Tracey Cooper, November 5, 2023.

In her Piece of Stuff this week, Tracey talked about the faked fossils that made up the Piltdown Man assemblage that were “discovered” by hoaxer Charles Dawson in 1912-13 and accepted as real by most of the academic archeological community until 1956. After this, the search for the culprit of the Piltdown hoax occupied the press periodically and at one point even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries was implicated. In 2016, Dawson was exposed as the culprit after years-long research by Isabelle de Groot (among others). It has been called the greatest scientific hoax in history, a label which I think exposes our enduring fascination with hoaxes: a quick search on Amazon for books with the word “hoax” reveals more than 10,000 titles. Here, I’m not even going to try to tackle the question of why the great general public find hoaxing so interesting, however, but focus instead on why someone like Charles Dawson might produce, perpetuate, and stake their reputations on a hoax.

America has had its fair share of archaeological hoaxes. The Kinderhook plates are a set of bell-shaped pieces of brass covered in strange hieroglyph-like lettering that were forged by three men from Illinois. In 1843, they dug a ten-foot pit in an Indian burial mound and then buried the plates at the bottom. The next day they invited witnesses to watch them “finish” their archaeological dig and the “discovery” of the plates. Their motivation was a to prank the local Latter-day Saint community with another amazing find like that of the Book of Mormon. According to Mormon belief, their leader, Joseph Smith, found the Book of Mormon engraved on golden plates in a reformed Egyptian

language and it recorded ancient Judeo-Semitic inhabitants of the Americas. Smith actually looked at the faked Kinderhook plates, said that they were indeed ancient and even managed to “translate” a portion – though they were never accepted into the Mormon canon of scripture.

Then there are the Michigan Relics, these are a whole series of faked ancient artifacts “discovered” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries across seventeen Michigan counties. These included clay cups and tablets, as well as copper tablets, engraved with a mixture of strange languages, with most bearing the same distinctive symbol of five lines. The Michigan Relics were purported to be evidence of an ancient Near Eastern culture in North America. A sign painter from Edmore, Michigan, James O. Scotford, was involved in most of the discoveries. He partnered with then Michigan Secretary of State, Daniel E. Soper, and they formed a syndicate that would take investors out into the fields where these investors could seemingly “discover” artifacts for themselves. Many of the Michigan Relics were also bought by The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints in the early 1900s.

While we can probably spot the motives of prejudice-based pranking and profits behind the Kinderhook plates and the Michigan Relics, I don’t think either of these motives fully explains the actions of Dawson. We may find more clues in comparing Dawson to disgraced Japanese amateur archaeologist, Shinichi Fujimura. Fujimura began a long career of archaeological hoaxing in 1971 and was not exposed until 2000. His method was to plant real artifacts in much older contexts. One of Fujimura’s major discoveries came in 1981 when he “uncovered” stoneware pottery in stratigraphic layers that were 40,000 years old. The artifacts were actually pieces of 13,000-year-old Jomon pottery, which is some of the earliest in the world with examples dating back to 16,000 years ago. There are, however, other pottery samples from Korea, Southern China and the Russian Far East that are of a similar age. “Discovering” pottery in 40,000-year-old layers would make the Japanese the earliest potters by far, and so we might find a motive here similar to one posited for Dawson: rampant nationalism. In a time of intense Anglo-German competition on the eve of World War One, when the Germans discovered the Heidelberg Jawbone. Dawson may have been inspired to “prove” that the oldest “missing-link” hominid was not a German but an Englishman. Fujimura may have been similarly motivated to “prove” that the oldest potters were Japanese. Both men, of course, also craved the accolades that came with such nationally important “finds.”

Proving a nationalistic point, however, perhaps does not provide the whole explanation, because both Dawson and Fujimura were life-long hoaxers. Fujimura hoaxed for his entire thirty-year career, and he had such an uncanny knack of unearthing paradigm changing artifacts that he was dubbed the archaeologist with the “divine hands.” This, of course, is very similar to Dawson’s moniker, the Wizard of Sussex, given to him for his uncanny knack of discovering artifacts. Fujimura became famous, he was a senior director of the Tohoku Paleolithic Institute, and schoolchildren read about his “finds” in textbooks. He did not content himself just with faking the age of Japanese pottery production, however, he also planted artifacts which faked the entire history of the arrival of people into Japan. It had previously been accepted that humans had first arrived in Japan around 30,000 years ago, but Fujimura’s “discoveries” pushed back this date to around 600,000 years ago making Japan the location of some of the earliest hominids in the world. Then in 2000 journalist at the Mainichi Shinbun newspaper received a tip that fakery was afoot, and they planted cameras that caught Fujimura in the act of planting relics. In a tearful confession, Fujimura claimed that he had been “tempted by the Devil. I don’t know how I can apologize for what I did…I wanted to be known as the person who excavated the oldest stoneware in Japan.” Well, he had done that in 1981, this doesn’t explain why he was still hoaxing in 2000. This seems like self-justification rather than a true motivation.

One of the things that Dawson and Fujimura have in common is that they were amateur archaeologists, and perhaps their frauds were intended to get respect from professional, academic archaeologists and a sense that they belonged within their ranks at an exalted level. These hoaxers perhaps had an overwhelming urge to be part of the culture of archaeological discoverers, but for some reason were unwilling or unable to put in the hard slog of making “real” archaeology their life’s calling. Dawson and Fujimura wanted a shortcut around everything that goes into a career in archaeology: all the attention to detail, care and caution, logistics, scientific and historical knowledge, grant woes, often vile working conditions, the need to work collegiately, having your work scrutinized and your results challenged, and ultimately taking a chance that nothing momentous will be found. The hoaxers wanted assured results, and this is completely the opposite of everything that motivates most archaeologists.

