The Skull of Doom

“Legend of the Crystal Skulls” is an interesting documentary about the so-called Mitchell-Hedges skull (a.k.a. the Skull of Doom), a peculiar artefact supposedly found at the Mayan site of Lubaantun in Belize in 1924 by Anna Mitchell-Hedges, the adopted daughter of F A Mitchell-Hedges, a British author and adventurer who conducted excavations there at the time. Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges may have been the role model for the fictitious character Indiana Jones. Think Hollywood blockbuster “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”. All kinds of wild claims about the crystalline cranium have been promoted, broadly connected to the New Age and conspiracist milieux.

It´s all a hoax, of course.

Three similar crystal skulls happen to be in the possession of museums around the world. They have been thoroughly analyzed and find to be modern. Also, there is no evidence that the Skull of Doom was found in Belize in 1924 – F A Mitchell-Hedges never mentions it in his writings on Lubaantun. He *does* mention buying the skull at an auction in London in 1943. Diligent searches in the archives have turned up a photo of the Skull of Doom in a 1936 scientific magazine, and it was *not* then owned by the Mitchell-Hedges family. The actual owner, art dealer Sydney Burney, was the very man who sold it to the adventurer seven years later. Finally, the Skull of Doom was also subjected to scientific investigation…and didn´t pass. It´s a work of modern craftsmanship.

Thus, we are not dealing with authentic Maya or Aztec artifacts. (Some have associated the skulls with the Aztecs rather than the Maya.) Nor is this evidence for Atlantis. Or probably not – crystal skulls can´t be dated by radiometric dating methods, so a true believer could always claim that the modern methods used to make the skulls were actually known to the ancient Mesoamericans or Atlantids. Indeed, that *is* what they are claiming. Personally, I´m with the skeptics on this one: I find it hard to believe that our modern technological methods are *exact* replicas of ancient technology. An unknown way of making crystal skulls would have been more convincing.

Since some of my ancestors may have been Mayan, I admit authentic crystal skulls would have been great fun, but it seems the Mayans were more into building pyramids, inventing the number zero, making incredibly exact astronomical observations and other such feats considered too boring by some White guys, but YMMV…