It is overwhelming to think of the volume of priceless artefacts and history-altering discoveries that have been brought out of the ground, not to mention the wealth of treasures that still lie beneath our feet. But the annals of archaeology are replete with examples of the experts being hoodwinked by tricksters and conmen looking to make money, a name for themselves, or maybe just a joke. Here, we explore some of the most infamous archaeological hoaxes in history.

Eoanthropus dawsoni, or ‘Dawson’s dawn man’ was the name given to the fossilised skull and jaw fragments announced at the Geological Society of London in December 1912. They belonged to a previously unknown species of early human that lived 500,000 years ago, and so provided the sought-after ‘missing link' in the evolutionary chain between apes and humans. The find had been made by an amateur archaeologist, Charles Dawson, on Piltdown Common, near Lewes in Sussex, and for four decades many in British palaeontology were happy to accept it. 

Only in 1953 did the truth of the so-called Piltdown Man come out. It was a fake, composed of the skull of a human from medieval times, the jaw of an orangutan and the filed-down teeth of a chimpanzee, all stained to look older. Exposing the hoax removed a stumbling block in evolutionary scientific research, but identifying its mastermind remained a mystery for years. Even Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became a suspect as he lived near Piltdown, before, in 2016, a review laid the blame on Dawson himself.

Excavations at Knossos, the palace complex on the Mediterranean island of Crete (and home to the minotaur of ancient Greek mythology), began in 1900 and continued for over three decades. Headed by British archaeologist Arthur Evans, the numerous digs drastically changed our understanding of the Minoan civilisation that flourished in the third and second millenniums BC. Among the many finds were faience (a type of ceramic) statuettes of bare-breasted women who appear to be wrangling snakes; Evans called them snake goddesses. They became icons of Minoan art and culture, but also the inspiration for a host of forgeries.

Existing snake goddesses that are thought to be fake include an ivory figure with gold serpents twisted around the arms, which is held by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and a stone version now in the Walters Museum in Baltimore. While there’s no question that the originals discovered in 1903 are genuine, they do raise an intriguing question. Evans became notorious for his heavy-handed restorations of artefacts, so could the most famous of the snake goddesses count as a forgery since he fabricated a whole new head for the statue?

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Constantine Samuel Rafinesque was a naturalist from the Ottoman empire who travelled the United States in the early 19th century and made valuable contributions to the study of nature, prehistory and Mesoamerican culture. Among his works was the translation of the Walam Olum, or Red Record, an alleged narrative of the Lenape (Delaware) Native American peoples on engraved and painted wooden tablets. It told of how the tribe crossed the frozen Bering Strait from Asia to America around 3,600 years ago.

Rafinesque conveniently misplaced the Lenape tablets but the record was preserved with the publication of his translation in The American Nations (1836), which helped the assertion that Native Americans had originated in Asia to persist throughout the century. The Walam Olum, however, is a hotchpotch of pictographic symbols, from the Delaware language to Egyptian and Mayan, and has been described as “puzzling and often incomprehensible” by Lenape people. It is thought Rafinesque devised it to bolster his reputation or, at least, his Asian migration theory.

It cost the Louvre in Paris the princely sum of 200,000 francs to acquire an 18cm (7-inch) high, golden tiara in 1896, believed to have been made as a gift from the ancient Greeks to the Scythian king Saitaphernes around the 3rd century BC. Elaborately decorated with scenes of daily life and adventures from the Iliad (an epic poem by Homer), the bell-shaped treasure remained in near-pristine condition. That really should have raised suspicions among the museum staff.

The tiara was actually just a year or two old, and the work of a master goldsmith named Israel Rouchomovsky based in Odesa, Ukraine. When commissioned by a pair of unscrupulous art-dealing brothers, Schapschelle and Leiba Hochmann, he thought he was making a present for someone who loved Greco-Scythian art, and so took extra care in the historical detail and accuracy. Instead, on hearing the news his creation was being masqueraded as a genuine artefact, he had to travel to France and let the Louvre know the bad news that they had purchased an expensive forgery.

Since runestones are icons of the Viking Age, there is no great surprise that they tend to be found in Scandinavia. Yet in 1898, a large slab of sandstone with runes engraved on its face turned up near the Minnesota town of Kensington. It was dug up, having been tangled in the roots of a tree, by a Swede, Olof Öhman. When translated, the runestone recorded an explorative journey by a group of Norwegians that went horribly wrong when 10 of the number were killed, or “red with blood and dead”.

Extraordinary ancient Egyptian finds from recent times

The Kensington Runestone has had its supporters (including the historian Hjalmar Holand), who claim that it proves the Vikings delved into mainland USA in medieval times, well over a century before the voyages of Christopher Columbus. When the inscription was sent to linguists, however, its veracity was quickly dismissed: the runes did not match those used in 1362, the date given on the stone. What’s more, the fact that it was discovered by a Scandinavian seemed too coincidental, leading many to point the finger at Öhman.

In museums from Britain to Italy to Turkey, there are genuine Roman-era sarcophagi carved on all sides with the 12 labours of the mythical Greek hero Hercules. However, the example unearthed in 1850 in Tarragona, Spain, by workers quarrying stone for a construction project at the nearby harbour, is not thought to be one of them. The marble sarcophagus depicted Hercules standing astride the Strait of Gibraltar (referring to the 10th labour, when he split a mountain in two).

