gems, jade, jadeite, fei cui, Mesoamerica, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Mayans, Olmecs, Aztecs, archaeology, history, archaeogemology, forensic science, gemology

This volume contains many of the papers presented at the Dumbarton Oaks conference on falsifications and misreconstructions of Pre-Columbian art, organized by Elizabeth P. Benson and held on October 14th and 15th, 1978. The purpose of the conference, and thus this volume, was to raise the issue of Pre-Columbian forgeries. A surprising number of falsified or largely reconstructed objects do exist in public and private collections and, in the case of architecture, in the public domain; many have been published in the literature as representative of Pre-Columbian artistic forms. The danger is that these recreations, unless identified as such, can distort our understanding of Pre-Columbian art and can lead to erroneous stylistic and iconographic interpretations. Thus the papers in this volume note the range of “antiquities” produced in relatively modern times, suggest why these were and still are being created, and show how such forgeries can be detected. In his 1964 article, “The Problem of Fakes in Pre-Columbian Art” (Curator 7: 19–32), Gordon Ekholm mentioned most of the published studies pertaining to Pre-Columbian forgeries. These studies need not be reviewed again here, but it is clear that the subject has been sparsely treated. Yet forgeries have a considerable time depth. Ekholm noted that fakes created as early as the 1820s in Mexico were of concern to such scholars as W. H. Holmes, Francisco Plancarte, and Leopoldo Batres near the turn of the century. Esther Pasztory, in this volume, discusses the Mexican falsifications of the nineteenth century in greater depth and argues strongly for a reappraisal of some well-known pieces acquired during this period. It would seem that one can no longer argue for the validity of an object solely because it has a known history of some 150 years.