The Crystal Skulls: What Four Instruments Found

Scanning electron microscopy of the British Museum skull found striations across the quartz that are characteristic of a rotary lapidary wheel: a wheel mounted on a spindle, spun, and held against a workpiece the carver turns in his hands. Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican lapidaries had no rotary wheel. The study appeared in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2008 under five names, Margaret Sax, Jane M. Walsh, Ian Freestone, Andrew Rankin and Nigel Meeks, working between the British Museum and the Smithsonian. Two national museums investigating their own holdings together, which is worth saying out loud, because it is the opposite of the way this story usually gets told.

Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican carvers worked hard stone with stone, bone and wooden tools, possibly some copper, and loose abrasive sand. They worked mostly from relatively small water worn pebbles collected out of alluvial deposits. The Aztec and Mixtec traditions did produce skull carvings in stone, jade and crystal, and they are typically small, a few centimetres. No life sized crystal skull is known from any controlled archaeological context anywhere in the pre-Columbian Americas.

The other half of the argument has to be stated carefully, because it is the half that goes wrong. Producing a life sized quartz skull with the polish and anatomical accuracy of the British Museum or Mitchell-Hedges pieces would have been extraordinary for any ancient culture. It is not impossible in principle, since other traditions produced remarkable quartz carvings. It is without precedent in the known Mesoamerican lapidary record, which is a different statement. George Frederick Kunz, writing in 1890 as Tiffany and Co.'s own gem expert, had already noticed that the size of the block was unusual against a tradition that worked small alluvial pebbles.

No crystal skull has ever been recovered from a documented, controlled archaeological excavation. Not one. Every one of them entered a museum or a collection through a dealer, a donation, an auction or an anonymous parcel. That is the quietest fact in this story and the strongest, because it holds before anybody switches on an instrument. The entire category exists only in the market.

How many are there? Nobody has an authoritative census. The research file this article was built from puts the number of major crystal skulls that have surfaced at approximately a dozen, and that is an estimate rather than an inventory. They range from pieces about an inch high to the Smithsonian's ten inch example, they enter and leave private hands constantly, and new ones keep appearing.

Analysis of the fluid and solid inclusions trapped inside the British Museum skull's quartz, by microscopy and Raman spectroscopy, showed that the crystal formed in a mesothermal metamorphic setting equivalent to greenschist facies. That signature points to Brazil or Madagascar as the geological source, and neither lay inside any pre-Columbian Mesoamerican trade network. Read it at exactly that strength: this is a geological inference from inclusion chemistry, not a fingerprint match to a named quarry.

The Smithsonian skull was sent to the institution anonymously in 1992, accompanied by a letter claiming it was Aztec, that it had come from the collection of Porfirio Diaz, and that it had been bought in Mexico City in 1960. That 1960 purchase is what the letter asserted, not an established fact. The object is catalogued as number 409954 and it is the largest of the group, roughly 31 pounds and close to 10 inches high, which dwarfs every other skull in this story.

Traces of carborundum, silicon carbide, were detected on the Smithsonian skull. Note which instrument did which job, because the two are constantly confused: the electron microscope showed the shape of the marks, and X-ray diffraction identified the substance left in them. Silicon carbide does not occur in usable quantity in nature. It is a synthetic industrial abrasive, so its presence on a worked surface means that surface was worked after silicon carbide existed.

Which was not very long ago. Edward Goodrich Acheson was granted United States patent 492,767, 'Production of Artificial Crystalline Carbonaceous Materials', on 28 February 1893, and founded the Carborundum Company the following year. The abrasive was patented in 1893 and in commercial production from the mid 1890s. That is a floor under the Smithsonian skull's surface and nothing more: a floor is not a date of manufacture.

The researchers put the object a good deal later than the floor. The carborundum, together with evidence of a high speed rotary tool carrying a hard abrasive, has been read as indicating manufacture in the 1950s or later. That figure is stated here as theirs and not as this file's own: it is a reported conclusion from a paper this file did not read in full, and it is flagged as such in the sources note. The claim that needs no hedge at all is the simple one underneath it. The abrasive is modern, therefore the object is modern.

