The Man Who Invented Aztec Crystal Skulls

The Adventures of Eugène Boban

Jane MacLaren Walsh, Brett Topping

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789200966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Eugène Boban began life in humble circumstances in Paris, traveled to the California Gold Rush, and later became a recognized authority on pre-Columbian cultures. He also invented an entire category of archaeological artifact: the Aztec crystal skull. By his own admission, he successfully "palmed off" a number of these crystal skulls on the curators of Europe's leading museums. How could that happen, and who was this man? Detailed are the travels, self-education, and archaeological explorations of Eugène Boban; this book also explores the circumstances that allowed him to sell fakes to museums that would remain undetected for over a century.

1

CAVEAT EMPTOR

The nineteenth century was the Wild West of archeological and ethnographic collecting, fueled by the increasing ease of travel to remote places and a growing interest in ancient cultures. It was also a watershed in museum history and collections acquisition. Newly opened national museums in Europe and the Americas had public money to spend, museum collections to amass, and vitrines to fill. The goal was to acquire as many artifacts as possible from the greatest number of places in the least amount of time. Curators busily purchased objects from dealers, private collectors, and agents who lived among native peoples in far-flung places. They also frequently traded objects that were plentiful in their museum collections for others they judged to be rare.

The increased demand gave “a considerable money value to antiquities,” in the words of the Smithsonian’s curator of aboriginal pottery, William Henry Holmes. The added value of the artifacts, combined with the relative dearth of knowledge about archeology and ethnography at the time, led to “attempts, on the part of dishonest persons, to supply the market by fraudulent means” (Holmes 1886: 170). Worries about the prevalence of misattributed or faked artifacts gave rise to the expert—an individual with enough knowledge in a specific field to evaluate and authenticate objects entering private and museum collections. Still, tourist art and outright fakes became ever more pervasive.

Onto this scene came a minor figure destined to make major contributions to the field of pre-Columbian studies: Eugène Boban. This young Frenchman threw himself wholeheartedly into the chaotic world of collecting, trading, and dealing. He excavated and gathered artifacts, helped museums build collections, and became a recognized authority in Mexican archeology whose opinions were sought after by curators and collectors in Europe and the Americas. He also occasionally passed off fake objects as genuine, thereby confusing museum history for over a century.

Boban went so far as to invent a class of archeological artifact—the Aztec rock crystal skull. They were not copies or fake artifacts, since the Aztecs did not carve crystal skulls, as he was well aware. The skulls were beautiful and interesting objects, acquired through purchase or trade, for which he deliberately created a false identity.

Boban was able to sell “Aztec crystal skulls” because most people knew very little about pre-Columbian Mexican archeology, while he knew a lot. Despite coming from a family of tailors, seamstresses, artisans, and laundresses, he had educated himself about ancient Mexican cultures, their language, customs, and documented history, and later began selling artifacts he had excavated himself. He spent decades becoming a recognized archeologist, collector and dealer, whose expertise in pre-Columbian studies was unquestioned. Added to all of this he had a magnetic personality, which combined fearlessness, charm, supreme confidence, and bravura. Nonetheless, he risked his reputation and livelihood in passing off these artifacts as genuine. In fact, more than once, he came close to being undone by these beautiful, mysterious objects.

Capturing light in their morbid details, the skulls astounded museum curators and visitors alike, since, according to Boban, they had been laboriously fashioned with primitive stone tools. They were also exceedingly rare. Fewer than a dozen could be found in the world during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1897 the British Museum paid $950 or £220, a great deal of money at that time for the largest of these artifacts. The Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris had already been exhibiting two of its crystal skulls for nearly twenty years.

By the end of a life of prodigious work and research, Boban had amassed and sold important collections of pre-Columbian artifacts that were displayed in major museums in Europe and the United States. His colleagues considered him a better educator than some of the famous professors at the Sorbonne. He was known in some circles for his erudite, two-volume catalog of pre-Columbian painted manuscripts. His papers entered the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris and the Hispanic Society of America in New York. Yet his contributions to pre-Columbian scholarship were soon largely forgotten.

As luck would have it, his story has come to light through his connection with crystal skulls, an occurrence he seems almost to have anticipated. In the last decade of his life, he chose to highlight this lucrative sideline. In fact, he seems to have bragged about it when Charles Inman Barnard, the New York Tribune’s Paris correspondent, interviewed him for a newspaper article about the problem of faked artifacts that appeared on 20 August 1900. “Numbers of so-called rock crystal pre-Columbian skulls have been so adroitly made as almost to defy detection, and have been palmed off as genuine upon the experts of some of the principal museums of Europe,” asserted Boban, whom Barnard describes as a most trustworthy source (Barnard 1900).

