This is a story of four different skulls that reached three of the world's largest museums under less than transparent circumstances-a fact that was mildly ironic given that three of these skulls were carved from rock crystal, and only the fourth is an actual human cranium. Perhaps more notable is that all of them have been thought, at various times, to be that bane of museum collections: frauds. The three quartz skulls, popularly known as crystal skulls, were all sold in the nineteenth century as ancient Aztec carvings by the French antiquarian Eugène Boban (1834-1908). Two found their way to the Trocadero in Paris in 1878 after they had been exhibited at the Exposition Universelle. The third skull was sold to Tiffany's in New York City in 1886, and purchased by the British Museum in 1898. The story's fourth skull was apparently that of a notorious Mexican bandit named Rojas, who fought off French invaders, and was shot in the back in 1865. On this diminutive skull's forehead is a legend, identifying it as "Mexique-Rojas-Chef de Guerillas-tué par un soldat cie. du capitain Berthelin du 81e." There are also several catalogue numbers inscribed upon it but, strangely, there is also a Venus symbol, signifying that the skull was also thought at one point to have been female. Perhaps it wasn't Rojas at all. The Army Medical Museum purchased it in 1887 from the very same Eugène Boban, and transferred it to the Smithsonian Institution's physical anthropology collections in 1904. The quartz skulls eventually raised the eyebrows of anthropologists for two reasons. First, rock crystal is exceedingly rare in pre-Columbian collections, and no crystal skull has ever been excavated in a controlled archaeological dig. And second, because of the man who sold them all: the amateur archaeologist, collector and dealer Eugène Boban, who lived in Mexico from 1853 until 1869. The story of how he sold his crystal skulls to important national museums-and what those skulls actually were-is one that has taken over a century to unfold. The unraveling of the mystery is well known and has been extensively written about by one of the authors, Jane Walsh. The after-effect of that story, however, was a need to understand the nature and authenticity of other artifacts Boban sold to the world's museums, which number in the thousands. The bandit's cranium, studied and evaluated in 2012, initially also appeared suspect. Its story, however, turned out to be even more dramatic, amplifying a moment in the history of imperialism and resistance in the Americas. This is a tale of four skulls, but it is also the story of authenticity and fakery in the imagined ruins of the Mexican past, conjuring images of pre-Columbian sacrificial victims, bloody bandits and betrayal-a history of illusions unlocked by twenty-first century science.
