Archaeological Forgeries

If you dig up something that looks old, there's all sorts of things you can say about it that people will believe if you're wearing a tweed jacket or the equivalent for your culture and gender.

The Piltdown Man
Of the many petrified people that have been turned up over the years, the granddaddy of them all is the famous 3,000-pound hunk of gypsum known as the Cardiff Giant, of whom much has been written. (If you don't believe me, click here, or here, or in Yahoo! for crying out loud).

More sophisticated, but in the same vein, was the Piltdown Man, which had the brainy folks going for quite a while.

The Vinland Map, which allegedly proves that the Norse had discovered America before Columbus, the Kensington Stone, and the plate of brass that puts Sir Francis Drake on the Pacific coast of the North American continent are a few fine examples. More recently, the finds at Burrows Cave in Illinios in 1982, are worth a peek.

The Kensington Stone
The Kelsey Museum of Archeology has put together a collection of fake phæronic antiquities in an exhibit called The Art of the Fake.

A fellow who had a feeling that God was just making fossils to use up extra creative energy (in opposition to the more accepted view nowadays, that they are the impressions of long-dead creatures), Dr. Hohann Beringer, was willing to theorize about any carved up rock that was planted at his digs. The wonderful Beringer's Stones included impressions of "Hebrew characters, [and] the figures of a winged dragon."

Religion and archaeology combine in interesting ways, leading to such phenomena as the discovery of Noah's Ark (reported on CBS), and the perpetual ballyhoo surrounding Shroud of Turin.
The Cardiff Giant

Don't get me started about the immense quality of bovinous excretion that has been piled higher than Mt. Ararat in an attempt to scientifically prove the account of divine creation from Hebrew mythology.

Joseph Smith was probably not the first person to invent an archaeology in order to found a religion, but his Book of Mormon takes the cake wherever cake is served, spawning a counter-hoax in the form of the Kinderhook Plates, and Ongoing attempts to shore it up with further pseudoarchaeology.

Religions have an honorable history of foisting off incredible nonsense on huge crowds of people by sheer force of authority. Check our our Great God Hoax pages for more.

The Shroud of Turin (detail)
A big round of applause to the folks at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, who created an exhibition called "The Centaur Excavations at Volos" that included a centaur skeleton that the exhibit claimed had been unearthed. But for more on invented creatures and monsters and aliens and such, check out our pages on Cryptozoology.

Learn more about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and other Literary Forgeries in our pages on that subject.

You might also be interested in checking our our pages on Pseudoscience, on Invented People and on Art Forgery.