Charles Stanish, Director, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA Faking the Ancient Andes is a call for anyone associated with ancient art to refrain from actively encouraging the wholesale destruction of the world's artistic heritage.
This is an important book that should be read by anyone concerned with our cultural heritage. The authors have brought together an impressive array of first hand evidence showing how the ever-growing number of forgeries has not only distorted the unethical antiquities market, but is also distorting our view of history. Fakes and are even illustrated in our textbooks. The reality is that forgeries of antiquities are found throughout the legal and illicit marketplace, in private collections, and in museum collections. This is a lively and engaging book that takes on a theme that many people wish to ignore. A parallel volume by the same authors discusses fakes in Mesoamerican archaeology. This is an important accessible introduction to pre-Columbian art fraud for archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals alike. Unique to this volume are biographies of several of the forgers, who describe their craft and how they are able to effectively fool connoisseurs and specialists. More important, they describe the system whereby these objects get made, purchased, authenticated, and placed in major museums as well as the complicity of forgers, dealers, curators, and collectors in this system. They discuss the most commonly forged classes and styles of artifacts, many of which were being duplicated as early as the 19th century. Authors Karen Bruhns and Nancy Kelker examine the phenomenon in this eye-opening volume. Fakes and forgeries run rampant in the Andean art collections of international museums and private individuals. Nasca pots, Quimbaya figurines, Moche porn figures, stone shamans.
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