Ancient Mixtec skull art a forgery

The National Museum of Ethnology made the shock discovery after a four-year study

An 800-year-old Mexican skull decorated with turquoise mosaic, for decades believed to have been a masterpiece of Mixtec indigenous art is a forgery, a Dutch museum and media said yesterday.

The National Museum of Ethnology in the western university city of Leiden made the shock discovery after an intensive four-year study on the skull, one of only around 20 in existence world-wide.

“Radiometric dating showed the skull and the turquoise are from the correct time period and origin and are authentic,” the museum said on its website.

“But alas: further investigation showed a 20th-century glue was used [to mount the mosaic],” the museum said.

The teeth are also false “as it was too well preserved for a skull that lay underground for centuries,” Dutch daily Trouw reported.

The museum bought the piece in 1963 for the equivalent of around $20,000 (Dh73,400) and was seen as a striking example of ancient Mesoamerican art.

An investigation into possible skull-duggery was launched after the museum’s conservator Martin Berger received a telephone call back in 2010 from a French colleague in Marseille, Trouw said.

The colleague told Berger they received a similar skull from a private collection and that person who donated the art had doubts about its authenticity.

Berger and his colleagues travelled to a Paris-based laboratory where the Dutch-owned skull was analysed and where “we realised that ours was also a bit more ‘modern’ than we thought”.