The online antiquities market is booming, but one archaeologist reckons 95 per cent of items are fake – and he's hoping the forgeries continue to fool collectors, writes MIKE BOEHM
WHEN CHARLES “Chip” Stanish, director of UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, craves a good laugh over human folly, he knows it’s just a mouse-click away, on eBay’s crowded bazaar of ancient artifacts. A reddish clay pot in the shape of a man’s head pops onto the computer screen in his office beneath the campus’s Fowler Museum. Stanish notes its wide-eyed, gape-mouthed face and tries to stifle a laugh, but there’s no helping himself.
“Look at this stupid face with the stupid grin,” he says. “The teeth are ridiculous. The eyes are goofy . . . It’s something you’d find at Lima airport.” The seller is advertising it as a mint-condition artifact of Peru’s Nazca culture – a depiction of a warrior, possibly 2,000 years old. It’s yours for $499.99 (€357), with a “lifetime guarantee” – as long as that lifetime expires within the 14-day window for returns.
When antiquities began sprouting on eBay shortly after the auction website’s founding in 1995, Stanish says, archaeologists were terrified that demand for ancient loot would explode, sending diggers swarming over unguarded ruins. “The great tragedy of looting is that somebody will come for one pot, and they’ll destroy an entire building or burial [site],” Stanish says.
But a funny thing happened on the way to eBay’s boom as a new forum for very old collectibles. It became apparent, he says, that people on the internet could be fooled into buying knick-knacks dressed up to look plausibly ancient. Why should local diggers break their backs and risk arrest when they could stay home and make a cottage industry out of copying what their ancestors had wrought? Stanish published his ideas in an essay in the May/June issue of Archaeology magazine, entitled “Forging Ahead, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love eBay.”
At first, he says, archaeologists’ fears were borne out. As late as 2000, websites offered “a 50-50 split” between “obvious junk and the kinds of things you have to hold in your hand and have an expert look at it, and weigh it, and smell it, and feel it, and all the things you do to authenticate these pieces. Now, 95 per cent of the stuff you’re looking at on eBay is not real.”
What gives Stanish relief has caused headaches for Bob Dodge, founder of Artemis Gallery Ancient World Art in Lafayette, Colorado. “Fakes have been a problem in this industry since 2,000 years ago, but it’s certainly a massive problem right now, and it’s getting larger. The handful of legitimate [online] dealers, we’re just pulling our hair out, trying to discourage people from throwing money away on cheap tourist crap.”
Now, he says, many potential buyers think he’s overpriced: “Why are we selling this piece for $1,000 when they can buy it for $50 [€36]? How dare we? And, once they do find they’ve been fooled, they’re going to leave the market completely. Both situations hurt my pocket.”
Usher Lieberman, a spokesman for eBay, says that if fake antiquities were as rampant as Stanish claims, buyers would complain and eBay would police the problem as it does when corporations alert it that knock-offs of their brands are being sold as authentic. “We take very seriously any claims that items sold on the site aren’t genuine . . . This isn’t something we’re hearing a lot about.”
But Stanish, Dodge and other antiquities cognoscenti say collectors rarely are willing to concede that they’ve been had. Dodge has posted a how-to buyers’ guide that counsels novices to study art in books and auction catalogues, and to “avoid eBay like the plague!” Written guarantees are a must, he says, preferably an unconditional, lifetime promise to refund an item if it is ever proven a fake.
Stanish doesn’t claim that eBay’s dilution as a marketplace for real ancient artifacts spells doom for the antiquities trade. But he’s hopeful that forgeries, having already fooled what he considers an “embarrassingly high” number of museums, will grow increasingly widespread and effective. Using indigenous soils and stone can defeat scientific tests used to suss out fakes, he says, and he’s betting that confusion from a proliferation of well-wrought fakes can put a real dent in the antiquities market.
However, at least one sympathetic expert has doubts. New York city archaeologist Oscar White Muscarella, author of The Lie Became Great, a book on forgeries from the ancient Near East, is an acerbic foe of the antiquities trade, but he doesn’t buy Stanish’s thesis that the existence of more and better fakes means less looting. “The guy who has money and a lust for antiquities is going to buy them,” Muscarella says. “What’s going to decrease plundering is not forgeries, it’s only if governments take more action.”