The Erudite Faker

When the famous jaw of "Piltdown man" was proved by chemical tests to be a skillful fake (TIME. Nov. 30. 1953), some authorities were unwilling to condemn the late Charles Dawson, a respected antiquarian of southern England who claimed to have found it in 1911. The faking was too good, the experts said, for a man without technical skill.

Respect for Dawson's skill has now gone up, and his moral repute has taken a tumble. Curator John Manwaring Baines of Hastings Museum found that five more antiquities that had been lent to the museum by Dawson and later bought from his widow, who sold them in good faith, were no more genuine than Piltdown man. Flint instruments proved to be of modern manufacture, and a "Roman" cast-iron statuette turned out to be a small, recent copy of a full-size statue in Rome. When not busy with antiquities, the industrious Dawson "wrote" a two-volume history of Hastings, much of which he copied out of an unpublished manuscript in the Hastings Museum.

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