(Via the Agade list.)
Also, don't miss the link in that announcement to the article on crystal skulls by Jane MacLaren Walsh in the current issue of Archaeology Magazine. Alas, they are fakes - a multi-generational industry that began in the Victorian era.
Impressed by their technical excellence and gleaming polish, generations of museum curators and private collectors have been taken in by these objects. But they are too good to be true. If we consider that pre-Columbian lapidaries used stone, bone, wooden, and possibly copper tools with abrasive sand to carve stone, crystal skulls are much too perfectly carved and highly polished to be believed.
