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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Cycladic art is iconic. Made between 3200-1100 BC in the Aegean, the figurines are sought after by museums and collectors for their striking, modernist appearance.
There's a good reason for that. We have no idea how many of them in circulation are fakes. 🧵
The figurines are typically made from marble and often represent a stylised figurine of a woman. They are now scattered far and wide in private hands and galleries around the world.
It has long been noted that the appearance of figurines in collections came without any contextual information. Without knowing the context of their discovery it is much harder to trace their authenticity.
Malawi is hardly the only country in Africa struggling with the problem of illegal moonshine production. A picture thread mostly from Kenya, Zimbabwe and Uganda.
On May 4th 2021, the Ugandan Parliament passed the The Prevention and Prohibition of Human Sacrifice Bill - a piece of legislation aimed at stamping out the pervasive problem of child sacrifice in the country.
A quick thread on how it's been going in Uganda since then:
'Hunting dogs lead police to den of human sacrifices'
The data is difficult to gather but maybe two children a week are abducted and ritually murdered in the country.
The reasons behind it are varied, usually to bring luck and fortune to a particular endeavour - an election, a new business or growing a church community
The story of the Arctic Dorset people, Palaeo-Eskimos who lived in Canada between ~ 700 BC to ~ 1200 AD, is quite well known now. They disappeared in the face of the advancing Thule Inuit. But - what if some of them survived in some isolated form until recent times?
Dorset culture technology was more limited compared to the Thule. They didn't hunt whales, use dogs or use bows-and-arrows. Instead they were masters of hunting seals. The broader diet of the Inuit certainly helped them move into and conquer a climatically unstable Arctic.
We don't know exactly what happened between the Thule Inuit and the Dorset (the Inuit called them Tuniit), but oral legends speak of the reluctance of the Dorset to fight and their rage at losing their hunting grounds.
The power of Orkney during the late Neolithic period is best seen through the movement of grooved ware pottery and the associated ritual package. This map shows the locations of grooved ware pottery finds, expanding outwards from Orkney down the coast and over to Ireland...
The enduring story of Tasmanian aboriginal cultural decline includes the fact that they stopped eating fish around 2000 BC, or worse - that they lost or forgot the skills to do so.
Let's examine this claim 🧵
The origin of the claim is two-fold, firstly ethnographic evidence from Europeans on Tasmania, who observed that the inhabitants ate no fish, and secondly an absence of fish in the archaeological record starting around 1,800 BC.
The famous researcher, Rhys Jones, excavated two caves at Rocky Cape on Tasmania's northwest coast during the 1960's, concluding that seal and fish bones were predominant in older middens, but absent later on. This was corroborated elsewhere on the island.