Age of an Artefact

The method of transmission of the information about some event long ago, relies on three different groups of people between the point of origin of the information about the event at the time of its occurrence and the final destination – the listener years later.

a) The first is an Eyewitness – who was physically present to observe and then narrate the event to others.

b) The second is those who were contemporaries to the Eyewitness to that event. Although they did not witness the event, they hear about it in the period in which the event has occurred. So although they are not direct witnesses, it is possible for a verification to occur to confirm the statement, either through physical verification or through the triangulation of statements of other eyewitnesses.

c) The third group is that of people who hear about the event as something that happened in the past – unverifiable personally. The generation immediately after, may even have the privilege of hearing it from the eyewitnesses themselves. Generations further apart might only have a chain of messengers relaying the message.

With time the chain grows longer. And it is likely that distortions trickle in unintentionally.

Faith in the messenger transmitting the story is critical to the listener believing it. But let us for a moment have faith that the listener is a complete believer. We then still have to contend with other factors that come in the way of perfect reproduction of the original message:

To begin with the Eyewitness’s account must be scrutinized for its truth value to ensure that attitudinal bias, lack of observation skills; lack of interpretation skills etc do not distort what she witnessed and recorded in her experience.

Then come the questions of how accurately the narrative of the event was retained before it was relayed to another. How her memory decayed over time, will determine how faithfully the message was relayed forward to the next person or next generation.

And these questions all arise every time the narrative is passed on from one person to another.

Even if someday this is written down on paper to reduce distortion, before that writing, it goes through a dozen exchanges from the origin to the final author of a printed message. (This is true unless every person maintains an army-style documentation journal every day of uses Meta Glasses to live journal everything)

So this leads us to exercise a good amount of doubt before embracing any story told as truth. Yet it is through these test of fire, that when we do believe, our degree of confidence remains high.

Using this on our world of textile arts, the question that comes up most often is ‘how old is it’. And the discussions on this subject are deep and narrow. The clues and proofs offered are often “X said this in Y book about a similar piece”. When using the questions stated above, at the next level of examination of X’s statement I am tempted to ask which of the three groups of messengers he belonged to: eyewitness? contemporary? or was it just hearsay?

Most often it is hearsay. And later books quote previous authors who are themselves quoting based on the basis of what their informants have told them. The chain gets longer.

Imagine the consequences of the first informant making a careless mistake in narrating!!

In any narration, many aspects continue to be verifiable through physical examination for decades and centuries into the future. Whether dyes are natural or not is verifiable. Whether an artefact came from a certain ethnic origin or not is verifiable.

But the aspect of dating is not verifiable, especially if we would like to date a textile that is less than 200 years old.

The methods we rely on are books. Books become popular for various aspects of their content: some are terrific for their breadth, their anecdotes, their insights, their photographs, the dots they connect and general enlightenment. Most use these for enlightenment and entertainment. Few will bother to cross-examine every statement for its truth value, especially not the books that are spectacular in other aspects. And then that book becomes a reference point for every word printed in it. Including the age of things.

And then from that point on, an unprovable date is repeated for comparable examples, by dealers, by museums and by auction houses – all leading experts in the field.

And here I am, being the unbeliever, questioning the basis of all dating, playing the devil’s advocate.

When the discussion comes up, I state my viewpoint that the dating is not really a rigourous exercise – so why take it seriously. However hard you try, the buck always stops at some elite name having said so. It is why provenance is seen as important … as if by being a billionaire owner or a Lord XYZ, the person circumvents the entire chain of informants and acquires Xray vision into the past to be able to see the artefact being made at the source. Or that his judgement is better than one’s own.

The important thing is not the provenance or the people in the chain.

The important thing is whether the questions have been asked and answered with rigour.

The only thing that offers a glimmer of hope in this futile area is that photography became popular in Asia in the 1840s.So photographs and paintings made in that era offer snapshots of life as undeniable evidence. It is also the time when Moorcroft traveled to Asia and maintained copious notes of his travels. Authors like Dalrymple dig through archives from national libraries to build their stories.

As publications like newspaper archives get digitised we might all have access in our lifetimes to these snapshots. And then maybe we will have real historical evidence rather than hearsay for our exercise of dating artefacts.

Until then, if my eyes like what they see, that is good enough for me. An exercise to determine whether it was made in 1870 or 1930, appears to me to be a game of no consequence.

Thank you for reading my rant on dating of artefacts that probably has offered no joy to the reader.

So as compensation here is a picture of one my favorite old things:

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jaina mishra / Sept 2026