The Iceni hypothesis — part two

Max Planck (1858-1947)
The father of quantum mechanics

On Friday night, Robert Van Arsdell filled in some gaps in my blog entry of that day, by telling me that it was John Talbot who was working on the Iceni die-links, and that he has finished them. Thanks, Bob! So we should be good to go (providing the photographs are not 1:1 scale printed in a very low-res halftone. I much prefer the web with its "click to enlarge"). As most of my interest, for the last few years, has been in early Celtic art, I have not been keeping up with all of the latest Celtic numismatic achievements.

On the weekend, I was struggling to invent a term that would serve as the philosophical basis for my Iceni hypothesis. I settled on quantum numismatics. The term exists only in two applications: the first was in a long sentence parodying modern academic terminology (as it would seem to be an absurd term at first glance), and the second was its use as a business name (as in the not-quite literate phrase "quantum-leap" which gives an impression of being huge).  In physics, a quantum (plural: quanta) is the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction. (Wikipedia definition), so it's not huge at all. The Planck length is 1.61619926 × 10^-35 meters; a distance so small you could not see it with a scanning electron microscope.

I came by my definition honestly: my "Rosetta Stone" for deciphering Coriosolite coin chronology was in noting that a small group of coins within J.-B. Colbert de Beaulieu's Class III had variations where a lash from the banner in front of the chariot pony either terminated in its tail ornamentation or connected to the driver's forehead and these were also combined with different designs for the pony's ears. That there were overlaps in these features made me realize that the traditional numismatic classification method that found importance in dominant design elements was not workable. For example, I have even seen an instance of where the coins were separated by "the boar or lyre mintmarks" (my Italics). These boar and lyre variants have the same religious iconographic original meaning (the dawn of the solar year) and the differences and later usage are all to do with specific cultural syncretisms. Their size on coins reflects their religious importance and have nothing at all to do with either coin die identity or any heraldic application. Once I understood this, I was able to rough out the entire chronology of the Coriosolite issues in just a few hours, after being baffled by it all for many months. It was a matter of evolutionary cladistics to chart it properly. God is in the detail, as the saying goes. The maximum number of dies in all of the series that had any internal subjective order was only five, and the chance of error was minute because of the many features I used (far more than like the six numbers in some lotteries).

Colin Haselgrove (BAR 222, 1992, p. 123) had noted that any single archaeological site could only tell us so much about the Celtic coins that it contained, and that in the light of finding too few data from one site, the thing to do would be to frame questions in a broader sphere through comparisons of numbers of sites with similar characteristics. He, too, came about this honestly through his Ph.D thesis which was published as Iron Age Coinage in South-East England: The Archaeological Context (BAR 174, 1987, 2 volumes).
I read this massive work three times in quick succession, hoping, unsuccessfully, that a single site would reveal something new and certain about British Celtic coins.

Haselgrove's method was intuitive and can often work in a "general trend" sort of way, but as the Iceni silver hoards are all so homogenous, we really need to look for very small variations in their makeup, and have to include other sorts of deposits that show similar clues in that particular case. We cannot treat the hoards like a series of archaeological sites and really have to go far beyond Iceni boundaries to find what we are looking for, so in a sense, Haselgrove's method is better than he might have imagined it to be when it gets expanded a bit to include even non-archaeological material.

When the metal detectorist Dean Crawford was puzzled by a Dobunni site that he had discovered and asked me about it. I had a eureka! moment. You can read about its significance in the blog post his name links to. An update to that post is the corrected XRF analysis: After Trefor contacted me about his plans to study the materials issues of the recent Jersey hoard, I gave him some of the samples that Dean had sent me so that I could get a properly done analysis and so that he could run some tests on the equipment prior to getting any of the Jersey coins. I had thought that the small silver pellets he found in some numbers at the site might well be related to some similar pellets found in an Iceni hoard I had just been reading about. I don't think that these other pellets have been analyzed. Imagine my surprise when the analysis revealed that the pellet was not even silver alone, but was the same "white gold" silver rich gold alloy as I found in a Norfolk Wolf Stater analyzed by Peter Northover, also in BAR 222. Even the non-alloying element of tin was in the same proportion. The site also contained quite a number of Thurrock potins (multiple finds on the original ground surface and not a scattered hoard). The small ingots at the same site also looked silvery and I was expecting to see that the pellets and ingots were all part of the same metalworking project that seemed to have taken place there (as evidenced by a much later cut denarius of Antoninus Pius that marked the end of the site sequence).

