pleasing at all.
But she also explained that this all probably had something to do with the rumours that had once been reported in the tabloid press. Much to her distaste, some staff were supposed to have claimed that the skull had started moving around by itself in its sealed glass case! The papers had even said that there were cleaners in the museum who insisted that the skull was covered with a cloth at night because they were so scared of it.
I asked if there were any truth in these rumours. Elizabeth Carmichael simply said that if the skull really had been moving around by itself then it was probably due to the vibrations of lorries passing on the road outside or some equally normal phenomenon. She went on to comment that there were an awful lot of ridiculous superstitious beliefs surrounding the skull and all kinds of incredible claims had been made about it, but in her opinion it was all nonsense. She did, however, confess that she herself would not want to be left alone in a room with it.
It soon became clear that the origins of the British Museum crystal skull were almost as mysterious and controversial as those of the Mitchell-Hedges. The museum records showed only that the skull had been purchased from Tiffany’s in New York in 1898. It was said to have been brought by a Spanish soldier of fortune from Mexico and had always been considered Aztec. The Aztecs, who lived several hundreds of miles further north-west than the Mayans, and several centuries later, in what is now central Mexico, were known to have been even more obsessed with the image of the skull than the Mayans.
Elizabeth Carmichael, however, explained that there was no real evidence as to exactly where the British Museum skull had come from. She said that whilst it was indeed possible that it might really be Aztec, there was also a strong possibility that it was actually a modern fake.
She also informed us that the British Museum skull had in fact once been examined alongside the Mitchell-Hedges skull back in 1936 and that an article had been published about this comparative study in Man, the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.10 She even had a copy of this article in her office.
As we read through the details of this comparison it seemed that there had been some debate at the time about the marked similarity between the two artefacts. One of the experts carrying out the study suggested that the British Museum skull was a copy of the original Mitchell-Hedges skull, which is more detailed and anatomically accurate, whilst the other believed the reverse to be the case. Either way, the article reached the conclusion that the two skulls had probably come from the same source.
But this article could not answer the question of how old the skulls really were, stating simply:
‘The technique will not help us to settle their relative ages for in neither case is there any trace of identifiable tool marks, and it is certain that neither specimen was made with steel [i.e. modern] tools.’ 11
I asked Elizabeth Carmichael how we could find out whether either of the skulls was really a ‘modern fake’ or not. She told us there were scientific tests which could now be done, which might prove the matter once and for all. When we asked whether we might be able to film such tests, she offered to suggest this to her head of department. She explained that it might take some time to get official approval, but in the meantime we might like to look through the other records the British Museum had in their files about their own skull or the Mitchell-Hedges skull as an aid to our investigations.
As we went through the records, it transpired that there was another problem with Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ story of her discovery. For there was apparently no written record of the discovery of the Mitchell-Hedges skull in the British Museum files relating to Lubaantun, although these files contained detailed records of all the other thousands of artefacts found there. We also discovered that when Captain James Joyce of the British Museum had visited Mitchell-Hedges’ party in Lubaantun to inspect their excavations, back in the twenties, it appeared that no mention had been made to him about the discovery of the crystal skull. Neither had the other members of the Mitchell-Hedges expedition, notably Dr Thomas Gann or Lady Richmond Brown, ever spoken publicly or written about the skull’s discovery.12
Anna Mitchell-Hedges, however, explained, ‘My father allocated the account of the various finds and incidents at Lubaantun to the member of the team that found the object, and was scrupulous in observing their right to give the facts first.’13
Hence the comment in his autobiography that Anna herself would explain ‘much more of what we discovered’.
We went back and had another look at Frederick Mitchell-Hedges’ autobiography. In it we found one very strong hint of a particularly straightforward explanation as to why Mitchell-Hedges had been reluctant to reveal exactly how he got the skull, an explanation which would account for why the skull’s discovery did not appear in the records of the dig held at the British Museum, as well as why Captain Joyce never saw it and why no member of the team ever publicly spoke or wrote about the find either at the time or afterwards. For Frederick Mitchell-Hedges quite clearly explained that, upon discovering the lost city of Lubaantun,
‘Our immediate purpose was to inform the Governor of our discovery, and, at a meeting of the Legislative Council of British Honduras, an act was passed granting us a sole concession valid for twenty years, to excavate over an area of seventy square miles around the ruins.’ 14
Quite how Mitchell-Hedges was able to negotiate such an agreement was revealed in George G. Heye’s press release on behalf of the Museum of the American Indian, in which he explained:
‘[Mitchell-Hedges] conducted his own expedition under an agreement that his finds were to go to the New York Institution [the Museum of the American Indian] and to The British Museum.’ 15
Given this agreement that all finds would automatically go to one or other of the museums, is it any wonder that no mention was made of the crystal skull at the time? As Anna was also keen to point out to us, ‘If we had kept the crystal skull when we first found it, it would have gone to a museum automatically like all the other things we found,’ and, ‘If Captain Joyce had seen the skull the British Museum would have got it.’ But in the actual event and whatever the real reason, by the time Captain Joyce came to inspect the dig the skull had already been given back to the Mayans. So it never did end up in the British Museum. Anna was also keen to say that if the crystal skull had not really been found at Lubaantun, then why do the Belizean government, and the British Museum on some occasions, still claim to this day that the skull is really their property and should be returned to them?
But there was one other problem for academics and archaeologists such as Elizabeth Carmichael. It was that there were two written records of a crystal skull in the British Museum’s archives from the first part of the twentieth century and neither was specifically related to Lubaantun. The first of these was the article we had already read, which appeared in the July 1936 issue of Man. This article specifically referred to the skull the British Museum themselves did not own as being ‘in the possession of Mr Sydney Burney’ and made no mention of Mitchell-Hedges. It also noted that the skull had ‘the character almost of an anatomical study in a scientific age’, though no sign of any tool markings could be found on it.
The other record was a note handwritten by one of the former museum keepers which said that a rock crystal skull had come up for auction at Sotheby’s of London on 15 September 1943, listed as ‘Lot 54’. The surprising thing about this entry was that it too referred to the skull as apparently having been sent for sale by London art dealer W. Sydney Burney, not Frederick Mitchell-Hedges. In fact the note implied that the British Museum had tried to buy the skull but in vain as it was then ‘bought in by Mr Burney’ and ‘sold subsequently by Mr Burney’ to none other than a ‘Mr Mitchell-Hedges for [only] £400’! This apparently
