphs for bacteria, we see that taxonomic names are virtually irrelevant, and yet microbiology seems to be doing fine as a discipline. So, perhaps it's time to think about a post-taxonomic world where taxonomic names, contra Patterson et al., are not that important. We can discover a good deal about organismal biology from GenBank alone (see my post Visualising the symbiome: hosts, parasites, and the Tree of Life for some examples, as well as Rougerie et al. 2010 doi:10.1111/j.1365-294X.2010.04918.x).

This leaves us with two questions:

1. How much biology can we do without taxonomic names?
2. If the lack of taxonomic names limits what we can do (and, playing devil's advocate, this is an open question) how can we speed up linking GenBank sequences to names?

I suspect that the answer to (1) is "quite a lot" (especially if we think like microbiologists). Question (2) is ultimately a question about how fast we can link literature, museum collections, sequences, and phylogenies. If progress to date is any indication, we need to rethink how we do this, and in a hurry, because dark taxa are accumulating at an accelerating rate.

How the analyses were done

Although the NCBI makes a dump of its taxonomic database available via FTP (at ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/pub/taxonomy/), this dump doesn't have dates for when the taxa were added to the database. However, using the Entrez EUtilities we can get the tax_ids that were published within a given date range. For example, to retrieve all the tax_ids added to the database in December 2010, we set the URL parameters &mindate=2010/12/01 and &maxdate=2010-12-31 to form this URL:

http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?db=taxonomy&mindate=2010/12/01&maxdate=2010/12/31&retmax=1000000.

I've set &retmax to a big number to ensure I get all the tax_ids for that month (in this case 23511). I then made a local copy of the NCBI database in MySQL ( instructions here) and queried for all species-level taxa in GenBank. I used a rather crude regular expression REGEXP '^[A-Z][a-z]+ [a-z][a-z]+$' to find just those species names that were likely to be proper scientific names (i.e., no "sp.", "aff.", museum or voucher codes, etc.). To group the species into major taxonomic groups I used the division_id.

Results are available in a Google Spreadsheet.

Some Reported UK Artefact Hunters' Hauls

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There has been some desultory discussion in the UK of Heritage Action's Erosion Counter (a model of the demolition of Britain's archaeological record by artefact hunters in search of collectables). Most of the time though supporters of current policies on artefact hunting and collecting over there either dismiss it as "too high" or ignore it. I cannot think of a single case however of anyone 'on that side of the fence' ever proposing an alternative model.

As I have said here before I do not think the figures quoted are "too high". On the contrary I think it is a very low estimate of what is happening in the fields, week after week, month after month, year after year and has been going on since the 1970s. It is a tragic picture. And its happening right under the noses of British archaeologists.

To recap, the model that HA produced (based on information derived from metal detectorists' own writings on the matter) is the statistical equivalent of each of ten thousand detectorists finding an average of just over thirty recordable objects a year. As we heard on the RallyUK forum, Mr Evan Hart found 200+ Roman coins and a load of other stuff in the past few weeks. While I am sure there are pathetic individuals who call themselves "metal detectorists" who may find three recordable objects a year and still persist, there are many more with access to "productive" sites that can find well over thirty objects a year with their eyes closed.

Among those that have denounced Heritage Action's figures is, surprisingly, the Portable Antiquities Scheme, British archaeology's outreach to the public in portable antiquity matters (so an organization that one would have thought highly interested in establishing such figures). They've even come onto this blog to say the figures are "too high" - but offering none of their own. Oddly enough on trawling through some old Annual reports I find that at the beginning of their period of operation (coming up to fifteen years now) they were reporting the size of some of the artefact collectors' collections they were coming across. This presumably in those early days was intended to show the government who they expected to fork out for it, how much extra money they needed to cope with recording all that stuff. Gradually the realisation must have set in that the figures of unrecorded stuff were counter productive in two ways, firstly it showed "Whitehall" that they were not making much headway mitigating the information lost as these masses of items leave the archaeological record for some personal collection in a council estate garden shed, and secondly metal detecting was being shown in a bad light - which hardly favours "partnership".

For what it is worth then, the annual report for 1997-8 (p. 29) tells of a single artefact hunter in South Ferriby who had a collection of 12000 objects (if the collector had started artefact hunting in 1970, that's a find rate of 444 objects a year). The 1998-9 annual report (p. 47) mentions a collection in Hampshire that the PAS had learnt of containing 17,500 objects (that'd be 625 objects a year) "Other large collections are known to exist in Yorkshire,
Worcestershire and elsewhere". While undoubtedly these are extremes, I have seen a private Essex collection that fills a garden shed, I have heard from a reliable source of a garage with fertiliser sacks full of sorted artefacts in Norfolk, and so on. These certainly suggests that a finds rate of 30 objects a year is by no means unachievable by the average "metal detectorist", even if they only go out a few weekends a year.

