famous crystal skulls are fakes

Less than three months after the Quai Branly Museum in Paris discovered that a crystal skull once proclaimed as a mystical Aztec masterpiece was a fake, it is now the turn of the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution to find they were victims of skull-duggery.
I didn't know about the Paris thing, but it doesn't surprise me. More and more evidence has been pointing toward the skulls being "fake" as in, not of ancient manufacture.
What does that mean for the whole 12+1 skull reunion that is supposed to stop the 2012 end of the world scenario?
Well, constant readers know I have major problems with the whole 2012 thing. So I'm not at all surprised that something that should uphold it actually helps to shoot it down. You'd think, as an author who writes extensively about the Mayan and Aztec calendars that I would revel in the attention those subjects are getting because of 2012. It's a mixed blessing, actually, as I constantly have to defend myself for not "believing" in 2012 (much the same way I have to explain to Christians why I don't "believe" in Jesus).
Legend-lovers had a bad day on April 18 when the Quai Branly said it had found grooves and perforations in its 11-centimetre (4.4-inch) -high quartz skull revealing the use of "jewellery burrs and other modern tools."
.... Seeking the verdict of science, researchers from those two museums examined the skulls with electron microscopes, looking at tiny scratches and marks left by the carving implements.
These were then compared with the surfaces of a crystal goblet, rock crystal beads and dozens of greenstone jewels known to be of genuine Aztec or Mixtec origin.
The study appears in the Journal of Archaeological Science, published by the Elsevier group.
The skull in the British Museum, purchased in 1897, is made of transparent rock crystal and is 15 centimetres (six inches) high. The Smithsonian skull, acquired by the museum in 1992, is of white quartz and measures 25.5 cms (10 inches) in height.
None of the articles I've found mention the date the article was published in the JAS, and it's not on PubMed because it's not medical news. I will keep looking, and also try to find the April 18th source. Anyone who has links, please let me know (in a comment is fine)
(screenshot; photo source=article source)
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mystery of the crystal skulls on SciFi

