He had abused his authority to achieve greater recognition. Schliemann was lionised by the civilised world. Also a great deal of national prestige is attached to archaeological discoveries. The value of relics like works of art is estimated in financial as well as cultural terms. One of these factors is of course the market. His activity shows how significant external factors are in producing the authenticity of a relic. Schliemann forged authentication and invented a context. The parts were genuine but the whole was fictional. Schliemann's treasure of Troy was not what it appeared to be. This revelation opens up the whole question of unreliable memoirs, and of the complicity of biographers who fail to check information in the proper way. Schliemann even inserted the fictitious tale of discovery into his own diary. The treasure was a forgery because its provenance was false. Some of them probably came from the site of excavation, others were from other sites or even bought from dealers. Most of the treasure was genuine in the sense of being genuinely old.

The complexion of this forgery is very interesting. Not only had Schliemann not uncovered Priam's fabled city (but a much earlier one)but it has recently been revealed that Schliemann's discovery of the fabulous treasure which became world famous was a hoax. This incident is particularly ironic for our purposes. There were major discoveries, the most famous being Heinrich Schliemann's supposed discovery of Homer's Troy in 1873. There were no archaeological fakes in the eighteenth century because the discipline had not become a central cultural activity. In doing so the forgeries laid bare the processes of evaluation and judgement concerning 'genuine' art that might not otherwise have been subjected to scrutiny.Īrchaeological forgery is a tangible form of historical fiction. Most of the literary forgers of the eighteenth century were producers of historical fiction which evolved from and satisfied many of the needs of contemporary literary-historical inquiry. The word 'monument' covered literary as well as concrete relics: ancient manuscripts as well as time-encrusted artefacts and human remains. The discipline emerged in the eighteenth century as part of the historiographical revolution seeking truly authentic modes of access into history.

Archaeology is the study of remnants and artefacts of the past. Sir Arthur Keith, A New Theory of Human Evolution (1948) If we are convinced that evolution is the true method of creation and that man and anthropoid ape have been evolved from a common ancestry, what is more probable than that we should find early human forms in which anthropoid and human features are combines? Archaeological Forgery and Fictions of the First Human

The missing link human evolution