Fake antiquity industry thrives

While the emergence of eBay has expanded the market for antiquities, it has also caused many looters to shift their attention from pillaging ancient sites to producing fakes on a larger scale.

This has substantially distorted the market for antiquities during the past decade, said Charles Stanish, director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA and a professor of anthropology. Stanish recently wrote an article in the May/June issue of Archaeology magazine in which he discussed the eBay phenomenon.

“Before eBay, looting was either a rich person’s hobby or (sellers) would hire a middleman in the country where the antiquity came from, and those middlemen would generally hire poor people to dig them up,” said Stanish.

However, eBay has significantly reduced the cost of selling antiquities by getting rid of middlemen, high-priced dealers and other added expenses, he said.

Therefore, locals and craftsmen can make a larger profit by mass-producing cheap fakes than they can by spending weeks digging around for real antiquities, he added.

Stanish said that the positive effect eBay has had in the reduction of looting is relevant to the archaeological community because looting is illegal and is widely recognized as detrimental to the cultural heritage of the world’s treasured artifacts and digging sites.

As opposed to archaeologists who could take months to document and carefully sift through a small 2-by-2-meter plot of an ancient site, looters may recklessly pillage the same plot in a day, destroying the area in the process of seeking treasure, Stanish added.

“(Looting) destroys an entire building to get a few pretty pots,” Stanish said.

“We don’t care if people own antiquities. We do care about the means by which they get them.”

Falsifying artifacts has been going on for hundreds of years, but eBay seems to be intensifying this problem, said Cecilia Klein, who teaches art history with a Mesoamerican focus at UCLA.

“They come without any context,” Klein said regarding artifacts bought over the Internet.

“If you’re not talking about a piece that’s being excavated archaeologically, you often don’t know where the piece came from. It’s hard to date it, who might have been using it, where it was made and used. You have to take the word of the person who’s selling it.”

However, with advancing technology, it is not only cheaper to sell fraudulent artifacts on eBay than it is to loot genuine antiquities, but the risk of arrest is also substantially reduced, Stanish said.

Before eBay existed, stolen antiquities generally had to be smuggled through customs in the luggage of couriers, said Stanish, who has worked with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the examination of antiquities.

But when a so-called antiquity is advertised on eBay, it is highly unlikely that it is a real antiquity, so customs doesn’t get into the act.

The risk of civil action is also lowered because the shipping is done internationally, Stanish said.

The economic risk is furthermore reduced for sellers when one considers the monetary difficulty faced by buyers to verify the legitimacy of antiquities on eBay. Some sellers will offer a money-back guarantee if the buyer can provide proof that the artifact is a fake from a recognized specialist.

However, this guarantee is nullified if it goes through any process of “destructive” analysis, such as thermoluminescence dating, which is used to test clay artifacts and can cost up to $400 for one test, Stanish said.

“Destructive analysis is simply a technical term for saying you’re going to take a piece of object and destroy it,” said Stanish, who went on to explain the process of thermoluminescence dating.

“You use the tip of a pen. It’s so small that it’s standard practice in museums to authenticate pieces.”

Thus, even though standard methods of verifying the authenticity of antiquities will not leave a noticeable mark, it is still considered destructive, so buyers can never know whether they’re getting their money’s worth, Stanish added.

This has effectively distorted the market, as antiquities have become more and more expensive to loot in lieu of the security and low cost of selling fake reproductions on eBay.

“This has had a major impact on collecting,” said Christopher Donnan, an anthropology professor at UCLA and a colleague of Stanish’s who focuses on South American archaeology.

“The fakes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and more difficult to identify, even by experts. This may help to diminish the enthusiasm of collectors to collect pieces.”

These various factors have caused the prevalence of selling fakes on eBay to increase dramatically over the past nine years.

Stanish has based his conclusions not only on his observations of eBay and his work with U.S. Customs, but also on his travels to workshops in Peru and Bolivia that reproduce supposedly ancient pottery.

“Many people have said this before, but I don’t think many have said it so forcefully,” Stanish said.

“Hopefully it will start a dialogue about the degree to which we have fake antiquities in our collection.”

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