Does snobbery help motivate the archaeological community’s support for clamp downs on collecting? One might conclude “yes,” based on this: http://paul-barford.blogspot.com/2012/05/what-they-collect.html
I’ve had the pleasure of being both a Trustee of the American Numismatic Society and the head of a local ancient coin club, the Ancient Numismatic Society of Washington, DC. Both have done excellent work fostering the appreciation and study of ancient coins. The work of the ANS is unparalleled. But the work of individual collectors has been important too. For example, members of the ANSWDC have written books that have ranged from the major work on Seleucid coins to another on an understudied area in Roman numismatics.
Now, more information is being placed on the Internet. Alfredo De La Fe should be commended for his new contribution. To mock it instead only betrays the academic snobbery behind the archaeological community’s opposition to collectors and collecting.
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A Web Log Championing the Longstanding Interests of Collectors in the Preservation, Study, Display and Enjoyment of Cultural Artifacts Against an "Archaeology Over All" Perspective
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
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About Me
- Cultural Property Observer
- Washington, DC, United States
- Peter Tompa has collected ancient coins for almost 50 years. He has written and lectured about cultural property issues for a decade. He is a contributor to a chapter on numismatics in K. Fitz Gibbon ed., "Who Owns the Past?" (Rutgers 2005). He has lobbied members of the U.S. Congress and the Executive Branch in an effort to ensure that the small businesses of the numismatic trade receive fair treatment from federal regulators. He currently serves as a board member of the Cultural Policy Research Institute and the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild. He also has been a co-chair of the American Bar Association's Art & Cultural Heritage Law Committee. His advocacy has received notice in the media, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Art Newspaper and the Voice of America. He hopes his views as a collector and lawyer will provide a counterpoint to the "archaeology over all" perspective found in most blogs about cultural property issues. This Web page is a public resource for general information and opinion about cultural property issues, and is not intended to be a source for legal advice. Opinions expressed here are the author's own.
9 comments:
Nope, I've looked again and I really cannot see in that post where I discuss either your "Ancient Numismatic Society of Washington, DC" or the American Numismatic Society.
I am talking about a specific resource called a "numismatic research website". It is not "snobbery" to conclude that by any definition you wish to apply it does not present or facilitate any kind of serious research.
Merely "placing information on the internet" is not "research", and if the data are poorly organized (see my actual comments on the European stuff of CoinProject) then it does not aid research.
Perhaps instead of sniping, you would like to explain how you think this particular "research website" is making any kind of "contribution" that would be useful, for example to that archaeological community.
One that is adequate replacement for the information likely to have been lost by the digging of upwards of 40 000 holes even if the coins are pinpointed by metal detectors. I simply do not see it. Do me the courtesy of explaining it to us, please.
Yes and no--academia is a mixed bag like any other group. There are some incredibly knowledgeable people who are gracious, modest, and unassuming and then there are others who are petty, arrogant, and downright childish.
I do not think that snobbery is the primary motivation for opposition to collecting, only that the snobbery of the snobs is readily apparent in their particular brand of opposition.
Voz Earl
For Mr. Barford, you only betray your complete ignorance with such comments. Note what your fellow Elkins said about a similar website when it went to a subscription only basis. See http://coinarchaeology.blogspot.com/2009/07/coinarchivescom-limits-access-and.html Such sites are useful for numismatic research, and this one remains free.
For Voz, I agree with you with respect to academics and would suggest the same applies to most any discipline. As for my own blog, I do think snobbery helps motivate those opposed to collecting. If it didn't, the anti-collecting types would be more amenable to systems like the PAS and Treasure Act to help address their concerns.
Peter, thank you for your response. I considered posting a response and decided against it when I weighed the source of the criticism.
With over 150,000 records in queue, it has taken 100+ part time volunteers the better part of 2.5 years to get through just shy of 50,000 of them (the records are NOT just from personal collections and commercial sites). This involves a great deal of work. Not just parsing all of the data, but ensuring that it is accurate (the "verification process" which has only been done on roughly 1/3rd of the edited and approved records) THOUSANDS of hours have been spent on creating accurate issuing authority lists. We currently have the most accurate list of Greek, “Ancient Spain” (should be Ancient Iberia) and Roman Provincial issuing cities and authorities anywhere to be found in one place. Many of the worlds leading historians and numismatists have provided input. The Ancient Spain category is one of the most complete available on the internet in English and has been “adopted” by a group of Spaniards that assure me that it is one of the most complete even when Spanish websites are taken into consideration.