("Live blogged" while I watched the show.)
Because of the hype for the upcoming Indiana Jones movie about crystal skulls, SciFi channel has a 1 hour special The Mystery of the Crystal Skull. Of course they tie it into 2012 (and John Major Jenkins makes an appearance) and hint that aliens carved them. They talk about the legend that there were 13 ancient skulls, and only 8 have been found. This show supposedly chronicles the search for the missing 5.
Of course the whole thing was started by the Mitchell-Hedges skull, and I've read in several places that the skull was planted for the daughter to find, if indeed it was ancient at all. It was found in Lubaantun in Belize--the photo is of Anna Mitchell-Hedges with the skull she found (source)--she died last year, and her husband Homann now has the skull and all her father's research information.
My thought is they were a type of really fancy talking stick, and I would simply love to believe they store information--after all, quartz is merely silicon dioxide and not any different than the silicon we have in our computers' memory. All quartz is piezoelectric, and that's not any special property this MH skull has and other pieces of quartz don't.
The show puts forth one theory, that aliens created the skulls and deposited them where ley-lines crossed, which is not unlike some of the crystal-burying ideas in the original version of Shamballa Multidimensional Healing.
John Major Jenkins believes that that the 13 skulls will activate on 2012 and save us from apocalypse.
So if they will activate automatically, why do they have to be found and correctly placed? If they are still where the aliens left them, why not leave them alone?
Homann goes back to Belize with maps and notes given to him by AMH to try to find the other 5 skulls. From a previous associate of AMH, Homann learns that Suki tok is the Mayan word for crystal, and supposedly a god descended from the sky (or from another dimension) and handed a crystal skull to an ordinary human. They learned to access the knowledge in that skull and from that made the other 12.
The MH skull is so finely carved that a facial reconstruction has been done on it (source--the reconstruction is on the left and the drawing is of a face seen during a meditation on the skull)--this wasn't in the show.
The Sci-fi team found large chunks of quartz within a mile from Lubaantun, where the MH skull was supposedly found (although, if you do research online on the various skulls, the quartz is thought to have come from Brazil). Then they headed to Uxbentun, a nearby unexcavated city, looking for a missing skull. Supposedly MH believed Lubaantun (and Tulum) were both port cities of Atlantis.
An author and former NASA employee, Richard Hoagland, claims there was an ancient civilization on Mars (face on mars); that Mars exploded, destroying the civilization on the moon. Left behind was a robotic head, which the astronauts who visited the moon brought back to earth. Somehow (not clear to me) this robot head is related to the crystal skull, and of course the government is covering it all up and denying that they are covering it up.
(My husband, watching the show with me, comments, "this guy is a crackpot.")
Next, after leaving Belize, Homann goes to Roatan (another place I've been) searching for a supposed second skull MH found there and later threw into the sea when authorities wouldn't let him take it from the island. For some reason, they chose to dive on a known wreck--would he have thrown his "treasure" onto an existing spot?
Then they show the skull "Max" whose owner travels with him, displaying him in a PVC pyramid on top of a colored light. Cool, yet kind of tacky. I am sure she has been around here with him; I seem to remember seeing some kind of flyer or invite at some time past.
The show goes back to Lubaantun, and Homann talks about bringing his wife AMH there, and that the pyramid where she found the skull isn't there anymore ("They took the top down or something") and that the pyramids were "different" from when she had been there in the 1920's. (How did they move?) Although there is proof that the skull was purchased by MH at Sotheby's in the 1940's, the refuting story is that MH had "loaned" it to the man who put it up for sales and forced MH to buy his own skull back.
A woman at the Smithsonian looked at the MH skull and said it had been carved with modern equipment and high-speed polishing tools, and it's clearly not pre-Columbian. Of course that's refuted too--the Atlanteans/aliens w ho carved it had, of course, high speed tools. So yes, it's one of the 13 ancient skulls, even though it was probably carved in the 19th century.
IMHO, the MH skull is still a gorgeous work of art, even if it's only 150 years old, not 1500+.
Edgar Cayce said that Atlantis ran on crystal power and that sent MH to Lubaantun, looking for crystals. (And magically, on her birthday, in a pyramid that no longer exists, his daughter found an amazing crystal skull. Although not one photo of that expedition has her in it, and no one else who wrote about that expedition wrote about her being there OR the skull being found...)
JMJ talks about 2012 and the earth lining up with the center of the galaxy. I just don't understand how, if he understands precession, that he can state any exact date related to it with any accuracy. So somehow they associate 2012 with Itzamna and the skull he is shown to carry, and the alignment will set off a pole shift, unless of course they are found, which JMJ says isn't necessary. (source of Itzamna)
In a very confusing twist, they return to Roatan, and change the story, saying that MH hid the other crystal skull in a cave in the nearby island of Helene (not thrown in the water, as they said earlier, so why did they bother to dive looking for it?). They have a 70 year old photo of the shoreline and another of the cave.
An elderly Mayan man says the MH skull belongs to Belize and should be displayed in a museum there, or at Lubaantun. Of course, if the skull was really ancient and was really found there, the elder is right. But if the story of finding it is a lie and it was created as a hoax in the 19th century, there is no history and no need to return it anywhere.
The explorers find the cave in the photos and find nothing, just like they found nothing in the water. They say it's because the skull is cursed, and is therefore protected, and that it "wants" to be there. (3 things contradicting each other)
The only 2 other skulls of the supposed 8 that exist they showed are Max and the tacky ugly one at the British Museum--except for a brief glimpse of 8 photos at the beginning of the show. (I can't even find a list of them online. Anyone else?) The explorers were supposedly searching for the other 5, but they haven't even found one, and they even say that the skulls don't have to be found for them to work in 2012. And of course, if the Mayans who created the whole 2012 thing (which my readers know I have serious doubts about) also created the skulls, or got them from aliens, and knew they would "activate" automatically and STOP anything from happening....why all the hype? Why a "prophecy" for something that isn't going to happen because there is already a solution in place?
Back in Belize, they head to a hidden secret Mayan ruin near Lubaantun. Local Mayans go to an altar here and do ceremonies. Legend says that a skull is hidden inside the pyramid. They don't find it, of course.

The couple of things that surprise me are that they show a brief view of a stella that supposedly will pinpoint the 2012 event by the sun, and that a legend says when an elder was dying, his/her knowledge was transmitted into a crystal skull and from that into a young apprentince. I had similar ideas in my NaNoWri novel The Ridden several years ago. I am thinking I should revisit it.
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