ABSTRACT
In the central and southern Andes, where the extremely dry climate has preserved abundant quantities of ancient wood, either in the form of architectural pieces that can be modified or genuine ancient wooden artifacts, forgery of wooden antiquities has become increasingly common. Many ancient wooden artifacts are quite plain, but they easily lend themselves to a little embellishment in the way of “restoration”: shell inlay, adding new and more lavish paint, or working in some carved details, maybe a bit of gold foil, or a patch of ancient textile to gladden the heart of the dealer and collector, and voilà! What was once a plain piece with minimal market value is now a very expensive, highly sought-after—even if brand spanking new—mummy head or ancestor figure. Despite the fact that the Peruvians and other South Americans have been swimming in forged artifacts since the late nineteenth century, there is not much mention of them in the literature; South American scholars, living in some of the hemisphere's more tenuous democracies, are not prone to write about the forgeries gracing their museums or the private collections of prominent members of the political and economic establishment, except when there is a scandal of international proportions, such as that of the Gold Museum in Lima. Even in this case, it was not the museum personnel or art historians or even the archaeologists (all of whom had been happily gossiping about the mess for decades) who finally took action after the politically and socially prominent proprietor, Don Miguel Mujica Gallo, had died at an advanced age; rather, it was the Peruvian consumer protection bureau (McIntosh 1989; Chueca 2002; Anonymous 2001a, 2006). However, it is well known that fakes abound and that wooden ones are not exactly rare. There are many classes of fraudulent wooden artifacts, some copies of or based on ancient models; others are pure invention.
