FAKING ANCIENT

MESOAMERICA

NANCY L. KELKER
KAREN O. BRUHNS
First published 2010 by Left Coast Press, Inc.

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Kelker, Nancy L.
Faking ancient Mesoamerica / Nancy L. Kelker, Karen O. Bruhns.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59874-150-6 (hardback : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-1-59874-149-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Indian art—Forgeries—Mexico. 2. Indian art—Forgeries—Central America.
3. Forgery of antiquities—Mexico. 4. Forgery of antiquities—Central America.
5. Indians of Mexico—Antiquities. 6. Indians of Central America—Antiquities.
7. Indian art—Mexico. 8. Indian art—Central America. I. Bruhns, Karen Olsen.
II. Title.
F1219.3.A7K455 2010
972'.01—dc22
200904664

ISBN 978–1–59874–150–6 hardcover

ISBN 978–1–59874–149–0 paperback
 CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS AND CREDITS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1. THE SECRET LIES OF FAKES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2. FORGERY IS NOT NEW. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3. THE NINE LIVES OF FAKES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4. A ROGUES’ GALLERY OF FORGERS, FAKERS, AND FACILITATORS . . . . . . . . 59
5. ESCAPING DE LANDA’S BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
6. BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD FAKE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
7. FEAT OF CLAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
8. THE LAPIDARY’S LAMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
9. SKULLDUGGERY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
10. WOODEN MEN, GOLDEN GODS, AND TALES ON THE WALL . . . . . . . . 203
EPILOGUE: A WORD TO THE WISE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
REFERENCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
ABOUT THE AUTHORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
 1
T HE S ECRET L IES
OF F AKES

he history of antiquities forgery in Mesoamerica presents a much short-

T er timeline than in Europe, where the first fakes are thought to have
been produced by the Phoenicians (Arnan 1961, 295–296). Most
scholars believe that Precolumbian fakes were being produced at least by the sev-
enteenth century. Indeed, it is possible that a pre-Conquest cottage industry of
forgers may have sprung up around the ruins of Teotihuacán to meet the
demands of pot-hunting Aztecs, who regularly went out to the “City of the
Gods” to search for artifacts. The arrival of mendicant friars also may have occa-
sioned the production of fakes as a means of satisfying the missionaries’ pen-
chant for burning idolatrous works. However, it was not until the 1820s—post-
Independence—when the borders of the formerly closed Spanish viceroyalties
were opened to foreigners—that native forgers began to do serious business. The
published travel accounts of such explorers as Count Alexander von Humboldt,
John Stephens, and Frederick Catherwood, as well as Enlightenment notions
about “noble savages,” and “lost” or “primitive” cultures, fed European interest
in the exotic, unknown lands of the Americas.
The nineteenth century was the age of European colonialism, cultural
imperialism, and collection building. European museums soon began acquiring
antiquities, ethnographic materials, and “primitive” curiosities of all kinds,
sometimes through donations of collections acquired by gentlemen-travelers,
missionaries, and colonial administrators, and sometimes by sending out their
own “roving curators” to obtain pieces directly. These activities created a
demand that was greater than the readily available supply of antiquities, and

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 K ELKER AND B RUHNS —FAKING A NCIENT M ESOAMERICA

local artisans quickly stepped in to fill the void. By the 1820s, black pottery for-
geries were being produced in workshops on Tlatelolco Street in Mexico City
and sold at Teotihuacán (Ekholm 1964, 22). The appeal of such “primitive”
materials in industrial Europe was as a foil to their own progress and as justifi-
cation for their colonization of lands belonging to these “less civilized” cultures.
As Shelly Errington (1998, 5) notes, “Progressivist meta-stories of the nine-
teenth century sort invent, indeed depend upon, the notion of the ‘primitive,’
because the universal line of time needs a starting point from which to measure
change and progress.”
Such concepts played an important role in shaping the directions fakery
took in the Americas because forgeries reflect contemporary market biases. Thus,
in the nineteenth century some rather hideous fakes were accepted as genuine
because their crudeness reflected the dominant culture’s concepts about the sav-
age nature of the presumed ancient makers. Even today, some novice collectors
equate crudeness with authenticity. Still other collectors sought a “primitive” art
that was more congruent with Western concepts of aesthetics and refinement.
Savvy forgers were quick to accommodate, incorporating classical ratios of pro-
portion and contrapposto movement into their designs. Today many of these
Westernized fakes still hold their appeal (and their places in museums) because
they seem more familiar, more understandable, than true antiquities. Even the
condition of fakes is determined by the market. The Victorians, for example,
were rather fussy about their knickknacks, preferring them to be perfect, whole,
and overly ornamented, thus giving a market advantage to dandified forgeries
over genuine but damaged artifacts. Conversely, some collectors assume that
genuine artifacts show signs of wear and tear, and forgers will play to their
assumptions by skillfully chipping away parts to give their fakes the look of great
age.
Much of our current thinking about fakes and forgeries continues to be
shaped by this legacy of nineteenth-century primitivism. Because conventional
wisdom holds that fakes and forgeries are made by horrid, nasty fellows, lacking
in imagination, it is erroneously assumed that fakes are always copies: “forgeries
require authentic objects to emulate, as well as skilled makers” (Coe and Miller
2005, 18). Using this sort of rationale, it would be an easy task to identify a for-
gery: one would simply compare it to the masterwork that spawned it and dis-
miss the copy. Of course, one could also run the risk of occasionally tossing out
a few authentic antiquities that were created as multiples, but a little breakage is
to be expected in any endeavor.

