Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Who actually made the skulls then? In many cases, Walsh suspects Boban may have acquired them from aging Christian churches in Mexico that the government was tearing down. We may never know. But Boban himself also seemed to tip off future generations to his complicity in the crystal skull saga when he talked to a newspaper journalist in the year 1900.
Many of these skulls were collected through illegal, often violent means. But according to Redman, this was justified through an assumed primacy of western science over the concerns of indigenous populations and their cultural practices. "Little thought was given to the fact that the way the bones were displayed and collected was profoundly against the traditions of many of the peoples from whom they were taken," he says. Five fossil skull finds , each with its own controversy, provide a glimpse into how much we’ve learned about our origin story — and how much remains uncertain. Skeletal evidence shows Britain's ancient Anglo-Saxon society as more genetically diverse than once thought. In fact, between 2015 and 2017, archaeologists dug up a monumental Aztec tower at Templo Mayor in Mexico City that’s some 20 feet in diameter and was built from more than 650 human skulls. The discovery of this skull tower belies the staggering scale of human sacrifice happening in what was then the Aztec capital city. It also shows just how obsessed their culture was with the skull. But in the 1990s, an anthropologist named Jane Walsh at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History started to develop suspicions about these objects.Centuries ago, Aztec spiritual beliefs and ceremonies placed major significance on the human skull. They carved ornate skulls into stone and depicted their gods wearing human skulls as jewelry. When the Aztecs sacrificed humans, they’d rip out people's hearts and put their heads on stakes. Yet even if actors or audiences are unnerved by the idea of using real remains, there seems to have been no shortage of people eager to donate their own and achieve a few moments of posthumous glory. The American actor Edwin Booth, who became a phenomenon as Hamlet on Broadway from the 1860s onwards, was reputed to have used a skull given to his actor-manager father by a notorious horse thief so desperate to appear in Hamlet that he was willing to do so even after his own death.
When you combine the pre-Columbian fascination with skulls with the technical prowess at carving stone, it may have been easy for some to believe that these ancient people could have carved skulls out of crystal. And for nearly 150 years, that subtext helped a number of museum exhibit curators feel comfortable about displaying their newly acquired archaeological artifacts, despite long-standing questions about the crystal skulls’ true origins. This article was co-authored by Renée Plevy and by wikiHow staff writer, Jessica Gibson. Renée Plevy is an Internationally Acclaimed Portrait Artist from New York/Palm Beach who has painted The Grand Dames of Palm Beach and various celebrities and community leaders. With over 50 years of experience, Renée specializes in painting realistically in oil and capturing the soul of the person. She has studied under internationally renowned portrait artists John Howard Sanden, David Leffel, Robert Beverly Hale, Clyde Smith, and Leonid Gervits. Renée is featured in over 68 shows and galleries including a one-woman museum show at the Paterson Museum. She has garnered numerous awards including “Artist of the Year” from The Bloomfield Art League and First Prize from the Boca Raton Museum Artist’s Guild. Renée has even painted a portrait of celebrity, Vanilla Ice. She also teaches at the Boca Raton Museum Art School - formerly at SVA in Manhattan.
Zombie Skull
Meanwhile, real archaeological artifacts were also streaming out of Mexico. Excavations were uncovering new clues about the Aztec, a civilization that was just as advanced as its contemporaries in Europe. And museums and private collectors around the world were eager to get a piece of it. Curators were snatching up objects that seemed rare and exotic. Ancient crystal skulls would have seemed like the perfect get.
Great Deal 
New Comment