The Fakes of Hacilar

Few things anger archaeologists and art historians more than being taken in by fake antiquities. A recent series of laboratory tests gives them good reason to be furious. A team of British and European experts, using a new dating technique, has reported that 48 of 66 objects thought to be from Hacilar, a settlement that existed 7,000 years ago in southwestern Turkey, are forgeries. The results of their investigations, published in the current issue of Oxford's Archaeometry, also showed that 25 "Etruscan" wall paintings on terra cotta, for which Swiss, American and other collectors have been paying up to $24,000 apiece, are less than twelve years old.

The revelations may seriously undermine confidence in the use of recently bought antiquities to describe past civilizations. In particular, the forgeries could lead to distrust of current archaeological concepts about ancient Anatolian culture. The Hacilar deposit was uncovered by British Archaeologist James Mellaart after he had been led to the spot by a Turkish farmer in 1956. Mellaart's find reversed the long-held belief that Anatolia, the area that is now Turkey, was only peripheral to the advanced Neolithic culture of Mesopotamia. So great was the wealth of the material found at Hacilar that some historians concluded that Anatolia, rather than Mesopotamia, was the cradle of civilization.

After Mellaart's discoveries in the late 1950s, there was a surge into the market of "Hacilar" artifacts that some archaeologists attributed to illicit excavating in the area. But doubts about the authenticity of some of the "Hacilar" material began to crop up in 1965, when the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford bought a two-headed ceramic vase on the London antiquities market. The style was distinctively that of Hacilar; but at the same time, at least three similar vases were sold for as much as $7,200 to collections in Europe and America. This coincidence, combined with several odd physical features of the vases, aroused more suspicion. Some preliminary age checks, using a new technique called thermoluminescence testing, were run in 1967, but the results were inconclusive. By then the market was being flooded with Hacilar pieces. Some of them were obvious fakes, but others were so cleverly crafted that they could not be identified as forgeries on the basis of style alone.

Since then, the thermoluminescence test has confirmed the suspicions. It is based upon the fact that most clay, as well as most soil, contains minute amounts of radioactive elements. Radioactive emissions strike electrons in quartz crystals in the clay. These electrons are boosted to a higher energy level, at which they remain trapped. As time passes from the date that the pot was fired, the number of excited electrons rises.

Obliging Farmer. During the tests, the temperature of a small sample from a bowl or vase is raised to as high as 900DEGF., reversing the process and allowing the electrons to return to their lower energy level. As this happens, they emit photons of light, which are measured by a photomultiplier. Because pottery fired long ago contains more excited electrons, it will glow more intensely than items recently manufactured from clay with the same amount of radioactivity. Thus, generally, the greater the light, the greater the age.

Art historians may take some comfort from the arrest last month of a possible perpetrator of the Hacilar scandal. In a raid on the home of Sevket Cetinkaya, 52, a man of substantial property in the town of Burdur, police uncovered 54 authentic artifacts, including Hacilar material, and 23 forgeries. It appears that Cetinkaya has considerably improved his station in life since 1956, when, as an obliging farmer, he guided James Mellaart to the buried riches of Hacilar.

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