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 CHAPTER 1—THE SECRET LIES OF FAKES

More dangerous is that this sort of Western-biased thinking leads to authen-

tications ad ignorantiam: if originality equals truth, then eccentric works without
known precedent are deemed to be genuine because they imitate no known mod-
els. This is simply not the case. Forgeries of Precolumbian art reflect a wide range
of skill levels, ranging from the mere copy to the pastiche to the original forgery
or “replivention.” In addition, there are the shadowy categories of “near fakes,”
including “false restorations”—antiquities that have been so overly restored that
there isn’t much “real” work left—and “faked-on originals”—genuine but plain
(undecorated) artifacts acquired by forgers as “blanks” and then painted to sig-
nificantly increase their market value. A frequently encountered category of
“faked-on originals” are plain (or sandpapered) Maya cylinder vases that have
been repainted in ancient Maya styles. The prolific “Don Honorato”1 of El
Salvador explained to Bruhns in detail how he made these “restorations” (which
were, of course, actually forgeries intended for the art market). Don Honorato
always worked in acrylic. Now, you would think that a buyer would have his Q-
tip™ and a bottle of alcohol or fingernail polish remover at the ready to test the
pigment, since the ancient Maya did not paint in acrylic—but maybe buyers just
don’t want to know, anyway. Honorato says that if the vessel was broken, he
would rejoin the pieces with white glue, painting the traces of the breaks with a
little gesso mixed with ground clay. An old break or one that did not fit would
be ground down and the lacunae filled with gesso, which was then painted to
match the background. These are legitimate restoration techniques, although this
is not what was intended here. Don Honorato says that sometime after he began
his “restoration” business, Sherwin-Williams began to manufacture Kemvar™, a
sealant not affected by the common organic solvents. Both he and dealers imme-
diately began to use it to finish off the repainted vessels. Kemvar reportedly
makes the vessel a bit yellower if applied too thickly, but mainly it makes a ves-
sel look like it was originally polished. Don Honorato claimed that the dealers he
knew would carefully brush it on over the newly painted pots, making them look
beautifully burnished and resistant to any attempts to find out if something more
modern than slip had been used in their fabrication.

THE COPY: IMITATION IS THE SIMPLEST FORM OF FAKERY

The crudest form of fakery is the copy, which replicates an existing work with-
out alteration; this is the bottom rung of the forgery trade. These are the more
common forgeries that are sold to tourists at archaeological sites and in curio

17
 K ELKER AND B RUHNS —FAKING A NCIENT M ESOAMERICA

shops, that show up regularly on Internet auctions, and that appear occasional-
ly in American sales galleries. Often these faux works find their way into muse-
ums as part of donated collections or as the result of curatorial inexperience or
naiveté. Some of these pieces may have actually started out as legally sanctioned,
but impermanently marked, reproductions that were sold by unscrupulous deal-
ers as the genuine article. This particular form of chicanery is far more common
than any dealer wishes to admit.
The models used by copyists may be authentic antiquities or, in some cases,
earlier forgeries. There are instances of the multi-generation production of fakes
based on earlier fakes made by grandparents or great-grandparents. In the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, the common means of reproduction
involved making a mold of the target work. Today, modern media have made
three-dimensional models unnecessary; the plethora of well-illustrated auction
and exhibition catalogs—many with stunning, full-color roll-out views—pro-
vide the copyist with a wide variety of working patterns. Hard-copy sources have
been further augmented by Internet databases, such as the Kerr Archive, which
are consulted by forgers working in a wide range of media.

