All episodes are now available on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Buzzsprout. Happy listening!
Want to support the podcast? The best way to do that is to leave a rating and/or a review! You can also contribute as little as $1 to the continued production and maintenance of the podcast by “buying me a coffee” at https://buymeacoffee.com/stuffaboutthingspodcast.
Main sources:
G.M. Morant. “A Morphological Comparison of Two Crystal Skulls.” Man 36 (1936): 105-107. [from 1936, contains photographs of the “Skull in the Burney Collection,” the same one that F.A. Mitchell-Hedges claimed to have found in Lubaantun]
Bruce Bower. “Skullduggery Worthy of a Film: Famous Crystal Skulls Shown to Be Counterfeits.” Science News 173, no. 19 (2008): 12.
Frank Dorland. “Der Kristallschädel von Lubaantun.” Antike Welt 6, no. 3 (1975): 48-51.
Richard Garvin. The Crystal Skull: The Story of the Mystery, Myth, and Magic of the Mitchell-Hedges Crystal Skull Discovery in a Lost Mayan City during the Search for Atlantis. Garden City: Doubleday, 1973. [fun but bananas read, commissioned by Anna Mitchell-Hedges]
“The Crystal Skulls” [an episode of Ancient Aliens, season 6, episode 2 — pour yourself a glass of wine and have some fun watching this one]
Images:
The Crystal Skull in the British Museum in London [image source: Wikipedia]Portrait of Eugène Boban, the man who “invented” the crystal skulls [image source: Wikipedia]Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, Lady Richmond Brown, and anonymous companion at Lubaantun in 1924 [image source: The Unredacted]Example of authentic skull motifs in Mayan art at Chíchén Itza [image credit: Dorothy and Bill Bell]Anna Mitchell-Hedges with the Mitchell-Hedges Crystal Skull [image source: The Unredacted]
The Smithsonian Skull with microscopic close-ups of the grooves of the teeth, which show markings consistent with the use of modern-day lapidary stones [image source: Semantic Scholar]Our hero! Jane MacLaren Walsh and the Smithsonian Crystal Skull [image source: Spokesman]Happy listening!
-Lindsay