Mexican crystal skull research

[Ishtar]

No doubt jumping on the Indiana Jones bandwagon, the British Museum has just announced that it's just starting research into a Mexican crystal skull.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/r ... skull.aspx

Kunz claims that the skull was brought from Mexico by a Spanish officer before the French occupation (1. See references at the bottom of the page). It was sold to an English collector and acquired at his death by Eugène Boban, a French antiquities dealer, later becoming the property of Tiffany and Co.

At that time human skulls and skull imagery were known to have featured in Aztec art and iconography in Mexico when first contact with the Spanish was made in AD 1519. They were worked by Aztec, Mixtec and even Maya lapidaries, and a human skull covered with turquoise and lignite mosaic is displayed in Room 27: Mexico of the British Museum (2).

[Minimalist]

I have this odd feeling that IJ's crystal skulls will be more exotic.

[kbs2244]

Ride the wave, that is where the dollars are.
For better or for worse.

[War Arrow]

Interesting article. I'd heard mutterings of this sort but this is the first time I've seen it explicitly suggested that said skulls may be post-conquest, which figures as they do look a lot like skulls depicted in more recent Day of the Dead woodcuts.

Shame the skull doesn't seem to be on display at the BM at the moment though.