THE PASTICHE: A LITTLE BIT FROM HERE,

A LITTLE BIT FROM THERE
The second, somewhat more sophisticated category of forgery is that of the pas-
tiche, or pasticcio. The pastiche-maker borrows motifs from various sources and
then assembles them hodgepodge into a new piece, which, while generally imi-
tative, does not exactly copy any particular known work. Because the common
misconception is that forgeries are always copies, the more skillful forger tries to
avoid producing the sort of obvious copy-work that will mark his creations as
frauds. As Claude Baudez (2002b, 11) notes:

Forgers are not foolish enough to simply copy, because they are well aware that
the demonstration of plagiarism is also proof of forgery. . . . The forger must
be able to create, combine and invent. . . . In a broader context, where thou-
sands of copies exist, a certain inventiveness is required to produce the sort of
spectacular work desired by collectors. The forger’s art lies in the ability to cre-
ate an exception, providing it remains within certain probable limits. The clos-
er the forger’s work comes to these limits, the more it will be sought after and
the higher prices it will command.

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 CHAPTER 1—THE SECRET LIES OF FAKES

Since the motifs borrowed by the pastiche-maker are derived from various
genuine artifacts or from illustrations in archaeological reports and museum cat-
alogs, the resulting works have the look of authenticity. The Rickards Zapotec
urn forgeries are good examples of the pastiche technique. Adam Sellen (2004,
35) found that some of the false urns were created using multiple molds, which
replicated parts of several different authentic urns; the resulting sections were
then combined to create an assortment of highly believable faux urns.
Another variant on the pastiche incorporates elements of “false restoration.”
Instead of assembling a new work from mold-made elements, the forger com-
bines fragments from several incomplete artifacts to create a new vessel, which
is then resurfaced with plaster, overpainted and lacquered (Sawyer 1982, 21–
22). Since lacquer is impervious to most solvents, traditional swab-tests are in-
effective, and because fragments of genuine vessels are used in the construction,
thermoluminescence testing might fail to identify the work as a forgery. Sawyer
describes this technique as practiced in the Andes, but it is also incredibly com-
mon in Mesoamerica and Central America. Given the lack of consensus as to
where restoration ends and forgery begins, as well as a general avoidance of the
ethical consideration of assembling ancient fragments into a new whole, we sus-
pect that pastiches of various degrees are as common in Precolumbian art as they
are in that of Africa and Asia (Brent 2001; Rasmussen 2008)

GILDING THE LILY

Embellishment of plain objects is a frequent means of adding value and is unfor-
tunately a very common practice in the art world. No one seems to worry that
there is a line, somewhere, between reconstruction and outright fraud. The only
time this has been publically discussed was in a 1978 paper by Dicey Taylor,
who brought up the inconvenient fact that a very large number of painted Maya
pots should not be used for “scholarly” study because the painted scenes were
over-restored. Yet even Taylor did not consider that over-restoration—painting
fancy new images over the faded ancient ones—constituted outright forgery.
The real problem here, aside from legal or moral issues, is that these over-
restored pieces, or outright fabrications on an ancient base, are altogether too
often included in photographic databases and then used to reconstruct ancient
life and, especially, mythology and rituals. It is a sad commentary on Ameri-
canist scholarship that so many studies are done using such artifacts as a suppos-
edly reliable data source.

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 K ELKER AND B RUHNS —FAKING A NCIENT M ESOAMERICA

THE ORIGINAL FORGERY: THE MASTERWORK

OF THE A RTIST-F ORGER

The third category is that of the “original forgery” or “replivention” created by

a master artist-forger who is able to manipulate style and technique to create
“original interpretations” of ancient works. History has shown that the greatest
art forgers, such as the young Michelangelo, are often great artists who possess
the imagination and ability necessary to exceed what scholars consider to be sty-
listic norms. Such “original forgeries” are neither copies of particular works nor
pastiches of several works; they are independent creations. In recent times, as the
career of Brígido Lara has more than amply demonstrated, these are the forger-
ies most likely to be the subject of authentication ad ignorantiam (originality =
authenticity), as well as the most difficult to unmask. Ironically, the works of the
artist-forger are of such quality that even when presented with irrefutable proof,
there are those who will still refuse to believe that the false works are not gen-
uine antiquities. Luckily for all the red-faced art historians, the Michelangelos
and Brígido Laras of the world appear on the scene infrequently (we hope).

FAKING IT: COMMON MEDIA AND TECHNIQUES

OF THE F ORGER ’ S A RT

The media selection for forgeries is limited only by the skill, inclination, and
ambition of the forger. The ancient cultures of the New World created in clay;
they carved wood, bone, shell, jade, jadeite, serpentine, basalt and a number of
other stones; painted manuscripts on hides and native paper; made objects of
gold, silver, and copper; worked images in feathers; decorated palace and tem-
ple walls with frescoes; and wove fine textiles of natural materials. Fakes have
been created in all of these media, but in Mexico, Guatemala, and the adjoin-
ing modern states occupying the region of ancient Mesoamerica, the most com-
mon forgeries are of ceramics, stone carvings, painted manuscripts, frescoes, and,
less frequently, works in wood and metal.