We really know too little (after all that publicly-funded PAS liaison with these people) about collecting patterns to say how typical or atypical collections of (say) more than a thousand recordable objects are out there. I think it is time we, and the British public, knew more. I think furthermore it is time we started asking why, in fact, despite a Scheme of fifty people working away in "partnership" with British artefact hunters we still do not know any more about this than we did in the mid 1990s. That too is a tragic misunderstanding of the role the PAS should be playing in keeping the British public informed about portable antiquities issues.

[the sound of pigeons cooing in Bloomsbury Square]

Museum Returns Athens Marble to Greece

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Newspaper de Volkskrant reports that Leiden's Museum of Antiquities is returning to Greece a small marble fragment of the Athens Acropolis. The fragment, measuring 15 by 5 centimetres, seems to be a fragment of "a cornerstone located just above a column". The stone was taken fifty years ago from the site by a Dutch tourist, who recently tried to donate it to the National Museum of Antiquities. The Museum, unsurprisingly, refused the donation because this souvenir was taken out of Greece illegally, and instead has decided to return it to Greece. Nice to see a museum with a conscience.

One Metal Detectorist's Recent Haul

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Julian Evan Hart, self confessed non-PAS recorder writes on the RallyUK forum:

Hi all, as always apologies have not been a frequent recent visitor to site...working on new books and stuff. [...] Done quite well recently with a large 14th C scabbard chape, a Viking scabbard chape, 200+ Roman coins in last 2 weeks (sadly only 2 made it into my collection rest grots...and a superb Cunobelin silver unit. Hope everyone makes some smashing finds too.

So these 200 or so coins that did not make it into the Evan-Hart collection of plundered antiquities - where are they? Winging their way across the Atlantic in a padded envelope for some US dealer to give the ones he cannot sell by weight to ACE maybe? All of these "smashing finds" taken by trashing sites, where does that get us?

The Amateurish Destruction of World History by Britain at Crosby Garrett

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An intriguing text by arts journalist Souren Melikian about the Crosby Garret helmet ('The Destruction of History') has just come out in the April 2011 issue of Art+ Auction magazine, now accessible online. The basic thesis is that the object is of Sassanian workmanship (which I do not accept) and raises the question of how it got to where it was found. Oddly, in the context of the article's main thesis, it does not discuss whether it was actually found where it was reputed to have been found. Melikian does not have too good a word for British laws on artefact hunting...

The piece[...] was found by an amateur at a site that was disturbed in the rough digging process instead of being recorded in detail. [...] If ever there was an instance of inept legislation granting legitimacy to what is effectively the destruction of an archaeological context, this is it. The British media chorus [...] implicitly accepting the notion that digging for the purpose of treasure hunting is okay. Reports deplored the loss of the helmet to the region where it had been unearthed, but not a word was said about the far greater tragedy incurred by what may be called Britain’s underground records of history. [...] The surrounding terrain [...] should have been very carefully investigated. Apparently it was not.[...] Whatever the location, each properly recorded discovery yields invaluable information to world history.

The article discusses the place of manufacture of the Crosby Garrett helmet, invoking a series of parallels completely ignored by the ('Universalist') British Museum's PAS in their own write-up of the object and then finishes with a flourish:

A law that [...] ignores the proper preservation of buried archives cannot be right. The notion of discovering a "treasure trove" is suitable for Boy Scouts but is absurd for anyone concerned with culture and knowledge. The amateurish digging up of artifacts from the ancient past is as unconscionable as burning the Amazon rainforest. It is high time for international agreements to be hashed out about the archeological ecology of our world. As the saying goes, we are all in it together.

And we are all the losers as the result of Britain's boy scout heritage mismanagement laws.
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CPAC Resignation: "a bias against the American people, against American business, and against the rule of law.”

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Glennbeckian accusations of the Obama administration having "a bias against the American people, against American business, and against the rule of law” are said to be behind Robert Korver's resignation from the CPAC (other resignations discussed here). Korver was right to resign if he cannot see a way to be an adviser on cultural property in general if after seven years of trying he finds he cannot function as a member of the committee without seeing above his own narrower interests as a coiney. Coin collecting circles are suggesting that his resignation means that the CPAC recommended not treating coins as portable antiquities to be covered by the MOU - but (it is alleged) the State Department added them anyway.

Whether or not that is true remains to be seen, though I would have questions about a committee of "experts" that does not consider ancient dugup coins as archaeological artefacts. I suggest immediately sending the remaining ten members of the Committee on a presidential fact-finding mission to one of the "source countries" for dugup coins in Europe (probably the London offices of the Portable Antiquities Scheme would be enough) to ask experts there whether ancient coins are archaeological artefacts. Members of the Committee may be surprised by the answer, which will help them in further deliberations.