Trefor delivered another shock to my system by revealing that the ingots were actually a very tin-rich potin (higher Sn content than the Thurrock potins themselves). This fact also adds further confirmation to my hypothesis that the Dobunni were the manufacturers of the Thurrock coin-like ingots that are found in hoards in the South East where they could be shipped by a sea/overland route to Massalia in the south of France. Their Massalia derived design indicating not influence from, but subsequent use for the copper coinage of that city. The latter coinage is known to have the lowest tin content of all Greek bronzes, and although most analyses of that coinage has not looked for the cobalt and nickel impurities in Massaliote bronze, one conducted by Ulrich Zwicker did, indeed find it (Northover op. cit.) This ratio identifies the source as British bronze, and not the typical continental bronze. There would have been no reason at all for the Massalians to have the need to import bronze from Britain, but they had experienced great problems from Carthaginian pirates seizing ships bringing British tin to their port and must have realized that an overland route would be far safer. The first tin shipments from the Dobunni would have been via the Durotriges at Hengistbury, probably to the Coriosolite port and thence, via the Redones, either overland to Massalia, or partially through a Veneti sea route landing northwest of Massalia and avoiding the Mediterranean. We must also ask ourselves just how early these Thurrock potins might be as Carthage was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC. and the Massilote bronze coinage started in about 200 BC. Mark Fox (who quotes me -- slight spoiler alert!) has some fascinating things to say in this article on the Thurrock potins.

Dobunni profit was possible because the tin was debased with copper and after Cassivellaunos made his little deal with Julius Caesar to cut out the Durotriges trade and bring Roman imports to the areas that he controlled, the subsequent tin trade went through the south east. Caesar must have thought the real motive was to obtain Roman trade, alone, but all trade is two-way anyway. The profit vanishes with empty ships unless you are some sort of raider or pirate. There must have been a long tradition of trying to cut out the Durotriges trade before Caesar. The later potin coins produced in the southeast contained even less tin. It was quite the little economy going on. Although it lacks recently discovered information, this paper, by Haselgrove has some interesting stuff about the Co, Ni profile etc. with regard to potin coins and Massalia.

Now, if you think all of this is strange and byzantine, you are in for an even greater shock tomorrow. It's fun playing Scheherazade!

The Iceni hypothesis — part one

Main Iceni silver types

There are three types of Iceni silver coins which exist in great numbers and with many varieties: Boar/Horse; Pattern/Horse; Head/Horse. There are also three Iron Age hillforts in Norfolk but nothing is known about the identity of their inhabitants. Nor can we associate any of these coins with any of the forts. Metallurgically, these three types present a jumbled picture: on average, there appears to be more tin in the Face/Horse type, but you can find examples which have less tin than examples of the other two types (Northover, British Archaeological Reports (BAR) 222, 1992). With three major types in a region we could be seeing three issuers with a regional focus or consecutive issues of a single issuer, or a combination of the two. To the best of my knowledge, the main focus of trying to understand these series is still through the large hoards, but these hoards show no regional focus to any of these types and include them all.

The first extensive study of Iceni coins and their hoards was by Derek F. Allen and it was the first paper in the first volume of the journal Britannia in 1970. He concluded that the Iceni silver coin hoards were buried at the time of the Boudiccan Revolt from the presence of Roman coins in some of them. Other papers on the Iceni coinage and hoards also appear in BAR 222. The homogeneity of the main Iceni silver hoards does not help at all in trying to better define these issues and opinions vary. A Norfolk government archaeologist told me some years ago that someone is working on the Iceni coinage, but I do not know if this is still ongoing. Since the late Tony Gregory became the "liaison par excellence" between detectorists and archaeologists, finds of Iceni coins have increased, vastly, since Derek Allen got the ball rolling. One of the papers in BAR 222 on Iceni coins is by Tony Gregory and it also includes his obituary (he died in 1991). Yet sorting out these issues continues to be one of the biggest problems in British Celtic coin studies. It appears that the types had circulated widely and this has effectively occluded any original distribution patterns.

Or has it? I have devised a method which might make sense of it all, but I can offer it only as a hypothesis because putting this method into practice would be a huge research project available only to a dedicated amateur. It could take many years to complete, and there is no guarantee that the expected answers will be found. Like most of my methods, it requires very large numbers of coins to fall within its parameters. We have large numbers of Iceni coins, but how many will fall within these parameters I cannot guess. Perhaps there are not enough right now, but it could work in other century or so. I have no idea.

Apart from these doubts, though, the method could also be used for other sorts of objects of more than this single culture and time, and the raw data might be more obliging for some of that. It is based on an observation of some coins and a knowledge of Celtic social practices and we will dive into it on Monday. Have a great weekend.

