In the proselytizing that always follows the looting of any archaeological site or news about another repatriation, there is usually a statement telling people not to buy any coin or artifact that has no sales record prior to the event or to the 1970 UNESCO convention. Any collector knows that such information is very rare: for centuries, noting previous ownership was reserved for rather important pieces, or where a previous owner was so notable that such a pedigree added value to the item. I had often wondered if such advice came from ignorance of the facts or was just a con job perpetrated by those opposed to collecting. Either way, it did not speak well of its author. No proper study collection can be built by using only specimens obeying this criterion. But that is their real point, the one they do not want to tell you.
Especially curious is the fact that most of this advice comes from processual archaeologists the term refers to those who bought into the New Archaeology of the seventies. Such people had an undying dedication to science, and science was going to tell us everything we needed to know about the past. This was the philosophy of modernism. For some, it was a very short honeymoon because in the eighties postmodern thought informed us that "all is text" and its "grand narratives" had as much to do with the viewpoint of the observer as it did with any objective fact. There was a certain amount of wriggling on the hook and explanations were offered that archaeology was really a "soft science" and nothing like chemistry, physics, and so on which stressed experiments or mathematical proofs. My wife was always skeptical of archaeological interpretation, saying that it was like trying to solve a crime where all of the witnesses were long dead and the evidence had mostly vanished. You would think that the mere word "interpretation" applied to archaeological remains should have clued everyone in, after all, when something is interpreted, it is changed from its original form to something else. Where does this process take place? Inside a mind, or inside a device that simulates a mind.
Things became even stranger in quantum physics and we were told that if we set up our equipment to detect light energy as a wave, the experiment would confirm that, but if we set up our equipment to detect it as particles it would confirm that, too. We were not in Kansas anymore, and a basic law of logic was violated: something can be both A and not A. Thanks to the thought and work of the Romanian particle physicist, Basarab Nicolescu, who reasoned that our ideas about reality thus needed an overhaul, transdisciplinarity came to our attention, well some of us, anyway. It has yet to reach the oaken halls of archaeology in any form other than as a "trendy" alternative term for multidisciplinarity. It is not, however a synonym. The only two words in the English language that are true synonyms (according to a scholar whose name I have long forgotten) are "gorse" and "furze".
You would think that even an attempt at objectivity would be made by those who have worshipped at the altar of science, but all you see is "cult-speak". I have much experience in the investigation of modern religious cults and helping those who have escaped such. I have been interviewed by the press on the subject and had even participated in a televised face to face confrontation with a certain very wealthy cult. The local police had to cordon off the block where the studio was situated at the time of the broadcast in case of "repercussions". One of my friends was murdered on the orders of a cult we were investigating and for some time I slept with a loaded pistol by my bed. Some of my associates were FBI witnesses in one case against a cult.
Always follow the money. Ask yourself if the person who spreads such bad advice has something to gain by supporting nationalistic views of so-called cultural property restriction proponents and read Archaeology Under Dictatorship for a good view of that end of the spectrum. Most collectors and dealers feel that if an archaeologist supports a nation's efforts to retrieve property that was made by previous cultures that existed within its modern borders, then excavation permits will be easier to obtain in the future.
Tomorrow (as this is becoming rather long): why culture should be the property of all in the world personally and experientially and not by proxy in the hands of its self-appointed "custodians". The theoretical archaeologist Alison Wylie called the latter practice "foxes guarding the hen house. These particular foxes wear cowls.
Variously known as The moneychanger and his wife, or The tax
collector and his wife, both subjects are common for this artist.
Note the talon aspect of their hands save for the hand of
the man who tightly grasps the coin he is placing on the
scale to check the weight. Before milled coinage, and
back when money had intrinsic value, the "hammered"
coins were frequently clipped or shaved at their edge
to profit on the metal or (rarely) to adjust the weight
before being distributed. Squeeze your thumb against
your forefinger and note the pressure that is needed for
your thumb to assume this shape.
