"Crystal Skulls" in Crystal Skulls Pictures.
Crystal Skulls
Description: The most celebrated of those so far 'discovered' is the Mitchell-Hedges Skull, unearthed in Belize in 1927: you can see a small image of it on the BBC Worldwide web page below, and on the cover of the book 'The Mystery...'. Famously this skull was analyzed by a team in the crystal laboratories of the computer company Hewlett-Packard in California in 1970: it was shown to have come from a single large block of natural and very pure rock crystal; amazingly, the research team concluded that it had to have been carved and rubbed entirely by hand in a process spanning '300 man-years of effort'.
In tests performed at the British Museum (and filmed by the BBC) in 1996, the background to the Museum's own crystal skull proved less exotic, however: traces of (jewellers') wheel markings on the teeth suggested it was manufactured with modern tools, out of Brazilian quarz. This appears to confirm the suspicions of many scholars that the skull - bought by the Museum in 1897 for some $900 from Tiffany & Co. in New York - was, like a similar one in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, a fake that had come through the hands of one Eugene Boban, a dealer in (often fake) antiquities who nearly succeeded in selling one to the National Museum of Mexico in the 1880s for $3,000.
In tests performed at the British Museum (and filmed by the BBC) in 1996, the background to the Museum's own crystal skull proved less exotic, however: traces of (jewellers') wheel markings on the teeth suggested it was manufactured with modern tools, out of Brazilian quarz. This appears to confirm the suspicions of many scholars that the skull - bought by the Museum in 1897 for some $900 from Tiffany & Co. in New York - was, like a similar one in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, a fake that had come through the hands of one Eugene Boban, a dealer in (often fake) antiquities who nearly succeeded in selling one to the National Museum of Mexico in the 1880s for $3,000.
