| Original Message: Re: Ancient North American double headed bird pendant |
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Here is the link for the publication I mentioned, entitled "Fake Bone Fetishes and Shamans [sic] Charms and How to Recognize Them".... http://snipurl.com/unelg Item number: 260563426197 "You are bidding on a fourteen-page guide to fake fetishes or shamans charms. The items pictured are all Indonesian carvings; commonly sold as Alaskan, Eskimo, cow, moose, elk, or buffalo bone carvings. includes: high quality photos of many fake Indonesian carvings a list of bead-dealers who import them eBay sources for bulk purchase in lots of 20-100 It is easy to tell whether the bone fetishes one sees are fakes; nearly all the figural bone or ivory fetishes commonly seen in live auctions, in antique shops and on eBay are fakes. These are fantasy items, originally produced for the bead trade; there are no genuine native items at all that look anything like these. Any item that looks like those pictured is a modern Indonesian import, not old or new Eskimo or Alaskan. All the items pictured can be found in the catalogs of the companies who import beading supplies. This small brochure explains how to recognize these common fakes by their incongruous style, and too-perfect condition; the incised lines which are obviously made with modern motorized tools. More importantly, items which appear in hundreds of copies cannot possibly be genuine Native American, Indian, Inuit, or Eskimo artifacts. If the same item appears in multiple copies, it is a forgery, even if someone has written a date or location on it; even if it is said to be 100 years old and from Lower Fort Garry. The carving of these items is now a cottage industry in Indonesia, with an annual production estimated in the tens of thousands of items. In 2005, the US Fish and Wildlife Service broke up an import/export crime ring; the crooks had been illegally obtaining marine ivory in the US, shipping it to Indonesia to be carved, and then importing it back into the US for sale. The confiscated inventory also included 10,000 otherwise-legal carvings made of Indonesian bone. The 10,000 pendants, whales, lances, otters, and so on, were auctioned off in September 2005. It is probably not a coincidence that large numbers of small carvings began to appear on eBay at about that time, sold by a whole rainbow of sellers. Those 10,000 items were probably not a stockpile of several years work; but likely represented just a few months production. The annual output is huge compared to the few real Native items available through excavation or purchase from old collections. These are the items one finds advertised as old Native or Eskimo artifacts; "1830's healing bone;" or "scrimshaw prayer bone." There is no known use or historical precedent for them; they were developed by the Indonesian carving industry to sell to gullible Americans. Needless to say, collections of old Eskimo items cannot possibly contain exact duplicates of common, modern Indonesian forgeries; and of course the supposed "native" items repeat the stylistic incongruities of the modern fakes. Nor do contemporary native carvers take their patterns from the Indonesians. There are sellers who make a habit of selling these carvings in deceptive ways. The fakes may have inscriptions dated from 1894 to 1925; they may be "collected" from widely separated places, even though identical in design. This would clearly be impossible if the items were genuine. They include all the favorite imports: the whales, fish, bears, totems, gaming pieces. It is hard to imagine that these sellers harbor any delusion that these items are genuine. They themselves have sold dozens of exact duplicates; and even a neophyte knows that real items do not appear in duplicates. Some sellers spin wonderful stories about how the items have been authenticated by a museum, or came from a dealer's stock of 100-year old carvings. They do not explain why the items look just like those in the import catalogs, or why they are all identical, undamaged, and show modern tool-marks.
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