Who would have thought that Indiana Jones' crystal skull was based on real life?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_skull#Mitchell-Hedges_skull I saw a documentary about it yesterday, the lady was showing it around (for money) advocating its fortune telling and healing ability. It is most likely fake, but it has an interesting history... And there are others too...
I think I seen that show a while back. There was 13 of them right... An if I remember right they couldn't find tool markings. So some speculated they were "other worldly". Brought here a long time ago... Interesting show.
Those sculptures, while all wonderful examples of what humans can do with primitive tools, are unremarkable in the greater historical context of fraudulent items made for money. (the shroud of Turin, pieces of the 'true cross' and all of those pieces of xtain saint's bodies etc) South America has a lot of phoney stuff coming out of and attributed to the general area and those extinct cultures. People are always willing to pony up hard cash for magical items though, and "there is a sucker born every minute." I have seen literally hundreds of quartz 'crystal skulls' at trade shows, they are now pretty cheap. I also have a shelf full of S American 'Inca' and 'Aztec' fakes given me by a very disappointed client who had purchased them based on appearance, not science. Quartz, like many other stones, can be worked handily with stone tools. Metal is not used to cut and polish quartz (even tool steel is too soft to do that) so the 'finding that there were no metal tools used in its carving' was sorta disingenuous. You can carve a piece with contemporary diamond sintered tools, then polish those tool marks out well enough that the method of manufacture is no longer visible. Additionally, it does not require "hundreds of years" to accomplish that or to hand polish a chunk of quartz with garnet or sapphire sand and a piece of leather or cloth. I have done that, it is simply not as hard as one would think. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The original explanation was that they made it with water and sand through 100s of years... Kind of hard to believe... Since crystal has no carbon in it, dating it is difficult.