Searching for the money tree — part eight

This brilliant graphic says it all
artist: Mick Stephenson

With today's economic problems, you have to watch your back. This is especially true if you are a member of the shrinking middle class. The linked article is about the United States, but the same is true, to a greater or lesser degree, for many countries and regions. The cycles of boom and bust hit such people especially hard. The arts often suffer when things go bad. People will naturally complain about funding going to the arts when their employers are talking about downsizing. When the bubble has burst, and you can neither make the mortgage payment nor sell the house for anything close to what you had signed for, the fact that some people might have to pay more for their opera tickets is of little comfort. Your government might well bail out the financial institutions who got you into this mess in the first place but you, my friend, are on your own. I cannot blame you for buying into the dream: our dreams keep us going and allow us to get through a few tough times because there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. Nowadays, though, some people are thinking that light is an oncoming train.

I used to be a typical "starving artist". While most people were revelling in the boom times and suffering in the bust times, it was the opposite for me. Like the protagonist in Robert Nathan's novella, Portrait of Jennie, I had a patron who owned a restaurant. Funnily enough, his wife's name was also Jennie. Oscar was a kindly Jewish businessman who had been in the Diplomatic Corps and Jennie had been a U.N. translator. I was working on a very elaborate and large pen and ink drawing for him and he allowed me to get an advance on the purchase price anytime that my finances were dwindling. He also allowed me to work on drawings in his restaurant, and if a customer wanted to order one from me, that was fine too. He had previously bought a larger than life size pen and ink drawing of a Canadian Lynx, and a few minor drawings. I once said that I thought that I would enjoy working for the Diplomatic Corps. I will never forget his answer: he laughed and said, "You like solving problems, Johnny, we used to work to avoid them." Once, they had to both be away from the restaurant for most of the day. They had three exceptionally attractive young daughters who worked there and Oscar asked me to watch out for them while they were gone. "If you get hungry", he said, "just go into the kitchen and make yourself something." I think that I sold a drawing that day, and thankfully, I did not have to play the role of "bouncer" against an overly amorous diner.

Convent Trees by the Elbow River
John Hooker, 1979, 12" X 16"
oil on canvas (public domain)

The drawings were just my "bread and butter". In my studio I painted in acrylic or oils and in a very different style. Whenever I got too thin, I would look in the newspaper job ads and would usually get something in a jewellery store because of my previous experience. I enjoyed the work and, being in my twenties, could afford to date more girls. Eventually though, I realized that I was not going to be another Cézanne and I decided to follow other interests. The painting on the left (sorry about the slight glare on the right side of the photo) was one of my last paintings. I kept it for myself. I wanted to give a hint of the stained glass windows in the cathedral next to the convent where I sketched the scene. The trees were actually that shape, but I went wild with the pathways. Even though I had sneaked into the convent grounds to get a better view of the trees and the nuns had spotted me, they allowed me to draw in peace.

The collector and the dealer of ancient coins and art is experiencing the effects of a "turf war" at the moment. Some archaeologists, especially those who cannot devise methods to counteract missing data, are even accusing us of being the "real looters". Art crimes are popular in the media these days, and accusations of not following "due diligence" are being made by those who are also withholding archives of works that are suspected (with only "ad hominem" evidence). Such people, of course, not only can benefit from excavation permits from countries getting the stuff back (and these countries use such as metaphorical "spoils of war" against the countries that have returned them), but some are cashing in by offering degrees in "art-crime" related topics to the young. Now if such courses insisted on prerequisites of degrees in international law, criminology and art-history. I might not laugh so much. I think the real looting going on there is of the parent's bank accounts or the student's debt load. From personal experience, I can assure you that there is little difference in the ethics of big business and educational organizations. You see news videos of "smugglers" being arrested and the "priceless artifacts" shown are just cheap tourist fakes. Dealers who advertise coins that originated in regions now in conflict are accused of selling looted artifacts sold to finance terrorism, even though such coins have been in collections for decades and even centuries, and any academic specialist knows this. The amount of money from art crimes is said to be second only to drug dealing or gun running and so on, but if you look at other sorts of crimes such as poaching, cigarette smuggling or whatever, exactly the same thing is being said there too.

These people do not have to worry too much about the state of the economy, though. If they lose their jobs, I'm sure they would do just fine as used car salesmen.

Tomorrow, my "Iceni hypothesis" will start.

Searching for the money tree — part seven

"Scrutant l'horizon"
Hans Jean Arp
photo: Wikifrits

"We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds." Hans Jean Arp

Walking with my daughter through the museum gallery, I encountered, quite by surprise, a marble sculpture by Hans Jean Arp. I ran my hand over its smooth organic form. Sculpture is such a tactile experience. A museum attendant with a concerned look on her face rushed over to us and told us that we were not allowed to touch it and recited the oils on our skin dogma. I thought that this would be the perfect moment to leave the museum. I wonder what Arp, himself, would have said to this woman. What would have been a perfect Dadaist or Surrealist response? My encounter with sculpture would have pleased the artist. His later abstract creation work included multi-part pieces which the viewer was invited to touch and rearrange. He had sculptures set up in gardens where people could discover them as a surprise, and where no attendants could destroy the moment.

