Mexico declared a forgery, a statue of the Mayan

[Dogel]

Mexican authorities said that the statue, which was sold March 21 at an auction in France for 4.1 million dollars, is a recently made a fake, Interfax reported, citing agency EFE. Auction house March 25 on Friday, has denied these reports.

"The artifact, which refers to the culture of the Maya, sold for a very high price at auction, in fact, been made recently, so it does not belong to any one of the cultures that existed in Mexico before the Spanish colonization period," - said in a joint communique of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico.

Organizers of Trade argued that the statue about 165 centimeters in height was created Mayan long before the arrival of the American continent, the European colonialists.

The Foreign Ministry of Mexico said that experts from the National Institute of Anthropology, examined 207 images of artifacts represented in the auction catalog in France. The experts concluded that 67 out of 207 works of art - fake. The total value of goods, departed with a hammer, was 10.6 million dollars.

Meanwhile, the Paris auction house Binoche Et Giquello refused to acknowledge that he had sold on its auction a fake statue of Maya, reports AFP.

The auctioneer Alexander Giclee said that the figure of a warrior with a shield and an ax was described by all the rules, subject expertise and put up for public display in 1976. Then none of the experts did not raise doubts about its authenticity.

In the opinion of giclee, the Mexican authorities, insisting on a fake statue, so detrimental to the legal market of works of pre-Columbian America and pave the way drug dealers. Meanwhile, experts polled by news agency, have expressed the opposite view: that sale of antiquities for such large sums of money may encourage "black archeologists".