Rant: The visitor at Knossos who dismissed the snake goddess figurines as 'tourist junk'

I was at the Heraklion Museum back in March, standing near the case with the faience snake goddess from 1600 BC, and this guy behind me tells his buddy it's obviously a modern replica because the colors are too bright. I turned around and explained the Minoans used tin glazes that survived because the storage pits in Knossos stayed dry, and he just shrugged and walked off. It stuck with me because people assume ancient means faded and broken, but those pieces came out of the ground looking fresh as the day they were painted. Has anyone else had a stranger at a site lecture you about authenticity when the actual archaeology says otherwise?

2 comments

2 Comments

gibson.elizabeth20d ago

Honestly the guy might have had a point, not about the replica thing but about how easy it is to get fooled by color. Bright blue and green on a 3,600 year old artifact does look wrong to most people because we're used to seeing Greek marble statues that lost all their paint. Every museum in the world has bright pieces that turn out to be fakes, like that Hobby Lobby stuff, so being suspicious is actually a sane reaction. The faience process does hold color well, but the snake goddess was restored and heavily reconstructed, Evans himself had the pieces copied and finished. What you saw in that case is part original and part guesswork, so the guy's instincts about something being off weren't totally crazy. People who study this stuff for a living still argue about what's genuine and what's cleaned up, so expecting a random tourist to know the difference is asking a lot.

tarar2719d ago

and honestly that whole thread reminded me of this documentary I watched about the Met's collection, they had a whole segment on how much paint survives on ancient stuff and it's way more than people think. @gibson.elizabeth you're spot on about the color thing, the faience glaze really does lock in that blue, but the snake goddess is such a messy case since Evans basically had it finished for display. I remember reading that he even didn't note which parts were actual finds and which were his craftsman's additions, so the whole piece is kinda a blend of real and restored. so yeah, a tourist seeing super bright paint on something that old and going "that can't be right" isn't dumb, it's just using common sense. museums need to do a better job of labeling what's original and what's been worked on, cause otherwise people will always wonder if they're being shown something fake.