Physical immortality continues to elude us and the vultures wait to pick our bones clean (if you are a Tibetan Buddhist, this is no metaphor). In this instance I am not talking about greedy relatives fighting over your estate; or funeral directors pushing for the purchase of the deluxe model of casket. I am talking about the tax man. Of course, we all know about death taxes in some countries. Here in Canada, there is no such thing, but the collector still has to be aware of another tax: capital gains. Laws will vary from country to country so make sure you know what your heirs might have to face.
For me, a dedicated coin collector summons up an image of someone without a lot of money in their bank account; an average job; function rather than fashion expressed in their wardrobe; and a car that has seen much better days. Oh, and a collection that might make the curator of a numismatic museum drool. This is not true in every case, of course, but it is far truer than the public's image of the billionaire collector sipping brandy in the vault beneath his mansion as he drools over his collection.
I have often heard collectors say that they plan to leave their collection to a museum. Perhaps they think that this will avoid some problems for their family, or that their name will be remembered as a donor, but they are mostly thinking about how the collection might benefit future studies. If you have such warm and fuzzy thoughts in your head, snap out of it and read this piece from a Canadian lawyer: Donating Art - Not as easy as you may think... . Like the confidence trickster, the tax man can see you coming. He knows that what you bought for next to nothing sixty years earlier can now be sold for a handsome sum and he wants part of that action and knows that capital gains tax can be obtained from your heirs even if you think you can avoid the problem with a donation to a museum. He sucks you in at first, with the promise of a tax break if you donate to a public museum, but that just makes sure that the taxman gets a free appraisal so that demanding the requisite capital gains tax is a simple matter. So your heirs end up with your meagre bank account and the old car and a tax bill that is worth more than the rest of the estate put together.
But there is much more in that law firm's article than the capital gains tax problem, and laws vary from country to country so do your research and give it all some very serious thought. Remember, though, that once an official appraisal is issued your fate is probably sealed. There is also mention in the article of cultural property laws and many of the proponents of such are also tricksters and con-men. I will sharpen my scalpel and dissect those for you tomorrow.
In 1999, at the Bournemouth (UK) meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists, I had just given a talk in which I spoke of the contributions to our knowledge of the past given by collectors and independent researchers. This was part of a session hosted by the Council for Independent Archaeology. After my talk, Neil Brodie, then at the McDonald Institute at Cambridge asked me if I thought that collectors would be willing to pay for research access to museum's collections (the vast majority of their holdings being in storage). The question was unexpected, and I don't even remember my reply. It seemed to me as if I had just offered to buy someone lunch, and they had asked me how much I would be willing to pay for that privilege.
The public's primary uses of museums and their exhibitions are as entertainment and social occasions, not so much as education. The collector, on the other hand, most often sees museums as a resource for their own studies. If a museum has to charge for admission because their funding cannot guarantee their survival, so be it. You might thus see a cash register at the entrance. You will always see one in the gift shop, of course. Other than that, perhaps one might be an exhibit, itself.
Art-Students and Copyists in the Louvre Gallery, Paris. Winslow Homer, 1836-1910
“Begin by learning to draw and paint like the
old masters. After that, you can do as you like;
everyone will respect you.”
Salvador Dali
If you are an artist who copies a painting from an illustration, the result will not be a copy of the painting, but a copy of the illustration. It is not just the exact colours which are in the painting that will not be reproduced exactly, but the painting is not two dimensional, it is three dimensional: textures and relief in the paint, itself is often invisible in a photograph. I remember being amazed at a highlight on a the tip of a nose when I was looking at a Rembrandt self-portrait in a gallery: it was if a stray drip of paint of the exact shape and size needed had landed on the canvas by accident. The artist had obviously not adjusted the stroke. It was done alla prima in a single motion: the mark of a master. My wife (who was also an art teacher) used to say that many contemporary paintings are flat-looking because the artist was influenced only by photographs of paintings. I think that it is true to say that the Louvre's traditional practice of allowing copyists had a positive effect on future art.
