Page 17 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - Febrary/March 2020 Edition

Acquisition of Mitchell-Hedges Skull 17

The 1943 Sotheby's catalogue gave this description of the skull, a photograph of which was used as the frontispiece: "A superb life-size crystal
Carving of a Human Skull, the lower jaw separate, the details are correctly rendered and the carver has given the orbits, zygomatic arches and
mastoid processes the similitude of their natural forms."

formerly in the "Sydney Burney Collection." It is
The Acquisition of the “I have just acquired a life-size rock crystal fashioned from a single block of transparent

F.A. Mitchell-Hedges skull with separate jaw, from Mexico, and I rock crystal, exactly life size; scientists put the
shall be glad to know if it is of interest to you or date at pre-1800 B.C., and they estimate it took
Crystal Skull your museum.” five generations passing from Father to son, to
complete. It is anthropologically perfect in every
It isn't known from whom Burney detail, a superb piece of craftsmanship. There is
Archaeological Institute of America acquired the skull, but either the seller claimed only one other in the world known like it, which
it was from Mexico, as the British Museum's is in the British Museum and it is acknowledged

The Mitchell-Hedges skull was first publicly skull was thought to be, or Burney himself to be not so fine as this.”
known in 1936, when it was published in the supposed it did, since his skull was so similar to
journal Man after London art dealer Sydney the museum's. The crystal skull remained with Frederick
Burney brought it to the British Museum for Burney owned the skull from 1933 until Mitchell-Hedges until his death in 1959, and
study. The Burney skull, as it was then called, 1943, all the while attempting to find a buyer. with his adopted daughter until her death in
was photographed, measured, and compared His bringing it to the British Museum for study April 2007. []
with the British Museum "Aztec" crystal skull. was not, I would speculate, entirely an academic
The British Museum had purchased their crystal exercise on his part. However, the museum did
skull in 1898 from Tiffany & Co. in New York not choose to acquire another crystal skull and it
City. Tiffany's had purchased the skull more was ultimately sold at Sotheby's in London on
than a decade earlier from the French October 15, 1943, to Frederick A. Mitchell-
antiquarian Eugène Boban, who auctioned off Hedges, Anna Mitchell-Hedges's adoptive
his Mexican artifact collection in October 1886. father, for 400 Pounds. (London was relatively
George Kunz, vice president of Tiffany's, acted quiet, with most of the fighting then in North
as an intermediary between Boban and George Africa and on the eastern front.)
Sisson, who apparently owned the skull for Frederick Mitchell-Hedges announced
some period between 1888 and 1898. In 1898, this purchase to his brother in a letter written in
Mr. Kunz once again acted as the middleman December 1943, which includes perhaps the
between Sisson, Tiffany's, and the British first mention of a date for the skull's
Museum (Walsh 1997; Sax, Walsh, et al. 2008). manufacture (the Mitchell-Hedges Official
Burney obtained his crystal skull in Website, accessed 11/08):
early 1933, as attested in a letter he wrote on
Burney Gallery stationary to the director of the “The "Collection" grows and grows and
American Museum of Natural History in grows. You possibly saw in the papers that I
February of that year (AMNH 2/17/1933): acquired that amazing Crystal Skull that was