The rock crystal skull in the Musee du quai Branly, inventory number 71.1878.1.57, is a different object with a different study behind it. A French team examined it using optical and scanning electron microscopy together with elastic recoil detection analysis, an ion beam method that measures how deeply hydrogen has penetrated a quartz surface over time. The tool marks show the skull was cut from a block using machine lapidary techniques unavailable to pre-Columbian artisans. The shallow hydrogen penetration shows it was cut more recently than a reference quartz surface cut in 1740. The team concluded that it is probably not pre-Columbian and was carved in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The paper is Calligaro and colleagues, in Applied Physics A in 2009.

And then the detail that decides whether any of this can be trusted. The same French study examined a second quai Branly object, a smaller anthropomorphic head in rock crystal, and reached the opposite conclusion about it: its surfaces were more likely carved and polished by hand, with techniques comparable to ancient ones. Not proved ancient, which the paper does not say and this file will not add. More likely hand worked, which is a statement about technique. Same team, same session, same instruments, two objects, two different verdicts. The instruments did not condemn everything put in front of them, and that is precisely what a test is for.

Stand back and the shape of the record is this. Three separate objects in three separate national collections were examined by three separate teams using different instruments, and all three came back modern: the British Museum skull by electron microscopy and inclusion analysis, the Smithsonian skull by microscopy and X-ray diffraction, the Paris skull by microscopy and ion beam hydrogen profiling. The Mitchell-Hedges skull was examined separately, with silicone moulds and microscopy, and came back modern too. What none of this work established is who carved any of them.

Eugene Boban, 1834 to 1908, was a French antiquarian who lived in Mexico from the 1850s to 1869, learned Spanish and Nahuatl, and built a collection of several thousand pre-Columbian artefacts. He opened a shop in Paris called Antiquites Mexicaines a few months after returning in 1869. He went back to Mexico City in February 1885 and opened a four hall museum he called the Museo Cientifico. He left abruptly for New York in March 1886, auctioned his entire collection and library there that December, sold his Mexican archaeological collection to Eugene Goupil in 1888 and became Goupil's curator, and went on selling artefacts until his death.

Three of the crystal skulls now in major museums passed through Boban's hands. Two reached the Trocadero in Paris in 1878 through Alphonse Pinart and are still in the Musee du quai Branly. The third was sold at Boban's New York auction in 1886, bought by Tiffany and Co., and sold on to the British Museum. The Smithsonian skull is not one of his: it arrived more than a century later from an anonymous sender and must never be attributed to him.

The Paris skull reached a public museum before either of the others, and the route it took is the mechanism this whole article is about. Boban sold it to Alphonse Pinart, a young French explorer. Pinart donated his collection to the Museum of Ethnography at the Trocadero in 1878. Accounts of that gift name three crystal skulls; two are the objects still in the museum. The museum did not acquire it from a dealer; it acquired it from an explorer. That is how a dealer's stock picks up a traveller's provenance on its way into a national collection. The object measures 11.3 cm high by 10.9 cm wide and has a hole drilled vertically through it.

The British Museum now displays the object as a nineteenth century one. Two visitors photographed the case years apart and transcribed its gallery label the same way: 'Rock crystal skull. Late 19th century AD. Purchased from Tiffany and Co., New York through Mr G.F. Kunz Ethno 1898-1'. A label photographed in a different year reads differently: 'It was originally thought to have been Aztec, but recent research proves it to be European.' Those readings come from independent visitor transcriptions of the gallery label rather than from the museum's own catalogue page, and this file attributes them accordingly. Even at that strength it is remarkable. The museum convicts its own object, in its own gallery, on the card beside the case.

