His daughter, Anna, later claimed that he had found the skull in a ruined temple in Belize during the early s. They had come from the lost city of Atlantis or been left by extraterrestrials.
Anna Mitchell-Hedges kept it until her death at age last year; the object remains in the family. Experts now believe that many extant crystal skulls were made in Germany during the late s; Walsh thinks that the Smithsonian skull was carved in Mexico in the s.
By , Walsh had decided to put the skull to the test. But in the s, an anthropologist named Jane Walsh at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History started to develop suspicions about these objects. One day, the U. Postal Service delivered a football helmet-sized Aztec crystal skull to the Smithsonian Institution from an anonymous donor. The note claimed it formerly belonged to a Mexican dictator. A colleague gave the skull to Walsh to look after.
And Walsh was also aware of their dubious side, having exhibited a skull in a museum exhibit that labeled it a fake. As she examined the new arrival, she spotted a handful of reasons to doubt it was a genuine artifact.
And as she eventually started digging into the backstories of other crystal skulls, she saw a trend of clear red flags and a strange pattern of similarities. Soon, modern scientific analyses would also show that these crystal skulls were cut with modern rotary tools, while in some cases, the rock originated from Brazil, rather than Mexico.
Walsh started by examining the origins of a 2-inch crystal skull in a Smithsonian Institution collection. It had appeared seemingly out of nowhere in the late s as part of a collection that came to the museum from Mexico.
And in a catalog card written in the s, she found an analysis done by a geologist named William Foshag — an expert in Mesoamerican carved stones. Records showed that a company partner bought it at a Boban auction in Again and again, their detective work seemed to trace the story of the crystal skulls back to a specific time frame — from the s to the s — and a single man, Boban.
But who was he? Boban, a Frenchman born in , was enthralled by Mexico and its history. The skull that arrived at the Smithsonian 16 years ago represents yet another generation of these hoaxes. According to its anonymous donor, it was purchased in Mexico in , and its size perhaps reflects the exuberance of the time. In comparison with the original nineteenth-century skulls, the Smithsonian skull is enormous; at 31 pounds and nearly 10 inches high, it dwarfs all others.
I believe it was probably manufactured in Mexico shortly before it was sold. The skull is now part of the Smithsonian's national collections and even has its own catalogue number: At the moment it is stored in a locked cabinet in my office.
There are now fifth- and probably sixth-generation skulls, and I have been asked to examine quite a number of them. Collectors have brought me skulls purportedly from Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, and even Tibet. Some of these "crystal" skulls have turned out to be glass; a few are made of resin. British Museum scientist Margaret Sax and I examined the British Museum and Smithsonian skulls under light and scanning electron microscope and conclusively determined that they were carved with relatively modern lapidary equipment, which were unavailable to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican carvers.
A preliminary report on our research is on the British Museum website, www. So why have crystal skulls had such a long and successful run, and why do some museums continue to exhibit them, despite their lack of archaeological context and obvious iconographic, stylistic, and technical problems? Though the British Museum exhibits its skulls as examples of fakes, others still offer them up as the genuine article.
Mexico's national museum, for example, identifies its skulls as the work of Aztec and Mixtec artisans. Perhaps it is because, like the Indiana Jones movies, these macabre objects are reliable crowd-pleasers.
Impressed by their technical excellence and gleaming polish, generations of museum curators and private collectors have been taken in by these objects. But they are too good to be true. If we consider that pre-Columbian lapidaries used stone, bone, wooden, and possibly copper tools with abrasive sand to carve stone, crystal skulls are much too perfectly carved and highly polished to be believed.
Ultimately, the truth behind the skulls may have gone to the grave with Boban, a masterful dealer of many thousands of pre-Columbian artifacts--including at least five different crystal skulls--now safely ensconced in museums worldwide. He managed to confound a great many people for a very long time and has left an intriguing legacy, one that continues to puzzle us a century after his death.
Boban confidently sold museums and private collectors some of the most intriguing fakes known, and perhaps many more yet to be recognized. It sounds like a great premise for a movie. See all of our coverage of Hoaxes, Fakes, and Strange Sites. Subscribe to the Digital Edition! Archaeology e-Update Subscriber Alert! A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America. Special Introductory Offer!
In this article, Smithsonian anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh shares her own adventures analyzing the artifacts that inspired Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in theaters May 22 , and details her efforts tracking down a mysterious "obtainer of rare antiquities" who may have held the key to the origin of these exotic objects.
Courtesy of Paula Fleming Collection These small objects represent the "first generation" of crystal skulls, and they are all drilled through from top to bottom. Courtesy of Paula Fleming Collection A second-generation skull--life-size and without a vertical hole--first appeared in in the Paris shop of none other than Boban.
South American Idol? In the opening scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark , Indiana Jones is hot on the trail of an extremely valuable golden idol created by an unidentified ancient South American culture. After finding markings that could only have been made by modern-day carving implements—rather than the stone, bone and wooden tools that would have been used in pre-Colombian times—they concluded that the skulls were likely fakes.
The scientists believe they were probably manufactured in the late s, in response to a surge of interest in the ancient world and its artifacts.
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