Ceramics

Clay is the most convenient and common medium for forgers of artifacts; it is
readily available and doesn’t require much to age convincingly. Even better for
the forger, ceramic material, according to Julie Jones, “is apparently among the

20
 CHAPTER 1—THE SECRET LIES OF FAKES

most difficult in the world to test” (Kutner 1987). Part of this is due to the
paucity of chemical and petrographic characterization of ancient clay sources.
However, in many cases forgers are using the original clay sources, so testing
would not help at all. Even thermoluminescence does not work on all clays. And
given the unavailability of testing technologies in many museums, it may not be
possible (or to their advantage) for many curators to have appropriate analyses
done on the works in their collections.
Fakers have devised some fairly ingenious ways to give the appearance of age
to new ceramics. Frequently, the pieces are broken to bits and patched together
to make them look as though they had been buried for centuries. When an intact
piece is required, the vessel may be beaten up a bit to create some chips and abra-
sions, and then buried in damp, acidic earth for a few months to mellow and
darken the clay body and to give the work that freshly looted look and smell.
The trick to aging ceramic vessels is to get the “repairs” and the original bits
the same color. First one must use a dish scrubber over the surface of the re-
assembled vessel and then repolish it with an ancient ground-stone axe. Don
Honorato explicitly said he used an ancient stone axe because it was hard
enough and smooth enough to do the job right. Then carbon or little root marks
are added. The carbon preferred by Central American forgers comes from bat-
teries; they open up the batteries, take out the pure carbon, mix it with a little
glue, and, using a toothbrush, splatter the pot to make it look like it has those
fungus marks that pots from a tomb often have. Rootlets can be emulated using
steel wool. You hold the steel-wool pad against the pot, move it gently in a
slightly circular motion, and, behold, the mark of a rootlet. Dirt of the appro-
priate color is also often applied. First it has to be passed through a sieve to make
a finely powdered substance, then a bit of pigment and water are added, and the
mix is applied to the vessel with a coarse brush. Once dry, the piece can be
brushed up and will look “authentically” dirty. The patina of age can also be
simulated through use of stain-washes or pigmented shellac compounds; miner-
al deposits, such as the dark manganese often found on West Mexican ceramics,
can be created using a toothbrush and black varnish. Of course, every forger has
materials preferences, but before 1960, when record manufacturers switched to
vinyl, shellac-based phonograph records were often broken to bits and soaked
overnight in methylated spirits to make a thick, black varnish suitable for speck-
ling or for imitating the bitumen paint of genuine Veracruz antiquities. Today
Veracruz forgers have found the bitumen seeps, but the artists elsewhere still
have to imitate bitumen in other substances.

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 K ELKER AND B RUHNS —FAKING A NCIENT M ESOAMERICA

Wood

While there is no doubt that woodcarving was a significant art form in many
parts of ancient Mesoamerica, so few excavated works have been found that we
cannot with certainty identify even the tree species preferred by ancient carvers.
Hence we cannot eliminate suspect works based on incorrect materials, as we
can in other forgery media. This is a big problem because wood is among the
easiest materials to age artificially. Depending on the type of wood and desired
finish color, a number of very genuine-looking effects can be created using com-
mon ingredients such as ammonia for darkening, vinegar and rusty nails to turn
wood gray or brown, rust and saltwater to give it an orange-red, hematite-like
color, or household lye, which can be used as a bleaching agent. General surface
abrasion is readily achieved by wire-brushing or sandblasting, and very realistic-
looking insect damage can be achieved by drilling and chopping followed by
sandblasting; ancient-looking worm holes can also be simulated in this manner.
Cracking can be induced in selected areas by soaking the wood, followed by
rapid drying with alternating cold and hot air blowers (i.e., by a hair dryer).
Wooden forgeries can be unmasked through scientific testing, but not all
forgeries are carved from new wood. Forgers have been known to obtain suit-
ably old wood from archaeological sites, such as Teotihuacán, which lie outside
of the tropical forest zone, or from dry caves where organic preservation is good.
Such forgeries are trickier to debunk scientifically because the material will test
as ancient since it is genuinely old wood.

