The Lying Stones of Marrakech Read Online Free Page A

impressions do not match the projecting, and supposedly corresponding, embellishments on the “fossil” itself.)
    But one style of fakery emerges as a kind of “industry standard,” as defined by constant repetition and presence in all shops. (Whatever the unique and personal items offered for sale in any shop, this vin ordinaire of the genre always appears in abundance.) These “standards” feature small (up to four or six inches in length) flattened stones with a prominent creature spread out in three dimensions on the surface. The fossils span a full range from plausible “trilobites,” to arthropods (crabs, lobsters, and scorpions, for example) with external hard parts that might conceivably fossilize (though never in such complete exactitude), to small vertebrates (mostly frogs and lizards) with a soft exterior, including such delicate features as fingers and eyes that cannot be preserved in the geological record.
    After much scrutiny, I finally worked out the usual mode of manufacture. The fossil fakes are plaster casts, often remarkably well done. (The lizard that I bought, as seen in the accompanying photograph, must have been cast from life, for a magnifying glass reveals the individual pores and scales of the skin.) The forger cuts a flat surface on a real rock and then cements the plaster cast to this substrate. (If you look carefully from the side, you can always make out the junction of rock and plaster.) Some fakes have been crudely confected, but the best examples match the color and form of rock to overlying plaster so cleverly that distinctions become nearly invisible.

    A fake fossil reptile from a Moroccan rock shop. Done in plaster from a live cast and then glued to the rock .
    When I first set eyes on these fakes, I experienced the weirdest sense of déjà vu, an odd juxtaposition of old and new that sent shivers of fascination and discomfort up and down my spine—a feeling greatly enhanced by a day just spent in the medina of Fez, the ancient walled town that has scarcely been altered by a millennium of surrounding change, where only mules and donkeys carry the goods of commerce, and where high walls, labyrinthine streets, tiny open shops, and calls to prayer, enhanced during the fast of Ramadan, mark a world seemingly untouched by time, and conjuring up every stereotype held by an uninformed West about a “mysterious East.” I looked at these standard fakes, and I saw Beringer’s Lügensteine of 1726. The two styles are so uncannily similar that I wondered, at first, if the modern forgers had explicitly copied the plates of the Lithographiae Wirceburgensis —a silly idea that I dropped as soon as I returned and consulted my copy of Beringer’s original. But the similarities remain overwhelming. I purchased two examples—a scorpion of sorts and a lizard—as virtual dead ringers for Beringer’s Lügensteine , and I present a visual comparison of the two sets of fakes, separated by 250 years and a different process of manufacture (carved in Germany, cast in Morocco). I only wonder if the proprietor believed my assurances, rendered in my best commercial French, that I was aprofessional paleontologist, and that his wares were faux, absolument et sans doute —or if he thought that I had just devised a bargaining tactic more clever than most.

    The striking similarity between the most famous fake in the history of paleontology (Beringer’s Lügensteine, or “lying stones,” of 1726) and a modem Moroccan fabrication .
    But an odd similarity across disparate cultures and centuries doesn’t provide a rich enough theme for an essay. I extracted sufficient generality only when I realized that this maximal likeness in appearance correlates with a difference in meaning that couldn’t be more profound. A primary strategy of the experimental method in science works by a principle known since Roman times as ceteris