When Art isn’t Real

The World’s Most Controversial Objects under Investigation

When Art isn’t Real

The World’s Most Controversial Objects under Investigation

Andrew Shortland Patrick Degryse

Leuven University Press

© 2022 by Leuven University Press / Presses Universitaires de Louvain /Universitaire Pers Leuven. Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium).

All rights reserved. Except in those cases expressly determined by law, no part of this publication may be multiplied, saved in an automated datafile or made public in any way whatsoever without the express prior written consent of the publishers.

ISBN 978 94 6270 312 4

eISBN 978 94 6166 461 7 (epdf)

eISBN 978 94 6166 462 4 (epub)

https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461664617

D / 2022/ 1869 / 16

NUR: 682

Typesetting: Friedemann Vervoort

Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray

Cover illustration: The Getty Kouros. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

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Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Piltdown Man

Chapter 3: The Getty Kouros

Chapter 4: Turin Shroud

Chapter 5: The Vinland Map

Chapter 6: The “Amarna Princess”

Chapter 7: Leonardo and the Eye

Chapter 8: The Reconstruction of Knossos

Chapter 9: Conclusions

A Guided Bibliography

Glossary

Chapter 1

Introduction

In 2019, trade in the global art market was estimated to have been worth in excess of £50 billion. Around two thirds of that huge sum was traded in only two countries, the USA and the UK. China comes in third with an 18% share and, as with many China-related statistics, this share will only grow over the next few years. At the very top end of the market, the last decade has seen a huge rise in the prices paid for art. Of the top twenty most expensive paintings ever sold fifteen have been sold since 2010 and, remarkably, all ten of the top ten prices paid for paintings were paid in the last decade. This includes Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, the world’s most expensive painting and the subject of Chapter 7. It is interesting to note, therefore, that although the art market has such value, it is one of the least regulated markets in the world. The high values paid are often in cash, buyers and sellers largely relying on the “traditional … hand-shake culture of the art trade”. This leads to the art market being called “famously opaque” with a threat of criminal activity that is ever present. The FBI has estimated that thieves steal art objects worth between $4-6 billion worldwide every year, raiding and damaging cultural assets. It identified art as the third biggest criminal market after drugs and weapons. Looted antiquities have been acknowledged by law enforcement bodies as a significant source of insurgent and terrorist funding.

The situation means a significant human institution, a basis of human culture and cultural identity made up of international networks of institutions such as museums, galleries, public exhibitions and auction houses, is blighted by crime. A survey of industry professionals conducted by Deloitte in 2016 reported that “around 75% of all stakeholders surveyed agree that ‘authenticity, lack of provenance, forgery, and attribution’ are the biggest threats to credibility and trust in the art market”.

Despite this well-known prevalence of problems with forgeries, fakes and smuggled art objects, only limited resources have been committed by policing operations to dealing with art crime. This has led to greater pressure on business and cultural institutions to ensure that they are dealing in works with established provenance. It is this world that this book describes – the drive to protect a market from those who would want to profit from it illegally.

We both work in universities and are both career academics. We have approached the art world from the study of objects from the ancient world. We were both trained initially as geologists, but then fell under the spell of archaeology and the analysis of objects from Egypt and Rome. This is essentially curiosity-driven research, and we have the great luxury to be able to work with problems and objects as they tickle our fancy. Working on these materials and objects provides an opportunity to gather a database of workable scientific techniques and accurate chemical compositions, a body of knowledge on art and science that on the one hand can be used to comment on cultures of the past and human behaviour, but on the other can help to identify those objects that are more of the present than the past – fakes and forgeries. Working in university departments on historical objects, we both started initially by analysing excavated archaeological material. This was partly a matter of chance, but also reflected the way analysis was carried out twenty years ago. Then, to do any really accurate work, the necessity was to take samples from objects. This is much easier with excavated material which is usually already broken and/or fragmentary. However, the work quickly spread to analysing comparable collections in museums. It is in this way that we both were introduced for the first time to the buying and selling of objects on the art market. Museums, especially American museums, have always bought extensively from the market. There are a number of such examples in this book. They act as a caution as to what can go wrong when enthusiastic curators believe that they have discovered a “sleeper” – an important lost artefact, misidentified as something trivial in the past but actually of much greater historical (and, of course, financial) value. This book is a series of stories of objects where science has attempted to validate or repudiate the opinions of other experts. As we will see, some of the cases described here have been proved “beyond reasonable doubt”, but others are still argued over, sometimes much to the chagrin of the scientists involved, for whom it is “case closed”. In particular, with these stories we want to give the reader some feel for the people involved. A feel for those period or material experts who give their opinion on an object’s validity from its looks, feel, even smell. A feel for the analysts, who employ their scientific equipment to the object and give their opinion from the numbers and pictures that are derived from them. A feel for the experts working with, in parallel with, and occasionally against each other.

