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The Beringer Hoax

Extraordinary fossils and inscriptions: 

Works of Nature or God? 

Or  made by jealous colleagues?

Title page

In the early 18th century, Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer--chair of natural history at the University of Würzburg and chief physician to the Prince Bishop of Würzburg--took part enthusiastically in the debate about the origins of fossils. Were they traces of real plants and animals, indicating that the earth was of great age, some other natural phenomena, or part of the biblical creation? Single-minded and with a high opinion of his scholarly abilities, Beringer was wide open for a simple, but devastating hoax.

Many accounts, as in The Scientific Monthly for May 1925, say Beringer often took students out to dig for fossils.

On one mountain they planted carvings of bizarre lizards and salamanders, mating frogs, spiders with webs, birds walking and flying, and even slugs and butterflies.

Beringer thought these were real, and, inspired by their success, the pranksters made ones with Syrian, Hebrew, and Babylonian inscriptions, even one with the name Jehovah on it. Beringer "wholly, publicly committed himself to the belief that fossils were merely the capricious fabrications of God, hidden in the earth by Him for some inscrutable purpose; possibly, thought Beringer, merely for His own pleasure; possibly as a test for human faith" and proceeded to write a book on them. Alarmed, the perpetrators told all--but he rejected their confession, claiming they were trying to stop the publication of his proof of the stones' godly origins. Beringer's masterpiece, Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, was printed in 1726. Soon after, the doctor uncovered another "fossil." It had his name on it. Beringer's bubble of illusions burst. Devastated, he tried to buy up all of the copies of his book, dying penniless and heartbroken. The story, in this version, was "a memorial at once of an almost incredible hoax, a colossal farce and a pitiful story of broken ambition and humbled pride."

Frontispiece

But historians Melvin E. Jahn and Daniel J. Woolf, who in 1963 produced the first English translation of Beringer's book, showed the truth behind the tale lies not in farcical student antics but in a slanderous plot by Beringer's jealous colleagues. Far from dying as a result of his shame, Beringer initiated legal proceedings. The stones were proved to be fake and the perpetrators revealed: J. Ignatz Roderick, professor of geography, algebra, and analysis at the university, and Georg von Eckhart, privy councillor and librarian to the bishop's court and university. Eckhart and Roderick were disgraced, but Beringer kept his job, lived another 14 years, and published several more books.

Roderick and Eckhart had hired 17-year-old Christian Zanger to assist them. Roderick carved the stones, which Zanger polished. In court, Zanger said Roderick devised the scheme "because Beringer was so arrogant and despised them all." Zanger and two other boys, Niklaus and Valentin Hehn, who were not in on the hoax, were then hired by Beringer to excavate and collect the stones. Some were planted, to be found by Zanger or the Hehns, others Zanger sold directly to Beringer.

Animal Fossils

When Beringer announced his intention to publish, Roderick and Eckhart spread rumors about the fossils' authenticity. But Beringer thought they were trying to rob him of his great discovery. "Our idiomorphic stones are not the handwrought products of recent artistry," he wrote, "as some persons have shamelessly pretended, and attempted to peddle to the public by widespread rumor and gossip."

Beringer was also aware that Roderick had carved a few stones, planting some on the mountain and giving others to "a stonecutter's helper" [Zanger] hired "to sell them to me." In court, Zanger said this was "to see if [Beringer] could be tricked into buying the false stones." When he "returned to the residence of the privy councillor, they all had a big laugh that Dr. Beringer was deceived by the stones." But the doctor refused to accept the implications of this incident, asking "Does this mean that every iconolith I have uncovered during the past six months smacks of imposture?" He answered himself with a firm "no."

Beringer was taken in because he was obstinate and because the stones fit the early 18th-century debate about the origins of fossils (Gould 1998). He compared his stones against various theories: relics of the Flood, the vagaries of Nature, created by a "marvelous force of petrifying moisture and salts of the earth" or some subterranean "generative vapor." But the 100 or so with inscriptions, unlike anything found before, baffled him. "For whatever power has fashioned [them] the agent...has surpassed his limits by employing the art of writing, and has traced the characters of several languages, but especially those of the sacred tongue, so exactly in accordance with the rules of Hebrew orthography that they were adjudged in the opinion of experts to extol in eloquent titles the most holy name, power, and wisdom of God, and thus perhaps manifest the one and only author of these wondrous stones."

