Crystal Skulls

Several life-size and miniature human skulls carved from quartz appeared on the antiquities market in the second half of the 19th century, billed as pre-Columbian Aztec or Mixtec masterpieces. The most famous reside in the British Museum, the Smithsonian, and the Musée du quai Branly, with a separate, much-mythologized example attributed to adventurer F.A. Mitchell-Hedges. A throughline connects many of them: the Paris dealer Eugène Boban, who handled the British Museum and other skulls in the 1860s–1880s and sourced quartz of European, not Mesoamerican, origin.

The skulls became fixtures of fringe lore — credited with psychic powers, with origins in Atlantis or Lemuria, and on Ancient Aliens folded into the ancient-astronaut hypothesis as supposedly impossible to carve without advanced technology, even inspiring a Hollywood film.

This one is plainly a hoax, and the science is unambiguous. Scanning-electron-microscope studies by the British Museum and Smithsonian (reported in 2008) found rotary-wheel tool marks — regular, concentric abrasions from jeweler’s lapidary wheels that did not exist in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Geological analysis traced the quartz to sources such as Brazil or Madagascar, outside Aztec or Maya trade networks. No crystal skull has ever been recovered in a documented excavation. They are genuine 19th-century European fabrications, not ancient artifacts at all.