Well, he's giving it exposure... Yeah, he at least hints at something such towards the end of the thread -- but I had no idea about that from before, so he "exposed" the whole thing at least to me.
The problem is that unless you have experience digging such artifacts out of the ground and an extensive familiarity with the provenanced material others have dug out of the ground, such impressions aren't worth much. In the context of looking at listings on Etsy and eBay to learn about looting of material culture, there's plenty of stuff I've thought was fake before an archeologist set me straight with dozens of links to similar material in museums. Likewise, there's plenty of stuff I thought was real that turned out to be an obvious fake to people who know better.
Incidentally a famous artifact called the Capitoline Wolf depicting Remus and Romulus nursing under a wolf was long thought to be an Etruscan artifact. A little while back I was reading a history of the arts published in the late 1990s that used it as an example of one of the high achievements of Etruscan art. It turns out, however, that radiocarbon dating done in the 2000s showed that it was actually a medieval work. Apparently there had been doubts about its origins for centuries, but they had mostly been ignored.
Interestingly enough, the Wiki article states there is good reason to think the wolf is Etruscan but Romulus and Remus are medieval.
> However, a recent study by John Osborne at the British School at Rome concluded that the radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dates were totally inconsistent. He pointed out that metal from which the wolf is made is of the Etruscan type using copper from Sardinia and that there is no sign of the adulteration common in mediaeval times, and that on the balance of probabilities, the wolf should be considered to be Etruscan.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 26.2 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitoline_Wolf
Interestingly enough, the Wiki article states there is good reason to think the wolf is Etruscan but Romulus and Remus are medieval.
> However, a recent study by John Osborne at the British School at Rome concluded that the radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dates were totally inconsistent. He pointed out that metal from which the wolf is made is of the Etruscan type using copper from Sardinia and that there is no sign of the adulteration common in mediaeval times, and that on the balance of probabilities, the wolf should be considered to be Etruscan.