others like it on their sudden departure? Could the crystal skull perhaps give us some clues as to why they left? How had it come to remain in the temple ruins?
We also wanted to see whether there were any other clues as to how the Mayans might have made the skull or how they might have used it, or even, as Frederick Mitchell-Hedges had suspected, whether it in fact dated back to some even more mysterious pre-Mayan civilization.
But as we began our further investigations it soon became apparent that these were questions to which there would be no easy answers. Despite the details archaeologists had uncovered about some aspects of Mayan history, whole chunks of knowledge seemed to be missing.
Indeed, as we continued our investigations we realized that we had unwittingly stumbled into a veritable minefield of great archaeological controversy. For not only was there heated debate about who the Maya were, where they had come from and where they had disappeared to, but one question in particular seemed to divide the archaeological establishment perhaps more than any other, and that was, where had the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull really come from?
As we were to discover, the controversy began even with the site of the skull’s original discovery – Lubaantun. Mitchell-Hedges himself was of the view that the site was really pre-Mayan in origin. He felt the evidence from the site suggested that pre-Mayan peoples were involved in its construction and that it actually dated back to a much earlier period.
What had made Mitchell-Hedges suspect that Lubaantun might have been pre-Mayan was that, as we ourselves had noticed, the building techniques used there were so very different from those used at every other Mayan site. In their Recent book The Mayan Prophecies1 author-historians Adrian Gilbert and Maurice Cotterell point out that the style of construction was remarkably similar to the techniques used by the even more ancient Incas of what is now Peru in South America. There are certain similarities between Lubaantun and the famous ancient Inca sites such as Machu Pichu, hidden high up thousands of miles away in the Andes. Gilbert and Cotterell suggest that whoever built Lubaantun might have enlisted the help of or learnt construction techniques from the ancient Incas of South America. Or perhaps both the ancient Maya and Inca had learned their construction techniques from some other civilization even more ancient than their own. This raised the question, had the crystal skull originally come from this same mysterious pre-Mayan civilization?
Mitchell-Hedges believed this civilization to have been the legendary Atlantis. Though this struck us as rather unlikely, he did in fact later find evidence that there had been some sort of pre-Mayan civilization in this part of the world during his later excavations of the Bay Islands off the nearby coast of Honduras. He donated several specimens from these digs to the British Museum in London and the Museum of the American Indian in New York, and Captain James Joyce of the British Museum wrote to comment:
‘It is my opinion that [the samples] represent a very early type of Central American culture; probably pre-Maya. The fact that they appear to bear relations with the pre-Conquest civilisations of Costa Rica, early Maya, and archaic Mexico, suggests that this is an early centre from which various forms of culture were diffused over Central America…
‘The results [of further research] are likely to shed new light on the current ideas of the origin and development of the American aboriginal civilisations…
‘I consider that your discovery is of great importance.’ 2
George G. Heye, then Chairman and Director of the Museum of the American Indian, had also written:
‘In every way we concur with the findings of the British Museum in regard to your amazing discoveries made on a chain of islands off the coast of Central America… The specimens … are of a hitherto unknown culture…
‘[They] open up a new era in scientific thought relative to the age and history of the original inhabitants of the American continent…
‘Your discoveries open up an entirely new vista in regard to the ancient civilisations of the American continent, and must compel archaeologists to reconstruct their present scientific theories in regard to the riddle which has existed for so many years in Central and South America. In fact as further work is done and more knowledge gained, in my judgment it will make fresh history, and open up a reconstruction of thought on the antiquity of cultural civilisations of a world-wide character.’ 3
We managed to track down an archaeologist, Dr Norman Hammond of Boston University, who had spent some time at Lubaantun during the 1970s carrying out further excavations of the site. Chris called Dr Hammond to ask him who he thought had really built the city. Dr Hammond was quite happy to talk about this and said that he believed it was the Mayans and the Mayans alone, without any external assistance, who had built Lubaantun. In his opinion the site had been built around AD 700 and abandoned around AD 850. It did not bother him at all that the buildings were constructed so differently from those at most other Mayan sites, as there were even examples of sites in the Mayan area that were built from red bricks and mortar like many modern homes, instead of from the usual blocks of cut white limestone. In Dr Hammond’s opinion, Lubaantun, like these other sites, was entirely Mayan and he would not countenance the view that any other people, whether Incas, Atlanteans or whoever, had been in any way involved.
But it was when we turned to the question of the crystal skull itself that we discovered that Dr Hammond’s views were about to drop a real bombshell onto our investigations. The minute Chris raised the subject of the skull Dr Hammond stated quite clearly and categorically that in his opinion, the crystal skull was irrelevant to Lubaantun, that it had never really been found there at all! He said that there was no evidence that Anna Mitchell-Hedges had ever even been to Lubaantun in the first place and that the story of the skull having been found there had only surfaced after her father died. He said that Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ own claim was the only evidence of the find.
By now we knew the crystal skull’s discovery had been controversial, but we didn’t know it had been quite as controversial as that. Norman Hammond said, in no uncertain terms, that he didn’t want anything more to do with the subject. We were horrified. We were about to make a film telling Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ fascinating story, when a respected archaeologist suddenly claimed the whole thing was pure invention. What were we to do?
As we were fast finding out, it was one thing trying to get our film off the ground but quite another trying to determine the truth about the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull. The truth seemed to be slipping through our fingers like grains of sand on a beach. If Anna Mitchell-Hedges had never really been to Lubaantun, how was it that she appeared to have all the photos to prove it? If the party had not really found the crystal skull there at all, why would Anna have invented such an incredible story?
It seemed that what had really got people wondering about the true origins of the skull was a series of puzzling discrepancies that appeared to exist between Anna’s detailed account of the skull’s discovery and her own father’s virtual silence on the issue. Even in his own autobiography, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges said very little about the skull. In fact, in a later American edition, published in 1955, he makes no mention of it at all. In the original edition he refers to it only briefly and somewhat enigmatically as follows, in a section of his autobiography mostly devoted to a later trip to Africa:
‘We took with us the sinister Skull of Doom of which much has been written… 4
If much had been written on the skull we certainly hadn’t been able to find it. But the plot thickened further when we read the remaining scant details Frederick Mitchell-Hedges offered about the skull:
‘How it came into my possession I have reason for not revealing.
