Stone Age Herbalist Profile picture
Oct 15, 2024 8 tweets 3 min read Read on X
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. Image
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. Image
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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.Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image

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More from @Paracelsus1092

Mar 28
A thread on the Pacific Dwarf mythology that accompanied the Austronesian expansion - the Primordial Little People Type-Tale Image
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. Image
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Mar 7
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) 🧵 Image
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Jan 25
Thread of pictures from Australia, taken from the book Peoples Of All Nations (1922) Vol I.

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Jan 23
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Read 19 tweets
Jan 22
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Jan 14
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These types of voluntary organisations are historically much more important than traditional forms of association like clan, tribe, caste or even extended family. Image
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