What people see at CoinProject is only a small part of what is planned. We collect a great deal of data (when it is available) and when finances permit will all users to pull up hoard data. We have also created the software to allow for biographical and bibliographic information for each folder and we plan on incorporating a discussion forum which will be linked to each category to allow for scholarly discussion. It is being tested and several academics have offered to write biographical information for certain categories (One in particular offered to write this for the Roman Republic)
Concerning the categories that are "empty"- Barford is more than welcome to volunteer and help create some of the issuing authority lists we need for "Ancient and Medieval India", much of Medieval Europe is yet to be completed (we have roughly 15% of the lists completed but it takes a great deal of time to add these to the site and 15% has taken three volunteers well over two years to complete!) or the "Modern World" instead of criticizing the work of others. In the meantime, we must focus on one area at a time as our resources permit. As volunteers make themselves available we expand into the other areas. As an example, one advanced collector of coins from the Ancient Far East has been volunteering for the past year and has slowly been putting together the list of issuing authorities for China and adding coins to them.
If I am "completely ignorant", then please enlighten me. I suspect I am not entirely alone in being disappointed you do not address the question I asked.
"Such sites are useful for numismatic research"
What do YOU understand by the term "research" with respect to what this specific site (the one I discussed) shows?
Perhaps instead of sniping, you would like to explain how you think this particular "research website" is making any kind of "contribution" that would be useful, for example to that archaeological community.
One that is adequate replacement for the information likely to have been lost by the digging of upwards of 40 000 holes even if the coins are pinpointed by metal detectors. I simply do not see it. Do me the courtesy of explaining it to us, please.
For Mr. Barford, I thought I answered your comment:
Note what your fellow Elkins said about a similar website when it went to a subscription only basis. See http://coinarchaeology.blogspot.com/2009/07/coinarchivescom-limits-access-and.html Such sites are useful for numismatic research, and this one remains free.
Elkins points out that such sites are worthwhile for die studies and the like. I agree with him.
Are you suggesting that the only possible numimatic research deals with archaeology?
No, Peter, you have not answered the question I posed in my comment. What I see when looking at the website is not "research" any more than when looking at a website of a stamp collector who orders his collection on the framework supplied by a stamp catalogue (Gibbons, Michel or whatever). That is not "research' is it? (Or do you disagree?)
You used the term "contribution", not I. The point coin collectors (recte dealers) frequently make is that archaeologists should be "grateful" to coin collectors (and dealers) because of the data they produce for us. Where is that reflected in Alfredo De La Fe's website? he is ordering the material according to the framework offered by the written records, rather than what the material tells us (Mieszko I of Poland for example)
As for Mr De la Fe's invitation to join in, first he'd have to convince me that there is some kind of point to it for me to give up my time to doing something like that. At the moment his supporters seem to be struggling to make more precise their suggestion that this is "useful". I see it as a stamp catalogue. But for his information, he really ought to get somebody on his team who knows about Medieval and Post-Medieval central European mintage and for goodness sake, use the proper names of the places, not the ones the Nazis used. Cracow is not in "Silesia", Mieszko I did not issue coins, did he?
According to one of our volunteers:
"And you can tell the ignorant Mr. Barford that, yes, according to Edmund Kopicki of Poland, Mieszko I did issue coins and they are found in his catalog of Polish coins. Sounds like ol' Paul learned something despite himself. I will not apologize for any name I used or any geographical classification I made just to conform to his notions of geographic political correctness. The city was known as Breslau for centuries before Nazis showed up, and was not officially changed to Wroclaw until World War II, nor is the spelling "Cracow" used anywhere on the site even one time."
Furthur clarification:
"Sorry, my rant was mostly directed against the wrong city (Wroclaw, not Krakow), but we still don't use 'Cracow' anywhere on the site, and I can only plead my sources that placed the Bishopric of Krakow under Kajetan Soltyk in Silesia. It was a single rare piece issued during the Seven Years War. Whether it belongs there or not in reality is above my paygrade, and is certainly above Barford's."
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