Word: mellaart
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...