They were relics of a lost civilization, hand-crafted by wizards, or possibly extraterrestrials. They could cast spells, conjure spirits, cure illness and foretell the future.

At least that’s what a lot of people believed when a number of humanlike skulls carved out of rock crystal began causing a sensation in the art and antiquities world some 60 years ago.

Actually, they aren’t ancient at all. And now, the archaeological detective who applied space-age methods to expose the true nature of these strange objects is developing a way to help museums around the world separate real artifacts from modern fakes.

“Crystal skulls have always been questionable,” says Jane Walsh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “Nobody has ever excavated one. But they are in a number of major museums, including our own. That’s how we first got involved.

Curses, gods and devils
Tall tales concerning the crystal skulls first began circulating in 1943, when F.A. Mitchell-Hedges, a colorful British banker-turned-adventurer, and his adopted daughter, Anna, made a startling announcement. During a 1920s expedition deep into the jungles of Belize, Anna discovered, tucked away under the altar of a Mayan temple, a crystal skull with supernatural powers. Or so they claimed.

Dubbing it “The Skull of Doom,” Mitchell-Hedges began producing it to entertain guests at social gatherings. According to him, it had been made 3,600 years ago. Mayan priests wielded it to invoke gods and devils. Its curse could bring misfortune and death.

As more skulls were “discovered” by others, the fanciful accounts escalated. Some said the things came from the lost kingdom of Atlantis, which had received them from space aliens. Others said the skulls had accompanied the Knights Templar in the Crusades. The objects emitted strange lights and sounds, depending on the alignment of the planets. They channeled spirits. They talked.

They could do stand-up comedy as far as Walsh is concerned and they still wouldn’t impress her as having been made much earlier than the 19th century, if then.

“If you were a pre-Columbian artisan and you wanted to carve something in stone or rock crystal—which is actually quartz—you’d use a stone file with maybe sand as an abrasive,” Walsh says. Modern stone carving tools have embedded abrasives, usually diamond or carborundum. They just leave very different imprints in the stone.”

In investigating the skull owned by the Smithsonian—which the Institution had received in the mail from a donor in 1992—Walsh scoured historical records. Then, using methods first developed by Margaret Sax, a materials specialist at the British Museum, Walsh plunged into a world where distances are measured in microns.

A dead giveaway
At a table behind her desk at the Natural History Museum, Walsh takes out a small stone carving, then picks up a device that looks like one of Martha Stewart’s glue guns. Walsh squeezes a quarter-size dollop of oozy black silicone onto a section of the carving. Within a few minutes the material hardens. She peels it off and holds up a perfect mold of the carving. Not only are the tiniest details revealed, but they pop out in relief, enabling Walsh to examine them more closely.

After receiving a super-fine coating of gold to reflect electrons, the mold is placed in a vacuum container to have its portrait made by a scanning electron microscope. At magnifications of 50 to 100 times, even an untrained observer can quickly discern patterns made by ancient tools versus modern ones.

Scorings made by pre-Columbian tools look uneven and messy. Modern stone-carving and polishing implements leave uniform marks that look like more like brushed steel. The reason is that abrasives that were used to make genuinely old artifacts—ancient craftsmen typically used sand—tended to move around as the tool dug into the stone’s surface. Modern abrasives that are permanently affixed to engraving and polishing tools leave neat, even rows.

Another dead giveaway is the use of wheeled tools—used, for example, to inscribe the lines between teeth on a skull. These lines show up as arcs where the wheel has bitten into the stone. As far as anyone knows, wheels were unknown to pre-Columbian Americans.

Modern fakes
Walsh took the Smithsonian’s crystal skull to London, where it and two similar skulls owned by the British Museum were subjected to the microscopic treatment. Sax and Walsh compared these skulls to several carved crystal artifacts from Mexico known to be authentic and to a crystal skull known to have been carved in modern times.

“We discovered that all of the crystal skulls had been carved with modern coated lapidary wheels using industrial diamonds and polished with modern machinery,” Walsh says.

Walsh is now working toward a collaboration with the British Museum to develop a database of scanning electron microscope images—taken of both authentic and fake carvings—that can be accessed via computer by other museum professionals. She is trying to raise $25,000 for the project, to be spent mostly on travel to London and Mexico City to make molds.

In the meantime, the Smithsonian’s crystal skull, a heavy object with a splotchy whitish complexion, resides inside a plain beige metal cabinet in Jane Walsh’s outer office. No one has ever heard it say a word. It passes the time in silence, staring sightlessly, one presumes, into the darkness