The Man Who Invented Aztec Crystal Skulls. Jane MacLaren Walsh
Riviale, who introduced me to Boban’s correspondence at the Bibliothèque nationale. The library had five albums of letters sent to him over nearly four decades. Four albums have letters that he received from a variety of correspondents arranged in alphabetical order, while the fifth contains only letters from the French-Mexican industrialist Eugène Goupil arranged chronologically. Paging through the albums for the first time, I hoped at least to recognize the names of people and places, since my reading French was still quite limited.
The second album yielded several familiar names and even had letters written by the Smithsonian’s William Henry Holmes. They were in English and were of great interest to me. A bit further on in the album I found several letters from George Kunz, including a note about retrieving a box for a skull—yet another confirmation that the British Museum skull originated with Boban.
After a few hours of reading through the albums, I had found quite a number of familiar Mexican, French, American, and German names. The letters provided a wealth of information about Boban, the business of archeology, and museum formation in the nineteenth century. Through his correspondence I learned much about his commercial activities—to whom he sold and with whom he traded, which museums purchased his artifacts, and how extensive his collections and knowledge were. However, only a few of these business letters yielded much information about the man himself.
The following year, thanks to Sharon Lorenzo, who was working on a dissertation on the famous Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin Collection of Mexican codices and painted manuscripts, I learned that there were fourteen boxes of Boban’s personal papers at the Hispanic Society of America (HSA) in New York City. Arts patron and connoisseur Archer Huntington, who founded the society, had purchased the collection from a German bookseller in 1910. Boban had organized the papers in leather-bound boxes with gold embossed titles “Collection Boban,” with individual headings such as “Mexican Antiquities,” “Mexican Manuscripts,” “Weapons and utensils,” “Mexican civilization, indigenous literature,” and “Myths and monuments.” Reading through the thousands of pages in Boban’s own hand has done much to fill out the picture of his collecting and dealing. Each box is packed with a welter of information, including copies of published articles, newspaper clippings, notes about artifacts, and personal reminiscences of his life, written on the back of business receipts and other scraps of paper. This trove of information has provided a few more details about the man and his life’s trajectory living and working in France, the Unites States, and Mexico.
I found a kindred spirit in Boban. His writings in the Hispanic Society reveal a man who was passionate about collecting ancient artifacts and illuminating their meaning. His recollections of his idyllic life in Mexico struck a chord with me. I, too, spent much of my youth in Mexico City, studying and traveling throughout the country, falling in love with the land and the people. There is a saying that once the dust of Mexico has settled on your heart, you will never be happy in another place. Boban’s life and career seem to corroborate that sentiment. Our shared love and appreciation of Mexico and its ancient cultures has generated an ongoing interest in discovering more about this intriguing and enigmatic man.
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CAVEAT EMPTOR
The nineteenth century was the Wild West of archeological and ethnographic collecting, fueled by the increasing ease of travel to remote places and a growing interest in ancient cultures. It was also a watershed in museum history and collections acquisition. Newly opened national museums in Europe and the Americas had public money to spend, museum collections to amass, and vitrines to fill. The goal was to acquire as many artifacts as possible from the greatest number of places in the least amount of time. Curators busily purchased objects from dealers, private collectors, and agents who lived among native peoples in far-flung places. They also frequently traded objects that were plentiful in their museum collections for others they judged to be rare.
The increased demand gave “a considerable money value to antiquities,” in the words of the Smithsonian’s curator of aboriginal pottery, William Henry Holmes. The added value of the artifacts, combined with the relative dearth of knowledge about archeology and ethnography at the time, led to “attempts, on the part of dishonest persons, to supply the market by fraudulent means” (Holmes 1886: 170). Worries about the prevalence of misattributed or faked artifacts gave rise to the expert—an individual with enough knowledge in a specific field to evaluate and authenticate objects entering private and museum collections. Still, tourist art and outright fakes became ever more pervasive.
Onto this scene came a minor figure destined to make major contributions to the field of pre-Columbian studies: Eugène Boban. This young Frenchman threw himself wholeheartedly into the chaotic world of collecting, trading, and dealing. He excavated and gathered artifacts, helped museums build collections, and became a recognized authority in Mexican archeology whose opinions were sought after by curators and collectors in Europe and the Americas. He also occasionally passed off fake objects as genuine, thereby confusing museum history for over a century.
Boban went so far as to invent a class of archeological artifact—the Aztec rock crystal skull. They were not copies or fake artifacts, since the Aztecs did not carve crystal skulls, as he was well aware. The skulls were beautiful and interesting objects, acquired through purchase or trade, for which he deliberately created a false identity.
Boban was able to sell “Aztec crystal skulls” because most people knew very little about pre-Columbian Mexican archeology, while he knew a lot. Despite coming from a family of tailors, seamstresses, artisans, and laundresses, he had educated himself about ancient Mexican cultures, their language, customs, and documented history, and later began selling artifacts he had excavated himself. He spent decades becoming a recognized archeologist, collector and dealer, whose expertise in pre-Columbian studies was unquestioned. Added to all of this he had a magnetic personality, which combined fearlessness, charm, supreme confidence, and bravura. Nonetheless, he risked his reputation and livelihood in passing off these artifacts as genuine. In fact, more than once, he came close to being undone by these beautiful, mysterious objects.
Capturing light in their morbid details, the skulls astounded museum curators and visitors alike, since, according to Boban, they had been laboriously fashioned with primitive stone tools. They were also exceedingly rare. Fewer than a dozen could be found in the world during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1897 the British Museum paid $950 or £220, a great deal of money at that time for the largest of these artifacts. The Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris had already been exhibiting two of its crystal skulls for nearly twenty years.
By the end of a life of prodigious work and research, Boban had amassed and sold important collections of pre-Columbian artifacts that were displayed in major museums in Europe and the United States. His colleagues considered him a better educator than some of the famous professors at the Sorbonne. He was known in some circles for his erudite, two-volume catalog of pre-Columbian painted manuscripts. His papers entered the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris and the Hispanic Society of America in New York. Yet his contributions to pre-Columbian scholarship were soon largely forgotten.
As luck would have it, his story has come to light through his connection with crystal skulls, an occurrence he seems almost to have anticipated. In the last decade of his life, he chose to highlight this lucrative sideline. In fact, he seems to have bragged about it when Charles Inman Barnard, the New York Tribune’s Paris correspondent, interviewed him for a newspaper article about the problem of faked artifacts that appeared on 20 August 1900. “Numbers of so-called rock crystal pre-Columbian skulls have been so adroitly made as almost to defy detection, and have been palmed off as genuine upon the experts of some of the principal museums of Europe,” asserted Boban, whom Barnard describes as a most trustworthy source (Barnard 1900).
Boban’s remarks are cynical on several counts. In essence he is undercutting the knowledge and sophistication of the curators at the British Museum and the Trocadéro. This statement is doubly sardonic because he himself “palmed off” the skulls on colleagues who bought them trusting