Any discussion of Mesoamerican archaeology has to be mindful that this one guy - Brigído Lara - managed to forge around 40,000 ceramic objects, manufactured so perfectly they fooled museum curators and researchers for decades.
He may be responsible for forging virtually all the Totonac pottery on record, opening up not just the possibility that some artwork might be fake, but that everything ever written about this culture is nonsense.
To make matters worse, no one knows whether Lara is lying about the objects he claims. This piece for example, depicting Ehecatl, the Mesoamerican wind god, is supposed to be one of his. But it is so perfect that curators think he's faking that this is a fake.
The piece is old enough that Lara would have been a child when he made it, at the earliest, but he knows so much about how it was made that some have suspected he was trained in the art of ceramic forgery - he might be the apprentice to an older master forger.
In 1910, Leopoldo Batres published Antiquedades Mejicanas Falsificadas: Falsificacion y Falsificadores, the first book-length study of forgery in Mexican antiques, "It offers an eyewitness account of a work-shop of forgers located near the pyramids of Teotihuacan"
Faking archaeological artefacts occurred on a near industrial scale in pre 1910 Mexico. The book has many pictures of forger's workshops and vendors plying their wares.
One academic response to Lara's massive output of forged pottery has been to consider them 'original interpretations', and try to find some value in them as pieces of art.
Lara is not alone though, although he seems particularly gifted. Entire museum collections, such as the Jubaozhai Museum in Hebei, have been suspected of being fakes. Producing these objects may employ around 250,000 people in China alone.
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A thread on the Pacific Dwarf mythology that accompanied the Austronesian expansion - the Primordial Little People Type-Tale
The dominant hypothesis as to why many Austronesian-Polynesian cultures have a foundational little-people story, is that when the proto-Austronesians arrived in Taiwan they found a short statured Palaeolithic people already living there.
This theory was recently strengthened by the discovery of 'negrito-like' human remains in Taiwan, dating back around 6000 years. The skull shows many similarities to other Negrito and African San peoples.
In 2016 the British Dental Journal identified a new child protection issue - the sub Saharan practice of gouging out the healthy tooth buds of children, euphemistically called 'Infant Oral Mutilation' (IOM) 🧵
IOM is the practice of removing erupting infant teeth in order to prevent ill physical and spiritual health - the buds are believed to be tooth worms or bad spirits which cause diarrhea and fevers. The cure is to remove the primary teeth.
The teeth are extracted in an extremely crude and painful manner, using bike spokes, penknives, hot nails, fingernails, razor blades etc, without anaesthetic and with the high risk of blood loss and subsequent infection, including passing on HIV or hepatitis B.
Thread of pictures from Australia, taken from the book Peoples Of All Nations (1922) Vol I.
The British authors survey both the European and Aboriginal inhabitants, considering the former to be a "sub-type of the British race... far more assertive, self-confident, ruthless"
"The Sturdy Stock They Raise On Australian Farms" - the authors mention the low birth rate in the cities, but praise the outdoor Australian lifestyle, as well as pointing to new technologies replacing older rural livelihoods.
Next up from the Peoples Of All Nations Vol I (1922), we have Annam.
Described as a 'long stretch of tropic seaboard, inland mountains and jungles' with a 'medley of races' - the Mongolian Annamese, Chinese traders, Malay Chams and jungle 'Moi savages'.
I have acquired a copy of volume I of the anthropological classic Peoples Of All Nations (1922), so I will post some threads of the different peoples covered with photos and images you can't easily find elsewhere.
First up is Afghanistan, described as a race of fighters in the hills, with their blood feuds and adaptations to Islam.
A Hazara sepoy and his son, a "fine Mongolian race of the little-known northern hills"
It goes unremarked, but Britain still has something like 8,000 magazine titles in circulation. These range from well known media publications to tiny niche hobby groups.
I think it reveals an important part of the Anglo/WEIRD mindset about how group associations are formed.
The richness of the smaller hobby sector includes everything from model railways, insects, arts and crafts, astronomy, botany, gardening, cooking, choirs and organs, horse care, military aircraft, medieval architecture and the like.
These types of voluntary organisations are historically much more important than traditional forms of association like clan, tribe, caste or even extended family.