The Crystal Skulls: How a Jeweller's Wheel Betrayed the Ancient Maya Legend
In July 1936, readers of Man, the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London, got a strange piece of forensic theatre: two life-size human skulls of polished rock crystal, measured point against point. The anatomist G. M. Morant concluded they resembled each other too closely to be independent works — one, he suggested, had been copied from the other. Adrian Digby of the British Museum disagreed in print. One of the skulls belonged to the museum. The other stood in the London gallery of the art dealer Sydney Burney, and nobody in that polite exchange imagined it would become the most famous "Maya relic" on earth.
The legend came later, and it was magnificent. The British adventurer F. A. Mitchell-Hedges claimed that his adopted daughter Anna had discovered the skull around her seventeenth birthday in 1924, beneath a collapsed altar in the Maya ruins of Lubaantun, in British Honduras — a flawless object he took to calling the Skull of Doom. In his 1954 memoir Danger My Ally he added mystery instead of evidence, writing only that he had reasons not to reveal how it had come into his possession. He was wise to be careful: the reasons were sitting in the files.
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