to all those who responded to the ACCG's and CPO's request that coin collectors make their concerns known about the State Department bureaucracy's efforts, aided, abetted and encouraged by elements in the archaeological community, to suppress the private collecting, study and display of common ancient coins of the sort widely and legally collected world-wide.
The number of comments of coin collectors and others opposed to the MOU or its application to coins compared to the dearth of comments from anyone other than parties with a professional interest in keeping the State Department and Egyptian cultural bureaucracies happy should raise two questions.
Are MOUs little more than special interest programs for cultural bureaucrats and archaeologists?
And is the point of them really cultural heritage preservation or control?
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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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Blog Archive
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2014
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May
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- Washington, D.C. Roundtable on Cultural Policy Reform
- Notable Statements on Egyptian MOU
- State Department Sponsored "Demonstrations" in Fav...
- Tunnel Vision: MOU Supporters Oblivious to Facts ...
- Image More Important than Substance?
- Where's the Beef?
- An Archaeo-Blogger's Manifesto
- A Century of Collecting and Learning
- Committee for Cultural Policy DC Event Now On-Line
- The CPIA "Covers" Coins?
- Return of the Pharaoh?
- The Silence of the Lambs
- Now he's a lawyer
- "Duplicitous" Coin Collectors; No Comment?
- 91% of Public Comments Against MOU with Egyptian M...
- Thank you
- Self-Absorbed
- My Comment to CPAC
- Trophy Room Readied for Spoils from Egyptian MOU?
- Legal Action Contemplated on Iraqi-Jewish Archive
- Collecting Egyptian Not So Bad?
- With a Little Help from Friends in High Places....
- The Full Story of the Iraqi Jewish Archive
- Museum Immunity Bill: Who Are You Going to Believe?
- Scapegoating
- Waving the Bloody Shirt
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May
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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.
1 comment:
The voices in favor of the MOU seem sincere in their belief that signing it it will reduce unlicensed digging in Egypt. I wish I could share their optimism.
I wonder how it is going in countries with active MOUs? I sometimes read news reports of unfortunates caught with forbidden antiquities in the press. I wonder if there is enough data in those reports to see smugglers changing their behavior over time. If anyone reading is getting anecdotal reports from the antiquities trade of of diggers passing up MOU-restricted items in favor of excavating MOU-exempted items I would be very interested.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong today the sad task of burning 28 tons of seized ivory has started. I wish HK luck, for the sake of the elephants. It seems to me that the burning will only increase the value of unsiezed ivory, and thus provide a perverse incentive to poachers. Hopefully the crushing and burning of ivory does not inspire anyone to do the same with antiquities.
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