Nearly twenty years ago, I wanted to do a web study of a series of Celtic gold coins, but there was one example (in the British Museum) for which I had only a photograph of one side. The article was to be about the way that the coins had been debased over time. It turned out (after looking at some of the actual coins) that my source data had been published with quite a number of typos and other mistakes and was of little use for my purposes, so it was never completed. When I requested the photo, I learned that it would cost me a total of 30 pounds for what I needed (This was before the British Museum allowed free use of their website photographs for non profit educational purposes). After explaining, on the phone, the problems of doing a freely accessible article on many varieties of a coinage when the cost would be so prohibitive, the keeper of coins kindly sent me a free polaroid of the coin I needed.
Weeks ago, I contacted the National Museum of Wales through their "contact us" link about some metal analyses of some Coriosolite staters which had been published without any reference to their position in the chronology, and without any photographs by which I could identify such. I even told them that if such data was lacking in their catalogue, I would be happy to recatalogue them at no cost to them. Apart from an automated response saying that I would be contacted, they never even replied to refuse. A couple of years ago, I needed to obtain a Bulgarian paper on the use of spurs in ancient Thrace, following a recommendation from someone I knew in Bulgarian academia, I got the name of a major Bulgarian archaeologist who could help and I emailed him about obtaining a copy, as it was not apparently available in North America. I got no reply. If anyone can help me, it is:
“On the spurs’ development in Thrace, Macedonia and Illyria during the Early Hellenistic times”. – In: ПЪТЯТ. Сборник научни статии, посветени на живота и творчеството на д-р Георги Китов , Sofia 2003, 198-203
It is not vital, as most of what I needed is confirmed by Xenophon's treatise on horsemanship, but it would certainly add useful data.
There was quite the buzz in London, fifty years ago, when Norton Simon bought Rembrandt's Portrait of a boy in fancy costume. I remember it well, and for me it epitomised the secrecy and codes within high-end art auctions. I will let Art News tell you all about it. At that time such art auctions were usually held when the average person was at work and only lesser things were sold at evening or weekend auctions. Even an auction catalogue listing could fool most people: if it said just "Rembrandt", it was a copy, if it gave his full name and dates, it was real.
Many years later, I bought an Old Master drawing at Sotheby's by an absentee bid. I had sent in a list of lots and the amount I was prepared to pay for each with the understanding that my first successful bid would cancel all the subsequent bids. Sotheby's handled the task with no problems and I won a French seventeenth century red chalk drawing of Apollo and the Muses. My first choice, though, was a lot of ten old master drawings that were not described, and of course, not illustrated in the catalogue. The high pre sale estimate was only two hundred and I bid three after having them give me a rough description of the drawings on the phone. When I phoned them the next day to see how I fared, I was surprised to hear that the first lot had gone for several times its high estimate. I learned from the man on the phone that such lots were aimed mainly at the local art dealers who would have been in the room. I saw another drawing in the same catalogue: a very small and excellent portrait of a boy that looked a lot like a Van Dyke work but was, again, unattributed. I think that its low estimate was three hundred (my limit) so I placed a bid, although with just about zero hope. It went, if memory serves, for forty-nine thousand. Still, I was very happy with my purchase, even though the shipping cost was exceptionally high and by the time that the invoice arrived, the British pound had shot up from about $1.95 Canadian to $2.35. When I received the drawing, more money went to its conservation framing and anti UV glass (even though red chalk is never fugitive, the paper tone can certainly be affected by light). I decided that collecting old master drawings was just too rich for me, but I did have some success buying undescribed and unillustrated lots of coins for far more than their estimate after hearing about the "local dealer tradition".
Nowadays, the auction market has become far more public and you can bid online at almost any auction in the world. What most people do not know, though, is that the old traditions and customs still persist. To be successful, you still need to be able to read between the lines to a degree. You might think, for example, that if you buy an object in an auction, then you can always return to that auction house for its resale in the future. If you are buying a fairly cheap drawing at a big auction house, you should understand that it was most likely part of a collection that was being sold in that sale: they probably would not have accepted it as single lot.
For ancient coin dealers lots, Sotheby's were a good source: common coins like most tetradrachms of Alexander the Great and Roman and Byzantine gold solidi were traded like commodities with only minor fluctuations in the prices of many large lots in each sale. The higher end coin dealers, too, often sold large lots of ancient coins like a hundred Roman denarii in conditions that were somewhat less perfect than the coins that were sold singly. Again, these coins were collection residues. They would not buy a single example of such a coin from you.
