“This stuff was supposedly illegally excavated — based on the great condition, there should be a plea deal and he turns in the excavators, who would then be employed training the supposed experts on how to locate and extract such great stuff.”
The slowness of the pros is because they care about context. What’s near it? What pollen or burnt wood is with it? Besides I’ll wager that most if not all of these are artful fakes. I recall an old movie where somebody stole the Mona Lisa. He already had a bunch of copies and was busy selling them. As I recall, he kept the original. There have been fake antiques for so long that it was a problem in ancient Rome. If you bought the fake, who would you dare get to authenticate it? This reminds me of when a SWAT team raided one of my tenants and recovered 48 10” pot plants and announced that they were worth $50,000. The authorities tend to exaggerate.
> I’ll wager that most if not all of these are artful fakes.
Then why would the authorities “return” them to the polities where they were “excavated”?
The slowness of the pros is due to the fact that they don’t have funding. Sales to collectors (with priority given to museums and universities) would fund archaeology and site conservation, but that would wrong wrong wrong because it is market-driven.
My first encounter with the Mona Lisa forger story was in the revived version of “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” — the guy stole the painting, had copies made, then on the QT offered the copies (one at a time) to rich foreigners with more money than brains, who were too humiliated by the con to report it after the real painting was returned to the Louvre. The same con man also sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap, twice, and got away clean. Eventually the crook got caught for something else, died in jail, with his death certificate showing a profession as “apprentice salesman”. :’)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Chaudron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_de_Valfierno