The Man Who Invented Aztec Crystal Skulls. Jane MacLaren Walsh
Museum skull, which named George F. Kunz, a gemologist and vice president of Tiffany & Co., as the intermediary in this purchase. Also referenced on the catalog card was Kunz’s book Gems and Precious Stones, published in 1890. In it he enumerated several artifacts in rock crystal then known to him. “Small skulls are in the Blake Collection at the United States National Museum [Smithsonian Institution], the Douglas Collection New York, The British Museum and the Trocadéro Museum. A large skull, now in the possession of George H. Sisson of New York, is very remarkable. … Little is known of its history and nothing of its origin. It was brought from Mexico by a Spanish Officer sometime before the French occupation of Mexico, and was sold to an English collector, at whose death it passed into the hands of E. Boban, of Paris, and then became the property of Mr. Sisson” (Kunz 1890: 284). Could the large crystal skull in the British Museum be the same one that had belonged to Sisson? If so, this meant that the London and Paris museums had gotten their crystal skulls from the same man, Eugène Boban. But how had the skull moved from Sisson to the British Museum’s collection?
Delving deeper into Holmes’s papers in the Smithsonian Institution Archives, I found an annotated sales catalog for an auction of Boban’s ethnographic and archeological collection that took place in New York in December 1886. The catalog listed almost two thousand objects. Holmes had attended the auction and noted names and prices alongside most of the pre-Columbian artifacts, which were of particular interest to him. Some ceramic vessels, several of which he sketched, sold for between $5 and $10. A terra cotta group of three figurines, described as Maya Quiche gods, sold for $35, and a carved stone figure from Veracruz went for $46 (Leavitt 1886a: 22, 24, 27). Several small crystal skulls appear, and one of “natural size” is described.
According to Holmes’s annotations, the natural-sized skull went for the highest price of anything in the catalog, being purchased for $950 by someone named Ellis. Further investigation revealed that a jeweler named J. L. Ellis had been a partner at Tiffany & Co., although he had retired from the firm by 1886 (Hannan 2008: 513). This meant that Tiffany’s purchased this crystal skull at the Boban auction in New York City. In any case, as recorded by Kunz in his gem book, George H. Sisson, who made a fortune in mining ventures in Colorado and Arizona (Bancroft 1889: 734), owned the skull in 1890. In the mid-1890s Sisson either sold the skull back to Tiffany’s or asked Kunz to sell it for him. The British Museum purchased it from Tiffany’s, through Kunz, in 1897.
At this point almost all the crystal skulls I had identified—the large and small skulls at the Musée de l’Homme and the large skull at the British Museum—could be traced directly back to Eugène Boban. However, I still was unsure of their authenticity.
The opportunity to scientifically determine the authenticity of the skulls came from an unexpected source. As a result of my correspondence with the British Museum curator, Elizabeth Carmichael, an independent producer of documentaries contacted me, describing a television program about crystal skulls that he hoped to make for the BBC. Eventually this led us to plan a joint study of the crystal skulls in the British Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Musée de l’Homme, and possibly in a few private collections, filming the entire process.
Because we needed an example of carved rock crystal that we knew was definitively pre-Columbian as a basis of comparison with the skulls, I suggested that the documentary’s producers contact the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) in Mexico City to request the loan of a rock crystal goblet that had been recovered from excavations at Monte Albán in Oaxaca, to use in the study. To my knowledge the goblet is the only large quartz or rock crystal object that has come from an archeological dig. It would give us an unquestionable example of pre-Columbian materials, procedures, and carving techniques to use as a yardstick for evaluating our array of crystal skulls.
After completing a couple days of filming at the Smithsonian, the production crew moved on to London to continue at the British Museum. Arriving at the Department of Scientific Research, located in an early nineteenth-century row house on Russell Square, I met with Elizabeth Carmichael and Margaret Sax, a specialist in prehistoric stone carving. She and her colleagues were poised to examine the two British Museum skulls and the large Smithsonian skull. Mexican archeologist Arturo Oliveros had brought the rock crystal goblet from Monte Albán. The goblet, insured for a million dollars, was placed on a long table in the center of the room next to the British Museum skulls and the Smithsonian skull, which dwarfed the other artifacts.
