The latest Indiana Jones film has really put the crystal skulls under the spotlight as never before. For a good summary you can check out the Wikipedia entry or (better) read Gordon's great overview in Fortean Times #237. The latter ends its look at the Mitchell-Hedges skull, the only one not yet shown to be a fake, with:
Tests carried out on the skull have failed to find the kinds of tool marks that might provide a definitive clue to the artefacts origins.
Until now that is. I just finished watching "Legend of The Crystal Skulls Revealed" on Channel 5, the summary of which is:
Historical documentary investigating the origins of the world-famous crystal skulls. Since the 19th century, a number of lifelike quartz skulls have been discovered and displayed in museums. These relics, allegedly dating from Aztec and Mayan civilisations, are believed to have psychic powers. But are they geniune artefacts or elaborate fakes? Now, for the first time ever, scientists are given access to the most famous skull of all, the so-called 'Skull of Doom'.
In it, the skull was subjected to the kinds of study that have revealed the British Museum and Smithsonian skulls to be fakes, and they found the same kind of tool marks. The people running the tests were pretty clear - they are from cutting machines that only appeared at the end of the 19th century.
This pretty much confirms the suspicions that had been raised. The Mitchell-Hedges skull was originally known as the Burney skull and first appeared in an article in the July 1934 issue of the Journal Man, after which its story is well known, as told in the May/June 2008 issue of Archaeology magazine:
A third generation of skulls appeared some time before 1934, when Sidney Burney, a London art dealer, purchased a crystal skull of proportions almost identical to the specimen the British Museum bought from Tiffany's. There is no information about where he got it, but it is very nearly a replica of the British Museum skull--almost exactly the same shape, but with more detailed modeling of the eyes and the teeth. It also has a separate mandible, which puts it in a class by itself. In 1943, it was sold at Sotheby's in London to Frederick Arthur (Mike) Mitchell-Hedges, a well-to-do English deep-sea fisherman, explorer, and yarn-spinner extraordinaire.
Since the 1954 publication of Mitchell-Hedges's memoir, Danger My Ally, this third-generation, twentieth-century skull has acquired a Maya origin, as well as a number of fantastic, Indiana Jones-like tall tales.
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There are numerous tales of how Mitchell-Hedges found the skull in the twenties or thirties (depending on who told the story and when they told it) but, unless you believe the complicated (and undocumented) story that they had given it to Burney as security on some debt, it seems these stories are fantasy and it even rules out one theory that Mitchell-hedges planted the skull as a surprise for his daughter on her birthday. The documentary suggested a more likely explanation was that the story helped Anna Mitchell-Hedges when she moved the skull from England to America.
What caught my eye was the discussion of the different generations of the skull and how the Mitchell-Hedges one fits in - something that was even remarked upon at the time (again form Archaeology magazine):
The 1878 Paris skull and the Boban-Tiffany-British Museum skull that appeared in 1881 are perhaps nineteenth-century European inventions. There is no direct tie to Mexico for either of these two larger skulls, except through Boban; they simply appear in Paris long after his initial return from Mexico in 1869. The Mitchell-Hedges skull, which appears after 1934, is a veritable copy of the British Museum skull, with stylistic and technical flourishes that only an accomplished faker would devise. In fact, in 1936 British Museum scholar Adrian Digby first raised the possibility that the Mitchell-Hedges skull could be a copy of the British Museum skull since it showed "a perverted ingenuity such as one would expect to find in a forger."
So is this the end of the road for the various claims being made about the skulls? The death of the skull as some New Age icon? Not likely. They cut straight to the Believers who had somehow decided this was evidence that the skull was made with tools that weren't available at the time the skull was discovered suggesting to the various skull supporters that it was either made in Atlantis or by our space brothers in the Pleiades (presumably using the kind of primitive technology we've had at our disposal for over a century, despite having fancy laser/sonic technology for carving stone vases, or not).
I know it does spoil some of the mystery, but I have seen the British Museum skull in the... flesh and it is a stunning piece of art (trumping Hirst's efforts) and knowing it is a fake doesn't lessen that (it actually adds a whole Trickster-style angle to proceedings, as well as adding new mysteries) and I'd love to see the Mitchell-Hedges skull, as it seems to be an order of magnitude better than that one (possibly, as we've seen, because it is based on British Museum skull and they went one, or even two, better). It has in effect lost one "life" and moved on to a new and equally interesting one.
So those who want to believe probably won't stop but the rest of us can put it on the shelf as a modern cultural artefact, which makes it appropriate that this wouldn't have come about expect for that other archaeological cultural artefact - Indiana Jones. I'm not sure how Dr Jones would have felt about it though.
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