Eric C. Rodenberg
Antique Week Correspondent

LOS ANGELES — In perhaps one of the collecting industry’s greater ironies, a veteran archaeologist is crediting eBay for decreasing illegal looting of artifacts from ancient sites.

During the past 10 years, the proliferation of fakes – of which a vast number are sold on Internet commerce giant eBay – has made the actual looting of authentic relics economically unfeasible, writes Charles Stanish, one of the world’s premiere authorities on Andean archaeology, in the May-June issue of Archaeology.

In the publication, subtitled “ … how I learned to stop worrying and love eBay,” Stanish – a UCLA professor of anthropology – writes how he initially feared that the Internet would “democratize antiquities trafficking” and “lead to widespread looting.”
What he has discovered, however, is that “ … local eBayers and craftsmen can make more money cranking out cheap fakes than they can by spending days or weeks digging around looking for the real thing.”

The overall value of the market has also depreciated, Stanish writes, “… because the low-end antiquities market has been flooded with fakes that people buy for a fraction of what a genuine object would cost, the value of the real artifacts has gone down as well, making old-fashioned looting less lucrative.”

In great part, Stanish bases his contention on working at digs in the Andes for the past 25 years, in addition to his occasional work with the U.S. Customs in authenticating objects.

“I’ve been tracking eBay antiquities for years now, and from what I can tell this shift began around 2000, about five years after eBay was established,” he writes.

At that time, he told AntiqueWeek, the ratio of real artifacts to fakes was about 50-50. About five years later, 95 percent of the offerings were fake.

Although that’s not necessarily good news for the collector, the academic world is reveling in it.

“For most of us, the web has forever distorted the antiquities trafficking market in a positive way,” Stanish says.

However, it is not only the proliferation of fakes which have had an impact on the antiquities market; but, the quality of fakes has become so good they even fool the experts, according to Stanish.
He recalls entering an antiquities store in La Paz, in Bolivia near its northern border to Peru.

“I saw about four shelves of supposed Tiwanaku (circa 400-1000) pottery. I told the owner that most were fakes and she became irritated and called me a liar. So I simply touched one at a time, saying ‘fake,’ ‘real,’ ‘real from Tiwanaku,’ ‘fake, ‘fake made by Eugenio in Fuerabamba’ and so forth. She paused for a moment, pulled one down that I said was real and told me that it was also a fake. I congratulated her on the fact that her fakes were getting better and she just smiled.”

During the past five years, village artisans aren’t just producing fakes; they’re producing “exact replicas,” Stanish says. An “embarrassingly high percentage” of objects in our museums are fake, he adds. Stanish has visited the towns in Bolivia and Peru where they are mass producing the replicas.

“I’ve seen the backyard kilns and they’re doing an incredible job duplicating these antiquities,” he says. “They’re using the same type of kiln used 2,000 years ago, the same material, the same techniques … Thanks to publicly available archaeological reports, they also now use the original clay sources and minerals to make and paint the pottery. They can create virtually perfect reproductions.”

And, it is difficult – and expensive – to clearly prove the age of a piece of pottery. The most reliable method, according to Stanish, is thermoluminescence dating, which determines the amount of time elapsed since the clay object was fired in the kiln. However, testing one sample can cost as much as $400. And, now, since forgers commonly include fragments of ancient pottery in their work, multiple samples have become necessary. Some of the more clever eBay vendors, Stanish said, have even found a way to circumvent this method of testing.

“They state that they will return a buyer’s money if they have a letter from a recognized specialist that proves the piece not to be authentic. However, this guarantee is nullified if you conduct any kind of ‘destructive’ analysis on the object.

“To the non-specialist this seems reasonable. However, the sampling of a few specks of clay from a vessel for thermoluminescence dating by a professional conservator is not even noticeable to the naked eye. While standard procedure in the museum world, this is technically a type of destructive analysis. It nullifies the guarantee … as a result, the guarantee is meaningless.”

Another economic factor – the risk of arrest – is also mitigated by eBay fakes, since you cannot be arrested for importing forgeries, Stanish says. “Should you import what you think is an illegal antiquity but it turns out to be a fake, you run little risk of prosecution,” he maintains. “The risk from lawsuits or criminal charges is effectively removed from the sale of antiquities when they are not really antiquities, a fact that reduces the cost and risk to both buyer and seller.”

Other related costs – such as shipping – are greatly reduced in the more streamlined laissez-faire world of Internet commerce.
“One vendor on eBay advertises a Greek marble head dated to around 300 B.C. For this ‘rare artifact,’ the shipping costs from Cyprus are a whopping $35 to anywhere in the United States. This is a far cry from the old days when a real illegal antiquity had to be couriered by a specialist who not only knew how to care for the piece, but how to doctor it up to avoid being arrested at customs.”
The same is true for nearly every other well-known ancient culture in the world.

The production of fakes is not just restricted to South America. Stanish asserts that Chinese, Bulgarian, Egyptian, Peruvian and Mexican workshops are now producing fakes “at a frenetic pace.”
He said the United States will soon see these replication workshops. “We’ve seen that in objects that are purported to be arrowheads, and they’re really not, for years,” he said. “We’re starting to see a lot more of the Hopewell items – the banner stones and so forth being faked.”

He believes that most of these workshops will concentrate on the larger pieces – where the most money is – in the artifacts indigenous to the Southeast and Southwest America.

Again, what drives the market is a desire to get something for nothing. And the willingness of crooks to fulfill that desire.
“I suppose,” Stanish writes, “if people stopped believing that they can buy a pill that will help them lose weight without dieting or exercise, then it is possible that people will stop buying fakes online, and we will return to old-fashioned looting. We just have to wait and see what surprises the Internet brings us in the future.”