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When antiquities began sprouting on eBay shortly after the auction site's founding in 1995, Stanish says, archaeologists were "terrified, absolutely terrified," that demand for ancient loot would explode, sending diggers swarming over unguarded ruins.Instead, Stanish says, contemporary inhabitants of ancient lands soon learned that many online antiquities shoppers were, shall we say, a tad lacking in connoisseurship. Why should local diggers break their backs and risk arrest when they could stay home and make a cottage industry out of copying, with less or more verisimilitude, what their ancestors had wrought?Stanish published his ideas in an essay in the May/June issue of Archaeology magazine, titled "Forging Ahead, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love eBay." At first, he says, archaeologists' fears were borne out. As late as 2000, Internet sites offered "a 50-50 split" between "obvious junk and the kinds of things you have to hold in your hand and have an expert look at it, and weigh it, and smell it, and feel it, and all the things you do to authenticate these pieces. Now, 95 percent of the stuff you're looking at on eBay is not real."