Science Club: Jane Walsh
In which DCist interviews area scientists, researchers, and academics on topics pertaining to natural and scientific interests. As Thomas Dolby would say: science!
Jane Walsh is an anthropologist with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History whose research focuses on Pre-Columbian Mexican archaeology and ethnohistory. Her work with crystal skulls has made her a specialist with regard to lapidary (stone-working) technology and ancient technological achievements. Dr. Walsh was written extensive articles on provenance/provenience issues and falsification regarding crystal skulls and other pre-Columbian artifacts and fakes for journals such as Archaeology and Journal de la Société de Américanistes, among others. Her research dovetails with objects seen in two Indiana Jones films.
DCist: The Tlazolteotl statue in D.C.'s Dumbarton Oaks collection is shown giving birth. Why is it also referred to as 'the eater of filth'?
JW: Most gods in the pre-Columbian pantheon had multiple guises and functions. She was a goddess of licentiousness and also eater of sins, as well as other functions.
DCist: How did Dumbarton Oaks come to acquire its Tlazolteotl statue?
JW: Dumbarton Oaks acquired the Tlazolteotl figure from the collection of Robert Woods Bliss, who purchased it from a dealer named Brummer in 1947 along with a series of other purportedly pre-Columbian stone carvings. In an article for Journal de la Societe des Americanistes, I discuss the sculpture, its provenance, publication and exhibition history, and also my examination of the sculpture under scanning electron microscope (SEM). I concluded that it was not a pre-Columbian artifact, and was probably created in Europe in the 19th century.
Alas, poor crystal skull. Photo of Jane Walsh and the Skull of Doom by James Di Loreto, National Museum of Natural History photographer.
DCist: What tools did the Aztec and Maya use to carve quartz? That seems like it would be difficult to do today—not impossible but definitely requiring specialized training and tools.
JW: Pre-Columbian carvers used stone tools and abrasive sand to carve and polish quartz and jadeite and other hard stones. Later carvers, perhaps Aztecs, may have used copper tools embedded with abrasive sand for certain types of stone. No pre-Columbian carver had wheeled tools, or hard metal rotary cutting saws.
DCist: What is you are looking for when you place an object like a crystal skull under a scanning electron microscope? Can the SEM prove or disprove an object's authenticity, or do you find that sometimes results are ambiguous?
JW: I’m looking for tool marks, which give me a lot of information about how the skulls, or other stone objects, were carved. Pre-Columbian carvers, as I said, used stone tools and abrasive sand. They sometimes used copper tools, but that is a relatively soft metal. All of those tools leave very different marks from those left by modern hard metal mechanized tools with very hard cutting abrasives like industrial diamonds. Margaret Sax of the British Museum and I have been studying the tool marks left by pre-Columbian carvers, which we find on objects that come from archaeological contexts. That is we know they're authentic because an archaeologist excavated them and recorded that fact. We can compare marks on archaeologically recovered artifacts with objects that have no provenience, other than their presence in a collection or a museum. Usually the results we get from SEM study are relatively unambiguous; when something has been carved or reworked in modern times it is fairly obvious.
DCist: The crystal skull seems to be an enduring symbol, reimagined recently by artist Damien Hirst, for example. For the pre-Colombian audience for these artifacts, what was the symbolic relationship between the crystal skulls and death?
JW: Crystal skulls are depictions of our own mortality in a medium which is prized by many collectors. In the 19th century rock crystal was considered to be very valuable, and represented purity and wealth.
DCist: Where do we get the various legends about the crystal skulls? F.A. Mitchell-Hedges?
JW: I believe that all of the legends are simply made up by the people who own and sell crystal skulls, with Mitchell Hedges being one of the earliest to invent stories about them. Essentially the "legends" are created to publicize and market the skulls. People pay a fair amount of money to see and commune with the skulls, so their owners adding mystical powers, and other-worldly origins to them make them more interesting and marketable. But there isn't any actual source for the stories, other than the dealers and collectors. I'm working on another article at the moment about the Mitchell Hedges skull, which I also had the chance to examine under SEM.
DCist: How many crystal skulls have surfaced, and how many can be described as legit artifacts?
JW: I have no idea how many crystal skulls there are at this point. I suspect the number may be in the many hundreds if not thousands. In the 19th century there were fewer than a dozen in museum collections, and most could be traced at least through their sellers and buyers. A few more showed up in collections during the first half of the 20th century, but after the 1960s and the New Age interest in crystals, I think there’s been a huge market created, and I’ve actually heard of one collector in Arizona who owns several hundred crystal skulls.
When you ask how many can be described as legitimate artifacts, it depends on what you mean by legitimate. They are all artifacts in the sense that they are all objects made by human beings. If by legitimate you mean ancient, I don’t think any are ancient. I can say for certain that all those in museum collections that we’ve studied have turned out to have been made in recent times: the 19th century or the 20th century.
Photo of Tlazolteotl statue at Dumbarton Oaks—declared a 19th-century European fake by Dr. Walsh—used with permission from Flicker user mosley.brian.