The collector learns about these things through experience, but the anti-collecting lobby among some archaeologists has no experience and cannot be bothered to learn about the culture. They present their criticisms at the public who is even less informed and it becomes a matter of the blind leading the blinder. A wiser archaeologist once told me to take any of their utterances with a grain of salt. For most collectors, such criticism are so beyond any reality that they become a source of entertainment. Setting aside privacy laws, expecting that a dealer would construct a Byzantine system of keeping track of low value coins which would have a history of being sold in unillustrated and undescribed lots in auctions dating back a few hundred years before the Internet and its cost-efficient jpegs is impractical (even if specific records existed). In reality, such things are impossible, they are the pipe dreams of idealists that are praised by the ignorant.
Again, I learned from experience: When I was in the jewellery business, a man stole a diamond ring from me when I glanced away for a split second. There was no one nearby, and when I looked back, I saw a hole in the tray that had not been plugged. The chain store area supervisor was in the shop at the time, so I told him what had happened. He knew that detaining the person could present some legal problems: not more than a year earlier, a jeweller at a nearby store was accused of stealing some gold (he was actually innocent). His boss searched him and found nothing, The jeweller sued and was awarded thousands. So, I followed the the thief to a pawn shop and the police did become involved. I was the main witness at his his trial. Even though describing everything, the judge asked me if the ring design was unique. I told him that it was a design that was not custom, but a standard style of one wholesale jeweller. The judge decided that the ring could not be positively identified as being stolen thus, and the thief was found innocent and got to keep the money from the pawn shop.
If you are purchasing any art object from a licensed dealer and that object is priced less than a couple of thousand, it is very doubtful that a chain of ownership could be traced even if you spent several times that amount trying to do so. You might be lucky once the object passed into the hands of a prominent collector because that fact alone adds value, but that would usually be mentioned in the sale listing, anyway. If they knew, they would tell you (even though they will not mention the name of its current owner without permission). The head of Galba that I mentioned earlier in this series was fifty pounds. I would guess that it would now fetch several thousand. Just because something is expensive now, does not mean that it always has been. Norton Simon spent 2.1 million on his Rembrandt. Can you imagine what that painting would fetch today? for a while, good old master paintings were increasing in price at 25% per annum. Really good coins and artifacts, in the same time period, were going up at about 11% p.a. Lesser, and ordinary objects? well, you don't collect for the investment value right? I once spent a week's wages on a coin that I could buy today for about $200. As Shakespeare said "Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy". Fortunately, I now collect early Celtic art, and unlike most buyers (and sellers), I know what is good. When more people understand it, my heirs might make a killing! Remember rarity is only one part of the equation of supply and demand.
If some anti collecting archaeologists do get their way and many collectors and dealers become paranoid, the market will drop and the safe, inexpensive, items will get even cheaper. This will result in even more young collectors and when they start earning more, the market will bounce back even higher. You notice things over fifty years. So such people do serve a useful purpose, even if it is counter to their intention. Rough coins from archaeological sites are especially cheap. Hoard coins are favored by all but the poorest and youngest collectors. You have to think in long term investments for this sort of thing, but even then be aware that fashions can change: A painting by Sir Edwin Landseer fetched far more in the nineteenth century than it would today (inflation adjusted). Never buy anything when it is a fad.
Tomorrow, the foolishness of making the researcher pay.
You don't miss your water 'til the well runs dry. The statue of the "inspector of the scribes" Sekhemka, deaccessioned by the Northampton Museum to raise funds for remodelling and sold for £15.76 million (pre-sale estimate £4 -6 million). Although the statue had not been on display for five years, and in that time no one had asked to see it and an agreement had been reached with the estate of the original donor about the sale, it became a highly controversial issue. Now, the British government has deferred the granting of an export permit to the foreign buyer (Ahram online) hoping that a British buyer could take over the purchase and that deferment might be extended if there is still a serious effort to raise the money at its deadline. Egypt, of course, wanted it repatriated.