The manufacture and sale of fake Mexican antiquities was being reported in the scientific press while it was happening. William Henry Holmes of the Smithsonian published 'The Trade in Spurious Mexican Antiquities' in Science in 1886, the same year Boban's collection went to auction in New York, and returned to the subject in a further note in the same volume.

Carving a human skull out of rock crystal was not a new idea in nineteenth century Europe either. The Louvre holds one, inventory MR 327, catalogued as German work of the second half of the sixteenth century, a date the museum's own record prints with a question mark, and recorded as having entered the French royal collection before 1791. That is a European craftsman carving a skull in quartz three hundred years before anybody called one Aztec. It is not a claim that the Louvre skull is connected to the Mexican ones. No evidence of any such link exists and none is asserted here. It is a claim about genre: the object was familiar in Europe long before the label was.

So where were they cut? The skulls were most probably carved in nineteenth century Europe, and the workshops usually named are those of Idar-Oberstein in the German Rhineland, then the world's leading centre for cutting quartz and other hard stones, and a place that worked imported Brazilian material in quantity. Read that at its own strength and no higher. It is an inference from the tool marks, the stone's likely source and the trade routes of the period. It is not a documented attribution. No workshop record, no order book and no maker has ever been identified. The continent and the century are strongly supported; the town is circumstantial.

In 1936 the journal Man carried a four part exchange about two crystal skulls, prompted by Sydney Burney bringing his skull to the British Museum. G.M. Morant published 'A Morphological Comparison of Two Crystal Skulls'. Adrian Digby, a British Museum curator, published comments on it. Morant replied to Digby. H.J. Braunholtz, the museum's Keeper of Ethnography, added further comments. The two skulls being compared were the British Museum's own and Burney's, the object the world would later know as the Mitchell-Hedges skull.

The Mitchell-Hedges skull's documented history begins in London in 1933, in the hands of the art dealer Sydney Burney. In February of that year Burney wrote to the director of the American Museum of Natural History: 'I have just acquired a life-size rock crystal skull with separate jaw, from Mexico.' He kept it for a decade and sold it at Sotheby's in London on 15 October 1943 to Frederick A. Mitchell-Hedges for 400 pounds. The Sotheby's catalogue lists it as lot 54 and describes it as 'A superb life-size crystal Carving of a Human Skull, the lower jaw separate.'

That catalogue page survives. It has been scanned and published, and it is the document that does the work here: a printed page, on a named date, giving a lot number and a description that matches the object exactly. It places the most famous crystal skull in the world in a London saleroom rather than under an altar in Belize.

The skull was analysed far later and far less than the museum pieces, because its owners restricted scientific access. It stayed with Frederick Mitchell-Hedges until his death in 1959, and with his adopted daughter Anna until her death in April 2007. The examinations described in the next section followed. Those are the dates, laid out in order; this file draws no conclusion about anybody's motive from them, because no source behind it supports one.

The famous origin story is not merely uncorroborated. It is dated. Jane MacLaren Walsh, who worked through the documentary record, states that Anna Mitchell-Hedges's account of finding the skull under an altar at Lubaantun was her own invention, beginning in 1964, as part of what Walsh calls a joint promotion. F.A. Mitchell-Hedges himself told a different story, placing the find somewhere in Central America in the 1930s. Walsh's verdict on the pair of accounts is flat: 'Neither of their contradictory accounts is true.'

The claim that some crystal skulls are genuinely ancient, predating the nineteenth century pieces and representing a lost tradition of crystal carving, has no scientific support. Every skull subjected to rigorous analysis has shown either modern tool marks or an untraceable provenance, and usually both. This sits at Tier 3 rather than Tier 4 for one honest reason: unexamined objects exist, and nobody can say what a skull nobody has tested would show. What can be said flatly is that of the skulls that have been examined, none has come back ancient, and that the category has no excavated example at all.

The story that thirteen crystal skulls exist and must be reunited to avert or fulfil a prophecy is a modern legend, and it is refused here as history. It has no basis in any pre-Columbian source. No Maya or Aztec text refers to it. It does not correspond to any inventory of actual objects. Refusing it as history is not the same as denying that people hold it, which many sincerely do, and those two statements have to stay apart or the result is either sneering or credulity.