Of course, it is also about the other side in this game, the forgers. We will show that some forgers have given a bit of insight into their motives. Surely, financial gain is one, perhaps very powerful reason to go about this work. However, it has been described by some as the motive to continue on the crooked path, not necessarily to start on it. Almost all forgers have more complex motives than just financial gain. Often there is an element of revenge in what they are doing. Sometimes they regard themselves as artistic geniuses who have cruelly and inexplicably been shunned by the art community. Therefore, there is an element of fooling and trying to embarrass those same critics and experts that have been dismissive of their own works. Once in the game, the forger can become addicted to the power he has. It becomes difficult to stop, and after all – when you’re caught, you’ll be famous and respected, or at least recognised, finally. There is also a great modern interest in newspapers and the public as a whole on the “little man” getting one over on the stuffy, élitist, upper classes of the art market – a forger can be a hero in the newspapers, despite what they are doing being essentially fraud. Interestingly, most forgers claim to see many more of their works in museums and galleries, indistinguishable from the real thing, still unrecognised for the forgeries they really are – is this true, or are they just not able to get rid of that monkey on their shoulder, craving further attention, and recognition?

So there is a whole gamut of smoke and mirrors in this field – forgers routinely and, in some cases, pathologically lie. Some have lived so long with their untruths that they appear unable to distinguish fact from self-generated fiction. Not only that, but they are also responsive in their works – they tend to improve with time. Indeed, the arms race between those who forge and those who detect is rather exciting. It is also rather important – history is subtly changed by the insertion of fakes into an artist’s or culture’s oeuvre. Sometimes this is minor, sometimes (see Chapter 2, Piltdown Man) it can have major ramifications. However, always it is slowly changing, slowing subverting, history. Historians rightly strive for accuracy, even though all would accept that a lot is a matter of opinion. However, that opinion is more difficult if some of the evidence used to create it is unreliable, corrupted by forgers’ intent on personal gain or fame, the effect of which is that they are, bit by bit, poisoning history.

Throughout the book we describe scientific approaches and briefly some methods, our area of expertise after all. However, individual chapters deal with personal stories related to the objects, and how they make or break careers and people. In the end, this book is also about how we interact with the objects and the people. Each chapter discusses a particular case, usually with one object or related group of objects taking centre stage. Often, we try to contrast this object with other similar cases. We also draw out themes present in most if not all of the cases we discuss, each theme brought out more strongly in one of the particular stories.

Our first case study in chapter 2 carries the title Piltdown Man and deals with our earliest case and one of the most famous. Piltdown is the location where a hominid skull was found, and it must be one of the oldest objects ever to be deliberately faked, dating as it does to before modern Homo sapiens walked the earth. In this story a very senior, world renowned scientist appears to have been fooled by an extremely prolific amateur forger. The themes that come out of this chapter are twofold. Firstly, the forgery here had a massive and long-term impact on our interpretation of the ancient past. It threw history off track for decades and caused our interpretation of real hominid remains to be distorted and reassessed. However, this is also the story of a senior scientist whose name will forever be tarnished by association with the case. Whatever wonderful work he did in other areas, it is with this case that his name is most known. He never lived to know that his prize discovery was an outrageous, deliberate lie perpetrated by a man whom he regarded as a friend.

