Forever Dumb?

I was reading an article by professor Stephen Urice in the Winter 2010 issue of the New Mexico Law Review when a familiar quote popped up.  Urice was expanding on his earlier commentary about the National Stolen Property Act in "Between Rocks and Hard Places: Unprovenanced Antiquities and the National Stolen Property Act."  The article raises important questions, but I'll leave those for legal scholars and the courts to ponder.  I do feel compelled, however, to comment on one seemingly innocuous quote.  Urice wrote "Although a great deal may be determined about an unprovenanced antiquity from stylistic and other analyses, the antiquity's archaeological context, and, thus, a vital component of its history, is irretrievably lost."  Urice hangs this conclusion on archaeologist Clemency Coggins, saying further that, "...an unprovenanced antiquity may be forever beautiful, but forever dumb."

In all fairness to professor Coggins, she was talking about Mayan artifacts.  To extend this observation from Mayan pots or figurines (which might have some relevance) to ancient coins is a quantum leap and one that betrays a rather appalling ignorance.  Now, Urice was not talking about ancient coins, any more than Coggins was.  But, there are plenty of "certified" archaeologists in the world these days who do make that leap daily.  To make a general statement that implies that provenance is of critical importance to all antiquities, is—I'm sorry to say—flat out stupid.  Anyone who is intelligent enough to earn a PhD should know very well that this is not the case, but like the NSPA advocates that Urice writes about, they are caught between a rock and a hard place.  The mantra adopted by the archaeological community is so deeply dependent on this notion of archaeological record primacy that they can have it no other way.  It is blatant and pitifully obvious Big Lie propaganda that is self serving, deceptive and manipulative.

The field of Roman Provincial Coinage is rich with specimens where iconography is vastly more important than the coin's find spot.  I don't feel a need to cite examples here, since I've published well over a hundred articles about them in the past 25 years.  These coins, almost without exception, bear the name of the issuing mint.  Knowing that they were found at a specific site tells us practically nothing.  Knowing where they were made, and by whom, and what their narrative reveals, can tell us volumes of information.  When they did circulate in antiquity, they did so randomly—not as trade coins—and therefore the find spot is of little consequence to history.  When they circulated during the past 2,000 or more years as collectables, they were already divorced from any find spot and provenance became irrelevant.  So irrelevant, in fact, that few collectors (or curators) ever bothered to record it or pass on any find spot information that might have been available.  Those cases where provenance might exist are usually cases where the coin resided at one time in the collection of a famous personality.  That provenance is merely a who's who of ownership, not part of any archaeological record.  So, to suggest that a coin with provenance today is somehow more "licit" than one without is ludicrous.  The same can be said for scores of utilitarian objects that collectors admire and use productively both to learn and to teach others with an interest in the past.

Every coin tells us something important and its precise find spot is normally not one of its most highly valued messages.  Forever dumb, they are not.