Norman Daly, professor of art history, spent years chronicling the lost Iron Age civilization of Llhuros – its relics, its rituals, its poetry, its music – as well as the academic commentary it inspired. But the thing that makes Llhuros most noteworthy as a civilization? It never existed. Daly wasn’t an anthropologist or archaeologist, but an art professor who taught at Cornell for 57 years. In the late 1960s, he created more than a 150 Llhuroscian “artifacts” from everyday materials and industrial detritus, all of it corroded and pre-aged to appear ancient, and he invented elaborate backstories about the culture that supposedly produced them. A small group of university and community collaborators helped him expand the project to include other kinds of media, such as sound and music.
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