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There's a concept called "provenance" which is basically "how sure are we that it's authentic". What work like this is doing is comparing scrolls with uncertain
by AlotOfReading 4y ago
There's a concept called "provenance" which is basically "how sure are we that it's authentic". What work like this is doing is comparing scrolls with uncertain provenance to items of very secure provenance like known fragments from the original excavations.
You can find forgeries everywhere in the antiquities trade. Some of them are modern productions, but many (see all pieces of the true cross in churches around the world) are old enough to be historical artifacts in their own right. One of the things that makes it difficult to know if objects of uncertain provenance are legitimate is that it's very common for locals to find materials missed / never seen by archaeologists or to simply loot from excavations in-progress. The dead sea scrolls were found over decades by many different groups, so they're particularly susceptible to this. Forgers take advantage of that. Good forgeries can fool even scrupulous buyers and are mainly given away by things like incorrect radiocarbon dates or the forger's unfamiliarity with the details of the source material like the article.
- wl 4y agoNot quite. Provenance is the story of how an object came from the ground to wherever it is now. The question of authentication is larger than provenance. If there's good documentation showing the object originally came from an archeological excavation, that's a point towards authenticity. If the alleged provenance starts with an unnamed antiquities dealer by way of an anonymous Swiss collector, that doesn't help one way or another with the authenticity question.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoYou're strictly correct, but I made some simplifications that I think are appropriate and avoid the whole semantic mess of what "authenticity" means. Secure provenance is usually a sufficient condition to establish authenticity for archaeologists anyway.
- wl 4y agoThe problem with that oversimplification is that provenance is much bigger than authentication and authentication is much bigger than provenance. Sure, some of the work overlaps, but they're distinct. When provenance research shows up in the media, it's usually in the form of identifying looted material culture and repatriating it. There's also the issue of objects that are almost certainly authentic and legally exported, but the provenance doesn't go back to the archeological context ("provenience" [sic]) and that lack of provenance limits the archeological value of these objects.
- moloch-hai 4y agoOversimplification is its own sort of forgery.
- hef19898 4y agoAnd then you have contemporay (foregries produced around the same time the originals were) forgeries. Which is a different class of forgeries than modern ones.