Çatalhöyük is a tell of a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 BC to 6400 BC, and flourished around 7000 BC. In July 2012, it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological fraud in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. Although there were doubts about its authenticity virtually from the beginning, the remains were still broadly accepted for many years, and the falsity of the hoax was only definitively demonstrated in 1953. An extensive scientific review in 2016 established that amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson was responsible for the fraudulent evidence.
An out-of-place artifact is an artifact of historical, archaeological, or paleontological interest found in an unusual context, which challenges conventional historical chronology by its presence in that context. Such artifacts may appear too advanced for the technology known to have existed at the time, or may suggest human presence at a time before humans are known to have existed. Other examples may suggest contact between different cultures that is hard to account for with conventional historical understanding.
James Mellaart FBA was an English archaeologist and author who is noted for his discovery of the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. He was expelled from Turkey when he was suspected of involvement with the antiquities black market. He was also involved in a string of controversies, including the so-called mother goddess controversy in Anatolia, which eventually led to his being banned from excavations in Turkey in the 1960s. After his death it was discovered that he had forged many of his "finds", including murals and inscriptions used to discover the Çatalhöyük site.
The James Ossuary is a 1st-century limestone box that was used for containing the bones of the dead. An Aramaic inscription meaning "Jacob (James), son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" is cut into one side of the box. The ossuary attracted scholarly attention due to its apparent association with the Christian holy family.
The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone is a large boulder on the side of Hidden Mountain, near Los Lunas, New Mexico, about 35 miles (56 km) south of Albuquerque, that bears a nine-line inscription carved into a flat panel. The stone is also known as the Los Lunas Mystery Stone or Commandment Rock. The stone is controversial in that some claim the inscription is Pre-Columbian, and therefore proof of early Semitic contact with the Americas.
Art forgery is the creation and sale of works of art which are falsely credited to other, usually more famous artists. Art forgery can be extremely lucrative, but modern dating and analysis techniques have made the identification of forged artwork much simpler.
The Glozel artifacts are a collection of over 3,000 artifacts, including clay tablets, sculptures and vases, some of which were inscribed, discovered from 1924 to 1930 in the vicinity of French hamlet of Glozel. Glozel is part of the commune of Ferrières-sur-Sichon in the Allier department, some 17 km from Vichy in central France.
Brígido Lara is a Mexican artist and ex-forger of pre-Columbian antiques. Lara claims to have created perhaps as many as 40,000 pieces of forged pre-Columbian pottery.
The Jehoash Inscription is the name of a controversial artifact rumored to have surfaced in a construction site or Muslim cemetery near the Temple Mount of Jerusalem in 2001.
The Persian Princess or Persian Mummy is a mummy of an alleged Persian princess who surfaced in Pakistani Baluchistan in October 2000. After considerable attention and further investigation, the mummy proved to be an archaeological forgery and possibly a murder victim.
Oded Golan is an Israeli engineer, entrepreneur, and antiquities collector. He owns one of the largest collections of Biblical archaeology in the world.
The year 1961 in archaeology involved some significant events.
Below are notable events in archaeology that occurred in 1927.
Charles Dawson was a British amateur archaeologist who claimed to have made a number of archaeological and palaeontological discoveries that were later exposed as frauds. These forgeries included the Piltdown Man, a unique set of bones that he claimed to have found in 1912 in Sussex. Many technological methods such as fluorine testing indicate that this discovery was a hoax, and Dawson, the only one with the skill and knowledge to generate this forgery, was a major suspect.
The Newark Holy Stones refer to a set of artifacts allegedly discovered by David Wyrick in 1860 within a cluster of ancient Indian burial mounds near Newark, Ohio, now generally believed to be a hoax. The set consists of the Keystone, a stone bowl, and the Decalogue with its sandstone box. They can be viewed at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum in Coshocton, Ohio. The site where the objects were found is known as The Newark Earthworks, one of the biggest collections from an ancient American Indian culture known as the Hopewell that existed from approximately 100 BC to AD 500.
The Shadwell forgeries, also known as the Shadwell Dock forgeries, the Shadwell Shams, or the Billy and Charley forgeries, were a series of mid-19th-century forgeries of medieval lead and lead-alloy artefacts. The latter name derives from the two Londoners, William "Billy" Smith and Charles "Charley" Eaton, who were responsible for their large-scale manufacture between 1857 and 1870. At the time, some antiquarians were fooled by the forgeries, despite them being crudely made by two individuals with limited skill in metalworking and little knowledge of medieval art.
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to forgery:
Several kinds of archaeological remnants of the Jerusalem Temple exist. Those for what is customarily called Solomon's Temple are indirect and some are challenged. There is extensive physical evidence for the temple called the Second Temple that was built by returning exiles around 516 BCE and stood until its destruction by Rome in the year 70 CE. There is limited physical evidence of Solomon's Temple, although it is still widely accepted to have existed.
The archaeology of Ancient Egypt is the study of the archaeology of Egypt, stretching from prehistory through three millennia of documented history. Egyptian archaeology is one of the branches of Egyptology.
