Some of the biggest archaeology hoaxes in newer history

Right! Now for something a little different than my usual posts. This week I've digged around the internet for some of the fascinating hoaxes in archaeology, that was once accepted as real science. That acceptance has to some extent slowed or understanding within the field as time spent on those hoaxes could have been spent on real archaeology. But as it is, such hoaxes tend to fascinate us I believe. And back in the day, those hoaxes certainly "helped" fill out the blanks in the archaeological and historical science.

Well, without further ado lets get digging!

The Feejee Mermaid: Early Barnum Hoax

The Feejee Mermaid (sometimes spelled Fiji Mermaid and FeJee Mermaid) was a hoax promoted by P.T. Barnum during the 1840s. It was the most famous of several fake mermaids exhibited during the 19thcentury. The Feejee Mermaid was exhibited in New York, Boston and London. Its whereabouts after 1859 are uncertain.

The Feejee Mermaid and other hoax mermaids had the upper bodies of apes sewn to fish tails, according to "The FeeJee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History" (Cornell, 1999), by Jan Bondeson. The Feejee Mermaid was probably made from an orangutan and a salmon.

Unlike images of mermaids in folklore and popular culture, such mermaids were unattractive, often described as hideous. In his autobiography, Barnum described the mermaid as "an ugly dried-up, black-looking diminutive specimen, about 3 feet long. Its mouth was open, its tail turned over, and its arms thrown up, giving it the appearance of having died in great agony."

Sauce: https://www.livescience.com/56037-feejee-mermaid.html

The Cardiff Giant

The Cardiff Giant was one of the most famous hoaxes in American history. It was a 10-foot-tall (3.0 m) purported "petrified man" uncovered on October 16, 1869, by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. "Stub" Newell in Cardiff, New York. Both it and an unauthorized copy made by P.T. Barnum are still being displayed.

he giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. Hull, an atheist, decided to create the giant after an argument at a Methodist revival meeting about Genesis 6:4 which stated that there were giants who once lived on Earth.[1]

The idea of a petrified man did not originate with Hull, however. During 1858 the newspaper Alta California had published a bogus letter claiming that a prospector had been petrified when he had drunk a liquid within a geode. Some other newspapers also had published stories of supposedly petrified people.[2]

Hull hired men to quarry out a 10-foot-4.5-inch-long (3.2 m) block of gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, telling them it was intended for a monument to Abraham Lincoln in New York. He shipped the block to Chicago, where he hired Edward Burghardt, a German stonecutter, to carve it into the likeness of a man and swore him to secrecy.

Various stains and acids were used to make the giant appear to be old and weathered, and the giant's surface was beaten with steel knitting needles embedded in a board to simulate pores. During November 1868, Hull transported the giant by railroad to the farm of his cousin, William Newell. By then, he had spent US$2,600 for the hoax (nearly $46,000 in 2015 dollars, adjusted for inflation).[3]

Nearly a year later, Newell hired Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols, ostensibly to dig a well, and on October 16, 1869 they found the giant. One of the men reportedly exclaimed, "I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!"

Sauce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Giant

The Piltdown Man

In 1912 Charles Dawson, an amateur archaeologist claimed to have discovered the ‘missing link’ between ape and man. He had found part of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown village in Sussex, England.

Dawson wrote to Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum at the time, about his find.

Dawson and Smith Woodward started working together, making further discoveries in the area. They found a set of teeth, a jawbone, more skull fragments and primitive tools, which they suggested belonged to the same individual.

Smith Woodward made a reconstruction of the skull fragments, and the archaeologists hypothesised that the find indicated evidence of a human ancestor living 500,000 years ago. They announced their discovery at a Geological Society meeting in 1912. For the most part, their story was accepted in good faith.

However, in 1949 new dating technology arrived that changed scientific opinion on the age of the remains Using fluorine tests, Dr Kenneth Oakley, a geologist at the Natural History Museum, discovered that the Piltdown remains were only 50,000 years old. This eliminated the possibility of the Piltdown Man being the missing link between humans and apes as at this point in time humans had already developed into their Homo sapiens form.

Following this, biological anthropologist Dr Joseph Weiner and human anatomist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, both from Oxford University, worked with Dr Oakley to further test the age of the Piltdown findings. Their results showed that the skull and jaw fragments actually came from two different species, a human and an ape, probably an orangutan.

Scratches on the surfaces of the teeth, visible under the microscope, revealed that the teeth had been filed down to make them look human. They also discovered that most of the finds from the Piltdown site had been artificially stained to match the local gravels.

The conclusion: Piltdown Man was an audacious fake and a sophisticated scientific fraud.

Sauce: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/departments-and-staff/library-and-archives/collections/piltdown-man.html

The Kensington Runestone

Probably the most popular of the American Runestones is the Kensington Runestone. Named for Kensington, Minnesota, the settlement it was discovered near in 1898. Specifically, it was found in the largely rural township of Solem, Douglas County, Minnesota.

As the story goes, a Swedish immigrant farmer Olof Ohman and his son found the stone lodged into the roots of a tree they were removing from a field to be plowed. According to the story, the two didn’t even notice the inscription until much later, after Ohman’s son dusted the stone, and dug the dirt out of the engravings with a stick. From there the story gets a little blurry, apparently there was an excavation looking for artifacts associated with the stone, but all they found were pieces of stone originally thought to be bone. Future exactions found nothing associated with the stone. Currently the stone rests in a Runestone Museum, located in downtown Alexandria, Minnesota.

The stone itself is a large slab of greywacke, roughly the shape of a tomb stone, that has runic inscriptions on two sides. The inscription tells the story of an ill-fated Norse excursion in the area that would become Minnesota. However, from the time of its discovery, the stone has been a source of controversy that still lasts today.

Sauce: https://archyfantasies.com/2013/07/17/where-the-vikings-werent-viking-runestones-in-america-the-kensington-runestone/

Crystal Skulls

The mystery surrounding the origin of crystal skulls has drawn supernatural speculation. There are perhaps a dozen of these rare crystal skulls in private and public collections. Some are crystal clear, others of smoky or colored quartz. Some are actual human size and of very fine detail, while others are smaller and less refined. All are believed to originate from Mexico and Central America.

Recent electron microscope analyses of skulls by the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution revealed markings that could only have been made with modern carving implements. Both museums estimate that their skulls date to sometime in the mid to late 1800s, a time when public interest in ancient cultures was high and museums were eager for pieces to display.

A British Museum study in fact pinpointed the manufacture of most of the skulls to an area of Germany famous for manufacturing intricate quartz and crystal designs in the late 19th century. The crystal is said to be found in Brazil or Madascar and thus inaccessible to pre-Columbian indigenous civilizations.

Its examinations and the fact that no such skull has ever been uncovered at an official archaeological excavation led the British Museum to extrapolate that all of the famed crystal skulls are likely fakes.

Sauce: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/archaeology/crystal-skulls/

Fake cat tax