Archaeologists worry a lot about looting. Artifacts stolen from historical sites fetch high prices on the black market, which gives looters strong incentives to steal these items.
The emergence of eBay, therefore, was a nightmare for those who hated looting. Reducing transaction costs and making the market more liquid would certainly lead to more looting. EBay almost certainly had that effect in other markets, I suspect, like baseball cards and Beanie Babies.
So of course it would happen in antiquities as well, wouldn’t it?
Apparently, eBay had exactly the opposite effect on looting. It seems to have reduced it, or at least that is what this fascinating article from Archeology argues. The reason: whatever impact eBay had on the market for antiquities, it had an even bigger impact on the market for forged antiquities! The crush of faked artifacts had a sort of “lemons” effect on the illegal antiquities trade, with low-quality items driving out high-quality items. In addition, the bigger market gave forgers a stronger incentive to invest in high-quality fakes, to the point where now experts can have a hard time identifying the fakes. For instance, the author of the Archeology piece, Charles Stanish, writes:
In an antiquities store in La Paz, I recently saw about four shelves of supposed Tiwanaku (ca. A.D. 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. My mistake is an instance of what San Francisco State University archaeologist Karen Olsen Bruhns has identified as a very real problem — the experts who study the objects are sometimes being trained on fakes. As a result, they may authenticate pieces that are not real.
Even if you are not interested in antiquities, I suspect you will find this piece fascinating reading.
(Hat tip: Larry Rothfield, who has a new book entitled The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum)
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Who cares if it is fake if you can’t tell the difference?
#1:
Answer:
The museum endowment paying $15,000 for a 500a.d. pottery bowl that was realy made last year and only worth the $150 of materials and labor put into it by the forger. It also distorts historical checking of say carbon dating.
I remember some historian interested in Roman era pottery writing about finding similar pottery pieces in a excavation in London to pieces from one somewhere in Italy- down to even the way a handle to jug joint was formed. His premise was that, while he couldn’t prove it, that the same person had formed both handles.
Watch the “Antiques Roadshow” sometimes and you will see why people want to forge pots, vases, etc when you see a vase valued at $30,000 to $50,000. And this for a piece less than 150 years old…
what?!- you mean that tuttenkhamen gold shroud i just bought for $129.99 is fake?- o wait… anybody want a used but authentic tuttenkhamen solid gold shroud?- bidding starts at 130
I remember reading someone suggesting (it may have been on this site) that the most cost-effective solution for African nations (and activist groups) interested in saving rhinos and elephants from poaching would be to invest in mass producing high-quality fake ivory.
Even 3 year olds prefer items that are authentic to perfect duplicates of those items. This seems to be a natural instinct.
See Hood & Bloom (2008):
http://www.yale.edu/minddevlab/papers/hood&bloom.pdf
As an archaeologist (although I don’t do artefacts, I do tephrochronology), I have to agree with #2 when he/she mentions the dating. Although radiocarbon dating is unlikely in the case of an artefact (can only be done on things with preserved organic matter, like bones, plants, seeds, etc), there are a number of other interesting things that could be done with it. It could be dated in other ways, it could have its material and glazing analysed to reveal its origins and manufacture, and any other residue, chemical or organic, could be analysed to determine use and place within the economy or spiritual life of the people who made it.
Essentially, the difference between a good forgery and the real thing is the difference between whether you just want a nice piece of art with no meaning behind it beyond evidence of a culture that promotes forgery, or whether you are genuinely interested in the context of the past lives that created an item.
If you do just want it for the art, though, then please do buy the forgeries, so we can get the real things into our labs!
That’s kind of the EBay problem writ large, no?
Then why can’t I find a nice fake Louis XV cartel?