THE ISRAEL ANTIQUITIES AUTHORITY is considering selling potsherds to shore up its budget. (Via Anders Bell, who doesn't like the idea.)

I've talked about this idea before. It's not an easy issue. The arguments in favor are that museums are stuffed enough with artifacts that are of little or no individual value and it does not harm to clear some space and raise some money for more digging and conservation. And selling such things could undercut the unprovenanced antiquities trade, since people would be more inclined to buy artifacts that were actually excavated and officially provenanced than to buy something off the street that could be a fake. (The latter argument works a lot better if the authorites sell more exciting things than sherds, things like coins and oil lamps, which also are common in excavations. A lot of archaeologists would be horrified by this, but there are some who would go for it. The idea of selling antique glass is floated in the article.)

The arguments against are that every sherd is of potential value, both because useful patterns of data can (and do) emerge in studying lots of individually unimportant bits and because new types of physical analysis will in the future (near future, even) almost certainly make it possible to extract valuable new information even from, say, common potsherds.

I see the force of both views. At some point there may have to be a trade-off between the ideal (all artifacts of any type should always remain in museums for further study) and the harsh reality that people want to buy ancient souvenirs and where there's a market someone will fill it. Actually, this trade-off already exists, emerging out of these market forces, in that dealers sell people antiquities whose provenance is generally then lost to archaeologists, even if the archaeologists (sometimes!) get to study the actual object. And provenance is important: if you lose the stratigraphic context of an artifact, you lose information about its date, its geographical placement, its connection to other artifacts in the same site, the same building, the same room, and the same locus. Such data, cumulatively, provide us with a lot of the useful information from archaeology.

So then should we give up on saving even scrap of potential information from the most trivial artifacts in order to focus on preserving the more important ones and the basic context and provenance of all of them? I don't know. But I guess I do give the IAA points for at least starting an open discussion about the problem.