Stone

Most types of stone carved in ancient Mesoamerica are highly susceptible to

chemical hydrolysis (weathering), particularly in tropical environments. The tra-
ditional means of aging stone carving has been to bury the pieces in moist,
acidic soil, often enriched with urine or dung, both of which do a remarkable
job of eroding the surface of the stone. After removal from the dung-heap, the
carving is often “antiqued” by rubbing the surface with pebbles and silicates to
abrade it. Iron stains and mineral accretions that suggest long burial can also be
added through chemical means (Peterson 1953, 179). Forgers know that the
“devil is in the details,” and since there is no means of archaeologically dating
stone, great care is taken by the best counterfeiters to produce signs of aging in
the cracks and crevices of the stone; this is achieved by adding limy accretions

22
 CHAPTER 1—THE SECRET LIES OF FAKES

to those areas. Since bore-markings are commonly scrutinized for signs of

modernity, or antiquity, industrious forgers will use ancient drilling methods on
their more expensive works. However, when modern drills are used, care is gen-
erally taken to polish out the resulting tool marks (Peterson 1953, 179).

Painted Manuscripts

Only 13 authentic Prehispanic codices are known to have survived the Con-
quest, yet many highly inventive forgeries of Mesoamerican painted manuscripts
have appeared over the course of the last two centuries. Mixtec and Borgia
Group frauds are usually apparent in their incorrect choice of support, specifi-
cally bark paper instead of hide, the use of too broad and/or too bright a palette,
or the obvious use of modern media such as felt-tip pens. Common sources for
these faux manuscripts are the Codex Colombino and various post-Conquest
lienzos. Most exhibit serious errors in iconography and jumbled sequence, sug-
gesting that the forger selected scenes based on ease of duplication rather than
on narrative importance; the forger, more than likely, was unable to read the
manuscripts.
The high desirability of Maya works in all media has inspired quite a few
fake Maya codices. In the case of Maya manuscripts, the forger’s task of creat-
ing a believable counterfeit is somewhat simplified due to the availability of
ancient paper. Funerary offerings of plain bark paper (amate) have been found
in Maya tombs and as offerings in dry caves; it is not difficult for an enterpris-
ing forger, well-connected with huaqueros,2 to obtain ancient paper. Failing
this, bark paper, in both light and dark varieties, is still produced in the Maya
region. Interestingly, many of the false Maya manuscripts tended to draw their
inspiration from non-Maya codices, perhaps because these works were repro-
duced as lithographic facsimiles in Alfredo Chavero’s Homenaje á Cristóbal
Colón: Antigüedades mexicanas (1892), and even earlier facsimiles were includ-
ed in Lord Kingsborough’s nine-volume set of the Antiquities of Mexico (1831–
1848). It has been rumored that the lithographer who did Chavero’s illustra-
tions, having learned the style of the codices, later authored a few fake manu-
scripts himself.
Prior to the decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphic system, manuscript
forgeries were debunked through errors of style or the use of incorrect media.
However, the advances of the last 30 years in the reading of Maya glyphic texts
have made it possible to detect forgeries through linguistic and epigraphic

23
 K ELKER AND B RUHNS —FAKING A NCIENT M ESOAMERICA

analysis. Despite such advances in detection, false works painted on ancient

paper continue to hold their illusions of authenticity, primarily due to the stren-
uous efforts of their supporters, scholarly and otherwise.

Fresco

Mural painting appears to have been widely practiced in ancient Mesoamerica

and to have begun in the early Preclassic period, although few early examples
have survived. These fresco paintings are similar in technique to the buon fresco
or “true fresco” of Renaissance Italy. The paintings are made by applying water-
soluble pigments to a fine lime and sand plaster while it is still wet, so that the
color seeps into the surface of the plaster. The buon fresco technique results in
paintings of remarkable durability. The ancient Mesoamericans also came up
with a few technical variations that were unknown to their European counter-
parts, such as painting on moist limestone (accidental fresco) and burnishing the
surface with a smooth stone while it was still damp. The burnished wall retained
its moisture for several weeks, making the fresco process considerably less diffi-
cult than that practiced in Europe, where unpainted plaster had to be chipped
out and reapplied each day. In ancient Mexico, the images were either incised
with a sharp tool, such as a maguey thorn, or painted as a red outline with a fine
brush and then filled with color (Edwards 1966, 8–9). Of course, forgers have
discovered that the average collector knows next to nothing about fresco paint-
ing, other than it is done on a plastered wall, if that. So none of that tedious
mixing is needed—especially not when acrylic paint and plaster of paris are
available at the local hardware store.

