The Skull That Fooled the World

In the late nineteenth century, a Paris antiquities shop belonging to a dealer named Eugène Boban began quietly offering something extraordinary: human skulls carved entirely from clear quartz. Boban had opened his business in 1870 and had spent years operating in Mexico City between 1860 and 1880, and he presented these skulls as relics of the Aztec or Maya world, objects of deep pre-Columbian mystery. He reportedly tried to sell one to Mexico's own national museum as an Aztec artifact, but was turned down.

The timing was no accident. By 1886, the trade in fake Mexican antiquities had grown so brazen that Smithsonian archaeologist William Henry Holmes wrote an article for the journal Science titled 'The Trade in Spurious Mexican Antiquities.' Boban sold most of his collection, including three crystal skulls, to the ethnographer Alphonse Pinart, who donated them to Paris's Trocadéro Museum, later renamed the Musée de l'Homme. Other pieces of his stock traveled further, crossing the Atlantic into the hands of American buyers.

One skull passed from Boban's Paris shop to New York, where it was bought by a collector named George H. Sisson. In 1887 it was exhibited at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science by George F. Kunz. Eventually it was auctioned and purchased by Tiffany & Co., which sold it at cost to the British Museum in 1897 — where it remains today, cataloged plainly as 'probably European, 19th century AD.'

The most famous of all these objects, though, emerged decades later under far more romantic circumstances. In 1924, Anna Mitchell-Hedges — adopted daughter of the British adventurer and writer F. A. Mitchell-Hedges — claimed to have discovered a crystal skull, later the subject of a 1990 documentary called Crystal Skull of Lubaantun. Unlike the others, it had a separate, movable lower jaw, and Smithsonian researchers who examined it described it as nearly a replica of the British Museum's specimen.

But replicas of what, exactly? Scientific scrutiny at the British Museum in 1967, 1996, and 2004 found something the myths never anticipated: the fine lines marking the teeth had been carved with jeweler's rotary tools, technology that did not exist before the nineteenth century. Chlorite inclusions inside the quartz revealed the stone itself came from Brazil or Madagascar — sources utterly unreachable to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.