Boban’s remarks are cynical on several counts. In essence he is undercutting the knowledge and sophistication of the curators at the British Museum and the Trocadéro. This statement is doubly sardonic because he himself “palmed off” the skulls on colleagues who bought them trusting in his guarantee that they were authentic. Surprisingly, all of these “so-called rock crystal pre-Columbian skulls” continued to be exhibited as impressive examples of ancient technology for the next hundred years.

The story of how Boban came from humble circumstances to become a world-renowned expert in the field of pre-Columbian studies is one of inspiring self-invention. It is filled with almost unbelievable achievements, various mysteries, some contradictions, and a few large gaps. His journey from recognition to anonymity and later rediscovery through his connection with crystal skulls is also a cautionary tale of how little we control our legacies. No matter what legitimate contributions we make, we may ultimately be remembered for what we did on our worst day. Research has revealed a nuanced history of a complex human being who dared greatly and accomplished much.

Boban Family History

Eugène André Boban Duvergé was born in Paris on 10 March 1834. The surname Boban, which he and some family members used occasionally with Duvergé or Duverger, does not seem particularly French, and caused some ongoing confusion among even his close friends and colleagues as to its spelling. It may have its origins in Croatia, where Boban is a rather common surname, associated with the village of Bobanova Draga in what is now Bosnia Herzegovina (Bellamy 2003). This said, his paternal ancestors had lived in France since before the 1740s.

The first family members recorded in France were his great-great-grandparents, René Boban, a master cloth maker specializing in serge, and his wife, Marie Houdu, who lived in Sablé-sur-Sarthe, between Le Mans and Angers. For several generations the family continued to live in and around Angers, moving back and forth to Paris as their economic circumstances dictated.

Eugène’s grandfather, André Michel Boban Duvergé, was a tailor, like his father and grandfather before him. He married three times. His first wife was Marie Renée Hémon, a seamstress. She died in 1805, leaving him to raise their infant son, also named André.

Two years later, at the age of twenty-nine, André Michel married Marguerite Victoire Licoys, the 21-year-old daughter of a day laborer, who was also a seamstress. She died in 1810, leaving him with a two-year-old son named René Victor Boban dit [called] Duvergé, born in Angers on 4 May 1808. He was Eugène Boban’s father.

In 1815 André Michel, now thirty-seven and a widower for a second time, married Henriette Chardon. Her parents were listed as property owners in the marriage document, so, presumably, she came from a prosperous family. Within the next ten years André Michel and Henriette had three daughters: Françoise Henriette, called Fanny, born in 1816 in Angers; Henriette, born in 1823 in Paris; and Victorine, born in 1825, also in Paris. Eugène Boban’s aunts Fanny and Henriette would play a significant role throughout his life.

As the birth location of two of his daughters’ attests, André Michel and his third wife went to Paris in the early 1820s in search of business opportunities. The family lived at 35, rue des Boucheries in Saint Germain, quite close to the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the left bank. The abbey and cloisters of this church had been one of the wealthiest in France, but during the French Revolution they were nearly destroyed by an explosion and fire. In the nineteenth century the area around the surviving church became somewhat less fashionable than it had been in the eighteenth century.¹

For reasons of his own, Eugène’s father, René Victor, used only the surname Boban, unlike other immediate family members, and was the first to pursue a profession outside the textile trades. He followed his father to Paris and became a gainier—a craftsman who produced chests, boxes, jewel boxes, scabbards, and other leather-covered luxury items. Gainiers often dyed the hides they used and occasionally gilded and embossed them with specialized tools. Their products were intended for the wealthier classes. In March 1830, when he was twenty-one, René Victor married Laurence Michelle Simon, a laundress who was nineteen. The couple lived in Paris at 3, rue Cardinale, a block away from André Michel’s house, near the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

René Victor and Laurence Michelle Boban eventually had five children. The eldest, Rose Louise, was born in 1831; Eugène André in 1834; and Marie Françoise in 1836. These three were born at rue Cardinale. Julie Félicité, the fourth child, was born around the corner at 1, rue Childebert, in 1838. The youngest, Charlotte Heloise, was born in 1841 in Montrouge, a working-class suburb of Paris, later the 14th arrondissement.

René Victor and his family seem to have fallen squarely into the stratum of French society known as the petit bourgeoisie, a broad denomination that, as historian Gordon Wright notes, “included the mass of little independents of city, town, and village—small enterprisers, shopkeepers, artisans, clerks, schoolmasters, petit employees of the state.” As though speaking about this family directly, he adds, “Some of them inherited an old family tradition of shop keeping or craftsmanship” (Wright 1987: 166).

The Bobans lived in rented flats mostly in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district, until the early 1880s. That their standard of living was relatively modest is indicated by the address of one of the buildings in which they resided, 22, rue des Grands Augustins, constructed in the 1670s.² The apartment shared by the seven members of the family consisted of two small rooms with a fireplace and a small kitchen alcove. Several other artisans were living and perhaps working at the same address. The other tenants may have been involved in the gainier trade as well, since they are listed as upholsterers, staplers, and leather guilders.³ It seems as though the family was struggling to get by, as were many Parisian artisans and tradespeople of the day.