According to the Coiney tabloid, it was the US State Department, not the CPAC, that considers that:

"Coins, a significant and inseparable part of the archaeological record, are especially valuable to the understanding of the history of Italy. The unauthorized search for coins in Italy is exacerbated by metal detecting, an activity that is destructive to fragile archaeological deposits”.

Korver, apparently disagrees with that, so he'd have had something else to talk to with the PAS about if he'd asked. But perhaps he subscribes to the ACCG view which is that ancient coins are somehow supplied to the market by coin elves and do not come from the searching of archaeological sites for collectables.

Coin World News goes on at length about the CPAC and what Korver almost-says about it in the letter that appears to have been leaked to them. Most of it is the same old repetitive claptrap that we see these days from the other US coin dealers about the CCPIA and the State Department, so we can give that a miss. At the end, however, the article rather revealingly gives Korver's view of the future of the CPAC:

He closed the letter urging President Obama to appoint an independent agency to investigate the minutes and processes of CPAC to verify compliance with CPIA; to request the resignation of all current CPAC members, “thus preventing further embarrassment to your administration”; to issue an executive order suspending enforcement of MOUs with Cyprus and Italy, because of ethical failures; and finally, to move a newly constituted CPAC to the Department of Commerce.

Why would Korver want all other CPAC members to tender their resignation? I assume that the Committee contains members who do care about fulfilling the task of the CPAC (which is advising the President on the implementation of the obligations of the US incumbent on being a state party of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property). Why does Korver think they should resign? The aim of the CPAC is not furthering commerce in illegally exported cultural property taken from any countries, and in particular those that have specifically asked the US to do something to help stop it. That is not in America's interests, neither is it in the interests of the Obama administration to preside over the wholesale looting of the world's archaeological record to serve the interests of a small group of shopkeepers who want to profit from currently lax US legislation.

If Mr Korver thinks the purpose of the CPAC on which he sat for seven years was to serve those in the US engaged in no-questions-asked (at best two-minute due diligence) commerce in antiquities, I think most people who are concerned about the preservation of the archaeological heritage would agree with me in thinking that the Committee is best off without him and that President Bush should never have appointed him.

Vignette: The photos of US coineys frequently show them to be rather large gentlemen with chubby faces and ill-fitting suits (Robert Korver almost as he appears in Coin World).

"About 1,000 relics stolen during Egyptian unrest"

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A number of newspapers are covering the story:

"Thieves stole around 1,000 relics from Egypt’s museums and archaeological sites after public protests against the country’s government broke out in January [...] Egypt's minister for antiquities Zahi Hawass told Spain’s El Mundo".

Firstly the number of artefacts known to have been stolen from storerooms may (or may not) have been around "a thousand", but the number of items looted from sites is unknown (but "number of items stolen" is not the important statistic, though easier to count than "amount of archaeological information destroyed"). Secondly of course the "uprising and the weeks of unrest thereafter" has not by any means ended yet. Egypt has much political turmoil ahead precipitated by the sequence of events begun in January 2011.

We are faced with the same problem as before, all the information that is coming out of Egypt about any aspect of antiquities and archaeological resource preservation is being filtered by a single person. We note that among the new posts being announced in the revived Ministry of Antiquities, press officer is not one of them. Which is a shame.

While the authorities there persist in their approach that the people out there looting are criminals "looking for gold or mummies and who lack knowledge of the value of the items they stole”, then they are not going to get anywhere with combating the problem.

Hawass told the Spanish daily that the thieves were not organised. “They lived near the archaeological sites where the objects were kept. They would take advantage of the night to enter the archaeological sites and pillage," he said.

I suspect we'd find that the truth is somewhat different if we had access to more information than that which Dr H. is putting out. This is odd because he himself was fighting several organized groups trading Egyptian antiquities before 25th January 2011. Why does he want western journalists to forget this and think the problem suddenly disappeared with Mubarak?

It is also notable that western internet egyptologists, who at the beginning were logging all the reports of looting so the scale of the activity was emerging, seem to have bored of this and are now apparently making only a desultory effort to keep up the service they were doing for the rest of us. Keeping the ongoing development of the problem in the international public eye is the way to help get something done through international co-operation, constant assurances from an office in Cairo that nothing is happening and its all under control is not. What is happening in the fields and sand dunes?

Vignette: Various "Egyptian antiquities", like those that fill the no-questions-asked market.

No Comment on New Buried Treasure Shop

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A while ago I wrote here about the Buried Treasure shop that had just opened in Eastbourne, at the time I wrote to the Portable Antiquities Scheme's Finds Liaison Officer, charged with liaison with PAS artefact-hunting partners and other members of the public in the area about portable antiquities about this matter. Sadly Ms Smith is too busy (perhaps busy dealing with artefact-finding "partners") to even acknowledge receipt of a query from a non-collecting member of the public. So much for "outreach". I get the impression that the PAS in Sussex have nothing to say about this new outlet for the British trade in "portable antiquities". I bet if I wrote to her in the guise of a local detectorist and said I'd found a golden helmet she'd have answered.

