Museum admits real-life Indiana Jones handed over a dud 'relic' 130 years ago

As Indiana Jones gets set to hit cinema screens with a new death-defying adventure in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a Paris museum acknowledged yesterday its star exhibit crystal skull was not what it was cracked up to be. One of only a dozen such skulls known to exist worldwide, the Quai Branly museum's piece was acquired in 1878 from an Indiana Jones-type explorer, Alphonse Pinart, as an Aztec masterpiece believed to be hundreds of years old. Yesterday the museum admitted it was probably made in the 19th century. Over the past decade experts had voiced growing doubts over the Aztec origin of the crystal skulls, one of which is in the British Museum, another at Washington's Smithsonian Institute. Fashioned in clear quartz crystal and 11 centimetres high, the Paris skull is marked by grooves and perforations that "reveal the use of jewellery burrs and other modern tools," the museum said. "Never has such technical precision been found in pre-Colombian art."