Nazca and the Three-Fingered Mummies
Since 2017 Jaime Maussan has been exhibiting small pale bodies with elongated skulls and three fingers on each hand, said to come from a cave near Nazca — and in 2023 he exhibited them to the Mexican congress. Peruvian prosecutors seized part of the collection and in 2018 published a forensic report led by Flavio Estrada: dolls assembled from human and animal bones held together with modern adhesive, with animal skulls standing in for human ones. Peru's college of archaeologists and its ministry of culture demanded an investigation. The bodies are still on the conference circuit.
The Davenport Tablets
In 1877 the Reverend Jacob Gass excavated a mound near Davenport, Iowa, and brought out slate tablets inscribed in several ancient alphabets at once, with a cremation scene. The Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences held them to be proof of contact between the Old World and the New. A century later the archaeologist Marshall McKusick went through the Academy's own archives: the slate matches roofing tiles from a demolished local brothel, and the alphabets on the tablet are copied, errors included, from a plate in the 1872 edition of Webster's dictionary. The correspondence suggests they were planted by members of the Academy itself, who resented the newcomer Gass.
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