Hooray for Ebay Fakes

Forging artifacts has become so lucrative that plundering no longer makes sense, according to Charles Stanish, director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and a professor of anthropology at UCLA.

According to Stanish, thanks to ebay, one can make more money forging an antiquity than digging it up. The more forgeries, the less looting, he suggests.

Many of these forgeries have become so highly sophisticated that they can fool experts.

[T]he experts who study the objects are sometimes being trained on fakes. As a result, they may authenticate pieces that are not real.