ABSTRACT
No ceramic object from the tiniest carved Manteño spindle whorl to the enormous painted urns of the Huari seems to have escaped the attention of forgers; false ceramic artifacts, by their sheer numbers, dominate the antiquities market and, as to be expected, private and public collections of Precolumbian art around the world. There are many Andean regional styles in which forgeries grossly outnumber genuine pieces. Additionally, like their counterparts in Mexico, Andean forgers have also invented out of whole cloth a number of entirely fraudulent styles, such as the alzates (see Chapter 2) and what we can only term “Nueva Quimbaya.” The enormous growth of the forgeries industry in the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is adding to these numbers daily.