Chapter 3, the Getty Kouros, also discusses an ancient object, in this case a Greek stone statue. Here the story is, if anything, more complex than in Chapter 2. The case becomes not only a question whether the object is a modern forgery, but also a discussion of how such an object, if real, could end up in an American museum. It shows that in some cases the work of the forger and the work of the looter and trafficker are closely related, each using the other as cover for their activities. The chapter discusses the murky world of trafficking in looted antiquities and how, in the past, some august institutions adopted a light-handed attitude towards the investigation of the history of objects that they wished to acquire.

After the controversy about the potential for recently smuggled or forged objects that is the heart of Chapter 3, the next chapter deals with the Turin Shroud, an object which all concerned agree has existed in pretty much its current state since at least the fourteenth century AD. If forged, it is therefore the earliest forgery in this volume. These are perhaps only facts that all agree on in this, perhaps most argued over of all the cases we present. For this is a religious object, intimately connected (or not) with the person of Jesus Christ. In chapter 4 we discuss how difficult it can be to approach objects, especially religious objects, objectively. How difficult it is for some to accept that scientists working on such objects are driven not by a desire to corrupt or deceive believers, but simply by an interest in the right answer. Of all the cases covered, this provokes the strongest opinions (on both sides) and the most vituperative arguments. There will almost certainly never be a consensus on this, one of the most emotive, interesting and charismatic objects ever made, regardless of whether it is real or a medieval forgery.

In contrast, chapter 5 on the Vinland Map presents an object that has much more of an academic discussion behind it. Potentially an early map mentioning North America, this has far less of the emotional impact of the previous chapter. However, the theme developed here is the ability of scientists to argue amongst themselves over the same observation or series of data. It shows how a clever forgery (if that is what it is), even if relatively simply made, can have generations of scientists scratching their heads and changing their minds. And, once again, there is a significant impact on our understanding of history if the object is real.

The modern case of the “Amarna Princess”, a small stone statue presumed of ancient Egyptian origin, is presented in chapter 6. It is the first case where the forger is still very much alive. So alive in fact that he has published his memoirs, showing a wide range of different object types that he forged. Here the theme is that of the forger’s mindset and motivation. It concerns an individual who extorted millions from victims and yet does not seem at all interested in the money. That individual also was relatively untrained – not a graduate of an art school or famous university (indeed, of any university – he left school at 16) – and yet with great artistic skill and even more operational cunning. He and his family worked a complex series of forgeries and deceptions for over a decade; indeed the extent of his forgeries is still debated and he has made incredible claims to having forged some very important and expensive pieces, also connecting him to the next chapter.

Chapter 7, Leonardo and the Eye, talks about the work of Leonardo da Vinci in general, and one or two of his paintings in particular. How much contact does an artist like Leonardo have to have with a painting for it to be a “Leonardo”? A lot of artists worked in studios with their students – is it enough for Leonardo to paint just part of the image? This is also a story of the huge amounts of money that can be made on the art market by the right person at the right time. It is the story of how the opinion of one or two individuals, combined with some very astute marketing, can make $100 million in only a few years. This is broadened into the theme of connoisseurs – who are these strange people who can just look at an object and know that it is real? What is “the eye”, that mystical ability to just know that an object is right? It also explores what happens when this whole edifice comes crashing down and a famous connoisseur makes a howling and very public mistake.

Chapter 8 the Reconstruction of Knossos continues on from the previous chapter in its investigation of how much of an object has to be created by an artist for it to be his or hers. Here the emphasis changes to how much of an object has to be preserved to make the object still the object it was? The art of conservation and restoration is described and different ideas of the ethically permissible extent of reconstruction is considered. Finally, this is taken to an extreme when an archaeological site is discussed where a very high percentage of the visible remains are extensively, and sometimes imaginatively, reconstructed. How much of this can go on before the site has all the historically damaging effects of a forgery?

