Mistakes and Fraud in Some Archaeological Finds It’s amazing how many articles I find where people write about something they don’t understand. For example, an article appeared the other day in which the author said scientists found the mummy of a cat, which had been created by the Egyptians and it had surprised archaeologists because when they studied it, they found it was pieces of cats not one whole cat. Egyptian history shows that people would buy mummies of animals to sacrifice to the gods and sometimes people who couldn’t afford the real thing and the creators of the mummies would only put in a piece of the animal. This was quite acceptable at the time. I guess we would consider it a sort of poor man’s offering. The same was true of mummification. There was three different levels, not all mummification was the same, it depended upon who you were and how much money you had. This makes me wonder how many archaeological finds there are which are misunderstood? Just because an expert tells us what he believes about an archaeological find doesn’t always mean that person is correct. All one has to do is go back to the time when the Museum of Natural History had the wrong heads on some of the dinosaurs. Mistakes are made and in science of any kind we learn by these mistakes. No one should be overly sure of something which can have several different meanings. Sometimes archaeological data is said to be a certain way when it is not and this is done on purpose. You may wonder what I am talking about. The Nazis in the second world war twisted archaeology to prove they were the pure race. They sent archaeological expeditions around the world measured heads, and such and tried to convince the world the Aryan race was the purest race and they were all descended from it. The Aryans were supposedly people of Indo European heritage. As a matter of fact, ancient Aryans was said to have settled in Iran in prehistoric times and also settled in the Indian subcontinent. Over the years the concept was changed. Today many scholars reject the idea there was an Aryan race. It is almost impossible for any of us to turn on the television and look at a program about ancient people without the discussion of lay lines coming up. We are told lay lines are areas on the earth that contain some sort of power. If I had a nickel for every time I was told this, I would be a rich man by now, but the idea of lay lines was not lines of power originally. The term was invented by Alfred Watkins who called them Neolithic pathways. Nobody has ever been able to show the power they are talking about. Could it be there are the reasons for building things in straight lines? All of us know the ancients didn’t just line things up without a reason. They were very concerned about the heavens, magic, their religions and other things we may not know about yet. To jump to the conclusion they knew something about a powerful force we know nothing about is a bit of a jump. Sometimes complete stories are made up about an archaeological find when there is no evidence to support them. There is also the problem that forgeries can fool well-intentioned archaeologists as was the case with the find of an ossuary. An ossuary is a box which usually contains human bones, a sort of a coffin. In 2002 one was discovered in Israel which was said to be the ossuary of Jesus. A very big deal was made about this and some said it was really his brother James. Well it turned out it was a modern forgery which was made to look old. It is one thing to fool us, but another to fool a group of archaeologists. It must have been a very good forgery. In a way this reminds me of eBay. Many people have said there are a lot of forgeries there but they would only fool us common people. One geologist really had egg on his face. The year was 1866 and miners in California claimed to have found a human skull which was buried beneath lava. A geologist got a whole of it and proclaim to the whole world this proved humans, mastodons and elephants all existed at the same time. The skull was then sent to Harvard University for testing and it was found the skull was of recent origin. At that point the miners admitted to playing a hoax. Even famous institutions can be fooled. One would think it would be very hard to fool the Louvre with a piece of art and while that may be true, in 1896 they were completely hoodwinked. An object known as the Tiara of Saitaphernes was bought by the Louvre. They thought they had gotten a great treasure which had belonged to a Scythian King named Saitaphernes. Experts had looked the object over and stated that it was made somewhere between the third and second century BC. It turned out the object was new and had just been manufactured by a goldsmith. This may be hard to believe but there is a category called archaeological fraud. That is when archaeologists fake evidence, usually to make themselves famous. One story relates to the fact of funding. An archaeologist was under a lot of pressure from the people who are funding his dig. The pressure kept mounting until it got to the point where the archaeologist was afraid the funding would stop. Suddenly the archaeologist announced a big find of pottery shards bearing graffiti from the third century. The dig was taking place in a Roman town. The archaeologist said he had found the earliest records of written Basque language. After that he announced he had found more shards and these had ancient Egyptian language on them and some even had the name of Nefertiti on them. Scientists began to notice there was problems with the form of the language and it was too modern for the period. The government decided to investigate and 26 experts were assigned. They looked at the evidence for over a year and finally came out with the fact these were a fraud. Some archaeologists who were involved said the inscriptions were found in the lab not in the dig, which many think means they later added shards. It just goes to show one can never be 100% certain of anything and even an expert can make a mistake and this certainly doesn’t mean fraud although this has happened in the past.
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