On 5/8/2010 5:04 PM, Dave Welsh wrote:

...

Dave Walsh posted here the entire copyrighted Washington Post article
except for two paragraphs, one of which spells out the reasoning of
those he disagrees with, which Dave indicated above by ellipsis points
(...). For the sake of completeness, here are the two paragraphs of this
21-paragraph article that were left out:

"Coins are part of the record of our past. To learn about the past and
think about our identities and cultural heritage, coins have to be
included," Leventhal said. "Ripping stuff out of the ground destroys our
knowledge of who we are and where we came from.

Under federal rules, anyone bringing certain ancient coins that are
Cypriot or Chinese into the United States must either have an export
permit from that country or documents that show they were unearthed
elsewhere or purchased before the regulations went into effect."

The article identifies Wayne Sayles as a collector, which was likely how
he identified himself. But he's a dealer, and he represents dealer
interests, primarily, though like just about all dealers he started out
as a collector and still collects coins. The group he runs, Ancient Coin
Collectors Guild (ACCG), also primarily represents dealer interests,
despite its name.

Dealer and collector interests here don't necessarily coincide,
completely, though neither group is monolithic in its beliefs. Many
collectors take a middle ground approach, neither the position at one
extreme of ACCG or at the other extreme of the Archaeological Institute
of America, a middle ground position that's represented as the article
points out by Alan M. Stahl of Princeton University. This middle ground
position was also spelled out well by Richard Witschonke of the American
Numismatic Society in an editorial published by the Celator magazine
some months ago.

Scholars like these support actions that preserve information now lost
with the current ancient coin distribution system, which has been in
place for many decades and which ACCG is trying to preserve, in which
the majority of new ancient coin finds are secretly and illegally
smuggled out of source countries so as not to run afoul of the laws of
these countries. What's needed most of all isn't the preservation of the
current badly flawed system but the changing of these laws so that the
context of coin and artifact finds can be studied, which could greatly
add to our knowledge, so that museums in these countries could have
first crack at what they wanted to keep and display, and so that
collectors could have a crack at the rest.

For the most part, they way they're constructed today, cultural
patrimony laws in source countries are irrational and draconian,
attempting to claim for that country even the most common ancient coins
and other artifacts even when they may not have been minted in that
country or even ever circulated in that country. Coins of the Roman
empire are just one example, which Italy is now trying to claim for
itself as its cultural heritage, when any given Roman coin may have been
produced at a mint in France, Germany, Great Britain, or elsewhere and
when such coins aren't strictly Italy's cultural heritage but the
cultural heritage of all countries today once under the rule of the
Roman empire as well as individuals whose ancestors lived in those
countries.

Of the ten objectives of ACCG that it spells out at its site, none deal
with improving the current badly flawed distribution system. Not
surprisingly, none of ACCG's seven officers are affiliated with any
universities or museums and its benefactors are primarily (or
exclusively?) ancient coin dealers and the VCoins marketplace.

Yes, private collecting should be preserved. But the current system
needs changing.

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Consumer: http://rg.ancients.info/guide
Connoisseur: http://rg.ancients.info/glom
Counterfeit: http://rg.ancients.info/bogos