DETECTING FORGERIES: CONNOISSEURSHIP AND SCIENCE

In the 1941 film classic The Maltese Falcon, John Huston presents the audience
with Kasper Gutman, an archetypal art connoisseur/collector/dealer hot on the
trail of a masterpiece. Gutman’s quest is for the Maltese Falcon, a sixteenth-cen-
tury jewel-encrusted golden falcon sent to Charles V of Spain by the Knights
Templar of Malta. He is willing to do whatever it takes, even commit murder,
to gain his prize. However, when Gutman does capture the prize, in a climactic
scene set in the office of detective Sam Spade, his dream turns to ashes: Gutman
seizes the falcon, disguised with a thick coat of black enamel, and turning it over
in his hands, he examines it with the practiced eye of the connoisseur; then he
24
 CHAPTER 1—THE SECRET LIES OF FAKES

takes out a penknife and begins to scrape away the paint, but instead of gold and
jewels, he finds base metal. “It’s Fake!” Gutman shouts, “It’s phony . . . it’s lead
. . . it’s lead . . . it’s a fake!” Alas, it is generally not that simple.
The mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries formed the great era of con-
noisseurship, as few scientific tests were available to judge the authenticity of
works of art. The proverbial connoisseur of this era was most often an impecca-
bly dressed gentleman from a wealthy background, who, more often than not,
was self-taught—immersed in art—rather than academically trained. The con-
noisseur was believed to be more intuitive and more sensitive to works of art than
the normal human, and thus more able to see the subtleties, discern quality, iden-
tify shortcomings, and recognize the nuances of style that escape the perception
of mere mortals, especially those with academic degrees. Because of their appre-
ciation of great art and their knowledge of all the juicy details about the lives of
artists and collectors, connoisseurs made entertaining dinner guests; but as a
group, their track record in detecting Precolumbian fakes is somewhat spotty.
Connoisseurship is based on the concept of having “a good eye”—the abil-
ity to see what others overlook. It is this “good eye” that supposedly allows the
connoisseur to recognize the hand of the master in a room full of imitations.
The problem is that not all connoisseurs actually do have a good eye—though
all think they do—and some of the more prominent practitioners in of this craft
have authenticated fake after fake. As is understandable in any competitive
enterprise, connoisseurs tend to look down on academic training as producing
scholars with “wooden eyes.” There is some truth to this accusation. Certainly
since the 1970s, art history programs in the United States have focused on the-
ory far more than the object, but with the advent of scientific testing methods,
authentication by “the eye” has lost some of its gleam. Prior to the development
of scientific testing procedures, dealers and collectors relied on the connoisseur’s
eye and memory to sort the authentic wheat from the artistic chaff. The ability
of the connoisseur to perform this task was sometimes impaired by his own aes-
thetic hubris and overzealous enthusiasm. Such vanities can lead an overconfi-
dent expert to accept works far too readily as genuine, even in the face of obvi-
ous inconsistencies. As Jerome M. Eisenberg Ph.D. (1992, 10) has noted:
The art historian should not be so ready first to accept and then to categorize
a work of art. This tendency of wanting to believe, also common among art
collectors, has led to the acceptance, not only of many individual forgeries, but
also of entire series of art objects over a period of more than two hundred years.
These objects, which were pleasing and acceptable to specialists in the past, still

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are to the current generation of scholars which was weaned on them and their
particular aesthetics. Many of the forgeries are works of art in their own right
and should be enjoyed as such, but they should not be included in the other-
wise relatively orderly evolution of art styles.
The judgment of the connoisseur was, and is, frequently further compro-
mised by his own economic interests; many connoisseurs make their living as
dealers of art and antiquities and knowingly acquire their merchandise from
smugglers who deal directly with the huaqueros and forgers. The romance of the
connoisseur/dealer is that he is an individual who does what he does for the love
of art. The reality of today’s art market is that the antiquities consumer is rarely
a collector, but rather a speculator who acquires not for the objects themselves,
but for the potential profits to be gained in their resale. The rocketing auction
prices that result from this sort of profiteering provide the main incentive for
both forgers and looters to continue their illicit trades (Kaiser 1991, 88).
There are some who would argue that connoisseurship as it is practiced in
the later twentieth and early twenty-first century is an entirely different exercise.
While many old-school connoisseurs are still to be found in the ranks of dealers
and collectors, the modern museum connoisseur (scholar-curator) is more like-
ly to be academically trained. In the best of all possible worlds, these individu-
als combine an “eye” with knowledge of the cultures and their particular aesthet-
ic canons. Indeed, when connoisseurship is grounded in fact and based in expe-
rience with authentic examples, rather than on intuition and the presumed emo-
tional response that great art is imagined to provoke, then it can be a viable
approach to the detection of fakes in the absence of scientific alternatives. There
are some scholar-connoisseurs who achieve this ideal marriage of “eye” and
knowledge, but again there are more who think they do than actually do. The
reality is that few universities have hands-on collections, and most museums are
reluctant to allow students to fondle their priceless collections. As a result, most
of the training in universities is done using images, often 35 mm slides (some-
times digitized and Photoshopped but still not as crisp as those produced by
modern digital cameras), and this is far from ideal. Sometimes this is enriched
with visits to museum collections where students can peer through vitrines at
works (some real, some not), but in many ways this is little better than looking
at projected images, since the student has no contact with the actual piece. Even
when study collections are available, they may be loaded with fakes or with
unprovenanced items that are of little real value to scholarship. Still, despite this
rather large caveat, sometimes connoisseurship is all there is.

