Chinese Shipwrecks Yield Treasures and a Dispute:

Emory Kristof could not believe his eyes. Crammed into a nondescript house in suburban Los Angeles were 10,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain and pottery, some 2,000 years old, so densely packed that any movement threatened to send them crashing to the floor. Some were encrusted with coral, evidence of their hidden life for centuries under the sea.

”It blew my socks off,” Mr. Kristof, an undersea explorer and photographer, said. ”It was absolutely incredible, the mother of all treasure.”

It is now also the subject of an emerging dispute between the entrepreneur who assembled the trove, working quietly in the Philippines while employing hundreds of locals to retrieve the old riches, and archaeologists who say he is plundering the world’s artistic patrimony to line his own pockets.

The entrepreneur is Phil Greco, a former New Yorker who became interested in Asian culture while serving in the Vietnam War. He lived and worked in the Philippines for more than a decade salvaging old Chinese shipwrecks.

From his home in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, Mr. Greco is shipping his discoveries back East, where they are to be put up for auction.

Some 7,000 of the artifacts have so far reached a warehouse in South Kearny, N.J., across the Hudson River from New York City. Some 3,000 are en route. They will be sold in September by Guernsey’s, an auction house on the East Side.

Art experts who have seen the collection call it impressive.

”It was mind boggling,” said Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey’s, who visited Mr. Greco two months ago to assess the assembled pottery.

”If anybody has been witness to massive collections, it’s probably me, because that’s become our specialty over the decades,” he said. ”Nevertheless, you never cease to be amazed and overwhelmed when you’re introduced to a fabulous collection like this.”

But Donny L. Hamilton, president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, a top preserver of old shipwrecks and their artifacts, said archaeologists worry when private salvors excavate potentially important undersea sites. They ”recover just what has a market value,” Dr. Hamilton said.

”The other material is ignored or left behind, so you only learn about the ceramic trade but nothing about the people on board, what they were eating, their armaments, the games they were playing,” he added.

The ceramics are insured for $20 million, Mr. Greco said, though Mr. Ettinger said the appraisals had not been finished.

Mr. Ettinger said the pieces were 500 to 2,000 years old, many from the Ming and Song Dynasties. Many, he said, are in remarkable condition, from the smallest powder jars to the largest vases. He said the collection included blue and white Ming porcelain, and other pottery and porcelain in earthen tones, browns and burnt