UCLA archaelogy expert exposes 'ancient' fakes on EBay

Charles "Chip" Stanish, director of UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, studies the economic life of ancient Peruvian civilizations, but for fun he likes to browse that thoroughly modern marketplace, EBay.

Like most archaelogy experts, Stanish deplores the antiquities trade. It goes back, he says, to his first trip to Peru in 1982, when he came upon a promising site -- what looked to be an intact thousand-year-old home -- only to find it had been looted, trampled and rendered useless as a window on how its inhabitants had lived. A few years later, he says, a diplomat from a Central American nation offered him $50,000 if he'd help illegally spirit an ancient find out of the country.

When EBay came along in 1995, Stanish and his colleagues were alarmed that electronic commerce would cause a boom market for looted objects, meaning more artifacts lost to private collections and more archaeological sites ruined. What he didn't foresee was potential looters instead becoming craftspeople, creating fake antiquities and selling them cheaply, or sometimes expensively, over EBay.

In a recent article for Archaeology magazine, titled "Forging Ahead or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love eBay," Stanish reports that the online auctioneer's ancient artifacts aisles have become a flea market of near-total fakery.

In this story in Calendar, we go browsing online with the professor who now laughs at the buying and selling he once feared.

--Mike Boehm

Photo: Charles Stanish has a laugh while browsing for antiquities on EBay. Credit: Christina House / For The Times.

Comments

[connie monaghan]

Dear Mr. Boehm,

You mentioned that people don't want to admit they've been fleeced... recently, after pondering whether to bid on an "ancient" Viking metal thingie (who knows what it was, but hell, it was touched by a Viking and discovered... um... wayyyy over there!) for my sister, who knows nothing about Vikings but has a strange affinity for them them anyway (the hairy chests, I think), I realized I would NEVER know if I was fleeced. Thus, a weighty philosophical dilemma: if it made her happy and she believed that it was real (which she surely would; I mean, who WOULDN"T want to own something that was forged by one of those guys who looked like Fabio, only better?), then wouldn't it be worth a few hundred bucks? So what that it was an utterly random bit of rusted metal, unconnected to its original, unknown use? It would be like owning an eyelash that belonged to Elvis: useless, probably false, yet emotionally charged (by oneself, of course, but isn't that what love is? Am I wrong?).

Thanks for the timely article! (PS, when I worked for the LA Weekly a zillion years ago, an editor there bought a baseball (on Ebay) signed by Sammy Sosa -- but from the wrong league! so much for intelligence!)