petercampbell.bsky.social
Lecturer in archaeology, underwater explorer, unreliable narrator, future ghost
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Thanks Nigel!
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That’s very sad news
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I love a bad archaeology movie! I just rewatched Timeline (2003). This is going on the list.
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I don't know about archaeology, but in paleontology, it's not uncommon for peasant farmers to forge significant fossils (typically by carving new features into a fossil, or sticking two fossils together) for financial incentive.
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Approximately 1500 years old. Agreed- I’m concerned by the drill marks and weathering, but without closer inspection it is just speculation that it could be a modern metal drill bit.
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Yes this case is a great parallel! And I also had a reaction to the term “peasant” - as an archaeologist whose practice is all based around fishers and farmers, I’ve seen first hand their brilliant knowledge of landscape and history.
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Another case of a forgery made by "an ordinary peasant" (and sorry, but that kind of statement reeks of elitism) is the Kensington rune stone, made in the 19th C madina in the 19th in Minnesota by a Swedish immigrant:
www.raa.se/in-english/h...
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Good question - we don’t know for sure. The assumption comes from the fact that usually when a stone carver made the effort to prepare the surface of the stone and then carve the inscription, they would also dress the edges.
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I’m afraid there isn’t a review of motivations for forgery, so one would need to read individual cases. This recent book presents several such cases in a single volume, which makes for easier comparison- www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9789462...
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Its a fascinating case and lets hope it is in fact a previously unknown inscription. However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I wish our Georgian colleagues the best in this study- additional fragments from an in situ context would be the best way to authenticate the find.
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Heritage crime cases have shown time and again that financial incentive is not necessarily a concern in forgery cases (see Piltdown Man). Ordinary people make forgeries all the time for lots of reasons, see the Greenhalgh case. These claims are not reasons to authenticate this inscription.
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However, they discard this hypothesis based on five points, the primary one of which is "People who found the artifact are ordinary peasants, and it would be illogical to think of them as falsifiers. Their financial incentive was insignificant."
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Other features don't quite sit right with me with this inscription, but I will leave those aside at the moment. I would like to raise one more point: the paper's authors do consider whether this could be a forgery.
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In the case of the ostraca of Iruña-Veleia, really early Christian and Basque inscriptions were found on Roman ceramics at the site in Spain. They turned out to be regular Roman sherds which the criminal had added inscriptions onto. www.parallelports.org/publication/...
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Instead, all the letters fit neatly within the broken edges of the stone fragment, indicating the letters were added after the stone was broken. This is a common finding in cases of forgeries using old stones or ceramics and adding inscriptions.
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Take a look at artifact. This inscription is ostensibly part of a large stele which has evidently been broken into fragments and we are seeing one (middle) section. All the edges are broken and unfinished. Here is the problem - if this was a broken stele, some letters would be fragmentary.
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Anytime a major discovery such as this is made, it has to be assessed critically. I am not an archaeologist of the Caucasus but I have seen many fakes and forgeries. One of the biggest red flags in forgery can be seen here.
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It’s about as good a job as it gets.
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Your new book sounds brilliant!
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Congratulations!
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Yes precisely! Shipwrecks behave very similar to whale falls and it’s an analogy we teach.