One of the highlights of the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden turns out to be false. It comes to an inlaid skull from Mexico, which the museum in 1963, bought for $ 20,000. The piece would be hundreds of years old, but research shows that there is glue used in the previous century.
“He is perhaps not as real as we thought,” says curator Martin Berger. Although the skull and the used mosaic, indeed, from Mexico, is the glue of a kind of which there hundreds of years ago was not yet available. Also with the teeth is likely to be tampered with.
The skull would be from the time of the Mixtec, an ancient Mexican people. Who decorated the skulls in the late middle ages with precious stones and put them in vaults.
Berger was suspicious when questions were raised about the authenticity of a similar skull from a French museum. He now suspects that the exhibit is from a Mexican dentist, who is known is that he along with his wife skulls revealed during excavation and decorated. He would the tissue have embellished. “Probably he thought: if my wife nice things, I also want to add something beautiful to the skulls.”
According to Berger through the dentist more fake skulls in the collection ended up. “There are all respectable museums ingetuind,” says the curator.
The skull is since its acquisition in 1963, always been exhibited in the Leiden museum. “We leave the skull right now but just stand, and tell this story there.”
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