Las caras de Jano: Autenticidad y falsificación en el arte Zapoteca

The Zapotec culture (Oaxaca State, Mexico) is famous for its famous ‘funerary urns’, ceramic effigies associated with a vessel forming the body. Known since the beginning of the 19th century, these pieces have been the subject of iconographic studies which have, however, included numerous forgeries made as a result of their success. This particular production was the subject of doctoral research carried out by the author in the 1980s. It has made it possible to establish a typology and a history of the evolution of Zapotec forgeries (based on iconographic studies of collection pieces, comparisons with pieces from excavations and the use of thermoluminescence). Of the approximately 4,000 urns counted in the world (of which only 500 come from scientific excavations), and based on the study of about a thousand photos, we have been able to classify 330 pieces as fakes. Thus, extrapolating the total number of urns, we could suppose that more than a quarter of the known urns in the world are fakes or at least very dubious. Twenty-three varieties of forgeries have been identified, grouped into eleven ‘styles’. These groups seem to be characteristic of the periods during which they were made and the fashions from which they were inspired. Zapotec forgeries appeared at the beginning of the 20th century and reached their peak in the 1920s. It seemed to have disappeared by the 1930s. However, new considerations have led us to question the conclusion we proposed several decades ago and to consider a new production of fake urns during the 1950s and 1960s.