Shanna Berk-Schmidt on Coins and the Cultural Property Debate

Shanna Berk-Schmidt has posted her thesis about coins and the culural property debate on academia.edu.  Her thesis provides an unusual and welcome perspective of a numismatic dealer to the issues in an academic environment.

The Show Will Go On After All

CPO is happy to report that the good people of Cleveland will get to see an exhibit of Sicilian antiquities after all.  But CPO suspects that "the beyond ownership" mantra of proponents of the MOU with Italy remains on life support.  The problem here was that Sicily had made a last minute demand for considerably more money for the exhibit to go forward after closing at the Getty.  In the future, however,  Sicily can and should get top dollar for renting out its antiquities before they are sent abroad  And Sicily should also consider selling off duplicates in State collections.   Sicily needs money to help preserve its magnificent cultural heritage.  Loans from Cleveland in return are fine, but they won't help pay the bills.

Opportunists?

Islamic fanatics are burning mummies and churches in Egypt while the army and police are nowhere to be seen.  Yet, unbelievably there are calls in the archaeological blogosphere for the United States to impose "emergency" import restrictions to expedite the repatriation of unprovenanced Egyptian artifacts back to Egypt.   Is this really about preserving Egyptian cultural heritage or taking advantage of the ongoing tragedy to further an anti-collector agenda?

Archaeology: Art or Science?

An underlying theme at both CPAC hearings and in the archaeological blogosphere is that archaeology is a "science" as to which all other interests must bow.   But is archaeology really a "science" as archaeologists who demand restrictions on collectors often contend?

Here is an part of an an interesting comment to a recent post that addresses this question:

I would now like to respond to Barford's call for the "METHODOLOGY of this discipline." Of what value is the methodology or methodologies employed in archaeology? What results have been obtained by these, what breakthroughs achieved? Having taken classes with numerous archaeologists over the past several years including three who were dig directors at the time, I am now of the opinion that archaeology is not a science at all. Archaeological digs yield certain assemblages of material objects in context. What any of this data means is open to wildly varying interpretation as one can clearly see from reading the publications of the archaeologists themselves. While I have the utmost respect for all of the archaeologists with whom I have studied, and value them both as people and erudite scholars, I find the discipline of archaeology itself to be of very limited value in telling us anything concrete about the past. Archaeological data is a useful tool at the historian's disposal in conjunction with documentary evidence (like coins, papyri, inscriptions) and ancient narrative accounts. By itself, however, a material assemblage in context tells you almost nothing and is open to almost any interpretation one can dream up. When dealing with prehistoric periods where the only evidence is a material assemblage and its context, the "science" of archaeology is less akin to the science of...well, SCIENCE than it is to the "science" employed by L. Ron Hubbard in crafting DIANETICS or Joseph Smith in creating the BOOK OF MORMON. The consensus among my fellow graduate students was that one could make up just about any story one wished and as long as it accounted for the material assemblage it was no more or less likely to be the truth than any other story including all of those published in the flatly contradictory and wildly varying interpretations of nearly every specialist in the field.

Perhaps then "archaeology over all" is an even more hollow ideology than it seems.

Out of Egypt

Egypt's union for archaeologists has demanded that the government throw out foreign, particularly American archaeologists because America has not formally approved of the military's coup against the Morsi Muslim Brotherhood Government.  American archaeologists have helped politicize archaeology through their support of MOU's as "public diplomacy" measures of the US Government.  Now, such politicization has only come back to haunt them.

Snobbery Behind Anti-Collector Rhetoric?

After reading archaeo-blogger Paul Barford's latest screed against numismatics, CPO has to wonder if the anti-collector bias of some archaeologists is motivated largely by academic snobbery.  But in an era where popular culture cares more about the Kardashians than the classics, we should celebrate pastimes like ancient coin collecting and not dismiss it out of hand.  Coin dealers like Italo Vecchi and collectors like Arthur Houghton have spent years producing magnificent studies of ancient coins that help keep the cultures that produced them alive.  And really, what's wrong with that?

Do the Right Thing

It appears from reading the Washington Post article about the proposed return of the "Jewish Archive" to Iraq that many of the artifacts are in fact personal in nature.  If so, shouldn't the US State Department and its Cultural Heritage Center be required to make images of the archive available to families of displaced Jews and give them an opportunity to claim what is rightfully theirs before such material is repatriated?   Who has better title, a successor government to those which hounded these people out of the country that had been their home for generation upon generation or the families themselves?