The final chapters bring us to a conclusion, but also provide a useful bibliography and glossary. Rather than providing exhaustive references through the chapters, we hope that the guided bibliography is a more user friendly way of exploring further the cases and themes raised in this book. The bibliography details some of the best sources that we have used in the drawing together of the chapters. A short commentary is provided on each of the sources, the aim here being to help readers pick a reference that is useful for them, whether they want a technical report or more general work, an “accepted” version of events or a more controversial one. In this way, readers will know whether the text they are reading is widely praised or “fake news”. Finally, a short glossary is added for the specialist terms, techniques and individuals named in the text, once again to free the main text of explanations that might interfere with the narrative.

The research, writing and travel for this book have taken the two of us over a decade and we have worked on many of the areas in collaboration. However, some of the experiences, impressions and descriptions are more personal to each of us – this is especially true of meetings where we have not both been present. We have tried to give a flavour of this through asides which we have written as individuals. To delineate this, they are set in a different font.

The authors would like to acknowledge the help that they have received from the following academic colleagues and others in the research for this book: Heather Bonney, Mark Carnall, Ian Trumble, Pierrette Squires, Stephen Donovan, Ray Swan and Sophie Hayes. Several others would prefer to remain nameless, but are thanked here. A special note should be made of Katherine Eremin and Marc Walton for many years of travel, hospitality and debate. Parts of this book were devised and written during PdG’s visiting fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford.

Chapter 2

Piltdown Man

A job vacancy at the British Museum.

© The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.

On 25 March 1882, the above job advertisement for a museum assistant appeared in the magazine The Field. To modern eyes this is an odd place to put such an advertisement, for The Field still exists and is the archetypal “hunting, shooting, fishing” magazine. It is also the oldest such magazine, having been in continual publication since 1853. However, The Field has interested its readers with wider matters, ranging from reports from the Crimean War to the development of the rules of lawn tennis. Perhaps, in this context, the advertisement is not so odd. It tells of two vacant situations as assistants at the British Museum, one “First Class” in the Department of Minerals, one “Second Class” in the Department of Geology, with annual starting salaries of £250 and £120 respectively. At a time when a skilled carpenter or bricklayer might earn £100 pounds per year and the most junior army officer £200, these are adequate, but not generous, amounts (rumour has it that some museums still do not pay top salaries…). However, the advertisement makes it clear that there is the opportunity for this to grow annually.

The British Museum mentioned here is the then brand new “British Museum (Natural History)”, abbreviated as BM(NH). The British Museum itself was founded as a “universal museum” by the British Museum Act 1753, joining together several libraries and collections of curiosities including fossils, rocks, antiquities, dried plants, animals and birds, ethnographic materials, books, manuscripts, drawings and much besides. The beautiful neo-classical buildings and courtyard in Bloomsbury in North London that the museum still occupies were finished in the 1850s. However, there was nowhere near enough space for all the collections, so the natural history collections were to be moved out and into a new building in Kensington in the up-and-coming West of London. Although completed only 30 years or so after the British Museum proper, the BM(NH) was a completely different building, reflecting the very latest tastes of late Victorian England. It was designed as a huge, Neo-Gothic, almost “cathedral”, in coloured brick and stone, a design that split opinion then as it does now. It opened in 1881, so had been open only months when our advertisement appeared in press. A major role of the desired new staff would be to move the natural history collections from the old museum in Bloomsbury to Kensington and to design the displays – the BM(NH) had opened with a lot of empty space in its display rooms.

These two posts, although junior, would be prestigious, with access to the world’s greatest collections, top scientists and the opportunity to progress. In the Victorian world it is very likely that such posts would be filled by the protégés of the Head of the Museum, or by young men with political influence. Indeed, the successful candidate would need to have a letter of recommendation from one of only three Principal Trustees of the British Museum: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor or the Speaker of the House of Commons! Additionally, the Head of the Geology Department, in museums known as the “Keeper”, certainly had in mind a person who had worked with him for years – a strong favourite. However, the Keeper was told that the posts must be filled by examination, so there was just a chance for outsiders.