The Ahram Online article includes:
""If a UK buyer makes a matching offer to the current owner, and the owner rejects the offer, then the Secretary of State could decide to refuse to grant an export licence," a ministry spokesman told Ahram Online.
"He refused to reveal the foreign buyer's identity for legal reasons."
Privacy laws forbid the identity of a buyer or a seller to be revealed without their permission, and this makes a lot of sense: the sale of part of a collection cannot be compared to the sale of a car or a firearm where a chain of ownership is required. It can be an embarrassment for a cash-strapped owner and could present that owner with business or family repercussions; the identity of a new buyer could make them a target for robbery; and people mostly do not like their financial affairs published for all to see. Yet a number of archaeologists publicly criticize those who would prefer to obey such laws (without even mentioning the existence of such laws). If there is any official criminal investigation about the object, however, a warrant can be obtained to free such information to the police.
Northampton Museum is mostly noted for having the world's largest collection of shoes, and in the photograph Sekhemka seems out of place among the pictures on the wall. As a collector, I will sell off something in my collection to raise money to buy something more important to me. Mostly, I will sell off things that could easily be replaced by something similar, but if the new purchase is important enough, I might part with something almost as important if there is no other solution. After my wife passed away, I was in severe financial difficulties and I sold my dekadrachm of Syracuse for $7,000 in order to rid myself of debts and finance a move. The most important consideration in selling part of my collection is the relevance of the object to my current collecting interests. Context is everything. Even as a non-profit, a museum is still a business: renovations might be needed; expansions to the museum can have positive effects on the numbers of visitors, and how much they will spend at the museum gift shop, cafeteria, etc.
Yet, I agree with a temporary export permit deferment because if the needed funds are raised then the country has provided solid evidence of the importance of the statue to the British people. The Northampton museum and the estate will retain the benefits of the sale. People might complain, but talk is cheap. Northampton Museum lost its accreditation because of the sale and I think that this was a wrong move. If I ever asked a bureaucrat for business advice I would hope that friends and family would seek psychological help for me. My friend Robert is a coin dealer and the City of Calgary insists that each coin must be recorded for a police database. He missed a golden opportunity when the City of Calgary offered him many cash bags full of foreign coins that had been deposited as fares on their buses. It would have taken months or more of full-time work to list all of those coins on the police database. He bought the coins, saying that they could not possibly be listed on the database as the value of each coin on average was less then a nickel as a wholesale price. In all the years that that database has been going, a single stolen coin-related object was identified: an Elvis medallion. I would have just told them that their stupid laws made it impossible for them to regain any of their lost bus fare income.
Tomorrow, the classic example of elite art-buyer secrecy, a world few of us understand.
Art collecting, whether by public institutions or private collectors is thoroughly intertwined with economic realities. Investors, during difficult times, are often advised to diversify and sometimes this diversification takes the form of buying very expensive works of art. Worries about repatriation, legal ownership and export bans can further increase the market value of objects considered safe from such problems. It does, however provide opportunities for the purchase of very minor works by collectors who have little money to spare and either cannot afford to buy such "safe" objects, or are trying to put together a proper collection for study or scientific purposes. What such collectors lack in their bank accounts is often made up for by the knowledge that they possess. I remember one young man in London who started to collect old master drawings at the time when you could find minor examples of such for a few pounds in shops such as Folio Fine Art. I used to subscribe to their catalogues. They are no longer in existence and I know of no equivalent today. This should not come as a surprise to anyone in the know: at that time, a Basan edition of a Rembrandt print was not considered important enough to mat, let alone frame. When they started to sell for about a thousand dollars, people jaws dropped — take a look at the current prices. The collection of drawings started by that young man eventually fetched a huge sum at auction. The market had dramatically changed.
At fifteen years old, even minor old master drawings were beyond my means and like many young collectors, I had started collecting "multiples", which are objects like coins, stamps and prints (save for monotypes). With me it was Greek coins (including Celtic), and minor artifacts that were originally produced in large numbers that most interested me. It never upset me that I could not afford the Athenian black-figure amphora displayed in a window at Spinks, but it did bother me when I saw something just slightly out of my reach, like a first century marble head of the emperor Galba which was about five inches high and was priced at fifty pounds in Portobello Road.