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AND THEN THERE IS SCIENCE

Unlike the eye of the connoisseur, science is neutral, empirical, and objective,
and like that eye, not infallible. Better put, it seldom works the way you want it
to, and it can be vague just where you really want precision. Science came late
to the authentication game, relatively speaking; the first independent dating
technology, radiocarbon dating, was not developed until 1949, and other tech-
nologies have been even later in their development and their diffusion into the
field of art.
Radiocarbon dating is the one scientific dating method everyone seems to
know about. Mostly, however, they have strange ideas about how it is used, ideas
promulgated by the scientifically illiterate who write popular articles and
books.3 Radiocarbon dating only works on materials that are organic—that is,
things that once lived. The earth’s atmosphere contains a small (and variable
through time) percentage of the radioactive isotope of carbon, carbon-14, in
addition to other, non-radioactive isotopes, of which carbon-12 is the relevant
one for dating. When an organism dies, it ceases to interact with the atmosphere
(breathe, eat), and the radioactive carbon is no longer replenished. Carbon-14
decays at a known rate, which can be measured. Thus the ratio of carbon-14 to
carbon-12 in a once living thing (in its bones, branches, fibers, whatever) will
tell you when it died. Because the ratio of radioactive to non-radioactive carbon
in the earth’s atmosphere varies through time, this date must be corrected to get
an accurate reading. The correction is done by calibrating the date from the
sample against a series of dates from samples of known age, most of which come
from dendrochronology (tree-ring dating). The calibration of dates is essential;
an uncalibrated date is useless, as is a date that does not state the standard devi-
ation. One will often see a catalog or dealer’s blurb declaring an artwork was car-
bon dated to 500 B.C. or something like that, but the first standard deviation
(not in the catalog, of course) is 500 ± 950 years before the present (the present
in radiocarbon dating is defined as A.D. 1950). Moreover, for calibrated dates
one needs to use the second standard deviation—all of which means that, no,
you can’t get the year of manufacture, just an approximation of the general time
of manufacture, maybe.
While radiocarbon dating has had a profound impact on archaeological
research, for many museums radiocarbon dating has been the authentication
measure of last resort, since it used to require the destruction of a significant
piece of the item to be dated. Today, with accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS)

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technologies, very tiny samples can be dated, and so destruction is not a serious
consideration. However, samples can be contaminated in various ways, and
many people associated with the art world are so ignorant of the issues involved
in any dating technique that their reporting is muddled in the extreme.
Moreover, radiocarbon dating cannot be used to date stone or ceramics (in most
circumstances). The easiest way to circumvent radiocarbon dating is to recycle
ancient bone, wood, paper, or textiles. This is very commonly done. The date
will be correct, but the embellishment of the base material turns that genuine
base material into a forgery.
Thermoluminescence dating is the main technique used for dating ceram-
ics that have somehow lost their archaeological context. It can also be used on
some other materials, although this happens less frequently. Thermo-
luminescence dating is based on the fact that most ceramic clays contain some
radioactive impurities. When the clay is fired into a vessel or artifact, microscop-
ic holes result in the ceramic fabric, and these trap the electrons given off as the
various radioactive impurities decay. When a sample of ceramic is heated, the
escaping electrons emit photons of light. These are released from their traps at
temperatures that reflect the specific element; but basically, the more time has
elapsed since a piece was fired, the more light is emitted. This technology was
unreliable for a long time because of problems in developing hardware to meas-
ure the light emitted. Many of these problems have now been solved, but ther-
moluminescence, for the museum or collector, has a fatal flaw: it can be forged.
The cheap and easy way is to insert bits of genuinely ancient ceramic into the
(conserved) piece at those points from which the samples are most likely to be
taken. Mark Rasmussen (2008, 21), in a thoughtful article concerning Asian
and African artifacts, points out that this means that a CT scan and/or X rays
are also necessary to ascertain where old pieces have been inserted in a new piece
and, indeed, how much of a piece is actually old. A more recent development,
and one which Rasmussen thinks is more prevalent than most imagine, is irra-
diating a new piece so that it will give a false positive for ancient in the lab.
Accuracy of thermoluminescence can also be impacted by environmental radia-
tion, such as X-ray examination within a year of testing; by the number of sam-
ples taken, and by the skill and integrity of the testing lab. Michael Brent (2001,
31) reports that on three occasions he was presented with certificates of authen-
ticity from large European commercial testing labs for obviously fake African
terra-cotta artifacts. Rasmussen (personal communication, August 11, 2008)
adds to that the possibility of forged documents being supplied by the dealer. In

