Real, Recent, or Replica: Precolumbian Caribbean Heritage as Art, Commodity, and Inspiration
Real, Recent, or Replica: Precolumbian Caribbean Heritage as Art, Commodity, and Inspiration (University of Alabama Press, 2021) is a new volume edited by Joanna Ostapkowicz and Jonathan A. Hanna. It examines the largely unexplored topics in Caribbean archaeology of looting of heritage sites, fraudulent artifacts, and illicit trade of archaeological materials. Describing the book, Neil Brodie (coeditor of Illicit Antiquities: The Theft of Culture and the Extinction of Archaeology) writes, “An unprecedented exploration of the furtive practices of collecting, faking, and looting as they entangle the scholarly study of Caribbean archaeology and ethnohistory. Local in focus but global in impact, the book has much to teach us about the consequences and unintended consequences of public policy’s embrace of cultural heritage.”