The belief is itself a real subject and has been studied as one. Joseph P. Laycock's 'The Controversial History of the Crystal Skulls: A Case Study in Interpretive Drift' appeared in the peer reviewed journal Material Religion in 2015 and traces how the meaning attached to these objects shifted over time. Pointing a curious reader at that literature is more useful, and considerably more respectful, than mockery.

Claims that crystal skulls heal, amplify psychic ability, carry encoded messages from a lost civilisation, were left behind by Atlanteans or extraterrestrials, or connect to a 2012 Maya prophecy have no evidential basis. Quartz has well understood optical and piezoelectric properties and nothing beyond them. Piezoelectric means the crystal generates a small voltage when it is squeezed, which is why a sliver of quartz keeps time in a wristwatch. That is the whole of the physics, and it is a very long way from a channel.

The legend reached a wide audience through popular books, of which the best known is Richard M. Garvin's The Crystal Skull, published by Doubleday in 1973. Its subtitle runs: 'The story of the mystery, myth, and magic of the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull discovered in a lost Mayan city during a search for Atlantis.' That closing phrase is the entire genre in eleven words, printed on a mass market book by a major publisher. On the other side of the argument, Joe Nickell's 'Riddle of the Crystal Skulls', in Skeptical Inquirer volume 30 number 4 for July and August 2006, is a widely cited sceptical survey that appeared two years before the museum studies did.

So the refusal, stated without softening. No crystal skull has been authenticated as a genuine pre-Columbian artefact by any museum, archaeological institution or peer reviewed study. The Aztec and Maya attributions attached to these objects were sales descriptions, and every physical test applied to them has contradicted the attribution. Note the wording, because it is deliberate. Not 'no skull has yet been authenticated', which politely holds a door open. The attributions were what an object needed in order to be worth buying.

In 1887 Boban sold the Army Medical Museum something quite different: a real human cranium, catalogued by the Smithsonian in 1904 as number 243967, which he identified as the skull of the Mexican guerrilla leader Antonio Rojas. Smithsonian staff had long doubted it. In 2012 Walsh and the physical anthropologist David R. Hunt re-examined it with computed tomography, three dimensional surface rendering and craniometric analysis, and superimposed the scan on a photograph of Rojas. Their conclusion was that the cranium is consistent with the photograph and with a nineteenth century Mexican or Central American man. An earlier Smithsonian catalogue card had recorded the skull as female, which the 2012 work attributes to its small size falling in the lower range for a nineteenth century Mexican male. Their account is 'The Fourth Skull: A Tale of Authenticity and Fraud', published in The Appendix in 2013.

One more thing the debunking register tends to lose. The crystal skulls are genuine nineteenth century antiques and impressive pieces of European lapidary craft. A life sized human skull hand polished from a single block of clear quartz is a remarkable object whichever century produced it, and the people who cut these knew their trade thoroughly. What they are not is what they were sold as. The objects are real; the labels were false.

Which leaves the gap almost every account of this subject slides over. Whether Boban commissioned the skulls, bought them already carved, or was himself deceived has never been established. Walsh and Topping's biography of him, the fullest study of the man, is titled The Man Who Invented Aztec Crystal Skulls, and a publisher's title is not a finding. No workshop, carver, order or invoice has been identified for any of these objects. The physical evidence dates the carving without naming the carver. Selling is not making, and the distance between the two is where the remaining mystery actually lives.

So the honest open question is not the one this subject usually ends on. It is not how old these objects are. It is who made them, in which workshop, and for whom. Rotary wheels and quartz pointing at Brazil place the work in nineteenth century Europe, and the trade routes point at the German gem cutting towns. But no carver has been named. No workshop record has been produced. No order for a life sized quartz skull has ever been found. A well documented industry left no paper trail at all for its most famous product.