I bought, for ten shillings at Seaby's, a lump of corrosion surrounding a Celtic billon stater of the Coriosolites from the Le Catillon hoard and twenty years later I started to reclassified the series and this culminated in my book being published by Archaeopress at Oxford as part of their British Archaeological Reports (International Series 1092, 2002). the time from the purchase of the stater to the publication of the book about them was thirty seven years (Well, I was doing many other things as well, and I have never even applied for any grant for a study). The fact remains, however, that without the purchase of that ten shilling coin the series would not have been reclassified. I had to create my own working method to reclassify these coins, as they had mostly been stolen from the Jersey Museum without the usual die-linking studies being published in full. I developed an art-historical method based on evolutionary cladistics that had very little chance of being subjective. It was the first study of its type applied to an archaeological subject, and (forever reinventing the wheel), I had never even heard of evolutionary cladistics at the time. Of course, when you reinvent the wheel, you might do it differently. The same was true about my expert system (or quick identification chart, as I originally called it, having never heard of expert systems before Bob Van Arsdell identified it as such).
Some of the best collectors, and that includes some who really advance the subject of their interest are not wealthy at all. Often, their passion for what they collect takes first place above financial goals, and this makes sense if you really think about it. Those making a lot of money are often far too busy doing that to spend too much time on their hobbies. When we had our business, there was virtually no time for my other interests at all. The private collector also has to sometimes adjust the amount of their purchases to fit with the more pressing demands of work and family. This all goes unnoticed in the press and there is still a vision of the collector being the sort of person the press does notice after spending millions at an art auction.
In deference to this lack of perception about collectors, I will continue this series tomorrow with some thoughts about the most recent high profile auction sale: the sale of the statue of Sekhemka by the Northampton Museum which has received a temporary export ban.
Almost all of the work on Celtic deities is focused on the Roman period. Depictions of deities in La Tène period Celtic art are quite rare and are concentrated in Provence and Germany. Paul Jacobsthal, Early Celtic Art, p.3) says: "The works from Germany (nos. 10-15) are far more original, since they are untouched by direct foreign influences: the sculptures in Provence speak audibly of the neighbourhood of Massilia." Celtic coinage appears to show plenty of deities but their exact identification can be difficult to impossible to identify and they first created their coinage based on Greek prototypes depicting Greek deities. The very earliest of these were just rather crude copies or copies of copies. It was important to the Celts to reflect their most heroic period when they fought for Greek patrons around the Mediterranean. I call this a Graeco-Celtic synthesis.
Epona is popularly described as a Celtic horse-goddess, but even though her name is Celtic was she really Celtic in origin? The best study of the goddess on the web is "Epona.net; a scholarly resource" by Nantonos and Ceffyl. I have communicated with Nantonos over many years and if you knew his real identity, you would not be too surprised by either the scholarship or the beautiful design of the website.
The BBC News headline "Roman McDonald's theory over Navenby coins find" got my attention but the article included very little information. Navenby Archaeology Group's
leader, Ian Cox is quoted as saying of the three hundred low-value coins: "It was as if people had dropped them while eating and drinking and couldn't be bothered to pick them up."
My first problem with the article was that the date range of these coins was not mentioned. As the site was on a Roman road, it could have been anytime after the conquest. Further searching found an older article about the excavations that stated that the buildings were second century. That takes us from the time of Trajan to Septimius Severus. If the coins came from the end of that period, they could not have been smaller than an as, but at the beginning of that period fractions of an as down to the quarter (quadrans)were used (although they are fairly scarce at that time).
The second century saw some inflation, so without any knowledge of the date and denominations of the found coins, there is no way to tell just how low the value was. I have a hard time with the concept that the coins were of such low value that no one could bother to pick one up if it fell to the floor, and three hundred quadrans would total 75 asses (a silver denarius was worth 16 asses). If the patrons or staff couldn't be bothered to pick up such a sum, it was not a Roman Mcdonald's, it was a Roman Ritz!
