Sunday, June 9, 2013

Can this Possibly be Real?

If I had to guess the date of this pot, I would say something like 1975. But according to liveauctioneers, this is Nazca, 100 to 500 CE, and they offer this citation:
Provenance: Ex-Platt and Friedenberg Collection, ex-Virginia Art Museum. Published by Hasso von Winning, photo 248 in Museum Catalogue.
And if you wanted to make a fake ancient artifact, wouldn't you make it look less like a 20th-century schoolroom mural? Or could it be a fake by a fiendishly clever faker who figured that since this looks so fake nobody would believe it was really a fake?

1 comment:

leif said...

things it has going for it:

• colors appear plausible
• shape is in the realm
• hair is in the correct style

some skeptical elements:

• color density is a bit much
• lacks the common 'whisker' element seen on many faces in pottery
• smiles? really? not an oval mouth? no phallus? only rarely are smiles depicted on nazca pottery

i wonder how it would hold up to C14 or other dating.