[CPProt.net] Finding Fakes: Sleuth sorts authentic ancient art objects from forgeries - sometimes very old themselves

Mon Apr 18 08:18:16 CEST 2005

Finding Fakes: Sleuth sorts authentic ancient art objects from forgeries -
sometimes very old themselves
By Jacqueline Trescott
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Most museums have fakes in their collections. This is a
reality to which they don't want to bring attention.

Jane MacLaren Walsh, however, loves to turn the material legacy of the past
over and over in her strong hands. As an art detective, it's both her
research and her reverie.

She fingers a tube of jade as narrow as a soda straw and wonders about its
maker, the artist who worked some 3,500 years ago and thought to carve a
snake like the one crawling near the fire.

Then she thinks of the other craftsmen who, roughly 200 years ago, created
forgeries of such antiquities so convincing that today they nestle in the
world's finest museums.

Walsh sits in a sunny office at the National Museum of Natural History and
wonders if the next wonderful piece of allegedly pre-Columbian art that
comes through the door will be real or fake.

Beneath her soft silver hair is skin reddened by the sun of Mexico, where
she has just been examining the bounty from a dig.

An anthropologist with the Smithsonian for 35 years, Walsh finds a certain
joy in being stumped and a delicious satisfaction in spotting a forgery.

It's not easy to find objects that are certifiably genuine to judge others
against. But Walsh and sleuths in Britain and Mexico regard three
pre-Columbian collections as beyond reproach:

. The Museo del Templo Mayor in Mexico City holds the finds from the
accidental discovery - in the 1970s - of an ancient Aztec temple. The
artifacts represent the last period of pre-Columbian art, from about A.D.
700-1500.

. The British Museum has a collection of Mayan jades dating from A.D.
100-900.

. And the Smithsonian has holdings from an Olmec site at La Venta, Mexico,
where anthropologist Matthew Williams Stirling, working from 1938 to 1946,
found a cache dated from 900 to 200 B.C.

``They were selected because they are documented. They came from controlled
scientific excavations,'' Walsh says. ``We know for certain that they are
authentic, and because of the cultures and sites, we know what time periods
they come from.''

Walsh is creating a computerized reference base meant to guide those trying
to spot fraudulent antiquities. After studying the holes and markings on
genuine items in the three museums, she examines suspect artifacts with
advanced scanners for the telltale marks of relatively modern equipment.

``In excavations, you don't find the tools because (the figures) were
offerings to the gods,'' Walsh says. The workshop where they were made was
somewhere else. So the indoor anthropologist has to ask hundreds of
questions as she turns over an object.

``What did they use to make that hole?'' she says, looking at an Olmec ear
ornament, dated from 900 to 400 B.C. Could the ancient craftsmen have used
bamboo? Or cactus thorns or small bones or flint or quartz?

What complicates the search for authenticity is that some of the forgeries
are also antiques.

``Fakes have been made, I think, since early in the 1800s. Some people think
they begin even earlier. After the wars of independence starting in 1810,
all of Mexico was opened up to travelers from Europe and America,'' she
explains. ``So when lots of travelers came in, they were fascinated by the
presence of ruins and wanted to take home souvenirs. They created a demand.
And, as usual, somebody else created a supply.''

Walsh's interest in Mesoamerican archaeology and history was kindled when
her father's foreign service career took the family to Mexico.

In high school, she often visited the museum that had been made out of the
home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. There she fell in love with its
paintings, folk art and antiquities. She earned her degrees from the
University of the Americas in Mexico City and later got a doctorate from
Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

``The beauty of the collections is that they are like libraries, they tell
you so much,'' Walsh says. At Natural History, which has the largest
scientific staff of any museum in the world, the collections yielded plenty
of authentic examples she could use to debunk frauds.

She uses all sorts of equipment in her detective work.

An Apple computer in her office is used to manipulate high-resolution
images. Many of these come from the museum's labs, which are equipped with
CT scanners, X-ray machines and scanning electron microscopes.

But advanced technology goes only so far: She has also created tools using
materials available to ancient artisans.

Walsh picks up a piece of obsidian, shiny and sharp, and shows how it might
have been used.

``This volcanic glass is the fifth hardest mineral there is,'' she says. A
fake, by contrast, often shows evidence of a hard metal tool. ``With modern
tools, you get these regular, clean lines, very sharp, very narrow. If you
see impressions left by a tool that didn't exist'' at the time, she says,
``you know it is a fake.'' A high polish may also signal the use of modern
tools.

She thinks of those very old hands.

``Of all the documented Olmec jades that I've looked at, I haven't seen
evidence of hollow drills yet,'' Walsh says, pointing out the jades were
probably drilled with a solid pointed stone. Later, after the Olmec period,
other cultures used bird bones and bamboo-like reeds for hollow drills.

And there Walsh stops.

``I don't want the fakers to know what to avoid,'' she says.

Tracking how ancient carvers worked has led Walsh down some curious trails,
including experimenting with a mouse bone as a drill bit. ``The rodent bone
worked very well. The mouse had tough small bones, and I used it to drill
with sand,'' she says. She also tried rabbit bones she took home from a
dinner out. Then there was a duck, eaten for dinner, its bones then donated
to science.

``It worked pretty well as a drill. Ducks and rabbits and mice all would
have been available to pre-Columbian peoples, and since they would have used
what they could find, I tried to use what I could find, too,'' Walsh says.
Once the bones are cleaned and sharpened, she goes to the museum's
mineralogy department, and with another colleague runs tests using
mechanical drills that more or less duplicate the motion of an ancient hand
drill.

``He runs them at a relatively slow speed to simulate a bow or hand drill.
Using quartz sand we see how long it takes to drill into some samples of
jade and jadeite,'' Walsh says.

Some cases are clear: She was certain about a purported Aztec crystal skull.
One arrived at the Smithsonian in 1992 from an anonymous donor. The alarm
bells went off, since Walsh knew that New Age practitioners bragged about
the powers of these objects and people were creating them to serve a special
market. But had they ever really existed?

``It was a class of artifact never dug up,'' she says. Working with the
British Museum, she created a test with molds of the lines and drill holes.
Under the microscope, her first inkling was verified.

``One of the things that was obvious about the crystal skulls was that the
carving was done by a wheel, or a rotary saw. No pre-Columbian carver had
such a tool, so we felt it had to be after European contact,'' Walsh says.

She investigated how the crystal skulls had made their way into the British
Museum and the Musee de l'Homme in Paris. The same dealer had sold both, and
the skulls had originated in Germany.

More often, she finds pieces she is 90 percent sure are counterfeit, but is
reluctant to render a verdict until she's finally completed her database. In
this way, she hopes she will someday be able to offer other art sleuths a
road map to fakes.

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