“Possibly Fake”? Freaks, Fakes, Jewels, and the Invention of Mesoamerica’s Most Ancient Culture
Miruna Achim (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City)
Among the Stirling Papers at the Smithsonian Institution, a file containing photographs of artefacts stands out: sometime in the early 1940s, Matthew Stirling, best known for his excavations of archaeological sites off Mexico’s Gulf Coast, put together a canon of Olmec jades. Only, on the back of some of the photographs, he scribbled “possibly fake?”. This paper takes Stirling’s annotations as a point of departure to reflect on the emergence of the Olmec as a category of art, science, commerce, and politics in the 1940s. Olmec jades of gem-like quality had been circulating on the market and among collectors since the late 19th century. Although they were thought to be different from most ancient artefacts coming out of Mexico, these objects did not form a category on their own until Stirling’s excavations. As “jewels” came out of “swamps,” artist, caricaturist, and collector Miguel Covarrubias – and close friend of Stirling’s — began to study them to identify their common and unique style. What role did “fakes” play in the construction of this style? How did the imperative to separate between the “authentic” and the “fake” contribute to consolidating an image of Mesoamerica’s ancient past? By concentrating on the gestures of artists, archaeologists, mineralogists, and curators as they collected, drew, analyzed, classified, and authenticated Olmec jades, I seek to trace the contours of the Olmec as a category, which evolved in conversation with modern art’s increasing interest in other peoples’ pasts, on the one hand, and with Mexico’s search for its cultural origins in the dawn of historic time. What was it about the “possibly fake” artefacts that defied categorization?
Plaster Casts, Human Zoos, and Hybrid Cultures: Contextualizing Authenticity in European Ethnographic Museums ca. 1900
Martin E. Berger (Leiden University)
In 1891, Lindor Serrurier, director of the Dutch Royal Ethnographic Museum in Leiden, published his Handbook for Collecting and Observing in the Field of Natural History, especially in Tropical Regions. Published in a period when Dutch travel to and presence in the Dutch colonies (esp. modern-day Indonesia) increased significantly, Serrurier’s aim in writing the Handbook was to instruct ‘dilettantes’ who travelled to the colonies on how and what to collect and bring back to the museum in the metropole.
In the Handbook, Serrurier encourages collectors to focus on acquiring objects used by “the poorer members of society, as these usually show more clearly the characteristics of the region, than the objects of the rich, in whom the European influences first make themselves felt”. At a time of rapid globalization, cultural change/genocide, and salvage anthropology, the ‘hybridization’ of cultural material made Serrurier encourage collectors to look for supposedly pure (authentic) material culture.
Around the same time, the Leiden museum exhibited a series of houses from Indonesia, which had previously been used as part of the ethnological exposition (or ‘Human Zoo’) of the 1883 Colonial Exhibition in Amsterdam. In these houses, inhabitants of the colonies had been exhibited to the general public, together with cultural objects. In recreating these houses and filling them with plaster casts of actual humans, Serrurier presented what he saw as ‘the most lifelike’ way to present the lives of the inhabitants of Indonesia.
Finally, the museum acquired hundreds of plaster casts in the same period, both of objects and of humans, which were used not only as study material, but also as part of exhibitions. In this presentation, then, I examine how authenticity was established, constructed, and studied (without actually being directly evoked) based on material, contextual, and aesthetic characteristics of objects and ensembles. I do this through a study of collecting handbooks, museum acquisitions, and museum exhibitions in and around the Dutch Royal Ethnographic Museum around 1900.
Marketing Race on a Late Antique Textile “Collage”
Kathrin Colburn (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
and Elizabeth Dospel Williams (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
A textile fragment depicting a dark-skinned figure, now held in the Byzantine Collection at Dumbarton Oaks (BZ.1953.2.16), serves as a point of departure in considering the production of imitation late antique Egyptian (“Coptic”) textiles for the modern art market and the marketing strategies behind these works.
In the first part of this paper, we provide a close reading of the material properties of the Dumbarton Oaks textile to explore questions about the artifact’s fabrication, presumably in late nineteenth or early-twentieth-century Cairo. Most notably, the Dumbarton Oaks textile bears evidence of having been pieced together from a patchwork of smaller fragments cut from original late antique fabrics, recognizable as archaeological textiles in their staining patterns, weave structures, and color schemes. Though the overall effect today reads as awkward and cartoonish, the “pastiche” (which we will refer to as “collage”) shows signs of skillful cutting, pasting, and rearranging. Further, its maker efficiently used those parts of late antique textiles deemed otherwise unsalable to early twentieth-century collectors: the stained, undecorated parts of tunics and furnishings, that were often cut away to privilege textiles’ figural, decorative, and ornamental motifs. We conclude this part of the paper by drawing attention to other “collages” we have identified in other museum collections. We note that while some museums suppress their late antique “collages,” in other some cases such assembled artifacts continue to pass as legitimate artifacts despite their material and stylistic discrepancies.
