Famed Archaeologist 'Discovered' His Own Fakes at 9,000-Year-Old Settlement

Owen Jarus, Famed Archaeologist 'Discovered' His Own Fakes at 9,000-Year-Old Settlement Live Science March 12, 2018

A famed archaeologist well-known for discovering the sprawling 9,000-year-old settlement in Turkey called Çatalhöyük seems to have faked several of his ancient findings and may have run a "forger's workshop" of sorts, one researcher says. James Mellaart, who died in 2012, created some of the "ancient" murals at Çatalhöyük that he supposedly discovered; he also forged documents recording inscriptions that were found at Beyköy, a village in Turkey, said geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger, president of the Luwian Studies Foundation. Zangger examined Mellaart's apartment in London between Feb. 24 and 27, finding "prototypes," as Zangger calls them, of murals and inscriptions that Mellaart had claimed were real.  [...] Mellaart first published descriptions of the Çatalhöyük murals in 1962 in the magazine Archaeology, and published more examples over the following decades. Some of the murals that Mellaart described in publications showed only drawings and no actual photographs. These include a mural from Çatalhöyük that supposedly shows a volcano exploding. How many of the Çatalhöyük murals are fake is not yet clear. Mellaart "produced a mélange of published facts, unpublished data and imagination. It is virtually impossible to disentangle," Zangger said. Mellaart's career was not without controversy. In 1964, he was accused of inadvertently aiding smugglers trying to sell stolen artifacts and was barred from excavating in Turkey. "He still had half a century to live. During this time, he appears to have increasingly entered an imaginary world. Maybe he wanted to somehow retaliate by misleading his colleagues in the field," Zangger said. [...] Mellaart was evidently a genius in some ways. But he misused his talents, thereby causing tremendous damage to the field," Zangger said. Ian Hodder, who currently leads excavations at Çatalhöyük, declined to comment on the situation.