Pascal Riviale later introduced me to Christine Besson, curator at the Musée Pincé in Angers, which holds a small collection donated by Boban in 1869. Christine gave me complete access to the collections and the accompanying archive. She also put me in contact with Sylvain Bertoldi, the director of the municipal archives in Angers. He provided information about Boban’s great-grandparents, grandparents, and aunts, all of whom lived in Angers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
At the Musée du quai Branly I have enjoyed the assistance of a number of colleagues and friends. In particular Fabienne de Pierrebourg, Paz Nuñez Regueiro, Andre Delpuech, Christophe Moulherat, and many others. I have also been fortunate to consult with Thomas Calligaro and Yvan Coquinot of the Louvre’s C2RMF (Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France).
In New York I have used extensively the archives held by the Hispanic Society of America. John O’Neill, the society’s curator of manuscripts and rare books, has been exceedingly kind and helpful, allowing me complete access to Eugène Boban’s papers. I am also indebted to the society’s director, Mitchell A. Codding, and to Sharon Lorenzo, who first informed me of the existence of these papers at the Hispanic Society.
My thanks to Leonardo López Luján, director of the Museo del Templo Mayor in Mexico City, and his wife, Laura Filloy, conservator at the Museo Nacional de Antropología. They assisted me in myriad ways when I first went to Paris to do research on Boban’s artifact collection, and Laura helped me obtain permission to publish several images from Mexico.
In Mexico City, Leopoldo Batres’s great-granddaughter, Elvira Pruneda, provided me with some of Batres’s correspondence. We had a fascinating conversation about him in Teotihuacan’s restaurant, La Gruta. Teresa Matabuena Peláez and Maria Eugenia Ponce Alcocer of the Universidad Iberoamericana assisted in locating papers in the Porfirio Díaz collection.
In Italy I have been helped by several people who provided information on crystal skulls, including Annamaria Ippolito, Barbara Nepote, Enrica Pagella, Paola Ruffino, and Paola Cordera. Martin Berger in the Research Center for Material Culture in Leiden and Gerard van Bussel in the Welt Museum in Vienna have also been of great assistance.
I am grateful to Norman Hammond of Cambridge University, Adam Sellen of the Universidad de Mérida, and Javier Urcid of Brandeis University for many broad-ranging discussions. Melissa Mead of the University of Rochester provided insights into the career of Henry Ward. I am particularly indebted to Kate Ralston of the Getty Research Library in Los Angeles for access to Boban’s photo albums. Many thanks also to Jacob Wainwright Love, James Hardin, Mary Sykes Wiley, Marie-Christine Bonzom, Basile Baudez, and Brian Jordan for their comments and suggestions.
Having worked at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington for more than four decades, I have enjoyed the friendship and invaluable assistance of a large number of people. I want to thank James Diloreto, Deborah Hull-Walski, James Krakker, Paula Fleming, Bruno Frohlich, Dave Rosenthal, Scott Whittaker, Tim Rose, and David Hunt from the National Museum of Natural History. I would like to thank Maggie Dittemore and Leslie Overstreet from the Smithsonian Libraries, as well as Ellen Alers and Pamela Henson of the Smithsonian Institution Archives. Pat Nietfield, formerly the collections manager at the National Museum of the American Indian, was always helpful.
AUTHORS’ NOTE
As a self-educated man, Eugène Boban had an improvised style of writing French. He used accents and punctuation erratically, often misspelled words, and did not always employ the most sophisticated terms. In recording his French writings in our notes, we have maintained as far as possible his original style, including, in some cases, his mistakes. Since we were working mostly from handwritten material, we may inadvertently have introduced some mistakes of our own. We have endeavored, however, to smooth out his language in our translations.
ABBREVIATIONS
| AD | Archives départementales |
| AGN | Archivo General de la Nación |
| AMM | Army Medical Museum |
| AMNH | American Museum of Natural History |
| AN | Archives nationales |
| BM | British Museum |
| BNF DMO | Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits Occidentaux |
| CADN | Centre des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes |
| HSA | Hispanic Society of America |
| MNHN | Musée national d’histoire naturelle |
| MQB | Musée du quai Branly |
| NAA | National Anthropological Archives |
| SIA: RU | Smithsonian Institution Archives: Record Unit |
| UI CPD | Universidad iberoamericana, Mexico City, Colección Porfirio Díaz |
| USNM | United States National Museum |
INTRODUCTION
On the Trail of Crystal Skulls
The human skull has been a source of fascination throughout history. The head is the most captivating feature of our anatomy, containing as it does the power center of the brain, which animates and regulates bodily functions and is the recording apparatus for all of our senses. The skull is a skeleton’s most recognizable element. It is a symbol that has been used to convey such concepts as danger, mortality, conquest, forethought, and redemption.
The skull is multivalent in Christian iconography. At the foot of the cross, it represents all of humanity as personified by Adam. When shown in paintings of saints, it is a reminder of the brevity of life. Echoing this theme, sixteenth-century Dutch still lifes often feature skulls and insects nestled among exotic blooms and luxury items. Skulls were the most important element of memento mori, as a reminder of the need to be prepared for the afterlife. The skull and crossbones displayed by pirates was universally recognized as a threat of murder and mayhem.
In the Americas, the skull was an important feature of Aztec ceremonies in Mexico from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Captives and slaves who were sacrificed before the images of their gods had their hearts torn out, their bodies divided up for consumption, and their heads removed to be impaled and placed