There was a life-size bronze sculpture of a Labrador retriever by Sir Edwin Landseer a couple of blocks from the museum in Calgary's only indoor garden. It was patinated all over save for its nose which was worn to a bright shine from the hands of thousands of children who came over to pet it, knowing that it would not bite. Life was everywhere in that garden: from tropical plants to fish and turtles in its pools. People often held their wedding ceremonies there, or at at least used the gardens for their wedding photographs. Children played in the playground or petted Landseer's dog. The place was relevant.

Had I seen the Arp sculpture in a museum or a mausoleum? Its attendant had certainly interrupted the Muses that day. Of course, you should not get a fingerprint on a sword blade or a proof coin and I always shudder when photocopying a nineteenth century book with its acid laden and brittle paper crumbling away even more as I turn the pages. The patination on the Landseer bronze was simulated, it was not the material finding equilibrium with its surroundings, but something added to make it look more classical (as we now see ancient bronzes). It was an affectation, an homage to a past long dead. The children, rightfully, ignored all of that frippery. Ferlinghetti's words come to me: "They were putting up the statue of Saint Francis... where no birds sang."

We have five senses, but all of them save for sight were being suppressed that day in the museum. The attendant played the role of the temple guard, she was there to make sure that the inner sanctum of the Mysteries was not penetrated by the uninitiated. Not all museums are that way: the Louvre, where art was always encouraged to live on and advance has a sign in one gallery: "S’il vous plait pour touchers les ouvres".

The sense of touch is very interesting, especially when it comes to how our memories work for that sense. Collectors might use all of their senses (even taste, sometimes) to learn more about the things in their collection. I was once offered an Armorican billon coin by a dealer who said it that it had a very high silver content. I could have tasted it, but decided to smell it, instead. I told the dealer that a previous owner had given it a strong bath in citric acid and the surface had been enriched by the acid eating away at the copper. It probably had no more silver inside than one that was not as bright and silver on its surface.

You see the temple attendants on TV wearing surgical gloves when they hold the ancient coin. I wonder if they know, consciously, that they are separating the past from the people. Do they also wear those gloves when the cameras are not present? I used to work in the same museum that I saw the Arp, but in the military department. There were no surgical gloves anywhere to be seen in the non-public area where I helped to catalogue the collection. There is a quote in Yannis Hamilakis' The Nation and its Ruins (p. 146) from the great Greek archaeologist, Manolis Andronikas:

"The time of archaeological research is the 'inhabited' time, that time that is not recorded with astronomic precision, but with cultural completion...The tactile and visible image of historical time is composed of countless relics of human creation...In other words, the archaeologist sees and touches the content of history; this means that he perceives in a sensory manner the metaphysical truth of historical time..."

So when you hear or read the phrase "cultural property" understand the lie: it really means "national property". Its intention is to "keep you in your place", and it shows in the writings and even the body language of those who frequently promote it. That power is given a religious veneer, today, as being imperialistic does not work as well as it used to.

Power and money are almost inseparable: the grand architecture of the museum is like the Medieval cathedral, splendid against the poverty and dirt of the town that surrounds it. Albert Speer's grand architecture and open spaces dwarfed the people below; it reinforced their subservience to the Nazi state and deadened their minds.

Searching for the money tree — part six

We can learn a lot from Reynard

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.

Searching for the money tree — part five

Marinus van Reymerswaele, 1539

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.

Searching for the money tree — part four

Cash register on display at the Indiana

State Museum.

Public domain photo by Daderot

Many museums allow photography with

certain restrictions (such as the use of a

flash). Others do not even allow people

to sketch the exhibits and can charge

exorbitant prices for the use of their own

photos.

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.

Now, the Prehistoric Society has come to the aid of the private scholar by condemning the practice of some museums who charge the public for access to their collections. (complete letter) Good for them. It does not address the situation of just being ignored, but it is a start. Better a public collection than an "elite only" collection where only their friends can benefit through such economical barriers being put in place for everyone else who would wish to advance our knowledge of the past.

More in this series on Monday

Searching for the money tree — part three

Rembrandt's Portrait of a boy in fancy costume.

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.

Searching for the money tree — part two

Sekhemka on museum display in the 1950's
photo: Bibilovski

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.

Searching for the money tree — part one

The Chinese myth of the money tree
public domain (source)

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.