Separating the pretend from the Pre-Columbian

Most museums have fakes in their collections. This is a reality to which they don’t want to bring attention. Jane MacLaren Walsh, however, loves to turn the material legacy of the past over and over in her strong hands. As an art detective, it’s both her research and her reverie.

She fingers a tube of jade as narrow as a soda straw and wonders about its maker, an artist who worked some 3,500 years ago. Then she thinks of the other craftsmen who, roughly 200 years ago, created forgeries of such antiquities so convincing that today they nestle in the world’s finest museums.

Walsh sits in a sunny office at the National Museum of Natural History and wonders if the next wonderful piece of allegedly pre-Columbian art that comes through the door will be real or fake. Beneath her soft silver hair is skin reddened by the sun of Mexico, where she has just been examining the bounty from a dig.

An anthropologist with the Smithsonian for 35 years, Walsh finds a certain joy in being stumped and a delicious satisfaction in spotting a forgery.

It’s not easy to find certifiably genuine objects to judge others against. But Walsh and other sleuths have three pre-Columbian collections they regard as beyond reproach.

The Museo del Templo Mayor in Mexico City has the results of an accidental discovery in the 1970s of an ancient Aztec temple; the artifacts represent the last period of pre-Columbian art, about AD 700 to 1500. The British Museum has a collection of Mayan jades dating from AD 100 to 900. And the Smithsonian has holdings from an Olmec site at La Venta, Mexico, where anthropologist Matthew Williams Stirling, working from 1938 to 1946, found a cache dated from 900 to 200 BC.

“They were selected because they are documented. They came from controlled scientific excavations,” Walsh says

She is creating a database meant to guide those trying to spot fraudulent antiquities. After studying the holes and markings on genuine items in the three museums, she examines suspect artifacts with advanced scanners for the telltale marks of relatively modern equipment.

“In excavations you don’t find the tools because [the figures] were offerings to the gods,” Walsh says. The workshop where they were made was somewhere else. So the indoor anthropologist has to ask hundreds of questions as she turns over an object.

“What did they use to make that hole?” she says, looking at an Olmec ear ornament dated from 900 to 400 BC. Could the ancient craftsmen have used bamboo? Or cactus thorns or small bones or flint or quartz?

What complicates the search for authenticity is that some of the forgeries are also antiques.

“Fakes have been made, I think, since early in the 1800s. Some people think they begin even earlier. After the wars of independence starting in 1810, all of Mexico was opened up to travelers from Europe and America,” she explains. “So when lots of travelers came in, they were fascinated by the presence of ruins and wanted to take home souvenirs. They created a demand, and, as usual, somebody else created a supply.”

Walsh’s interest in Mesoamerican archeology was kindled when her father’s foreign service career took the family to Mexico. In high school, she often visited the museum that was formerly the home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. There she fell in love with its paintings, folk art and antiquities. She earned her degrees from the University of the Americas in Mexico City and later got a PhD from Catholic University here.

“The beauty of the collections is that they are like libraries, they tell you so much,” Walsh says. At the National Museum of Natural History, which has the largest scientific staff of any museum in the world, the collections yielded plenty of authentic examples she could use to debunk frauds.

She uses all sorts of equipment in her detective work. An Apple computer in her office is where she can manipulate high-resolution images. Many of these come from the museum’s labs, which are equipped with CT scanners, X-ray machines and scanning electron microscopes.

But advanced technology goes only so far: She has also created tools using materials available to ancient artisans.

Walsh picks up a piece of obsidian, shiny and sharp, and shows how it might have been used. “This volcanic glass is the fifth hardest mineral there is,” she says. A fake, by contrast, often shows evidence of a hard metal tool. “With modern tools, you get these regular, clean lines, very sharp, very narrow. If you see impressions left by a tool that didn’t exist” at the time, she says, “you know it is a fake.” A high polish may also signal the use of modern tools.

“Of all the documented Olmec jades that I’ve looked at, I haven’t seen evidence of hollow drills yet,” Walsh says, pointing out that the jades were probably drilled with a solid pointed stone. Later, after the Olmec period, other cultures used bird bones and reeds for hollow drills.

And there Walsh stops. “I don’t want the fakers to know what to avoid,” she says.

Tracking how ancient carvers worked has led Walsh down some curious trails, including experimenting with a mouse bone as a drill bit. It “worked very well. The mouse had tough small bones, and I used it to drill with sand,” she says. She also tried rabbit bones she took home from a dinner out. And there was a duck, eaten for dinner, its bones then donated to science.

“It worked pretty well as a drill. Ducks and rabbits and mice all would have been available to pre-Columbian peoples, and since they would have used what they could find, I tried to use what I could find too,” Walsh says. Once the bones are cleaned and sharpened, she goes to the museum’s mineralogy department and with a colleague runs tests using mechanical drills that more or less duplicate the motion of an ancient hand drill.

“He runs them at a relatively slow speed to simulate a bow or hand drill. Using quartz sand we see how long it takes to drill into some samples of jade and jadeite,” says Walsh.

Some cases are clear-cut: She was certain about a purported Aztec crystal skull. One arrived at the Smithsonian in 1992 from an anonymous donor. The alarm bells went off, since Walsh knew that New Age practitioners affirmed the powers of these objects and people were creating them to serve a special market.

Had they ever really existed?

“It was a class of artifact never dug up,” she says. Working with the British Museum, she created a test with molds of the lines and drill holes. Under the microscope, her first inkling was verified.

“One of the things that was obvious about the crystal skulls was that the carving was done by a wheel, or a rotary saw. No pre-Columbian carver had such a tool,” Walsh says. She investigated how the crystal skulls had made their way into the British Museum and the Musee de l’Homme in Paris. The same dealer had sold both, and they had originated in Germany.

More often, she finds pieces she is 90% sure are counterfeit but is reluctant to render a verdict until she’s finally completed her database. In this way she hopes she will someday be able to offer other art sleuths an authentic road map to fakes.