In the second part of the paper, we consider the racialized overtones of the Dumbarton Oaks’ textile in its art market context in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. The figure’s dark skin, dancing pose, and semi-nude features recall, for example, actual late antique furnishing textiles featuring such characters, usually interpreted to represent Dionysius and his retinue, themselves associated with the god’s origin stories in Ethiopia or India. Such furnishings were undoubtedly the artifacts the Dumbarton Oaks textile’s maker had in mind when making his or her “collage,” though we are unable to determine whether the object was purposefully intended to deceive or was made as an homage to such artifacts. In the larger scheme, however, the Dumbarton Oaks’ textile evokes troubling depictions of Africans that drew on a long history of racist European and American visual tropes, particularly those used in the period’s advertising. This observation leads us to the consider the visual references in the imagination of the Dumbarton Oaks’ textile’s maker, as well as the methods of marketing archaeological artifacts to the art market’s wealthy, white Euro-American clientele in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt.
Making and Faking the Minoans
Ken Lapatin (Getty Villa, Los Angeles)
It has long been recognized that Sir Arthur Evans constructed as much as reconstructed the Bronze Age civilization of the so-called “Minoans” on the southern Aegean island of Crete, retrojecting various modern ideals (e.g., peaceful maritime mercantilism and feminist liberation) on ancient people whose surviving writings he longed to, but could not read. More recently, the diverse roles of conservators and forgers working for and in the shadow of Evans have also garnered attention. This paper focuses specifically on 1) the role of the expert (Evans himself) in creating a vibrant market for faux Minoica, be it reconstructions, acknowledged replicas, or fakes (some of which he himself purchased); 2) the makers of those “artifacts,” so far as they can be identified, and how they often “wore different hats” (i.e., crossed professional boundaries), drawing on various skills and technical training as well as experience with genuine material from excavation sites to which they had privileged access to produce convincing “ancient” artifacts; 3) the specific models and processes they used to do so, from the infliction of deliberate “damage” to make their pseudo-antiquities more credible to the creation of plausible provenances as well as false documents, which seem to have more often been produced by and certainly for networks of 4) international dealers, foreign scholars, and curators, all eager to possess examples of this newly discovered, yet amazingly “modern” earliest of “European” civilizations. Several of these enthusiastically validated the new “discoveries,” beating back voices of criticism. Scientific analyses rather than analogical studies been only recently been employed for the purposes of detection/authentication, but continuing belief in their efficacy is, at times, as wishful as the desire of Evans and others to possess and thus commune directly with an idealized past.
Fakes: A Methodological Problem and a Family Business
Irina Podgorny (CONICET/Museo de La Plata, Argentina)
The proliferation of forgeries is part of the history of archaeology and archaeological methods. Archaeologists have always been attentive to questions of provenance, and they learned from forgers, namely, expert and knowledgeable artisans. From this point of view, archaeological fakes acted as catalyzers of new methods and provided heuristics for modern archaeology, just as they were pieces in games of wealth and prestige. Counterfeits also illustrate the process of “scientific acculturation,” namely how lay people acquired the skills and knowledge for evaluating objects presented to them by archaeologists, museum curators, and collectors. Fakes reveal the porosity of boundaries between the true and the false, and especially how these borders relate to the fears of the deceived.
This paper deals with (a) the methods to detect prehistoric fakes developed by Austrian criminologist Siegfried Türkel (1875-1933); (b) the analysis of the family structure of the fake business in Latin America and the relationship between the search for the novelty and local entrepreneurship. This section presents the cases of the Colombian Alzates, the Mexican Acámbaro figurines, and the Peruvian Ica Stones.
Forgery Industries in Late Ottoman Jerusalem
Michael Press (University of Agder)
In the second half of the 19th century, Jerusalem was a hotspot of antiquities forgeries. Fakes of various types were made, culminating in the 1870s with the production of thousands of fake “Moabite” pottery vessels and figurines. Scholarly attention to these forgeries has been minimal, however. Most of it has centered on the Moabite pottery, but most of that attention in turn has focused on the seller of the pottery, a European-born merchant named Moses Shapira. In this paper, I will look at the Moabite pottery within a broader range of antiquities forgeries in Jerusalem, such as coins, stone inscriptions, and seals. I will look at the network of people behind the forgeries, paying special attention to the local Levantine craftspeople who produced them. How did traditional crafts and industries in Jerusalem impact the choice of forgeries and their success on the market?