Arthur Woodward was shown the advertisement by his father. He was two months short of his eighteenth birthday, so actually underage for the jobs. Arthur had wanted to join the Geological Survey in Australia, but this had just been vetoed by his parents. Transportation of convicts to Australia finished only in 1868, so perhaps his father and mother still associated this new country with that. Perhaps it was in a spirit of reconciliation that they showed Arthur this, more suitable, post. Arthur had several disadvantages in applying for this role. He was from Macclesfield, a textile town in Northern England (you can almost hear the Keeper saying “Where?”), not the fashionable South-East or, better still, London. His parents could not give him an easy introduction into the world of science and he had not been to the University of Oxford or Cambridge. He did not have a great deal of influence, having to go through a tortuous series of local dignitaries before eventually getting the Archbishop to support his application. However, he did have a couple of big advantages. The Keeper was told that the posts must be filled by examination, to avoid the appearance of appointing favoured, placed men. Arthur was talented and committed, and the examination saw him come top (beating the Keeper’s man, eight years his senior, into fourth place). The job, assistantship second class in the Department of Geology, was his.

It did not start well. The Keeper perhaps nursed some resentment and made it clear that Arthur was on a year’s probation. And there was another complication. The Keeper’s name was Henry Woodward (absolutely no relation, as I am sure he grew tired of telling people), and to avoid “confusion” insisted that Arthur changed his surname, so Arthur became Arthur Smith Woodward, incorporating his mother’s maiden name. There is an image of the BM(NH) Geology Department staff taken in 1883, a year after Smith Woodward joined. Smith Woodward is the tall young man standing on the left, sporting a neat beard, which he wore for his entire life, and a rather dashing double-breasted suit. The suit is perhaps new – it fits well and is neat and clean, in contrast to the dusty and threadbare look sported by his seniors in the picture. The Keeper, Henry Woodward, sits on the right, a serious-looking man with an unsympathetic eye. The other three members of staff could be straight out of central casting for Victorian paterfamilias. They are all pictured in one of the cloistered courtyards of the new Museum, with the multicoloured brick clearly visible.

Staff of the new British Museum (Natural History) in a court within the building. Arthur Smith Woodward is standing on the left. His boss, Henry Woodward, is seated on the right.

© The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.

The Piltdown Painting, now hanging in the Geological Society of London in Burlington House, Piccadilly. Smith Woodward stands on the far right. Standing next to him is Dawson. Keith sits in the white laboratory coat.

Reproduced by permission of the Geological Society of London.

Let us now fast forward over thirty years to another image, this time an oil painting, finished in 1915 and now hanging in the Geological Society of London in Burlington House on Piccadilly. This is the famous Piltdown Painting and, again, it is a collection of learned men, eight this time, some seated, some standing. Arthur Smith Woodward is pictured standing on the right. He was fifty at the time the picture was painted, but looks older, his hair and beard grey to white, and he is balding (he lost his hair in his early twenties). He wears a pair of pince-nez glasses with a gold chain and he looks quite old-fashioned compared to many of the others, who wear modern-looking suits. In this image, the eyes of all the men, and also those of the viewer, are drawn to the table that they cluster around. A single figure in the middle wears a white laboratory coat and holds what looks like a slightly deflated brown leather football in his right hand and a pair of dividers in the left. Just in case the viewer is in any doubt that this is the important part of the painting, one of the standing men is pointing at it – rather heavy-handed imagery by the artist, John Cooke. The table has a number of skulls on it and a wooden contraption designed to allow skulls to be measured. The skull on the right, on its own, is that of an ape. The four skulls on the left are modern human. The brown “football” is pictured between the two, but closer to the modern human; again some rather heavy-handed imagery, for the “football” is also a skull, a reconstructed cast of the brown fragments of cranium and jaw that also lie on the table. The skull fragments and cast are shown between the ape and human skulls because the men pictured believed this to be the most important find in British palaeoanthropology – the “missing link” in the evolution from ape to man. Its importance is highlighted by the ghostly image shown in the frame above the fireplace in the background – Charles Darwin, father of evolutionary theory hovers ethereally above the scene.

