You know, I like Indiana Jones just fine, but...

It was 1926 when Anna Mitchell-Hedges, adoptive daughter of British adventurer and author Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges, was something of a real life Lara Croft. She was crawling through an ancient Mayan temple in Belize, long ago wrecked by the ages and the ravages of the encroaching jungle. Beneath a crumbled altar, she unearthed perhaps the most curious artifact from the ancient world: A perfectly clear crystal skull, expertly carved, and immaculately preserved, and about two thirds the size of a real skull. For nearly 30 years the Mitchell-Hedges family kept the crystal skull a secret, until F.A. Mitchell-Hedges mentioned it briefly in his book Danger My Ally. In this book he said the skull was 3,600 years old, and was used by Mayan priests to strike people dead by the force of their own will. After her father's death, Anna took this so-called "Skull of Doom" on tour throughout the world, and its strange powers became well known. Arthur C. Clarke even used the Mitchell-Hedges skull as the logo for his television series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. The fourth Indiana Jones movie is about a crystal skull with mystical qualities, and furthers the theme originally proposed by Mitchell-Hedges that crystal skulls are alien in origin, coming from Atlantis or Roswell or some alien world. In fact, practically every reference to a crystal skull over the past 40 years or so has usually been specifically about the Mitchell-Hedges skull.
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Indiana Jones and the Heap of Old Junk

The 12 surviving Aztec crystal skulls are cherished by museums, revered by New-Age writers, and have a starring role in Harrison Ford's new movie. There's just one problem: they are fakes, say French experts

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According to one version of events, the 12 skulls – and a missing 13th sister skull – must be lined up or piled in a pyramid on or before the last day in the Mayan calendar, 21 December 2012. Otherwise the globe will fly off its axis.

Doubts about the authenticity of the skulls as Aztec or Mayan artefacts have existed for years. The British Museum, which owns one example, concluded 11 years ago that its skull had probably been polished by a wheeled machine. The pre-Colombian civilisations on the American continents discovered many things, but not the wheel. (Ah well, say the New Age theorists, the Mayans may not have had the wheel. The beings from outer space obviously did.)

The "French skull", acquired by the French state from a bankrupt collector in 1878, is now in the hands of the Musée Quai Branly, the excellent new museum of non-Western art beside the Eiffel Tower.

Because of the interest inspired by the Spielberg film, the French national museum service's research and restoration centre, C2RMF, decided a few months ago to subject the crystal skull to the most advanced forms of analysis, including "particle induced X-ray emission and Raman spectroscopy".

The centre's official report will be published next week but the principal findings were released yesterday by the Quai Branly museum. The "French skull" was probably made in a small village in southern Germany in the second half of the 19th century. The quartz from which it is made is of Alpine, not Central American, origin. The pre-Colombian origin of the "French skull", and probably several of the others, was almost certainly concocted by the French adventurer and antique merchant, Eugène Boban, who sold it to a wealthy French collector in 1875.

"The grooves and perforations clearly show the use of jewellery drills and other modern tools," said Yves Le Fur, the deputy head of collections at the Quai Branly. "It is inconceivable that such precision was the work of pre-Colombian artists."

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