Reframing Forgery: The Enduring Cultural Legacy of Zapotec Urns
Adam Sellen, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
The Zapotec urn is a complex ceramic effigy vessel dating from 200 BCE to 600 CE. However, distinguishing pre-Hispanic examples from expertly crafted forgeries has long posed a challenge. Since the 1970s, scholars have sought to differentiate these modern creations from ancient artifacts, yet few have examined the techniques used to produce these forgeries. Though our understanding of their origins remains incomplete, growing evidence suggests they were created in ceramic producing communities in Oaxaca. My investigation reveals that artisans employed the same traditional techniques as their ancestors, suggesting that today’s so-called “fakers” are part of an enduring ceramic tradition.
This raises critical questions about the status of these artifacts in museum collections. While their authenticity is contested, many forgeries have their own historical significance—some, now over a century old, qualify as antiquities. Others reflect the artistic and cultural contexts in which they were made, whether as deliberate deceptions or as evolving expressions of tradition. Rather than dismissing them as mere frauds, we can recognize their role in shaping aesthetic and cultural narratives.
How should museums handle these objects once exposed as fakes? Do they have a responsibility to preserve them as they would any other artifact? Should these pieces, often relegated to storage, be reconsidered for exhibition? By engaging with the perspectives of Oaxacan artisans—who continue to practice ceramic traditions rooted in ancestral heritage—we can shift the conversation, seeing these works not merely as forgeries but as part of a vibrant, ongoing tradition. In this talk, I will trace the journey of these objects from their creation to their acquisition by museums and their current institutional treatment, reconsidering their place in the broader historical and cultural discourse.
Reviving Islam Akhun: Swindler and Forger or Anti-Colonial Mischief Maker?
Nur Sobers-Khan (University of Exeter)
The title of this paper is clearly tongue-in-cheek as it examines the career of Islam Akhun, a prolific creator of imitation manuscripts who was active in the years 1894 until 1901, when he was ultimately apprehended and confessed to the fabrication of manuscripts for sale to British officials. Islam Akhun had served as a guide for British officials exploring the Taklamakan desert and had abused his privileges and access to British officials to extort money from other Afghan notables in Central Asia and exploited his adjacency to colonial rulers through a number of ruses, all based around stories of script either French and Swedish (showing Swedish newspapers to tribespeople as proof of his right to hunt for kidnapped British Indian slaves, or pages from French novels as talismans to be ingested by willing ‘patients’) or Brahmi and Sanskrit (the manuscripts he forged for the antiquities trade to the British), to swindle both the British as well as Afghan tradesman and Hunza tribespeople. (Reference: (Sims-Williams, “Forgeries from Chinese Turkestan in the British Library’s Hoernle and Stein Collections,” p. 113). In the archival materials documenting Islam Akhun’s practices, he seems to have relied on craftspeople, including a cotton-printer, to make the tools by which his ‘forged’ manuscripts were created; however, some level of ingenuity, a rough understanding of which ancient scripts to imitate, and most of all, a keen understanding of the antiquities market of the objects being purchased by colonial officials, shaped his practice of generating fake manuscripts.
There are several sets of forged manuscripts from the Hoernle and Stein collections, housed in the British Library, which were collected during the last decade of the 19th century and first years of the 20th. These manuscripts have been studied and written about by a number of British Library curators, including Francis Wood, Susan Whitfield, and Ursula Sims-Williams, and these historic forgeries — they were revealed as forgeries in their time – have also served as an intriguing and at times entertaining critique of 19th-century philology’s foibles, manners and pretensions. Two of the forgeries were exhibited in the 1990 exhibition, “Fake? The Art of Deception” in the British Museum, and have since served as the subject matter for talks and articles exploring the intersection of local networks of antiquities traders in Central Asia and the prestigious institutions representing colonial-era Western knowledge practices. Whilst these manuscripts are not, as they were claimed to be at the time, the “earliest manuscripts in an Indian script”, they are, however, original documentation of practices of craftsmanship and also showcase the ingenuity of tricksters who saw an opportunity to exploit the colonial ‘explorers’ thirst for antiquities and managed to do so with a great deal of creativity and ingenuity in their artisanship. This paper will re-examine some of the key narratives and characters involved in this set of forgeries and aims to present new material not just regarding the manuscript forgery practices of Islam Akhun, but of his contemporaries who were also engaged in the antiquities and manuscript trade to the British and Russians at the end of the 19th century.