August 20, 2000
CONTENTS:
- Roadshow stars expose antiques counterfeiters
- Fremont Indian Artifacts Unearthed on Antelope Island
Roadshow stars expose antiques counterfeiters
By Rajeev Syal and David Bamber
PRESENTERS from BBC's Antiques Roadshow are teaming up with undercover police officers to expose crooked dealers and counterfeiters. Alastair Dickenson, the show's silverware specialist, accompanied plainclothes officers when they raided an antiques dealer from Chester and found a bag containing 16 identical counterfeit silver snuffboxes and eight false tortoiseshell-plated antiques. Mr Dickenson, 49, spotted that the boxes made in the Victorian style had fake Georgian hallmarks. Last week Alan Shindler, 59, who owns the shop, began a six-month jail sentence for selling fake goods.
Mr Dickenson said: "I was asked by trading standards officers to get involved as they started to close in on the fraudsters. They paid me to go with them into the shop and examine the wares and I found that they were obvious forgeries. The police do seem very keen on hiring the services of recognised experts. The Roadshow does put us in the public eye and so it is natural that they ask us to help them out."
Peter Nahum, one of the programmes's fine art specialists, helped to smash one of the biggest peddlers of counterfeit art ever to operate in Britain. He helped police identify fakes among a number of paintings sold as works by Marc Chagall, Georges Braque and Paul Klee which had been sold by a dealer, John Drewe. Last week he said that police were seeking the help of expert witnesses more and more as they close in on counterfeiters: "Art fraud is the second oldest profession in the world - but it is growing at a pace. The number and quality of copies are increasing so quickly."
Bill Harriman, who has regularly assessed firearms on the show since 1985, has also been asked to give expert testimony by the police and trading standards departments. As well as appearing on the programme, Mr Harriman is firearms officer for the British Association for Shooting and Conservation.
Recently he was commissioned to provide an opinion on whether a sword sold by a Brighton antiques dealer, described as coming from the Nazi era, was genuine. He said: "In this case my opinion was commissioned by the defence, but it makes no difference because I am completely impartial and would give the same opinion whoever asked for it. The sword was definitely from the pre-Nazi era but it had two SS lightning-style initials engraved on it.
"The antiques dealer was being accused of selling a fake but in my opinion the SS flashmarks were put there during the Nazi era. They were consistent with others and were to a high standard, so the sword was genuine. Trading standards dropped the case."
He is also regularly asked to judge whether firearms seized by the police are legally held. Six months ago, he was asked by police in Wales whether a handgun was legally held since the 1997 ban was imposed. "I said I thought it was legally held and, what's more, qualified as an antique so was exempt from the ban."
The show's experts have even been used by thieves to evaluate their hoards. Last month one suspect, described as a "military gent" with a handlebar moustache, was told his silver antiques were worth £20,000 when he took them to the Roadshow, being filmed in Middlesbrough. Police later realised he was a conman, valuing stolen goods.
(Daily Telegraph)
Fremont Indian Artifacts Unearthed on Antelope Island
BY BOB MIMS
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
ANTELOPE ISLAND -- From high up a slope of the Great Salt Lake's largest desert isle, the view is a panoramic and stunning picture, framed by the distant Wasatch Mountains, of miles of blue-green water, a steady breeze washing the rocky shore with a briny surf. But at the Mushroom Springs dig, Darrell and Marty Thomas are oblivious to the scene, peering intently at a bucketful of dirt freshly dumped onto a wood-and-screen sifting contraption. Marty works the apparatus, rocking it back and forth, separating the soil from rocks -- and perhaps archaeological treasure. Suddenly, Marty stops, and Darrell thrusts a work-gloved hand into the bin to pluck a slate-gray fragment about 2-by-3 inches. "Hey! There's a piece of pottery!" he cries, a small smile of victory showing teeth through the sweat and grit. It has taken hours under a warming sun to dig, brush and sift this tiny artifact at the roughly 250-square-foot dig two miles southwest of the historic Fielding Garr Ranch. The Thomases insist it was a worthwhile investment: The slightly curved, quarter-inch thick simple chunk of pottery is more proof that ancient Fremont Indians once hunted and gathered on Antelope Island 1,000 years ago. "See those flecks?" Darrell says, pointing to glisten specks in gray shard, soon to be bagged and labeled for future study. "That shows they probably used sand in the firing process."
