Potential German Law Change Threatens The Hobby

Thanks for the post austro- That law change could make a huge impact on those who buy and sell from Germany and potentially (eventually) the entire eurozone

Heres the coinsweekly article on the draft legislation

http://www.coinsweekly.com/en/News/...2016.07.2015

If the objective is to preserve archaeological information then suppressing collecting is a misguided approach that will inevitably fail. Furthermore, it will have negative unintended consequences that will far outweigh the potential (but illusory) positives. After paying attention to this for a long time I still wonder why very intelligent people in the archaeological information game remain PC and don't risk saying the obvious "This approach won't work!"

Here are just a few points I could expand upon:

There is an assumption that laws somehow force behavior to accord with the laws. You might as well pass laws against pre- and extra-marital sex (or alcohol). Perhaps a good idea, but it goes on anyway.

In non-communist countries most people believe in private-property rights. Do governments have the "right" to dictate what their citizens may or may not buy when the negative side of such purchases is of such minor concern?

In the chain of economics from looter to collector there are already strong laws agains looting.

We, in the US, would like to think that a person is who he is, which is not determined by his father, mother, or fore-bearers. The creators of ancient coins are long gone. Cultural patrimony belongs, not to the state happening to occupy certain territory (often of an unrelated culture), but to the world. (Recall that Turkey claims Greek coins found on its soil, and Greece claimed an EID MAR denarius arguably found on its soil. Claims of cultural patrimony are hypocritical. Governments regard coins as having value and are as greedy as any collector.)

People have sought treasure and defiled archaeological sites for thousands of years--long before there was a market in antiquities and numismatic coins.

Information that hoards have beyond just the existence of the coins may be lost--not because coins are found by treasure seekers, but because governments claim ownership and do not adequately reward finders. Only England, with its rational Treasure Trove law, has many well-recorded hoards. For example, Italy, with it's draconian laws about hoards, has few well-recorded hoards. (Duncan-Jones, in an article on the mobility of coins from place to place, stated he had to leave out Italy because there were too few recorded hoards!)

Some hoards have information that would be lost if they were not "undisturbed", but most do not. Mostly the information is simply in the existence of the coins. One member mentioned the Frome hoard from England as a case where archaeological information was preserved because the hoard was undisturbed. I invite you to read about the Frome hoard with the intent of seeing how much information was gleaned because it was an undisturbed hoard, as opposed to the information in the existence of the coins themselves. The answer is -- virtually nothing! Furthermore, it was not from an established archaeological site to begin with--it became a site only because it was discovered because of treasure-seeking. So we could argue that collecting brought to light any information that there was in that hoard! What it did bring to light was the coins. If we were to use the anti-collecting logic, we could say the market makes the coins valuable and helped to discover the Frome Hoard and its information.

Archaeology was developed to meet the desires of collectors. All the early famous archaeologists were, or were supported by, collectors who expected to (and did) take home the stuff. It eventually morphed into a scholarly subject, but it is still largely funded by (read "dependent upon") collectors and organizations supported by collectors. Without collecting, the interest of the wealthy people who make archaeology happen would wither. This would be a major unintended consequence of anti-collecting schemes.

Many scholars were first intrigued by collections. They might never have made their contributions without the interest provoked by collecting. Even Nathan Elkins, one of the foremost exponents in the anti-collecting camp, admits he used to be a collector. Would he even be studying antiquity had he not collected?

Without collectors the institutions that support scholarship would die. The ANS and RNS and major numismatic societies of Europe, which together publish most of the important information about ancient coins, would die without the support of collectors. There are far to few academicians to keep them going.

There are relatively few academics and a large number of amateurs (in the best sense of the word) making contributions to scholarship about ancient coins. Professional scholars are not able to deal with the volume of information and the amateurs who do are collectors and most would not be involved if collecting were not a motivation. (For example, It took academics over 50 years to publish the very limited amount of material in the Dead Sea Scrolls!)

A substantial percentage of the "scholarly" works on ancient-coins were written by amateurs who became experts because of their collections.

The information that could potentially be associated with any given coin is infinitesimal. The type may have some small amount of information, but so do other coins of the same type. The idea of keeping track of provenance is proposed to make collecting financially impossible, not because it matters in the slightest.

There may be the idea that academics are better stewards of artifacts than collectors. That is false. Anyone in the field of die-studies (which are essential to many PH.D.s in ancient numismatics) knows that commercial sale-catalogs provide more and better illustrations than all the museums put together. The commercial need to satisfy collectors' demand for photographs has the consequence that scholars benefit.

Google information about almost any ancient-coin topic. If information is the goal, you can see far more information on the web is provided by collectors and dealers than by scholars.

A large fraction of archaeological information gathered from professional digs remains unpublished twenty and more years after it was uncovered. I have read several articles where the author remarks that excavation began many years ago and bemoans that the work remains unpublished (and probably never will be). Had it been looted, the information left to posterity would not be much different. The archaeology profession is not entirely without blame.

Does anyone out there really think treasure seeking and looting won't continue unabated because of laws against collecting? Does anyone deny that collectors have been the greatest supporters of archaeology and scholarly organizations that promote interest in antiquity? Does anyone deny that collecting makes one care at all about antiquity?

The thought that anti-collecting laws will help is misguided, wrong, and ludicrous!