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Archaeological Forgery
Archaeological forgery is the manufacture of supposedly ancient items that are sold to the antiquities market and may even end up in the collections of museums. It is related to art forgery. A string of archaeological forgeries have usually followed news of prominent archaeological excavations. Historically, famous excavations like those in Crete, the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and Pompeii have caused the appearance of a number of forgeries supposedly spirited away from the dig. Those have been usually presented in the open market but some have also ended up in museum collections and as objects of serious historical study. In recent times, forgeries of pre-Columbian pottery from South America have been very common. Other popular examples include Ancient Egyptian earthenware and supposed ancient Greek cheese. There have also been paleontological forgeries like the archaeoraptor or the Piltdown Man skull. Motivations Most archaeological forgeries are made for reasons similar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statuette Of A Seated Man
A figurine (a diminutive form of the word ''figure'') or statuette is a small, three-dimensional sculpture that represents a human, deity or animal, or, in practice, a pair or small group of them. Figurines have been made in many media, with clay, metal, wood, glass, and today plastic or resin the most significant. Ceramic figurines not made of porcelain are called terracottas in historical contexts. Figures with movable parts, allowing limbs to be posed, are more likely to be called dolls, mannequins, or action figures; or robots or automata, if they can move on their own. Figurines and miniatures are sometimes used in board games, such as chess, and tabletop role playing games. The main difference between a figurine and a statue is size. There is no agreed limit, but typically objects are called "figurines" up to a height of perhaps , though most types are less than high. Prehistory In China, there are extant Neolithic figurines. European prehistoric figurines of women, s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neutron Activation Analysis
Neutron activation analysis (NAA) is the nuclear process used for determining the concentrations of elements in many materials. NAA allows discrete sampling of elements as it disregards the chemical form of a sample, and focuses solely on atomic nuclei. The method is based on neutron activation and thus requires a source of neutrons. The sample is bombarded with neutrons, causing its constituent elements to form radioactive isotopes. The radioactive emissions and radioactive decay paths for each element have long been studied and determined. Using this information, it is possible to study spectra of the emissions of the radioactive sample, and determine the concentrations of the various elements within it. A particular advantage of this technique is that it does not destroy the sample, and thus has been used for the analysis of works of art and historical artifacts. NAA can also be used to determine the activity of a radioactive sample. If NAA is conducted directly on irradiat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Assyrian Sculpture
Assyrian sculpture is the sculpture of the ancient Assyrian states, especially the Neo-Assyrian Empire of 911 to 612 BC, which was centered around the city of Assur in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) which at its height, ruled over all of Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt, as well as portions of Anatolia, Arabia and modern-day Iran and Armenia. It forms a phase of the art of Mesopotamia, differing in particular because of its much greater use of stone and gypsum alabaster for large sculpture. Much the best-known works are the huge ''lamassu'' guarding entrance ways, and Assyrian palace reliefs on thin slabs of alabaster, which were originally painted, at least in part, and fixed on the wall all round the main rooms of palaces. Most of these are in museums in Europe or America, following a hectic period of excavations from 1842 to 1855, which took Assyrian art from being almost completely unknown to being the subject of several best-selling books, and imitated in political cartoons. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Celtic Art
Celtic art is associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic languages. Celtic art is a difficult term to define, covering a huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. A case has been made for artistic continuity in Europe from the Bronze Age, and indeed the preceding Neolithic age; however archaeologists generally use "Celtic" to refer to the culture of the European Iron Age from around 1000 BC onwards, until the conquest by the Roman Empire of most of the territory concerned, and art historians typically begin to talk about "Celtic art" only from the La Tène culture, La Tène period (broadly 5th to 1st centuries BC) onwards. Early Celtic art is another term used for this period, stretching in Britain to about 150 AD. The Early Medieval art of Britain ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient Rome
In modern historiography, ancient Rome refers to Roman civilisation from the founding of the city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdom (753–509 BC), Roman Republic (509–27 BC) and Roman Empire (27 BC–476 AD) until the fall of the western empire. Ancient Rome began as an Italic settlement, traditionally dated to 753 BC, beside the River Tiber in the Italian Peninsula. The settlement grew into the city and polity of Rome, and came to control its neighbours through a combination of treaties and military strength. It eventually dominated the Italian Peninsula, assimilated the Greek culture of southern Italy ( Magna Grecia) and the Etruscan culture and acquired an Empire that took in much of Europe and the lands and peoples surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. It was among the largest empires in the ancient world, with an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants, roughly 20% of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shaun Greenhalgh