The people depicted alongside Hercules were thought to have heralded from Egypt (due to the crocodiles and palms with them). The carvings, therefore, offered evidence that at the height of their pharaonic power the Egyptians came to ancient Iberia and colonised the land of modern-day Spain. This idea greatly appealed to Spanish nationalists, who celebrated the authenticity of the sarcophagus in spite of widespread belief that it was, in the words of one denouncement, a “childish parody”.

These ancient finds quite literally changed history

American geologist and Harvard professor Josiah Whitney claimed (correctly, it turned out) that humans lived alongside mastodons and mammoths, shortly before the discovery, in 1866, of a human skull that seemed to give him his proof. Found deep in a mine and beneath a hardened layer of lava in Calaveras County, California, the Calaveras Skull – which actually means ‘Skull Skull’ – was determined to come from the Pliocene epoch, well over two million years ago.

While Whitney convinced his successor at Harvard, Frederic War Putnam, stories of bones being planted by locals to fool gullible archaeologists soon swirled. Sure enough, analysis indicated that the skull was no older than a millennium. The writer Bret Harte penned a poem, To the Pliocene Man, mocking the hoax – the skull is asked to talk about the Pliocene times, only to respond: “Which my name is Bowers, and my crust was busted / Falling down a shaft in Calaveras County; / But I’d take it kindly if you’d send the pieces / Home to old Missouri!”

What was so significant about a small golden fibula (or cloak pin) dating from the 7th century BC and presented by the noted German archaeologist Wolfgang Helbig in 1886? Inscribed on the side were the words, “MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NUMASIOI”, which roughly meant that the clothing accessory had been made by someone named Manios for a Numasioi. This, according to Helbig, was the earliest-known example of Old Latin, and a clue to the development of languages in Italy. The fibula was reportedly acquired in 1871 in Palestrina, not far from Rome.

This, however, contradicted another claim that it was among the finds of the Bernardini tomb, which was not opened until 1876. Doubts over the fibula seemed to be confirmed when, in the 1980s, Italian ethnography expert Margherita Guarducci declared it to be a fake. Yet, in a surprising twist, analysis as recently as 2011 actually asserted its authenticity, thus redeeming Helbig’s reputation. Today, the Praeneste fibula is housed in Rome’s Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography.

Was it the headstone of a European settler? A reference to Pope Leo X? Or a link to Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León’s mythical quest to locate the fountain of youth? These were all proposed meanings of the strange inscriptions of a 128lb (58kg) oval stone unearthed in 1820. A farmer named Philo Cleveland found it near Pompey, New York, scrawled with a picture of a tree being climbed by a snake and the words “Leo De L on VI 1520” (at some point, this was changed to “1589”).

The given date suggests the Pompey Stone was carved in the 16th century, which would make it a tantalising piece of evidence of early European life in the Americas – if it was real. In 1894, the antiquarian William Martin Beauchamp debunked all the theories of its meaning, leading a man named John Edson Sweet to come forward and admit that his uncle and nephew made the enigmatic additions to the stone themselves “just to see what would come of it”.

Amazing archaeological finds discovered by amateurs

When workers digging a well in 1869 came across a 10-foot (3m) tall figure of a naked man made of stone, they’d have been forgiven for thinking it was a fallen statue. Instead, the news that spread was of a petrified prehistoric colossus; this was a time of religious fervour in the USA, and the find seemed to evidence the Genesis verse: "There were giants in the earth in those days". William Newell, owner of the land near Cardiff in New York, charged 50 cents to see it, and people came in droves.

Yet the truth was that the Cardiff Giant was indeed a statue. Businessman George Hull spent thousands to have a large block of gypsum carved (with himself as the model), treated with sulfuric acid to make it look suitably eroded, and buried on Newell’s farm, who was his relative. He meant it as a lesson about taking the Bible literally, as well as being a money maker. The hoax – which spawned a number of copies, including from circus showman PT Barnum – did not last long, with one palaeontologist declaring it unequivocally as “a most decided humbug”.

As well as his position as professor of medicine at the University of Würzburg, Dr Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer was an avid collector of anything retrieved from the earth. His interest was piqued in 1725 when he was shown unearthed chunks of limestone carved with the shapes of strange animals, which he concluded to be the petrified remains of real creatures. The fact that some stones bore words, including the Hebrew name of God, confirmed for Beringer that a divine presence was at work in these mysterious finds.

In total, he built a collection of some 2,000 of these stones and wrote a book about them, Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (1726). That was when he finally realised that he had been the victim of a prank. Fellow professor J Ignatz Roderick and university librarian Johann Georg von Eckhart had come up with the idea of making these Lügensteine, or ‘lying stones’, and burying them where they knew Beringer would look in the hopes of discrediting him. Although Beringer took them to court and won, his reputation never fully recovered.

During the late 19th and 20th centuries, a demand emerged for crystal skulls. Carved out of clear or coloured quartz, they were purported to be examples of craftmanship from Mesoamerican civilisations such as the Aztecs, and centuries old, if not millennia. In 1924, a woman named Anna Mitchell-Hedges claimed she discovered one in a Belize temple. Amidst a surge of interest in the pre-Colombian world at the time, museums and private collectors snapped them up, and they remain in the collections of institutions like the British Museum and Smithsonian.

Except, not a single crystal skull came from an archaeological dig. More damningly still, they bore tell-tale signs of contemporary jewellery-making tools, meaning they most likely originated in European workshops and were sold as fake artefacts by dealers, most notably the Frenchman Eugène Boban. The Mitchell-Hedges skull, for example, was bought at a Sotheby’s auction. Yet fascination in them remained undiminished to the point where they have been associated with supernatural powers, as explored in the Indiana Jones movie Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).

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