Who carved the crystal skulls

The crystal skulls really do exist. They sit in major museums, they are cut from solid rock crystal, and some of them are impressive pieces of craftsmanship. The question was never whether they exist, but who made them. That trail leads not to Yucatán, but to the trading houses of the 19th century and to a German stone-cutting town.

How the market for ancient Mexican objects arose

In the 19th century Mexico became reachable for European collectors, and ancient Mexican pieces turned into prized items for museums and display cabinets. Little was excavated scientifically at the time, while a great deal was bought. Between the collectors and the country stood dealers who supplied what was ordered — and where, over time, more is ordered than is found, something eventually gets made. This is not a conspiracy, it is the usual end of a market of that kind.

The same name turns up in the acquisition histories of several skulls: Eugène Boban, a French antiquities dealer who worked for years in Mexico City and had excellent connections in Paris. He was regarded as an expert on ancient Mexican antiquities, and that is precisely what made him credible as a seller.

The routes into the museums

In Paris, one skull came in 1878 as a gift from the collector Alphonse Pinart to the museum then housed at the Trocadéro; Pinart had it from Boban. Today the piece belongs to the holdings of the Musée du quai Branly. The British Museum bought its skull in 1897 from Tiffany & Co. in New York — this example too had passed through Boban's hands beforehand. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington received its own in 1992, anonymously, in the post, with a note saying the piece had been bought in Mexico City in 1960.

Three times the same finding: the objects surface in the trade, not at an excavation. For none of them is there a find site that anyone has documented.

Why Idar-Oberstein comes into it

Rock crystal cannot be dated. It contains nothing organic, so radiocarbon dating gets no purchase on it, and a cut stone looks the same after a hundred years as after a thousand. Anyone who wants to know when such a piece was made has to take other routes: the paperwork, the raw material, the marks left by the tools.

That route leads to Idar-Oberstein on the Nahe. The town had lived off stone cutting for centuries, and once the local deposits were exhausted it worked imported quartz from Brazil — on a large scale, at water-driven cutting wheels. Specialists who have studied the skulls hold the workshops there to be the most likely place of origin for at least some of the pieces. Material, technique and period fit together.

The most famous skull

Most of the storytelling surrounds the example that carries the name of the Mitchell-Hedges family. It enters the record in 1943: the British adventurer Frederick Mitchell-Hedges bought it at an auction in London. The story that his daughter had found it as a young girl in 1924 in the ruins of Lubaantun in present-day Belize only spread decades later, and finds no support in the reports of that expedition.

The same piece carries the claim that cutting it by hand would have taken centuries. The figure can be traced back to the popular literature of the 1970s; the arithmetic it is supposed to follow from is not supplied there.

Three questions that help

The skulls make a good exercise, because they show what matters in stories of this kind. First: where does an object appear for the first time, and in which document? Second: who stood to gain from selling it? Third: is the story older than the object, or younger? With the crystal skulls it is younger throughout — the stones came first, the interpretation came afterwards.

These three questions cost you ten minutes and spare you most tall tales. The history of astrology holds the same kind of case, invented tradition included, and such cases can be taken apart in just the same way.