Charles Dawson (11 July 1864 – 10 August 1916) was a British amateur archaeologist who claimed to have made a number of archaeological and palaeontological discoveries that were later exposed as frauds.

[1] Many technological methods such as fluorine testing indicate that this discovery was a hoax, and Dawson, the only one with the skill and knowledge to generate this forgery, was a major suspect.

[4] In 1893, Dawson investigated a curious flint mine full of prehistoric, Roman and medieval artifacts in the Lavant Caves, near Chichester, and probed two tunnels beneath Hastings Castle.

[2] In the same year, he presented the British Museum with a Roman statuette from Beauport Park that was made, uniquely for the period, of cast iron.

[2] In appreciation for the donation of fossils Dawson provided to the British Museum, he was given the title of "honorary collector" and in 1885, he was elected a fellow of the Geological Society as a result of his numerous discoveries.

[4][6] In 2003, Miles Russell of Bournemouth University published the results of his investigation into Dawson's antiquarian collection and concluded that at least 38 specimens were clear fakes.

Russell has noted that Dawson's whole academic career appears to have been "one built upon deceit, sleight of hand, fraud and deception, the ultimate gain being international recognition.

"[7][8][2] Among these were the teeth of a reptile/mammal hybrid, Plagiaulax dawsoni, purportedly "found" in 1891 (and whose teeth had been filed down in the same way that the teeth of Piltdown Man were to be some 20 years later); the so-called "shadow figures" on the walls of Hastings Castle; a unique hafted stone axe; the Bexhill boat (a hybrid seafaring vessel); the Pevensey bricks (allegedly the latest datable "finds" from Roman Britain); the contents of the Lavant Caves (a fraudulent "flint mine"); the Beauport Park "Roman" statuette (a hybrid iron object); the Bulverhythe hammer (shaped with an iron knife in the same way as the Piltdown elephant bone implement would later be); a fraudulent "Chinese" bronze vase; the Brighton "toad in the hole" (a toad entombed within a flint nodule); the English Channel sea serpent; the Uckfield horseshoe (another hybrid iron object) and the Lewes prick spur.

Of his antiquarian publications, most demonstrate evidence of plagiarism or at least naive referencing as Russell wrote: "Piltdown was not a 'one-off' hoax, more the culmination of a life's work.

For years, the creator of these remains was unknown, though it was then determined, through a meticulous inspection of his finds and collections, that Charles Dawson was most likely responsible for this forgery.

First, Dawson had previous history of deception: he was responsible for about 38 forgeries, plagiarized a historical account of Hastings Castle, and had pretended to act on behalf of the Sussex Archeological Society.

Third, not only did he have access to the museum and antiquarian shops that carried these objects, he was also a popular collector, an amazing networker, and knew what the British scientific community expected in a missing link between apes and humans.

[5] Although there is not a substantial amount of evidence, some believe that he received aid from other experts such as Teilhard de Chardin, who discovered a fake canine, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of the Department at the Natural History Museum, co-author of the announcement of Piltdown II, and Martin Hinton, a zoologist at the Natural History Museum where, in 1970, a trunk of his was discovered containing bones stained to make them appear old, using the same technique as for Piltdown Man.