eBay Archaeology
In a recent interview with Heritage Key, Royal Ontario Museum curator Paul Denis spelled out why buying antiquities off the internet is a bad idea.
“A lot of scam artists put things on for sale, but all you see is a picture, you’re not really seeing the real object. You don’t know what you’re buying. They could have a picture of a real object. When you get it in the mail, or when it’s delivered to you, it could be a total forgery.”
He should know. Denis has been with the ROM since 1981, working in the Greek, Roman, Etruscan and Byzantine galleries. He is also the curator for Fakes & Forgeries Yesterday and Today, an exhibit opening in January.
He's not the only one saying that buying off the internet is risky.
In a piece in Archaeology, back in May, UCLA professor Charles Stanish went a step further and said that the proliferation of fakes on ebay is so great, it has actually pushed down the value of the real thing. “A very curious thing has happened. It appears that electronic buying and selling has actually hurt the antiquities trade,” he said.
He says that workshops have gotten very good at producing fakes, making it hard to tell them apart from authentic pieces.
“In the first years of eBay, I observed about a 50-50 real-to-fake ratio in Andean artifacts. About five years ago, my informal assessment was that about 95 percent were obvious fakes and the rest were real or dubious. This was the period when the workshops first went into high gear; the market was flooded with low-end junk. Now, the workshops are producing much higher-quality fakes, increasing the category of ambiguous objects now available.”
Now, before we go further I want to say one thing. I believe that buying antiquities for a private collection is generally a bad thing. Artefacts acquired before the advent of antiquities laws were often obtained outside of proper excavation. Professional archaeologists do not “sell” artefacts, they store them away in labs and storehouses, or put them on display in museums.
eBay Guidelines to Sellers
Despite the reported proliferation of fakes on the site, and the ethical issues to artefacts being sold, ebay still allows these items to be auctioned off on their website – under certain guidelines.
I spent some time on the website’s American portal (ebay.com) to get a sense of what their policies are.
My favorite guideline has to be that for human remains:
"We don't allow humans, the human body, or any human body parts or products to be listed on eBay, with two exceptions. Sellers can list items containing human scalp hair, and skulls and skeletons intended for medical use.”
“We don't allow humans, the human body, or any human body parts or products to be listed on eBay, with two exceptions. Sellers can list items containing human scalp hair, and skulls and skeletons intended for medical use.”
Now, this is ridiculous. I simply cannot imagine any credible research institute allowing human remains, donated for medical purposes, to be sold on ebay.
I remember a Physical Anthropology class that I took at the University of Toronto where we worked with human skeletons. We were told that if we showed any disrespect to these remains we would be removed from the course.
Somehow I think hawking a skeleton on ebay would be considered disrespectful, to say the least.
Getting back to antiquities eBay has restrictions on these as well:
"Antiquities," are defined (by the website) as being "items of cultural significance and can come from anywhere in the world," the restrictions are:
- Items have to be authentic.
- Sellers have to include either a photo or a scanned image of an official document that clearly shows both the item's country of origin and the legal details of the sale (it has to be approved for import or export).
Now, here is where it gets confusing.
Below "antiquities" there is a set of guidelines for "artifacts, fossils and relics." The restrictions for these are not as tough saying that, “the item has to match the time-period category that it's listed... if the item has been reworked or modernized in any way, this information has to be called out and fully described in the listing.”
So which criteria does an object have to meet? Is it the first one that requires a document? Or is it the second that is looser?
It's not clear to me - and I don't see how it would be clear to a potential seller.
I spent some time going through the website's Egyptian section and was hard pressed to find any that had an official document posted - so it seems as if people are going for the latter.
The website does draw a line in the sand when it comes to a few areas. It bans sale of objects from gravesites. It also bans objects found in federal or state public land.
It also has a ban on some Native American artefacts, including all those found on Native American land. It also bans “items from Native American or Native Hawaiian grave sites,” including funerary objects “placed with the dead,” grave markers and human remains. It also bans the sale of “sacred items used by Native American religious leaders in ceremonial practices,” such as ceremonial masks and prayer sticks.
So there we have it - the moral of this story? Don’t buy artefacts off the internet, or better yet, don’t buy them at all – save your money and get a museum membership instead.
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