Shaun Greenhalgh (born 1961) is a British artist and former art forger. Over a seventeen-year period, between 1989 and 2006, he produced a large number of forgeries. With the assistance of his brother and elderly parents, who fronted the sales side of the operation, he successfully sold his fakes internationally to museums, auction houses, and private buyers, accruing nearly £1 million. ''The Guardian'"How garden shed fakers fooled the art world" 16 November 2007. The family have been described by Scotland Yard as "possibly the most diverse forgery team in the world, ever". However, when they attempted to sell three Assyrian reliefs using the same provenance as they had previously, suspicions were finally raised. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London held an exhibition of Greenhalgh's works from 23 January to 7 February 2010. The Metropolitan Police's Art and Antiques Unit built a replica model of the shed where the works were created. Many of Greenhalgh's fakes, inclu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pre-Columbian Art
Pre-Columbian art refers to the visual arts of indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, North, Central, and South Americas from at least 13,000 BCE to the European conquests starting in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The Pre-Columbian era continued for a time after these in many places, or had a transitional phase afterwards. Many types of perishable artifacts that were no doubt once very common, such as woven textiles, typically have not been preserved, but Precolumbian monumental sculpture, metalwork in gold, pottery, and painting on ceramics, walls, and rocks have survived more frequently. The first Pre-Columbian art to be widely known in modern times was that of the empires flourishing at the time of European conquest, the Inca and Aztec, some of which was taken back to Europe intact. Gradually art of earlier civilizations that had already collapsed, especially Maya art and Olmec art, became widely known, mostly for their large stone sculpture. Many Pre-Columbian cul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brígido Lara
Brígido Lara (born 1939/40) is a Mexican artist and ex-forger of pre-Columbian antiques. Lara claims to have created perhaps as many as 40,000 pieces of forged pre-Columbian pottery. Brígido Lara began to create forgeries in the 1950s and 1960s. He created many items in the style of the Mayans, Aztecs and especially the lesser-known Totonacs – in fact to such an extent that the majority of purported Totonac artifacts may actually be of his creation. He worked in a museum, where he was acquainted with both original artifacts and potential customers. Lara sold his work as genuine Mexican antiquities; buyers did not ask many questions since they were buying contraband — taking antiquities out of Mexico is illegal. Some of the works were sold to the Morton D. May collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated AD 400–700 and attributed to the Remojadas culture in Veracruz. In 1971, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History presented a large exhibition en ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shinichi Fujimura
is a Japanese archaeologist who claimed he had found a large number of stone artifacts dating back to the Lower Paleolithic and Middle Paleolithic periods. These objects were later revealed to be forgeries. Success Fujimura was born in Kami, Miyagi, in 1950. After graduating from a high school in Sendai, he obtained a job in a manufacturing company. He became intrigued by archaeology when he was a child, finding shards of Jōmon pottery in the backyard of his house.''発掘捏造'', 毎日新聞旧石器遺跡取材班, 毎日新聞社, 2001. In 1972 Fujimura began to study archaeology and to look for Paleolithic artifacts during his holidays. Within the few years to follow, he rose to fame among amateur and academic archaeologists in Sendai by which he was appointed the head of the NGO group, ''Sekki Bunka Kenkyukai''(''石器文化硏究会'', literally translated to ''stone tool culture research association'') in 1975. Fujimura discovered and excavated many Paleolithic stone ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and transitioned into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. Population decline, counterurbanisation, the collapse of centralized authority, invasions, and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in late antiquity, continued into the Early Middle Ages. The large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East—most recently part of the Eastern Ro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Archaic Period In Classical Antiquity
Classical antiquity (also the classical era, classical period or classical age) is the period of cultural history between the 8th century BC and the 5th century AD centred on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome known as the Greco-Roman world. It is the period in which both Greek and Roman societies flourished and wielded huge influence throughout much of Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. Conventionally, it is taken to begin with the earliest-recorded Epic Greek poetry of Homer (8th–7th-century BC), and continues through the emergence of Christianity (1st century AD) and the fall of the Western Roman Empire (5th-century AD). It ends with the decline of classical culture during late antiquity (250–750), a period overlapping with the Early Middle Ages (600–1000). Such a wide span of history and territory covers many disparate cultures and periods. ''Classical antiquity'' may also refer to an idealized vi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alceo Dossena
Alceo Dossena (1878–1937) was an Italian sculptor. His dealers marketed his creations as originals by other sculptors. Biography Dossena was born in 1878 in Cremona, Italy. He was a talented stonemason and sculptor, and was so skilled at duplicating classical and medieval art, that his agent, Alfredo Fasoli sold his works as authentic antiques. Fasoli commissioned copies of Greek, Roman, medieval, and Renaissance sculptures, and of works by such artists as Giovanni Pisano, Simone Martini, and Donatello. Dossena was meagerly paid by Fasoli who made immense profit off of the copies he sold to museums and collectors. One of the fakes was a sculpted tomb attributed to Mino da Fiesole that was sold to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1928 Dossena discovered that some of his works were displayed in museum collections as original antiques, and that his dealers were keeping most of the profit for themselves. The artist was only paid the equivalent of $200 per sale. He exposed the rus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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