The earliest imitations of Aztec pottery were commissioned in the mid-16th century by Spanish administrators to satisfy increasing demand for such curiosities in their homeland. They are a mixture of native symbols and European designs in grotesque forms, such as jars with whistles around the rim, or clarinet-like flutes in the shape of a crocodile. With the opening of its borders after Independence, Mexico became a popular destination for European and North American travelers, including Alexander von Humboldt, John Stephens, and Frederick Catherwood, whose published accounts of their exploits encouraged others to explore the Middle American nations and collect artifacts for their curio cabinets, thereby creating a burgeoning market for forgeries. By the late 1820s forgery workshops on Tlatelolco Street in Mexico City were creating black wares that were sold, as authentic, to the tourists at Teotihuacan. These workshops remained in production at least to the 1890s. In the early 20th century, Batres found the Barrios Brothers operating a successful forgery workshop at San Juan Teotihuacan near the archaeological site. Today, similarly crude and fanciful wares continue to be hawked at Teotihuacan and at tourist shops around Mexico City....
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Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica: Forgeries
Nancy L. Kelker
Article
Pre-Columbian South America: Forgeries
Nancy L. Kelker
See also Pre-Columbian South America
Accounts in the colonial histories of the Andes make few mentions of the creation of faked artifacts for the Spanish market. Yet there are abundant examples of Inka-style wooden keros (drinking cups) manufactured during the 16th century that have found their way into museum collections in Europe and the Americas. Although anecdotal evidence, the widespread looting of archaeological sites during the Viceregal period, including the almost entire destruction of the Huaca del Sol at Moche, does suggest that there was an early demand for antiquities. Collector interest was further stimulated by the published accounts of scientific expeditions to the Andes such as those of Alexander von Humboldt (1801–1803), and later Squier (1877). By the second half of the 19th century, Andean forgery workshops were doing a booming business. In 1886, William Henry Holmes remarked on the flood of spurious antiquities coming into the United States at that time, “Peru is hardly less fully represented [than Mexico], as the factories in that country have been at work for a number of years” (...
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Restitution
Noémie Goldman and Kim Oosterlinck
Term for the return of lost or looted cultural objects to their country of origin, former owners, or their heirs. The loss of the object may happen in a variety of contexts (armed conflicts, war, colonialism, imperialism, or genocide), and the nature of the looted cultural objects may also vary, ranging from artworks, such as paintings and sculptures, to human remains, books, manuscripts, and religious artifacts. An essential part of the process of restitution is the seemingly unavoidable conflict around the transfer of the objects in question from the current to the former owners. Ownership disputes of this nature raise legal, ethical, and diplomatic issues. The heightened tensions in the process arise because the looting of cultural objects challenges, if not breaks down, relationships between peoples, territories, cultures, and heritages.
The history of plundering and art imperialism may be traced back to ancient times. Looting has been documented in many instances from the sack by the Romans of the Etruscan city of Veii in ...