Sometimes, archeologists have such a deep respect for the past that they decide not to dig. My students are always shocked that despite knowing the exact location of the mausoleum of the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, Chinese archaeologist have for the moment chosen not to dig there. They know, of course, that whatever is there will be spectacular, the 8,000 terracotta warriors from the surrounding area of the tomb are a strong indication of that, but they refrain from excavating the actual mausoleum because they do not want to cause irreparable damage to the structure. This is something, I think, that hoaxers could never comprehend and highlights a major difference in motivation.

In this age of fake news and malicious misinformation, examining the psychology of hoaxers becomes increasingly urgent. Peter Hancock in Hoax Springs Eternal: The Psychology of Cognitive Deception highlights six steps to a successful hoax, which I believe apply to Dawson and Fujimura:

1. Identifying a constituency – a group of people that will care about whatever you are fabricating.
2. Identifying a particular dream of your target constituency, something they will want to believe.
3. Create a hoax that is appealing but is not without ambiguities – something must be “under-specified” so that your constituency will have invest the hoax with their belief.
4. Have your hoax discovered.
5. Find someone to champion your hoax.
6. Make people care – this care can be negative or positive, ideally perhaps both, because then people will debate ambiguities and the fame of the fabrication will spread.

I think we can recognize some of these steps in the deceits of Dawson and Fujimura. Hoaxing is risky behavior that is very different from April’s Fools pranks, in which the ideal outcome is that the falsehood is exposed and both victim and perpetrator can have a good laugh about it. There are real-life consequences to the hoax being discovered: while Dawson died forty years before his hoax was discovered, Fujimura’s entire life was shaped by perpetrating a hoax, and ultimately it ruined his life. When he says the Devil made him do it, that might be how it feels to him, he may not fully understand his compulsion to hoax.

As a lover of true crime podcasts, thinking about archaeological hoaxers also put me in mind of those unfathomable people who hoax in order to insert themselves into crimes.  Their hoaxes run the gamut from phoning in false bomb threats or false tips, to making a false confessions of murder, to the truly despicable act of tormenting family members with their lies. They waste hundreds or hours of police time, cause a lot of upset and stress, but according to University of London Psychologist, Glenn Wilson, what they get out of it is “a sense of potency.” He adds, “They may be people who make no impact on the world, and this is one way that they can do that, rather as fire starters start fires, then stand back to admire their handiwork. They see people running around and think ‘I did that!’ For people who feel like they have no power, it is the capacity to influence events.”

Can exhibitionism and the potency of inserting themselves into the drama also explain the actions of Charles Dawson and Shinichi Fujimura? I think we may be closer here to a motivation that matches their compulsion. Moreover, as they situate and elevate themselves within the profession by their hoax, they may even share the same warped gratification as firefighters who start fires, or doctors and nurses who harm their patients. On that disturbing thought, I will stress two caveats: first, if this is the pathology behind archaeological hoaxers like Dawson and Fujimura it hopefully makes them as rare as those warped firefighters and nurses, and second, my doctorate is in history and not psychology. At least to me, however, there does seem to be this same willingness to do something totally antithetical to the professional calling that inspires legitimate practitioners.

By serendipity, I took a break to watch some TV, before I finished editing this piece and I switched on an episode of Unknown on Netflix called, “The Lost Pyramid,” and Dr. Mustafa Waziry, an Egyptologist  working in Saqqara, made a comment that I had to rewind and write down because it sums up perfectly the diametrically opposed mindset of an archaeologist and a hoaxer. Waziry’s voiceover is rather wistful as he says, “I cannot describe what it feels like to be an archaeologist, when I do excavations, I don’t know what is beneath the ground.” At this point in the production, Waziry uncovers a tiny, blue pendant of a cow from the dirt. “Beautiful,” he says, “Imagine, the last person to hold this amulet lived thousands of years ago. What was their world like? What did they believe?” This joyous sense of curiosity and wonder is not at all what the hoaxer feels, instead they feel the need to impose themselves and their deception over the story of the past. By fixing the “results” in a way that subverts the truth about the past, archaeological hoaxers like Dawson and Fujimura completely miss out on the immense gratification of revealing the unknown felt by those they desperately want to emulate.

Mark Griffiths, “The Psychology of Hoaxing: Why do individuals deliberately try to mislead others? Psychology Today, May 18, 2017. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-excess/201705/the-psychology-hoaxing

Dennis Normile, “Archaeologist Faked Important Discovery: Famous amateur admits planting “oldest” stone tools in Japan,” November 7, 2000. https://www.science.org/content/article/archaeologist-faked-important-discovery

Isabelle De Groote, “Solving the Piltdown Man crime: How we worked out there was only one forger,” The Conversation, August 10, 2016 https://theconversation.com/solving-the-piltdown-man-crime-how-we-worked-out-there-was-only-one-forger-63615

Picture Credit: Hoax Spray Painted on Lamppost – Paul Sableman edited by Tracey Cooper. March 27, 2014 Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hoax_(13503946294).jpg

Kinderhook plates, History of the Church (1909), vol. 5, 374-75. Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kinderhook_plates.png