This is the famous Piltdown skull, and the men shown in the picture all contributed to its finding, study and conservation. All would gain from their association with the skull; no fewer than four of them would be knighted for their services to science. However all is not as it might seem, for it is extremely likely that at least one of the men pictured here knows that this skull is not the missing link. He knows this because he himself made the skull, fraudulently and deliberately, with the intent of deceiving the other men around the table and the world in general. For Piltdown is a fake – an outrageous concoction that fooled British academia for the best part of forty years. It would damage Smith Woodward’s career and tarnish his exceptional legacy. It would set British palaeoanthropology back so far that it almost didn’t recover.

The first finds

For Arthur Smith Woodward, his involvement with Piltdown started on 15 February 1912. By now he had a very successful career, had published widely and well in his specialist area of fossil fish, and had risen to be Head of Geology – he was now the Keeper – at the BM(NH). On this particular morning he received a letter from an acquaintance, Charles Dawson, who was a solicitor and amateur fossil collector. Dawson stands next to Smith Woodward in the painting. He is also balding and wears glasses. He has almost a fatherly appearance, apparently pleased that the learned men around the table are paying the skull such attention. Dawson and Smith Woodward had been out collecting together in a quarry near Hastings and the letter discussed the expenses that they had incurred. It also mentioned Arthur Conan Doyle (the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories) who was writing a new novel, Lost World, but was also a fossil enthusiast known to both men. There was more chat about mutual friends and colleagues and their activities until Dawson casually mentioned a find that one might imagine immediately caught Smith Woodward’s attention. He said:

“I have come across a very old Pleistocene (?) bed […] which I think is going to be interesting. It has a lot of iron-stained flints in it, so I suppose it is the oldest known flint gravel in the Weald. I portion [sic] of human skull which will rival H. Heidelbergensis in solidity”.

A “Pleistocene bed” refers to a layer of rock or, as in this case, gravel of Pleistocene age which, using modern scientific dating, we know to be somewhere between 11,000 and 2.6 million years old. Dawson and Smith Woodward would have had only the haziest idea of the calendrical date. The Weald is an area of chalk uplands in Southern England stretching across the counties of Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex and Kent. The key sentence is the last one. It is slightly garbled, but suggests that Dawson has found an ancient, thick fragment of hominid skull similar to that of Homo Heidelbergensis – “Heidelberg man”. Found near the German city of Heidelberg, this was an ape-like jaw with teeth and represented the most likely earliest ancestor of modern humans, Homo sapiens, then known. Dawson had had the chance to see casts of this fossil specimen, although it is not known when, and so he knew what he was talking about in the comparison. At the time, France and Germany had a wealth of early hominid fossils, including Neanderthal man, Homo neanderthalensis. Britain, on the other hand, had a rather paltry selection of questionable stone tools, known as eoliths and palaeoliths (now dismissed as entirely natural), but precious little else. French palaeontologists jokingly referred to their British colleagues as “chasseurs de cailloux”, or “pebble hunters”, and that smarted with the British. Britain needed some good fossils to keep up with continental Europe. Could this be what Dawson had found?

Smith Woodward wrote back to Dawson by return of post, apparently suggesting that he keep quiet about the find until Smith Woodward had had chance to see it. Weather and work commitments intervened, which meant that Smith Woodward could not go down to Sussex to see the site or the fossil as he obviously wanted to do. Dawson, perhaps overcome in the excitement of his find, starts to show it to a range of friends and colleagues and this is recorded in contemporary letters during April. Eventually on 24 May Dawson comes to London and, perhaps with a degree of theatre, places the skull on Smith Woodward’s desk. Smith Woodward must have been delighted, for it would be obvious to him that the skull was indeed a hominid. We can be sure that he asked Dawson the exact circumstances of its discovery, the details of which Dawson repeats in one of his later papers in the Hastings and Sussex Naturalist. It appears that Dawson was a visitor to a Barkham Manor, an estate near the hamlet of Piltdown and a couple of miles west of the Sussex town of Uckfield. Dawson was working in the Manor as president of the Court Baron, a junior version of a magistrates’ court designed to hear disputes of tenants and the like. Whilst on site, he visited some pits where gravel was extracted to put onto the farm tracks. The farm hands digging the gravel told him that they had never found any “fossils or bones”, but Dawson asked them to look out for anything that might be of interest. Dawson does not say exactly when this conversation occurred, but it is likely to have been in 1899. On a subsequent visit (perhaps in 1908), workman handed him the first piece of skull, part of the left parietal. He immediately searched for more, but could not find anything. “Several years later” (in 1911) he found a “larger piece of the same skull”. In his book The Earliest Englishman, Smith Woodward gives a slightly different version of the find, which he could only have had from Dawson himself. He says that the workmen “dug up what they thought was a coconut”, which they thought might interest Dawson. However, since it was “a little bulky to keep, they broke it and threw away all but one piece”. The story is repeated in other accounts, all of which derive directly or indirectly from Dawson.