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fact, he claims that fully 10 percent of the documents pertaining to objects he

was authenticating were forged, belonged to some other artifact, or had been
altered. It is far easier to alter paper than to alter science. The long and short of
it is: for every new authentication tool that science provides, forgers and dealers
will devise countermeasures.
As yet there are no means to date the fabrication of stone artifacts. However,
microscopic examination of the surface of an artifact can often show if it was
made with ancient or modern tools. Here one depends on modern experimen-
tation with different types of tools, ancient and modern, and the base materials
used by ancient artists, to identify the differences between ancient and modern
tool markings. This was the method used to reveal that the British Museum and
Smithsonian crystal skulls were nineteenth-century artifacts (Sax et al. 2008).
More recently, Jane Walsh, in an exhaustive study of the Dumbarton Oaks “Tla-
zoltéotl” figurine, has shown clearly that the interaction between provenance
studies, petrographic analysis (including survey of known minerals in use by the
Precolumbian peoples of the pertinent time and place), and study of known
genuine depictions of a subject, again within that specific time and culture
frame, can be combined with microscopic techniques to reveal much about the
authenticity of a figurine (Walsh 2008b).
However, forgers soon caught on to surface analysis and began to rough out
pieces using metal tools but then finished them using ancient technologies of
sand and reeds. Providing they use the right sand, and not emery (Al2O3 +
Fe2–3, which is what modern lapidaries use), all is generally well, and the for-
gery must be ascertained on other grounds, such as petrography. Leaving the
stone for a time in an acid environment will often alter the surface enough that
any evidences of funny business are sloughed off. However, professional miner-
al identification is essential, because sometimes, as with the crystal skulls, arti-
facts are made of materials not available to the culture to which they are attrib-
uted (see Chapter 9).
Scanning electron microscope (SEM) technologies have also entered into
authentication and are becoming more common. The scanning electron micro-
scope is capable of enormous magnifications, at which it is very difficult for a
forger to hide all evidences of his industry. This was one of the methods used to
verify that the crystal skulls were forgeries and to reveal the fraudulent status of
the “Olmec” head made by Dr. Luis (see Chapter 6). Since a giant stone head
cannot be put in the tiny microscope chamber, a high-resolution mold was
made of the head in various places and that went into the SEM chamber. In this

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case, the SEM showed patterns typical of modern tools. (Of course, there al-
ready were photographs of the sculpture process, complete with sculptor!) These
kinds of technologies are more commonly used by law-enforcement bodies or
by scholars than by dealers, who have no incentive to unmask their wares as
fraudulent. Nor are they usually used by curators, whose museums rarely have
such equipment. They are expensive and not readily available; there is no “SEM
store” you can go into, as if it were a nail salon.
X rays and infrared photography also have (limited) use in detecting forger-
ies. Many pastiches are covered with a new “finishing” coat, and the X ray can
discern this. Infrared photographs can often show details of the surface that
shouldn’t be there.
At this point in history, science is useful in authentication but certainly not
infallible. The most useful technologies, radiocarbon dating and thermolumi-
nescence dating, can be forged by using ancient materials, as well as by other
means.

30
 NOTES

CHAPTER 1
1 The pseudonym “Don Honorato” has been used to protect the identity of our source
who could suffer repercussions if his identity were revealed.
2 Although the Quechua term huaquero meaning a grave robber or looter is more fre-
quently used in the Andes than in Mesoamerica, the authors use it in both volumes
for consistency.
3 The authors’ favorite is a popular romance originally called Marcia and the Inca Gold,
but reissued under various titles since the original printing in the 1960s (Judson
1966). Among the other howlers in the innocent author’s book (innocent of the
slightest understanding of archaeology) is the “nuclear scientist” along for the ride
who whips out his radiocarbon machine and casually dates virtually everything that
comes his way. It is the case that entirely too many people learn “science” this way.

CHAPTER 2
1 In 1520 Albrecht Dürer, on a trip to Brussels, saw the “Treasure of Cortés” including
gold work, weapons, armor, rare clothing, and feathered items. He wrote in his diary,
“All the days of my life I have seen nothing that so rejoiced my heart as these things,
for I have seen among them wonderful works of art” (quoted in Bray 2002, 246).
2 Dumbarton Oaks, which used to “deaccession (i.e., resell) debunked pieces (see
Chapter 3), has actually behaved very well with their “Tlazoltéotl” “outing.” The
piece was reassigned to the nineteenth-century French collection!

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