My suspicion is that the patrons left the money as a formal tribute and its display encouraged further such donations. The amount of money left on display would have indicated something of the status of the establishment (and the rest could have been gathered as income). Without much more information, this is just a guess: if the coins were the later asses, then even one or two might have bought a bottle of wine or have covered a day's food expenses. Even a picture of one of the coins would have helped.
Is such reporting just sloppy, or is it because no one is interested in knowing more?
An online Scientific American item about a link between smaller brain sizes in lower income families' children comes with some reader's criticisms about how the experiment was designed and what it might indicate. A further critique was given as a link. It came as a bit of a surprise for me as I remember my wife telling me, nearly thirty years ago, that the effects of malnutrition in a pregnant mother can last for three generations and one of the main things to suffer was intelligence. I have no idea where she got that information.
For me, the whole study presents various classification and sampling problems. For example, we see world hunger maps drawn up by country, but malnutrition also occurs within countries that are very affluent. We think of malnutrition mainly as a lack of food and pictures come to mind of starving African children with swollen bellies. When we look at the traditional ethnic foods of poorer countries, we see combinations of foods that supplement each other: beans and rice being a well-known example. Some of these dishes can be time-consuming to prepare but time is always available when work or profit are not.
The situation in affluent countries is very different. For the working poor, malnutrition can follow a habit of getting three large meals a day at the drive-through window washed down with a bladder-testing amount of pop. Time is less available when low paying jobs are plentiful. TV commercials tell us that their dishes take only five minutes to prepare. Perhaps the action of peeling back the plastic for the last minute in the microwave gives us the idea that we are cooking.
Some years ago, a local supermarket was selling baskets for donation to the Food Bank. It bothered me that the products were all the cheapest brands: the spaghetti sauce was thick because of the cornstarch and owed much of its flavour to refined sugar; bleached white flour dominated the grains in any ingredient list and the list of additives would need someone with a degree in chemistry to explain. I could only think that the purpose of the large and inexpensive baskets was to make their customers feel more generous than they really were. The last thing you should feed someone at a time of economic stress is empty calories. At a time when people have to be quick-thinking and creative in order to survive, bad nutrition can lead to mental dullness and its resulting apathy. Of course, apathetic people do not complain much...
Even if you are doing fine, economically, have lots of free time and enjoy cooking, what is available to you might be limited: the recipe does not say "Be sure to make sure the water is boiling before you pick the corn", or "always use basil within half an hour of harvesting". Fresh and barely processed foods can be a problem for city dwellers without their own vegetable and fruit gardens and we have developed a taste for things that are grown in very different climates. Someone living where mangoes grow often has their choice of several different varieties, for most everyone else it is only one or two. It is not just about the quality of the taste of very fresh food, but the fact that its nutritional value can often diminish after a very short time and can vary with different varieties. Then there are GM foods lurking everywhere, and you know that the big packers are going to have their choice of the best of the crops...
With so many factors mentioned in the article and its comments and links, I don't think we can estimate the role of malnutrition in these shrinking brains, but as epigenetics is an interest of mine, I recommend A bomb is ticking: the genetic impact of malnutrition. What we eat can affect our grandchildren.
It has been six months since I filed the application for the replacement of a missing document that is holding up most of my pensions and senior's benefits and that is the estimated waiting time that is posted on the government website. I started the whole process fifteen months ago. Needless to say, I am seeing the interiors of restaurants and bookshops far less than what I am used to. My book want list prices must add up to about a thousand dollars by now. At least I'm eating healthier.
Today, J. Laurence Hare, Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums and the German-Danish Borderlands.goes on my list. For some people, archaeology is a public relations tool for nationalist propaganda and is not conducted, as it should be, "to exercise the mind and to delight the senses". Perhaps the real purpose of nationalistic archaeology is to dull the mind and deaden the senses. I think that what we are seeing is the last dying gasps of a long-established archaeological subservience to political ideology. Anthropologists today think more in the terms of very personalized cultural frameworks than marching to national anthems. Like a plant that will suddenly go to seed or fruit when its survival is threatened, the end of an idea is always marked by a very active period before its demise.
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