When Charles "Chip" Stanish, director of UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, craves a good laugh over human folly, he knows it's just a mouse-click away, on EBay's crowded bazaar of ancient artifacts.
A reddish clay pot in the shape of a man's head pops onto the computer screen in his office beneath the campus' Fowler Museum. Stanish notes its wide-eyed, gape-mouthed face and tries to stifle a laugh, but there's no helping himself. The tousle-haired anthropologist, who researches ancient commerce and communal life in the mountainous Lake Titicaca region of Peru, is slain again.
"Look at this stupid face with the stupid grin," he says. "The teeth are ridiculous. The eyes are goofy. . . . It's something you'd find at the Lima airport," selling for a few bucks. On EBay, the seller is advertising it as a mint-condition artifact of Peru's Nazca culture -- a depiction of a warrior, possibly 2,000 years old. It's yours for $499.99, satisfaction backed with a "lifetime guarantee," as long as that lifetime expires within the 14-day window for returns. Customers have given this seller a satisfaction rating of nearly 100%.
"Oh, I have such a good time," Stanish says. "Sometimes I put it on my TV, and my friends and I have some glasses of wine and crack up."
A measure of relief
Their laughter is intensified by a sense of relief. When antiquities began sprouting on EBay shortly after the auction website's founding in 1995, Stanish says, archaeologists were "terrified, absolutely terrified," that demand for ancient loot would explode, sending more and more diggers swarming over unguarded ruins. They envisioned a pastime dominated by wealthy collectors and high-end dealers suddenly proliferating with Web-based equivalents of Wal-Mart. Many more buried clues to the ancient past would vanish, researchers feared, their surroundings damaged beyond anyone's ability to make sense of what remained.
"The great tragedy of looting is that somebody will come for one pot, and they'll destroy an entire building or burial [site]," Stanish says. "All this cultural information is lost, for one pot."
But a funny thing happened on the way to EBay's boom as a new forum for very old collectibles. Stanish says that contemporary inhabitants of ancient lands soon learned that many online antiquities shoppers were, shall we say, a tad lacking in connoisseurship, not to mention in basic consumer sense.