"18,857 people involved" in PAS

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The PAS loves big numbers, and true to form, its website home page announces the statistics related to its database:

436,893 records, 692,934 objects, 18,857 people involved, 2,881 accounts.

They might have added "Hooray for us".

That figure 18,857 people involved is pretty interesting if you analyse it. It seems to be the equivalent of the word "finders" ("finders" of artefacts who've reported them to the PAS). The use of the term is a bit misleading because in that "public" there are accidental finders and those who've found artefacts because they've gone out looking for them in places most likely to produce them. A measure of how well PAS is doing in dealing with the information loss to the archaeological record due to the activities artefact hunters of course is how many artefact hunters are coming to the scheme regularly with how many of their finds. But that figure is pretty hard to come by from the numbers that PAS supplies (one can only speculate why).

However, reverse engineering of the statistics of the annual reports reveal something about this. The number of non-detectorists coming to the scheme with objects for reporting is given in the annual reports. Many of them will be people coming on finds days with single items they have found accidentally. They will be responsible for single records on the database and on the whole they will not be repeat recorders. Their numbers therefore can be subtracted from that 18857 to give the number we are after. We are not told how many of them there were in the first year of PAS recording, it can't have been a large number. The sequence of reports from 1988-9 to the end of 2007 is continuous. In total they come to 9873 people. The figures for 2008, 2009 and 2010 are not yet known (!), but the trend of the annual reports 2005-7 (2416, 2216 and 2542 people respectively) suggests they might be as high as 2000 a year. If that is so, we are looking at a figure for 1998-2010 of some 15000 recorders. That means the number of metal detectorists who have been recording with the PAS (some of whom showing only one item each) might be as low as 3900 people. That is out of a total of 8000 (Bland's estimate) in the region covered. Less than half.

True, 18,857 might seem like a large number, but given that taken with other big numbers published by the PAS it suggests that maybe more than a half of the artefact hunters in Britain have never recorded anything with the PAS, it really looks a bit pathetic.

This just highlights once again the need to have a proper study of what is and is not being recorded as a result of British archaeology's "partnership" with metal detector users and collectors and a review of current policies and superficial thinking, and what is NOT getting recorded by the voluntary Scheme that has now been in place 14 years which has obviously reached the limits of its capability to cope with mitigating the information lost through artefact hunting.

NCMD Go Back on Responsibility Agreement

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NCMD membership requires each member to

observe the Constitution, to adhere to the NCMD Code of Conduct and be free from conviction for any criminal offence relating to metal detecting activities.

The NCMD Code of conduct says:

acquaint yourself with current NCMD policy relating to the Voluntary Reporting of Portable Antiquities.

Which is?
The only document on this matter is that appended as Appendix D to the current NCMD Constitution the NCMD 'Policy Statement on the Recording of Finds Data with Third Parties'. This reads:

The NCMD recognises that landowners hold a greater legal title to all non-Treasure items found by metal detection or other means on their land. In doing so, NCMD members need to recognise that they have a duty of care to ensure that they uphold this at all times. This duty also includes an intent to ensure that before recording any finds with third parties they have full permission from the landowner/tenant/occupier to do so and then only to an accuracy and detail to which all relevant parties feel comfortable. Issues surrounding the potential publication of find spots data, such as on the Internet and elsewhere as well as the possible use of such data by recipients should be considered in discussions with landowners. Where necessary, recording organisations should be informed of any required restrictions on publication at the time of recording and should make provision for this information on recording forms and/or receipts.(Appendix D to the NCMD Constitution AGM June 2007).

So what happened to the assurance given when it agreed to this Code along with a number of other organizations that a condition of NCMD membership placed on all members would be adherence to the Code of Practice for Responsible Metal Detecting?

There is not even a link to it on their website...

So is it "responsible detecting" to go onto land to hoik things out where the finder does not have the freedom to report with adequate "accuracy" what they have found. No, of course it is not. Does the NCMD state that? No, of course it does not.

First of all, if it the farmer who has issues with the degree of reporting, it is up to the farmer to come to an agreement with these "third parties" (the PAS in England and Wales and the Treasure Unit in Scotland). The metal detectorist cannot act as the farmer's agent in such matters. Secondly, while the finds are the property of the landowner, the information gained as the result of the artefact hunter's search (what was found where is the intellectual property of the artefact hunter, which is not owned by the farmer who has given him permission to go onto the land to obtain that information). The NCMD policy is not in accord with British law.
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