“Somewhat like her father’s, from what I can tell,” he replied, “but I’ve learned not to probe. In our business, we take funding where we can find it. The old man seems satisfied with our current arrangement and I don’t want to jeopardize our work by getting into unnecessary theological disputes.”
I nodded. This made perfect sense.
“How much time has she spent at the site?” I asked.
“She visited for the first time earlier this year.”
“Does she have any archaeological training?”
“No. She just happened to be there when we uncovered the skeleton; but I’ll give credit where it’s due: She was the one who initially noticed the polyester core in the thread. The brand is called D-Core; it’s quite common today.”
Since others waiting at the departure gate could overhear our conversation, we agreed not to discuss further specifics until we reached our destination, though I couldn’t resist making a final pass through online databases before having to shut the system down for takeoff.
***
Considering that I had made my last trip to Israel in the back of a noisy, windowless C-130, I couldn’t complain too much about having to fly coach. We landed about six the next morning, cleared immigration and customs, and were comfortably ensconced in our rental car by eight, crawling slowly forward in Tel Aviv’s rush-hour traffic.
Half an hour later, we pulled into the parking lot of Radiometric Labs and greeted the friendly receptionist. She escorted us to the back, where two technicians had laid out the skeleton on a metal table in the center of the room.
“I called ahead,” said Lavon.
We introduced ourselves. Radiometric’s manager, Jonathan Dichter, had studied with Lavon at Michigan before returning to his native country.
The lab was arranged in a typical fashion. A long bench ran the entire length of one side, covered with an array of beakers and reagents, an autoclave and couple of laptop PCs — though I suppose I should qualify the term “typical.” Old movie posters of Godzilla breathing fire upon Japanese cities festooned the walls.
“Two thousand years from now, confused scientists might attribute the destruction of our present world to such a cause,” Dichter explained.
I shrugged. To each his own.
We chatted a few more minutes and then got down to business.
“When did you first realize you had a problem?” I asked.
“Let me start by explaining our normal procedures,” Dichter replied.
“When a skeleton comes in from an excavation site, we lay it out on the table and count the bones, to determine whether it is completely intact and to resolve the question of whether two or more sets of bones may have been mixed together.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Then we take preliminary measurements of the long bones and x-ray everything.”
“That would have picked up the pin, wouldn’t it?”
“That’s correct, if our equipment had been working. Our machine broke down a few days earlier, but the local hospital had priority access to the parts we needed. Getting it repaired took over a week.”
“That’s when you found the pin?”
“Yes, but by then that was only one of many anomalies,” said Lavon.
Dichter continued, “From the femur length, we estimated the man’s height at 185 centimeters. That’s six foot one to you Americans; tall for the era, but not Goliath.”
From my recollection of Henry Bryson, that sounded about right.
“Once we did that,” Dichter said, “we took random samples of the bones and calculated a preliminary age using a standard radiocarbon process. In this case, the results dated consistently to the first century, with a margin of error plus or minus a decade or two.”
“This all seems rather straightforward,” I said. “When did you first suspect that you were dealing with something out of the ordinary?”
Dichter reached up to grab a bright circular lamp, similar to the type found in a dentist’s office. He turned the skull toward me and focused the light.
“Let’s see if you can do any better than I did,” said Lavon. “Tell me if you notice anything unusual.”
I studied the skull for a couple of minutes, but nothing looked terribly out of place. “I can’t see anything,” I finally said.
“Count the teeth,” Lavon instructed.
I did so. “23.”
“The normal adult human has 32,” said Dichter.
“Right, but didn’t everybody lose teeth two thousand years ago?” I asked.
Dichter and his assistant both laughed. “Robert said the exact same thing.”
I examined the skull again. The odd thing was, I saw no gaps between the teeth that remained.
“Ah,” said Dichter. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“That’s what we first noticed,” said Lavon. “Plus the loss of teeth is symmetrical. The bicuspids are missing, top and bottom, as are the wisdom teeth.”
“The left side of the upper jaw is missing one more,” I said.
“The second molar,” replied Dichter. “We extracted that one ourselves to run a separate test, using the Electron Spin Resonance method as opposed to radiocarbon. ESR is ideally suited to dating tooth enamel, but it requires input in powdered form.”
“We had to grind it up,” said Lavon.
“And?” I asked.
“First century, more or less. ESR is not as accurate as radiocarbon, but the tooth was definitely not modern.”
***
None of us spoke for a while as I considered this.
“Now you know what we’re up against,” Dichter finally said. “Until a few years ago, orthodontists regularly pulled teeth before installing kid’s braces, but I’ve never heard of such a thing in the ancient world.”
“I’m not sure I’d want to,” Lavon joked.
I certainly didn’t.
“Could someone have grafted the teeth in later, like, um …”
“Piltdown Man?” said Lavon.
Both archaeologists laughed. “Discovered” by an English professor in 1912 and heralded for years as the missing link between ape and human, Piltdown Man remained one of archaeology’s most well-known frauds. Later examination revealed the specimen to be an orangutan’s jaw with chimpanzee teeth, attached to a medieval skull.
“I don’t think so,” said Dichter. “This jaw showed no signs of tampering at all. Although it took scientists forty years to prove Piltdown a hoax, we’d spot the same thing in minutes today.”
“That just means the fraudsters have to be smarter,” I said.
Lavon and Dichter laughed again. “They are.”
The trade had become a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse. A renewed interest in ancient history, compounded by rising affluence across the globe, had created a growing pool of new and relatively unsophisticated buyers.
“In our world, demand begets supply,” said Dichter. “Do you remember the
I vaguely recalled the story: something about a box of bones that supposedly belonged to Christ’s brother.
“It got so much publicity because if authentic, it would have been the first physical reference to Jesus directly traceable to the first century,” said Dichter.
“But not long afterward, the IAA — the Israel Antiquities Authority — raided a warehouse owned by the
