For decades, the National Museum of Ethnography in Leiden, Holland has prided itself on one of the rarest artifacts in its collection: an ancient skull adorned with turquoise mosaics. There are only two dozen such skulls in the world. Origin - Mexico, authorship belongs to the ancient Mistecs, one of the main peoples of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Time of creation - XIII-XV century.
The turquoise mosaic is perhaps the most famous Mixtec "brand": masks and skulls decorated with turquoise continued to be created even after the conquest of the Mixtecs by the Aztecs in the 15th century - one of these mosaic masks is presented, for example, in the British Museum as the result of joint Mixteco-Aztec creativity …
The National Museum of Ethnography acquired its "own" turquoise skull in 1963 for an amount equivalent to modern 19,000 euros. Since then, the skull regularly worked out the status of an ancient masterpiece in the museum, until it turned out that the famous artifact was a fake, according to Art Daily, citing AFP.
Spoiler alert: There have always been doubts about the authenticity of all known turquoise skulls. There is no information about who and where exactly found them; all the artifacts were purchased from private individuals. However, before making a shocking statement, the experts of the Dutch Museum studied the legendary skull for four years in all possible ways. The research was carried out within the framework of the special museum program “Masterpieces under a Microscope”.
Exploring the turquoise skull
Photo: volkenkunde.nl
“According to radiocarbon and isotope analysis, the skull itself and the turquoise plates are ancient, date back to the correct time period, and are consistent in place of origin. However, to create the mosaic itself, a glue produced in the 20th century was used,”the museum's website says.
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The teeth also turned out to be fake, adds the Dutch newspaper Trouw: "for a skull that has been lying underground for centuries, they are too well preserved."
The first alarm bell, literally and figuratively, rang in 2010. Martin Berger, the restorer of the Ethnographic Museum, received a call from a French colleague from Marseilles and said that a similar skull from a private collection was donated to their museum, but the donor doubts its authenticity.
This was the beginning of an international scientific investigation. In 2012, both skulls, accompanied by Dutch and French curators, went to the Paris laboratory. “We soon realized that our skull is also a little more“modern”than it was generally believed,” stated Martin Berger.
Berger suspects that the forgery was made by a certain Mexican dentist and his wife in the 1940s or 1950s. At that time, Mexican antiquities were undergoing large-scale uncontrolled looting, and the sale of rare artifacts like the Mixtec skull was a very profitable business. A married couple dug up genuine skulls, decorated them with semi-precious stones - also genuine, and the husband's knowledge in dentistry helped the ancient Mixtek acquire new teeth.
Teeth analysis of turquoise skull
Photo: volkenkunde.nl
Asked by Trouw journalists if he was saddened by the unpleasant discovery, Berger answered philosophically: “No. After all, the skull told us an unusual story, and this is exactly what museums want to do: tell stories. The turquoise skull remains one of the masterpieces of our collection, we just changed the information on the accompanying plate."
In addition, the skull, according to Berger, is only partially fake: “The skull itself, like the turquoise on it, is genuine archaeological material. But it was not the Mixtecs themselves who glued the turquoise to this skull.”
Exploring the turquoise skull
Photo: volkenkunde.nl
Dutch museum workers managed to turn the scandalous discovery into an almost cute story. They have already learned from the bitter experience of other "cheated" museums: the loudest scandal with skulls from Central America happened relatively recently. The famous crystal skulls from museums in Paris, London and Washington - the mysterious artifacts of the pre-Columbian era, to which books and films were dedicated - turned out to be 100% fake: this was proved by scientific research published in 2008.
But two other artifacts studied in the framework of the museum's program "Masterpieces under a Microscope" were verified for authenticity. This is an Aztec manuscript of the 18th century - the only example of Aztec writing in Holland, and the so-called Code of Anute, a Mixtec manuscript of the 16th century. Modern research methods have helped to reveal hidden drawings on its pages that could not be seen with the naked eye.
All three studied artifacts will tell their stories in a special exhibition organized by the National Museum of Ethnography in Leiden.