"How do you dig up a hoax in a temple?" The Calixtlahuaca head put through the Evidence Code

SUMMARY"How do you dig up a hoax in a temple?" The Calixtlahuaca head put through the Evidence Code (Nov 3, 2026).
PHYSICAL

RECORDJosé García Payón excavated it in 1933, a burial offering under THREE INTACT FLOORS of a pyramid, sealed 1476–1510 (the town was abandoned after the Aztec conquest in 1510). It lay alongside gold, copper, turquoise, rock crystal, jet, shell and pottery. The field notes show no disturbance.
LAB: Heidelberg thermoluminescence (1995) puts the firing between the 800s BC and the 1200s AD. Even the cautious range rules out a colonial-era fake.
STYLE: Ernst Boehringer dated it to the 2nd–3rd century AD; Bernard Andreae, former director of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, called it Roman, of the Severan period (193–235 AD). Hristov also notes a likeness to Punic masks (ties to P173).
THE HOAX CLAIM: Paul Schmidt (UNAM) said he heard from the late John Paddock that a student, Hugo Moedano, planted it as a joke. Michael Smith (ASU) repeated the story and said he could neither confirm nor reject it. It surfaced in writing about 2000, some 67 years after the dig. Paddock and Moedano were both dead. The excavator's son says his father was present, Moedano was not there, and the story is "nonsense." Ignacio Bernal, Paddock's colleague, took the head to an international congress in 1960 and never mentioned a prank.
EVIDENCE

CODERule 6 (one standard): field notes, a sealed layer and a lab date outrank a secondhand story from two dead men. Rule 3: the hoax claim comes from the side defending the "no contact before 1492" story. The logic test: a 1933 prankster would still need a genuinely ancient Roman-style terracotta, because the lab date says the clay was fired long before Columbus. Even the hoax story leaves an ancient Mediterranean object in Mexico

VERDICTRecord (excavation, lab, style) + Disputed (a hoax claim that is hearsay only)

LENSthe object stays standing; the "hoax" is a rumor with no receipt.
METHOD, the hoax checklist for any find: (1) Was the layer sealed, and do field notes exist? (2) Independent lab date? (3) Who called it a hoax, when, and with what evidence (document vs. hearsay)? (4) Does the hoax story explain the lab date? (5) Who gains from each verdict? Apply next to Bat Creek, Los Lunas and Paraíba.