A totora reed raft has appeared repeatedly in Chilean archaeology since 1967. Over time, as biography after biography of Jean-Christian Spahni invented a new object based on the original piece – each different from its predecessor – the supposed miniature raft became accepted as irrefutable evidence of these vessels’ antiquity and pre-Hispanic navigation in northern Chile and even the Andes. A recent study at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève in Switzerland revealed that the object is not a raft but a bundle of vegetable fibers. Common in the funerary contexts of the Formative period in northern Chile, this type of artifact is described as paintbrushes, brushes, combs or packs of raw materials. Jean-Christian Spahni’s initial confusion and his biographers’ reproductions are inputs for discussing how we construct archaeological evidence and write accounts in prehistory.