Inscriptions

As Beringer describes the stones and weighs the interpretations in his book, he passes by one telltale clue after another: "The figures...are so exactly fitted to the dimensions of the stones, that one would swear that they are the work of a very meticulous sculptor." The fossils have a "smoothness suggesting the polished effect of applied pumice, though the lower side retains its natural soiled roughness." "One would swear that he discerned on many of them the strokes of a knife gone awry...."

Beringer's experience shows how hoaxers can exploit a single-minded belief that can blind those unwilling to question their own initial conclusions despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Trapped by their own hoax, Roderick and Eckhart tried to shift the blame. Roderick threatened the Hehns with irons and fetters if they did not admit to having carved and hidden the stones. They promised Zanger "much money and many favors if he would state that the Hehn brothers made the stones." To his credit, Zanger refused and the hoaxers were disgraced. (He did, however, ask "the commission for help in obtaining the wages owed to him by Roderick for eight days of stone polishing for which he had received no compensation.")

© 2009 by the Archaeological Institute of America
archive.archaeology.org/online/features/hoaxes/beringer.html

Cacciatori di Falsi

Conversations: Hunting Fakes

January/February 2005

A Smithsonian sleuth says counterfeits lurk in museum collections the world over.

Jane Walsh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, is best known for her work with museum collections and for exposing several crystal skulls, once thought to be Precolumbian, as nineteenth-century German fakes. She is now working with several museums to create a database that can be used to identify bogus Precolumbian jade, crystal, and other stone artifacts. She talked to ARCHAEOLOGY about why you shouldn't always trust what you see at museums.

 Can you say how many fakes are in any one museum's collection?
Well, no. But what I can tell you is any museum--I don't care what museum it is--has fakes, because fakes are ubiquitous. I have a friend who works at the Holocaust Museum as a conservator, and even they have forgeries--Star of David badges and prison uniforms that were made for Hollywood films and later sold by dealers as authentic artifacts.

How did counterfeit Precolumbian jade, crystal, and other stone artifacts become so prevalent in museum collections?
Museums all over the world began collecting Precolumbian stone carvings in the 1820s just after Mexican independence, when the country was first opened again to foreigners. They created a demand, and there probably wasn't a supply to satisfy that demand. So local artisans, or maybe some Europeans, started creating the supply. In the beginning, people were unknowingly collecting the fakes because they didn't know what the things were supposed to look like.

It seems likely that some forgeries must have made it into serious scholarly research.
There are a number of very famous pieces that I wonder about, and people have published on them for a century. And there are plenty of pieces that are completely anomalous--that don't look like anything else that anyone has ever dug up--that have made it into scholars' papers. Those publications are always filled with complicated explanations of why the objects don't look like anything else. I think there may be an easier answer. I'm not saying they're all fakes. I'm saying this project may offer the opportunity to make sure they're not.

Is that what interests you most about looking for fakes?
It's not just that I want to say, "Oh, that's fake!" It comes out of my interest in collections and what they say about us as much as what they say about the people we think made the objects. Fakes are sort of creatures of their time. A lot of them were made in the nineteenth century, which was a very inventive age--people had absolutely no compunction about taking something that was 500 years old and changing it to make it look "better."

How will you use the stone artifacts from the Smithsonian, the British Museum, and Mexico's Templo Mayor Museum to identify fakes?
We want to create a database with documented artifacts from archaeological contexts that we can use to make comparisons with artifacts in question. Basically, we'll subject objects to various analyses using silicone impressions, scanning electron microscopes, CAT scans, and x-ray fluorescence.

Do you worry that the results of your work may tip off the forgers?
It will get to them. I know it will. Someone 50 years from now will have to figure out what they figured out. But by then, this technology that I'm using is going to look like what they used in the nineteenth century. People will be able to zap a laser beam at an object and tell immediately that it's from 1963.

How do you think museums will react to your work?
Some people in my department say, "Oh, you are going to be deluged by people who want you to come and take a look at their stuff." That's not my fear. My fear is that I'm going to be locked out of collections because people will be afraid that I'll say their favorite object is a fake. 
   I'm already sort of dealing with that at the moment. I can't really talk about it, but I have to say I was surprised. To me it just seems like the most obvious thing in the world to do is research your collection. Otherwise it's kind of like having a library where you won't let people take the books down because they look so nice, stacked up all evenly. Collections really are like libraries. The objects are like books and you have to open them up to learn anything. You can't just admire them through glass cases.

© 2005 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/0501/etc/conversations.html