It is a discovery that is ample pay for Darrell, a North Salt Lake dentist who occasionally trades his office whites for the shorts, hiking boots and shovel of an amateur archaeologist. It is a passion he shares with his wife; both Darrell and Marty are Utah Statewide Archaeological Society officers. Marty prefers the sifting, or "screening" part of the process, and has a keen eye for archaeological treasures amid the dirt and rock being dug up by a dozen other volunteers carefully peeling away the soil a few feet away. "We've also found two pieces of bone today, and yesterday we found what we call lithics -- pieces of rock which appear to have been worked by man, maybe used as grinding stones," she said. Every discovery, whether bits of animal bone some Fremont once gnawed for its last bit of marrow or a fragment of pottery or stone used to mash native grains, adds to the archaeological record of a people who predated both the white Mormon settlers of 150 years ago, and existing American Indian tribes of the region. "When you pick up those pieces, it's history and prehistory in your hands," Marty said. "You think about the people who might have used them, what they were like." Had it not been for Bill Latady, a curator for the state Division of Parks and Recreation, the Mushroom Springs site may have been lost. It was Latady who halted the project in February 1999 while checking the spot where a contractor was excavating a spring to supply water for ranch visitors. "I started seeing artifacts in the area. There were grinding stones, arrowheads, rabbit and antelope bones, pottery," Latady recalled. "The first thing I thought was to stop the digging right away so we could take a closer look." Latady had found what appeared to be the only Fremont Indian camp site known on the island, one established about midway through the now-extinct tribe's 700-1300 A.D. reign over a range extending throughout Utah and adjacent areas of Idaho, Colorado and Nevada. Fremont sites are numerous along the Wasatch Front, where they left behind characteristic pit houses, shelters dug into the ground and covered with brush roofing.
The Antelope Island site appears to have been more temporary in nature. The idea fires Latady's imagination. He can envision generations of Fremonts crossing the 3 to 7-mile gap from a small village near the western shoreline, hoping to supplement their families' food supplies with antelope and bison meat. "They could have floated across on rafts made of reeds, which grow in the marshes around here. Or, they may have waded across, if the water was shallow like it is now," Latady said. The Mushroom Springs site would have been "a natural campground. It's certainly no surprise that people would locate their camp near a fresh water source on a desert island," he said. Kevin Jones, an archaeologist with the Antiquities Section of the Division of State History, says laboratory testing and detailed study of all the artifacts eventually recovered could provide a fuller picture of what the camp may have been. Under Jones' direction, the ThomAases and other volunteers began digging Thursday. Work on the site is expected to wrap up Saturday.
"It's definitely a Fremont Period hunting and gathering camp," he said. "What we hope to eventually find out is what kinds of plants they were gathering, what animals they were hunting, and whether they were eating them here or taking meat back to provision another camp." All that will have to wait. First, Jones and his army of archaeology enthusiasts must carefully scrape away layers of brush, soil and rock with flat-bladed shovels, resorting to hand trowels and whisk brooms when a likely candidate emerges. What diggers don't spot, those working the screens likely will, says Mercedes Munsee, a 14-year-old volunteer from Murray who was taking tips on sifting technique from the Thomases. "You look for bones, pieces of pottery, anything but rocks," she laughed. "It's something to do other than watch TV and stay home all summer."
Public tours of the Mushroom Springs dig are offered Monday through Friday at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m., noon and 2 p.m. For further information, call 801-773-2941.
(The Salt Lake tribune)