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Originally Posted by Wormius
Are you concerned that scholars are giving forgers ideas of how to counterfeit more authentically, or do they simply not have the tools to be able to evade detection? Or were the counterfeits done long ago when detection methods were primitive? I imagine with the amount of money behind this, they would be investing some money into forging better.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
This is always a concern. The physicist that I worked with in Germany was extremely reluctant to publish any of our findings because of of this. I tend to think that the publicity is a risk worth taking, mostly for the amount of exposure it creates for this issue...
As for the question of technology, I also tend to think that several of the errors I have observed are virtually impossible to avoid. The problem for the forger is that he or she needs to use ancient material, and while it is possible to acquire small bits of ancient leather—it would need to pass C-14 tests. (As a side note, that attention whore Joel Baden said on the documentary that it is easy to purchase ancient uninscribed parchment on e-Bay; this is simply not true. While it is the case for papyrus, parchment was much less common in antiquity, and thus, finding any uninscribed scraps is exceedingly difficult. This is why almost all of the modern forgeries are actually made from ancient leather, NOT parchment.) Ancient leather is already so badly damaged and deformed that it makes for a completely unforgiving writing surface. Close inspection of the fragments reveals rather unambiguously the application of ink to already ancient and damaged materials. At one point in the documentary I was attempting to show how ink appears on damaged edges or delaminated portions of the fragment. The scale I was working on was 400x magnification, using a Keyence VHX-6000 3D digital microscope. I maintain that producing convincing script on an ancient fragment that can pass for authentic at that scale is virtually impossible. It would require working in micrometres, but with ancient tools and materials.
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I wanted to say something more about this ...
While there is a risk in tipping our hand to the forgers in how to produce better fakes, the solution is abundantly simple.
In the first place, I think the exposure which raises awareness and hopefully by extension casts much more needed light on the scandalous antiquities markets, looting and fraud will reciprocally make it just that much more difficult for antiquities dealers to buy and sell artefacts. If the Greens have become the poster-boys for wasting millions of dollars on forged antiquities, I would think other potential buyers would think twice, and demand better documentation and transparency in their acquisitions.
This leads to a second point: Forgeries would be impossible to sell if the Isreali government would finally do the right thing and completely shut down the antiquities markets. Virtually all of the Dead Sea Scrolls in private collections are not provenanced. There is no record of their discovery, removal, and original sale. As part of my research project I have taken the opportunity to review records and receipts at the Museum of the Bible for dozens of their purchases, and many of these are laughably bad. Some amount to little more than a hand written record on the back of a napkin for million-dollar acquisitions. It is frighteningly stupid. If it were illegal to buy and sell antiquities, it would be nearly impossible for anyone to profit off of forgeries, and more importantly, this would in turn protect the integrity of archaeological sites, cultural heritage objects, and their contribution to our understanding of antiquity. When artefacts are removed illegally from archaeological digs, much of their scholarly value is significantly diminished, unrecoverable, and this is honestly the greatest tragedy in all of this.