… I am fascinated with antiquities dealers and “manufacturers” in South America. I’ve learned much by hanging around the men and women who produce these objects. I know, for instance, of one fellow who makes grass-tempered reproductions of a 2,000-year-old pottery style. Having worked on archaeological projects for years, he learned to get the grass for his fakes from ancient middens near his house. If fired properly, and if the organic residue in one of his pots were carbon dated, it would appear to be a very old piece indeed. Looters on the north coast of Peru have discovered not only the famous 12th-15th-century A.D. Chancay anthropomorphic vessels, but also the original molds used to make the vessels. Thanks to publicly available archaeological reports, they also now use the original clay sources and minerals to make and paint the pottery. They can create virtually perfect reproductions.
In an antiquities store in La Paz, I recently saw about four shelves of supposed Tiwanaku (ca. A.D. 400-1000) pottery. I told the owner that most were fakes and she became irritated and called me a liar. So I simply touched one at a time, saying “fake,” “real,” “real from Tiwanaku,” “fake,” “fake made by Eugenio in Fuerabamba,” and so forth. She paused for a moment, pulled one down that I said was real, and told me that it was also a fake. I congratulated her on the fact that her fakes were getting better and she just smiled. My mistake is an instance of what San Francisco State University archaeologist Karen Olsen Bruhns has identified as a very real problem — the experts who study the objects are sometimes being trained on fakes. As a result, they may authenticate pieces that are not real.
That’s from an essay, Forging Ahead: Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love eBay, by Charles Stanish in Archaeologymagazine (May/June 2009). I’ve been chuckling about it for a few days, trying to decide how to approach it because it ties in, in a wonderfully literal way with recurring themes attacked and counter-attacked on this blog with responses or related posts from Felix Grant and Ray Girvan and even one from Dr. C: alternate histories, straight records, and déjà vu (links later) — not to mention digitally manipulated photography.
Just think about it; what is it that is fake and real in the above quote? All of the things being discussed are real. They aren’t imaginary. It’s not even the stuff they’re made of:
False positives [from thermoluminescence dating] can occur in the case of deliberate insertion of genuine fragments into modern pieces — notably, bases in porcelain. We have found shards inserted into glazed pieces — the shards being unglazed as the forgers know that we do not usually drill into a glazed area, so they guide our hand, so to speak. There are also pieces on the market which have been artificially irradiated so that they are exposed to approximately the same amount of radiation as the pot will have absorbed over its life time. The list of forgers’ tactics is endless. The forgers, particularly the Chinese ones, are very ingenious, and as soon as we discover one scam, they start another.
– (above) from How to Date an Old Horse by Dennis Gaffney from PBS’s Antiques Roadshow. Find more on authentication techniques at BidAncient.
These fakes are alternate history made flesh (or pottery). And all could be thought of as déjà vu-s and not-quite-straight records. What exactly is it that is not in a forged piece? It’s the hand that made it — the hand that is long gone and not a recognizable part of the thing (notice that the only way they can spot fakes is by analyzing the material, not by looking at the work).
I’m being deliberately provocative: I don’t like forgeries of antiquities any more than you do, but it’s interesting to think about why. And to relate that thinking to ideas about history — straight, crooked or repeated.
I’ll leave you with those thoughts and give you more from Stanish’s eBay essay, which is interesting in its own right:
The economics of these transactions are quite simple. Because the eBay phenomenon has substantially reduced total costs by eliminating middlemen, brick-and-mortar stores, high-priced dealers, and other marginal expenses, the local eBayers and craftsmen can make more money cranking out cheap fakes than they can by spending days or weeks digging around looking for the real thing. It is true that many former and potential looters lack the skills to make their own artifacts. But the value of their illicit digging decreases every time someone buys a “genuine” Moche pot for $35, plus shipping and handling. In other words, because the low-end antiquities market has been flooded with fakes that people buy for a fraction of what a genuine object would cost, the value of the real artifacts has gone down as well, making old-fashioned looting less lucrative. The value of real antiquities is also impacted by the increased risk that the object for sale is a fake. The likelihood of reselling an authentic artifact for more money is diminished each year as more fakes are produced.
Another economic factor — risk of arrest — is also removed by eBay fakes, since you can’t be arrested for importing forgeries. Should you import what you think is an illegal antiquity but it turns out to be a fake, you run little risk of prosecution. The risk from lawsuits or criminal charges is effectively removed from the sale of antiquities when they are not really antiquities, a fact that reduces the cost and risk to both buyer and seller.
… The wealthier collector who up to now has been laughing about the naive folks who buy on eBay is in for a surprise, too: those dealers that provide private sales are some of the forgers’ best customers, knowingly or otherwise. In fact, the workshops reserve their “finest” pieces for collectors using the same backdoor channels as before, but now with a much higher profit margin because they are selling fakes. As a former curator myself, I know that an embarrassingly high percentage of objects in our museums are forgeries. What fools the curator also fools the collector.
… A time will come when technology will outpace the looter and antiquities dealer. The cost of these technologies will likely always fall over time, but the price of professional labor will always rise, adding another expense for dealers. Like radiocarbon dates for organic objects, the application of these new techniques will become standard practice for all antiquities bought and sold. This will also inject a new element of risk for the buyer that will dramatically add to the risk of illicit, high-end trafficking. Who wants to spend $50,000 on an object “guaranteed” to be ancient by today’s standards, when someone can come along in five years with a new technology that definitively proves it to be a fake?
Technology will validate authentic time. Not aesthetics.
Read the whole article if you’re interested. [ link ]
As promised, here are some links to previous posts:
alternate history, more <<— that post contains links to related posts by Felix Grant and Ray Girvan
straight records, more, more, more, more, more
déjà vu, more, more, more, more
-Julie
