Antiquities Sleuth Has a Fraud Mandate

Jane MacLaren Walsh uses a flint to file lines in a piece of jade, demonstrating how most authentic artifacts have less-than-perfect markings on them. (Michael Williamson -- The Washington Post)

She thinks of those very old hands. "Of all the documented Olmec jades that I've looked at, I haven't seen evidence of hollow drills yet," Walsh says, pointing out the jades were probably drilled with a solid pointed stone. Later, after the Olmec period, other cultures used bird bones and bamboo-like reeds for hollow drills.

And there Walsh stops. "I don't want the fakers to know what to avoid," she says.

Tracking how ancient carvers worked has led Walsh down some curious trails, including experimenting with a mouse bone as a drill bit. "The rodent bone worked very well. The mouse had tough small bones, and I used it to drill with sand," she says. She also tried rabbit bones she took home from a dinner out. Then there was a duck, eaten for dinner, its bones then donated to science.

"It worked pretty well as a drill. Ducks and rabbits and mice all would have been available to pre-Columbian peoples, and since they would have used what they could find, I tried to use what I could find too," says Walsh. Once the bones are cleaned and sharpened, she goes over to the mineralogy department at the museum and with another colleague runs tests using mechanical drills that more or less duplicate the motion of an ancient hand drill.

"He runs them at a relatively slow speed to simulate a bow or hand drill. Using quartz sand we see how long it takes to drill into some samples of jade and jadeite," says Walsh.

Some cases are clear-cut: She was certain about a purported Aztec crystal skull. One arrived at the Smithsonian in 1992 from an anonymous donor. The alarm bells went off, since Walsh knew that New Age practitioners bragged about the powers of these objects and people were creating them to serve a special market.

But had they ever really existed?

"It was a class of artifact never dug up," she says. Working with Margaret Sax at the British Museum, she created a test with molds of the lines and drill holes. Under the microscope, her first inkling was verified.

"One of the things that was obvious about the crystal skulls was that the carving was done by a wheel, or a rotary saw. No pre-Columbian carver had such a tool, so we felt it had to be after European contact," says Walsh. She also investigated how the crystal skulls had made their way into the British Museum and the Musee de l'Homme in Paris. The same dealer had sold both, and the skulls had originated in Germany.

More often, she finds pieces she is 90 percent sure are counterfeit, but is reluctant to render a verdict until she's finally completed her database. In this way she hopes she will someday be able to offer other art sleuths an authentic road map to fakes.