Forging Ahead by Charles Stanish.
A little over a decade ago, archaeologists experienced a collective nightmare--the emergence of eBay, the Internet auction site that, among other things, lets people sell looted artifacts. The black market for antiquities has existed for centuries, of course, with devastating consequences for the world's cultural heritage. But we could at least take some comfort that it was largely confined to either high-end dealers on one end of the economic spectrum or rural flea markets on the other. The sheer physical constraints of transporting and selling illegal artifacts kept the market relatively small. But the rise of online auction sites promised to drastically alter the landscape. And so it did, just not in the dire way we had anticipated. Even more remarkable than the growing demand for cheap fakes is the fact that the low-end market phenomenon is actually distorting the mid-range and lower high-end markets as well. Again, this seems counterintuitive. How could the selling of bad fakes and tacky tourist art as inexpensive antiquities distort the higher-end markets? Surely the sophisticated high-end buyers would not be affected by the rubes who pay $223 (plus $30 shipping from Lima) for a "genuine pre-Columbian Moche III Fineline" piece (which, by the way, can also be bought for $15 from the woman selling pottery outside the tourist buses in the Peruvian city of Trujillo). But the high-enders are indeed affected. It was only a matter of time before a few workshops producing the cheap fakes started turning out reproductions that can fool even supposed experts like me. A number of these workshops have swamped the higher-end market with beautiful pieces that require intensive study by specialists and high-cost tests to authenticate. This manufacturing business never could have developed on such a scale without the Internet, and these forgers have forever transformed the antiquities market into something that we could not have imagined just a decade ago. more... http://www.archaeology.org/0905/etc/insider.html _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
