'Ancient' artifacts, cyber scams

Stanish doesn't claim that EBay's dilution as a marketplace for real ancient artifacts spells doom for the antiquities trade. But he's hopeful that forgeries, having already fooled what he considers an "embarrassingly high" number of museums, will grow increasingly widespread and effective. Using indigenous soils and stone can defeat scientific tests used to suss out fakes, he says, and he's betting that confusion from a proliferation of well-wrought fakes can put a real dent in the antiquities market.

However, at least one sympathetic expert has doubts. New York City archaeologist Oscar White Muscarella, author of "The Lie Became Great," a book on forgeries from the ancient Near East, is an acerbic foe of the antiquities trade, but he doesn't buy Stanish's thesis that the existence of more and better fakes means less looting. "The guy who has money and a lust for antiquities is going to buy them," Muscarella says. "What's going to decrease plundering is not forgeries, it's only if governments take more action."

Jerome M. Eisenberg, an antiquities dealer since 1954, says his Royal Athena Galleries in New York is not hurting, with annual sales in the tens of millions of dollars, including an Internet trade that has "increased exponentially" over the past few years. Stanish is right about what's happening on EBay, says Eisenberg, who also enjoys watching "just for fun" to see how people are getting fleeced. "But anybody with a decent amount of intelligence isn't going to buy on EBay unless they know who they're dealing with."

He is unconcerned by all the brouhaha over museums having to repatriate looted relics, or being caught with forgeries in their collections -- Berlin's famed bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti being the latest to have its authenticity challenged.

"All it does is bring people's notice to the fact you can buy ancient art," Eisenberg says. "All the discussion of the antiquities trade only has succeeded in making it grow."

--

mike.boehm@latimes.com