There are some obvious problems with these accounts of the first finding of the skull. The “coconut” story does not feature in Dawson’s formal accounts – perhaps this was the verbal story behind the formal account. More difficult is the timeframe – it takes the labourers eight years to find something and, in the coconut story, the first thing they do is smash it with a shovel and throw away most of it. Why did Dawson never mention the early first find of the skull in 1908 to Smith Woodward (or anyone else) even though they were fossil hunting together in the same area? The second fragment is not found for another three to four years, and yet is this the same skull? Why does Smith Woodward appear not to question the various discrepancies in Dawson’s account?

Down to Piltdown, the 1912 season

As Smith Woodward looked at the fragments of fossil skull on his desk on 24 May 1912, he knew that this was perhaps the find of his career. Both he and Dawson were impatient to get down to the site and look for more, but had to wait for the pits to dry out after recent rain. Therefore it was on 2 June that they eventually made it to the site. They were accompanied by Father Marie-Joseph Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and keen amateur palaeontologist, who had worked before with Dawson looking for fossils in the area, plus an unknown man who “was there to help us dig”. This was probably Venus Hargreaves, a labourer who was employed by the team in 1912 and 1913 and appears in some of the photographs of the diggings. They dug and sorted the gravels sporadically at weekends and holidays through June, July and August, but unfortunately either kept no notebooks of the dig, or the notebooks were lost or destroyed subsequently. What was found, and when, therefore has to be reconstructed from contemporary letters or later accounts, often muddled. What is clear is that they were exceptionally lucky to have a spectacular success on the first day, even though they apparently did not arrive on site until 3pm. A letter from Teihard de Chardin, written the next day clearly states that after “several hours […] Dawson discovered a new fragment of the famous human skull”. A few weeks later, three more conjoining fragments of the same skull were found on successive days. According to Smith Woodward they were “evidently not […] disturbed since they were thrown away”, echoing his coconut story.

The real prize also came sometime in June, but again it is not clear when. For the first time in undisturbed gravel (rather than in the spoil from digging), Dawson found a further fossil fragment. However, this time it was a piece of the jaw, which allowed it to be directly compared to H. heidelbergensis for the first time. Dawson said that it was found in the identical spot to the very first find, years before. Smith Woodward then found another piece of cranium “within a yard” of where the jaw was found. In addition to the hominid bones, a diverse collection of animal bones including mastodon, hippopotamus, deer, horse and elephant were found, along with now discredited “worked” flints, all naturally stained brown by the iron content of the gravel.

This completed the first season at Piltdown, and Dawson and Smith Woodward sat down to study what they had found and to draft a formal announcement of the discovery. At this point the first and only attempt at chemical analysis was carried out. Dawson sent a small fragment of bone from the cranium to Samuel Allinson Woodhead, who was “Public Analyst for East Sussex and Hove, and Agricultural Analyst for East Sussex”. Dawson had worked with him several times before and Woodhead was familiar with the Piltdown site. His chemical analysis showed that the bone contained no organic material, but high contents of phosphates and iron. The fragment was therefore fossilised, not fresh bone – good news. The jaw was not analysed. The paper was ready for publication.