Margaret Sax had developed a method for studying tool marks left on carved stone from her work examining several thousand Mesopotamian cylinder seals dating from 3500 to 400 BC. First, she would look for residual tool marks on the seals under a light microscope. Then, to get a clearer view of the tool marks, she would take silicone molds of the incised areas of the seals and examine them using a high-powered scanning electron microscope (SEM). As the SEM beam scans the mold’s surface, it generates an image of its topographical features. Sax was now prepared to try out her method on the crystal skulls in question.
Placing the super-sized Smithsonian skull under the light microscope was quite an undertaking. Sax had to stand on tiptoe to look through the lens, but within a short time she seemed certain about what she was seeing. Then she moved on to the two skulls in the British Museum’s collections. Ultimately, after taking silicone molds and reviewing them under SEM, she determined that the two British Museum skulls and the Smithsonian skull had all been carved with rotary cutting tools. By analyzing the impressions of the tool marks replicated on the silicone molds, she could clearly demonstrate that all three crystal skulls had been carved and polished using modern technology. The remnant marks on the skulls did not resemble in the least those found on the pre-Columbian crystal goblet from Monte Albán. None of these skulls could possibly be Aztec.
The next task was to examine the crystal skulls Boban had sold to Alphonse Pinart. Since the Musée de l’Homme had refused to lend its skulls for the study, I flew to Paris, following our work at the British Museum, to at least have a close look at them. Although I thought that I had arranged to see them through my correspondence with Daniel Levine, upon my arrival at the Musée de l’Homme, I discovered that he had left for Mexico the previous day. Luckily mutual friends introduced me to Marie-France Fauvet-Berthelot, an archeologist who had worked at Copán in Honduras and at archeological sites in Mexico. She was then the museum’s curator of pre-Columbian archeology. Fauvet-Berthelot directed me to the exhibit area, where I spent some time examining the larger crystal skull through its glass vitrine. She later showed me a small pamphlet entitled “Museo Científico,” which advertised a private museum that Boban opened in Mexico City in the mid-1880s. The pamphlet’s descriptions of the exhibit rooms included one where a crystal skull was on display. By then it had become clear to me that the entire crystal skull story revolved around Eugène Boban. But who was he?
In the early years of the twenty-first century, I read an article about Boban’s career written by Pascal Riviale, a French historian who has focused on nineteenth-century archeological explorations in Latin America. His research gave me an entirely new perspective on Boban. According to Riviale, Boban corresponded with Max Uhle, a pioneer of Andean archeology and curator at the Royal Museum of Zoology, Anthropology and Archeology in Dresden, Germany; Enrico Giglioli, the director of the Royal Zoological Museum of Florence, Italy; Ernest T. Hamy, founding director of the Trocadéro; and many others—a veritable who’s who of nineteenth-century museum curators. Up to that point I had no inkling that this man, whom I knew only through his association with crystal skulls, could have had business dealings with so many well-known European intellectuals, or that he sold artifacts to most of the important museums in Europe.
A few years later, Leonardo López Luján, a Mexican archeologist and friend, emailed me saying he was in Paris working with Marie-France Fauvet-Berthelot to create a catalog of the Musée de l’Homme’s Aztec collection. He wondered what he should say about the crystal skulls. I decided the time was right to go to Paris to see what more I could learn about Boban through the collection he formed. Working with López Luján and Fauvet-Berthelot in the storage of the Musée de l’Homme during that time was enormously rewarding and enlightening. The Pinart/Boban collection was impressive, comprising some 2,400 artifacts. Seeing and handling it helped me appreciate Boban’s broad expertise and inspired me to continue following his trail.
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