Indiana Jones and the Temple of eBay

June 24, 2009

By:

Matt Palmquist Print

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or the past couple of years, Charles "Chip" Stanish, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been hosting a regular, rather geeky get-together of his colleagues. "I have a couple of friends over, we get a nice bottle of Cabernet, and we plug my computer into my big-screen TV," explains the director of UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology with a sly chuckle. "Then we log on to eBay, do a search for something like 'Egyptian antiques' and just roll with laughter all night long. It is really funny."eBay reveals that for only $223 (plus $30 shipping and handling from Lima), you, too, can be the proud owner of a "genuine pre-Columbian Moche III Fineline" piece — which, as Stanish points out, can also be bought for $15 off the lady selling pottery to bus-borne tourists in Trujillo, Peru.Archaeology, has proven to be the exact opposite. "People who used to make a few dollars selling a looted artifact to a middleman in their village can now produce their own 'almost-as-good-as-old' objects and go directly to a person in a nearby town who has an eBay vendor account," Stanish writes. "They will receive the same amount or even more than they could have received for actual antiquities."U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in authenticating objects that come into the country. "They play the humble villager thing ... but in the chess game of antiquities, they're a step ahead of us."Smithsonian anthropologist W.H. Holmes catalogued numerous fraudulent artifacts for sale in Mexico. But these days, as Stanish writes, "every grade and kind of antiquity is being mass-produced and sold in quantities too large to imagine. ... 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."San Francisco State University archaeologist Karen Olsen Bruhns, who has identified a very tricky problem stemming from the glut of good-looking forgeries: If the experts who study the objects and draw conclusions about their cultural heritage are in fact examining modern replicas, they could be authenticating objects (and entire aspects of culture) that are simply not real.Brigido Lara, who was arrested in Mexico in the mid-1970s for looting antiquities. When he requested fresh clay be brought to his cell, he promptly reproduced the ceramic wares he'd been accused of stealing; still, the experts judged the pieces to be ancient. After his release from jail, Lara began to discover that the 40,000-odd pieces he'd made — mostly ceramic wares of the ancient Totonac people, who lived in Veracruz between the seventh and 12th centuries A.D. — were on display in museums all over the world, from the Dallas Museum of Art to New York's Metropolitan Museum. In 1971, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History even presented an exhibit on the "Ancient Art of Veracruz" that included at least a dozen objects made by Lara, meaning he had helped to "create" this ancient culture. "He is the undisputed champ," Stanish says with a note of genuine admiration in his voice. "The Italians were probably the great experts in the 19th century, and now eBay has democratized it."