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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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.
A new paper interpreting the East Anglian Anglo-Saxon site of Sutton Hoo and similar graves has hypothesised that the magnificent burials belonged to warriors who fought for the Byzantine Empire and returned home as heroes.
Let's take a look 🧵
The article, from the English Historical Review, proposed:
"it is likely that the men buried in the princely burials at Prittlewell and Sutton Hoo served as cavalry soldiers in the Foederati recruited by Tiberius in 575 in the wars with the Sasanians on the eastern front"
The extraordinary treasure of Sutton Hoo and other similar princely graves has been debated for nearly a century. One standard interpretation for the Mediterranean artifacts and wealth is the trade and diplomatic links with the Merovingians.
The 'Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice, other Inhuman and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act, 2013' is a piece of Indian legislation aimed at tackling the problem of religious human sacrifice and other similar activities 👇🧵
The specific clauses of the act cover a range of magical and religious acts that could lead to harm, death or manipulation - eg coercive sex or theft of money. The list is so specific you have to imagine each of these things has been reported before.
The origins of the bill go back to 2003 and every step of the legislative process has faced fierce opposition. One of its greatest advocates, Dr Narendra Dabholkar, was shot dead in 2013 by Hindu nationalists.