Archæological Forgeries |
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"None of the experts who have scrutinized the specimens and the gravel
pit and its surroundings has doubted the genuineness of the discovery."
- William Gregory, in Natural History reporting on the Piltdown Man
There's really no big secret to Archæological Forgeries. What it comes down to is that if you dig up something that looks old and obscure, there's all sorts of things you can say about it that people will believe if you've got the trappings of authority (and sometimes even if you don't). 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, try this page, or this page, or this page, or this Yahoo! category for crying out loud). More sophisticated, but in the same vein, was the Piltdown Man. Fossils "discovered" in Britain, actually fabricated from a human braincase and a chimp jaw, were believed to support the then-current anthropological theories about the origin of the human species. The Piltdown Man was welcomed into the family tree of our species, and it took forty years to uncover the hoax and to start correcting the textbooks. The responsible party never confessed and remains unknown, although everyone seems to have a pet theory. (But have you heard the one about the Piltdown chicken?) The Vinland Map (which allegedly proves that the Norse had discovered America long before that Columbus fellow), the runeful Kensington Stone, and the plate of brass that places Sir Francis Drake on the Pacific coast of North America are a few fine examples of pickled relics. The Kelsey Museum of Archeology has put together a fine collection of fake phæronic antiquities in an exhibit called The Art of the Fake. Dr. Hohann Beringer had a feeling that God had made fossils just to use up extra creative energy (in opposition to the more accepted view nowadays, that they are the impressions of long-dead creatures). He was amusingly 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." And on that note, see also the fascinating fossils of Homo sapiens miniorientalis discovered by Chonosuke Okamura. When allegedly historical artifacts are also religious relics, you end up with such phenomena as the discovery of Noah's Ark (reported on American TV), and the perpetual ballyhoo surrounding the Shroud of Turin. Don't get me started about the mountain of bullshit that has been piled higher than Ararat in an attempt to 'scientifically' prove the version of divine creation from Hebrew mythology. It's not polite to make fun of the mentally ill, and its especially unwise when they outnumber you. Joseph Smith was probably not the first person to invent an archæology 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 the original story up with further pseudoarchæology. I'll try to start a big round of applause for 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 Cryptozoölogy. And you can learn more about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and other Literary Forgeries in our pages on that subject. |
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