The history of the Boban Duvergé family in Angers and Paris is illustrative of the economic and social developments of the nineteenth century in France. Following the debacle of the Napoleonic Era, the country was slow to industrialize, falling well behind European rivals such as Germany and England. However, textile production was one area that did experience industrial growth of sorts, although the majority of textile manufacturers were small businesses. According to the economist Armand Audiganne, in 1847 only 318 workshops in the department of the Seine, which included Paris, used mechanical power or employed more than twenty workers. Of the 29,216 clothing and shoe producers in Paris in 1847–48, 18,930 (65 percent) consisted of a proprietor and a single worker or a proprietor working alone (Price 1972: 6–7).

Aside from the slow pace of industrialization in France, another indication of stagnation in economic and social development was the lack of upward mobility in most of the country. At mid-century, the one exception was Paris, although the majority of individuals who were able to enhance their prospects in the capital had moved there from less advantageous circumstances in the provinces, like the Boban Duvergés.

For the first decade and a half after Eugène Boban’s birth, the Orleanist king Louis Philippe ruled France. Uninterested in the pomp and formality that had been hallmarks of previous generations of nobles, he was sometimes called the “Citizen King” or more derogatorily the “Grocer King” (Horne 2006: 251). After 1840, he and his ministers, particularly former historian François Guizot, who became foreign minister and later prime minister, helped expand French business through protective tariffs and low taxes, government deregulation and large expenditures in public works. Like many conservatives today, Guizot firmly believed that France was a country of equal opportunity and that those who failed to get rich and acquire the privileges of the rich had only their own limitations to blame (Wright 1987: 118, 154).

Boban would have finished his primary schooling at about the age of twelve in 1846. There is no record that he went on to receive a secondary education, so he probably assisted his father as a gainier at that stage, learning the trade as an apprentice.

From 1845 onward France had experienced extremely poor harvests, partly caused by a potato blight that had begun spreading across Europe. The situation was extremely difficult for the poorer classes, who saw prices of their two staple foods—wheat and potatoes—rise dramatically at the same time, with other food products in short supply. The weakness in the farming sector soon rippled throughout the French economy. In 1847 alone 4,672 businesses failed in France, compared with 2,618 in 1840, which had not been a good year either (Price 1972: 84).

Support for Louis Philippe’s government had eroded among many classes in France by the beginning of 1848, a year that was to experience revolution and chaos across Europe (Wright 1987: 125–26). Parisian students and workers took to the streets, clashing with the police on 22 February 1848. Called upon to restore order, the National Guard proved disloyal to Louis Philippe, and the clashes turned into all-out rioting. The following day the king attempted to calm matters by firing Guizot, who had become hugely unpopular.

The news of Guizot’s dismissal inspired a public demonstration of thanks in front of the minister’s former office. Unfortunately, what started as a celebration ended in tragedy.

A column of students and artisans, unarmed, but singing ‘Mourir pour la patrie,’ came down the boulevards; at the same instant a gun was heard, and the 14th Regiment of the Line leveled their muskets and fired. The scene that followed was awful. Thousands of men, women, children, shrieking, bawling, raving, were seen flying in all directions, while sixty-two men, women, and lads, belonging to every class of society, lay weltering in their blood upon the pavement. (St. John 1848: 167–68)

After this the situation in Paris was beyond Louis Philippe’s control, and he abdicated in favor of his grandson. (Wright 1987: 126–27).

The citizens of Paris then declared a Second Republic (the first having been established during the French Revolution) and appointed a temporary government. At first it seemed that a new era of universal accord and understanding had dawned (Price 1972: 95–96). Despite this apparent harmony, the economy worsened bringing about even greater unemployment.

On 15 May the National Assembly came under attack as thousands of armed workers convened on its chambers demanding reform. On 21 June the situation got out of control when the Assembly issued a decree restricting membership in the National Workshops, which had provided some financial support for unemployed workers. The announcement was like a spark to tinder. Barricades immediately appeared all over Paris, and for the next five days skirmishes and pitched battles occurred across the city between working-class Parisians and the government’s soldiers. By the time the fighting ended, 900 soldiers along with 1,500 citizens, and perhaps as many as 3,000, lay dead (Knapton 1971: 392; Wright 1987: 134).

The fiercest battles took place around the enormous barricades near Place de la Bastille and Faubourg Saint-Antoine, immortalized by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables—across the Seine and some distance from the Boban family household. There also was intense fighting just across the river from them in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements, and the Left Bank and Latin Quarter up the street (Price 1972: 170). Living day-to-day ...