(They had come from the lost city of Atlantis or been left by extraterrestrials.)
The family’s stories seemed to generate the “discovery” of more skulls with even wilder tales attached. His daughter, Anna, later claimed that he had found the skull in a ruined temple in Belize during the early 1920s. Some of the things sold to these foreigners may not have been made to intentionally deceive, but certain dealers claimed that they were ancient.”Ī major player in the skull game, according to Walsh, was Frederick Arthur Mitchell-Hedges, an English stockbroker-turned-adventurer who, in 1943, began displaying a crystal carving that he called “The Skull of Doom” to his dinner-party guests. “After Mexican independence,” she says, “a lot of outsiders started coming into the country and collecting historic pieces for museums.” The collectors, she adds, “created a demand, and local artisans then created a supply. Walsh knew that if the skull proved to be a genuine pre-Columbian relic, it would constitute an important addition to the Smithsonian collection. Until that point, skulls of this kind typically had been attributed to ancient Mesoamerican cultures. Some time later, Walsh, an expert in Mexican archaeology, was asked to research the skull, one of several known to exist. In 1992, according to Walsh, the museum received an unsolicited donation of a larger-than-life, ten-inch-high skull carved from milky-hued quartz. “I didn’t start out as a skeptic,” she says, “but experience has changed my outlook.” In fact, she has become something of a specialist on the subject. “There are always artists capable of making and selling things that seem old,” says anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). These skulls, carved from large chunks of quartz, may well have been chiseled by descendants of Aztecs and Mayans, but they are decidedly post-Columbian.įakes are an all too real part of the museum world. (Disclosure: in my day job, I work for a magazine published by producer George Lucas’ Educational Foundation.) As it happens, the prop bears a strong resemblance to scores of crystal skulls in museum collections around the world.
The crystal skull sought by Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in the latest silver-screen installment of the archaeologist’s over-the-top adventures is, of course, a movie prop-masquerading as an ancient artifact from pre-Columbian Central America. “There are always artists capable of making and selling things that seem old,” says anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh. Fakes are an all too real part of the museum world.