Maine Archaeology Month Lecture to Focus on Fake Artifacts
Contact: Gretchen Faulkner, (207) 581-1904
ORONO — The Hudson Museum will host a free, public lecture by Karen Olsen Bruhns, one of the leading authorities on Pre-Columbian fake artifacts from Mesoamerica and the South American Andes, Thursday, Oct. 14 at 7 p.m.
Bruhns is director of the Cihuatan/Las Marias Archaeological Project for the Fundacion Nacional de Arqueologia in El Salvador. Her talk, “Faking Ancient Mesoamerican Art,” being held in the Bodwell Area of the Collins Center for the Arts.
The lecture is part of UMaine’s observation of Maine Archaeology Month, a month established in 2000 to present archaeological research to the public through scholarly lectures, exhibits and tours of archaeological sites.
The presentation will draw on Bruhns’ expertise on fakes, forgeries and forgers from the ancient Americas. Bruhns argues that this tradition originated with the Conquest as Spanish missionaries demanded pagan artifacts to burn. In response, indigenous populations created a growth industry in churning out reproductions.
Many of these pieces, however, have ended up in museum collections and are exhibited today with little acknowledgment of how they were acquired or whether they are authentic. The Pre-Columbian antiquities trade was formally banned in 1970, but objects continue to circulate on the art market and emerge in museum collections.
According to Bruhns, no one wants to know the dirty secret of looted art, that it’s mostly fake. She will take the audience on an illustrated journey of Pre-Columbian art from renowned collections and institutions, which are not as old as they are labeled. Rather than calling them Pre-Columbian works, Bruhns suggests they be identified as Post-Columbian art.
Bruhns, professor emerita of anthropology at San Francisco State University, received her Ph. D. in archaeology of Central and South America from the University of California at Berkeley. She has directed archaeological projects in Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and El Salvador, and has participated in projects in Belize and Mexico. Bruhns has recently co-authored with Nancy L. Kelker, Faking the Ancient Andes (2010) and Faking Ancient Mesoamerica (2010).
For more information, please call the Hudson Museum at (207) 581-1901.