Context is Truth -- or maybe not :-(

In perusing the blog of one archaeologist today I noticed an interesting comment. The blogger and a commentor were questioning the accuracy of the reported "find" location of some objects reported in the British Portable Antiquities Scheme. They were, in fact, criticizing the PAS itself. Both implied that professional archaeological excavation was the only way to guarantee the origin of an object (i.e. not "looted") and its authenticity.

The reason that this resonated in my admittedly foggy memory is that some twenty-years-ago I was personally involved in a raging debate over the authenticity of some small silver-alloy coins from the Balkan cities of Mesembria and Apollonia, referred to as the Black Sea Hoard. Without going into a long explanation of the details, I was one of a group of private numismatists that condemned the coins as modern fakes. Opposed to our view was a scientist from a prominent university in Michigan who tested the coins with an Electron Scanning Microscope and pronounced them ancient, not modern. As the debate raged, over a two-year period, the scientist defended his analysis by actually making a trip to Bulgaria, where these coin types were struck in antiquity. At the archaeological museum in Varna, the scientist found deposited there coins of this type from a local archaeological excavation. Indeed, the coins were a die match to some of the coins being debated. This would seem to suggest, since the excavation was an official state controlled project, that the dies were indeed ancient and that the coins in question were authentic. Well, that was not the case. The Black Sea Hoard coins first started showing up in European markets in 1986, the same year that these excavation coins were accessioned at the Varna museum. What a coincidence! To make a long story shorter, I'll cut to the chase. The coins were fakes and the actual dies used to produce them were ultimately made public. The excavation coins at the Varna museum were salted in the excavation to lend credibility to their authenticity.

In November of 2000, a leading Japanese archaeologist admitted fabricating the discovery of exceedingly rare and early stoneware by planting the objects himself. He revealed to reporters that the new discoveries were actually objects found in earlier digs that he had planted in the 600,000-year-old layer of earth and that he had kept more than 60 of the stoneware pieces at his home. Obviously, the information from this official excavation was totally invalid.

There have been many other cases of outright fraud in supposedly controlled environments.
Archaeologist Paul Bahn wrote about the problem of fraud within his own discipline in a 2001 article where he states that: "Careers have been boosted, reputations made and enhanced, salaries raised and honours awarded because the perpetrators have indulged in these kinds of dishonesty. Too often, nobody has felt able or courageous enough to point the finger and expose them; no one, least of all the media, has checked the facts; and, anyway, most people find it hard to believe that scholars would lie and cheat so brazenly." Bahn rightly points out that such cases in relative terms are rare, but they do have an impact on scholarship.

The point, I think, is that there are no guarantees in the realm of human experience. We all need to do the best that we can and the PAS does offer a far superior model for the preservation of cultural property and archaeological sites than any of the draconian laws of Mediterranean countries where antiquities are found in seemingly endless numbers. We ought to be praising the efforts of those who manage the PAS rather than snatching at any and every way to hurl a criticism.