Don’t Call Them Fakes: Museums, Markets, And Authenticity In Peruvian Antiquities Collections

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Global Archaeologies and Latin American Voices: Dialogues Transcending Colonizing Archaeologies", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

European ethnographic museums are riddled with Peruvian archaeological objects, many of them looted, gathered, commercialized and transported to Europe along with other plundered commodities. Among these collections, however, are plenty of artifacts of recent manufacture currently under different epistemological regimes. Some replicas were commissioned by collectors to populate their holdings with desired pieces, while others were commissioned by museums themselves for similar reasons. Other objets manufactured in the last quarter of the nineteenth century have been by and large classified as forgeries. In this paper, I focus on the latter subgroup, which I call neo-antiquities, and delve into their context of manufacture, their distribution across European museums, and the sources and challenges for investigating them. I underscore the importance of their study as it pertains to the implications for elucidating collectors’ desires and aesthetic views, and to understand how some museums have contended with the neo-antiquities among their holdings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Global Archaeologies and Latin American Voices: Dialogues Transcending Colonizing Archaeologies   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow