The topic of precolumbian fakes fascinates a broad audience, perhaps because the stories behind these creations read like whodunits, where the reader is given the opportunity to engage in the investigation of the crime. Jane MacLaren Walsh and Brett Topping's book documents one of the greatest capers of the nineteenth century, the creation and distribution of Aztec crystal skulls, a seductive artifact that is now firmly rooted in our popular culture as an icon of the mystical past. This book will probably do little to dispel the outlines of that myth propagated by Hollywood and its legends. Yet, clear-eyed readers will find it a fascinating romp through the intellectual life of nineteenth-century Mexico and its many characters, foreign and Mexican, who considered themselves archaeologists before the discipline became professionalized; they were a curious mélange of intellectuals, antiquarians, and museum curators whose complex lives often involved self-promotion, charlatanism, and forgery.

Eugène Boban, the French adventurer and owner of a “Museum shop” in Mexico City, had been relatively unknown in the annals of archaeological history until he was outed—thanks to Walsh—as the principal behind the crystal skull caper. The book contains a great deal of background information on Boban, as well as delightful details, such as his entertaining visitors to his store with his pet rattlesnake. At times the account is densely biographical, but this has a lot to do both with the nature of the evidence—recently discovered notes in the Hispanic Society of America in New York written in Boban's own hand—and with Walsh and Topping's stated ambition to tell the full story of his fascinating and complex life. In many ways, this is a classic coming-of-age story of a young man seeking fortune in the New World. Details of his itinerant life, as he wandered between Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Paris, are expertly woven through the larger narrative of French imperialistic ambitions in Mexico, a violent entanglement that turned out poorly for Napoleon III and especially for Maximilian of Hapsburg, the puppet emperor who was executed by the victorious Juárez regime in 1867. Yet the authors make clear the French intervention was a watershed for Boban, who anointed himself “the antiquarian to the emperor” after Maximilian visited his store once and purchased a few items. Boban also aligned himself with the scientific commissions formed in France to study and collect artifacts in their new possession. It was a seminal moment in the history of Mexico, one that influenced all intellectual endeavors, in particular archaeology and the genesis of museums.

Piecing together evidence from a variety of sources, the authors detail Boban's 12-year stint in Mexico City, the base for his exploration of the country and his compilation of archaeological collections. His time in Mexico would define the rest of his life: he sought to make a name for himself as an expert in New World antiquities, in part by selling his collections to a major museum. His return to Paris in 1869, however, initiated his descent into obscurity. The nation had soured on Napoleon III's colonizing adventures, and the hundred-day siege of Paris in 1870–1871, which Boban endured, only exacerbated the collective misery. A lack of interest in Mexican antiquities coupled with hard economic times forced him to sell his collection. As the authors demonstrate by a careful reading of history, Boban's fortunes were inextricably tied to the geopolitics of the time.

Perhaps the book's greatest strength is its detailed account of Boban's contacts with other collectors of the time—what their relationships were like and how the business of collecting the prehispanic past functioned. Boban's divestment of his first collection to Alphonse Pinart in 1875 is richly narrated, for example, and several chapters are devoted to his second holding, which included the important Aubin Collection of Mexican manuscripts that was clandestinely spirited out of the country. Readers may wince at this bald-faced plunder of Mexico's heritage and quietly cheer the heroic efforts of a Mexican intellectual who tried to have it returned. Absent from the notes is that the Aubin Tonalamatl, a Nahuatl codex on maguey bark paper and one of most important prehispanic manuscripts from Aubin's collection, was taken from the French National Library by a Mexican lawyer and journalist in 1982 and then “repatriated” to Mexico. That story continues.

To the investigative credit of the researchers, Boban's diverse collections in his shop in Paris are surprisingly well documented through photographs. One photo is of the storefront on 35 rue du Sommerard. In the window nestle massive bones, Chinese porcelain, and prehispanic objects, and just as Boban intended, we are enticed inside. The authors also capitalize on our curiosity by detailing the biographies of particular artifacts in his collection that are now housed in various museums in France and in North America. For example, Chapter 11, “Of Fakes and Fakers,” is an insightful look at many of the other supposed prehispanic objects that Boban sold in his shop and that have since been exposed as nineteenth-century creations.

At the heart of this well-written book is a conundrum: How could a self-educated scholar of Mexican history turn to forgery? What motivated him to deceive his colleagues and risk his reputation? Was it economic gain or a sense of vainglory at having fooled the so-called experts? Curiously, in the contemporary press, Boban himself warned that many rock crystal precolumbian skulls were fakes. Was he using this as a smokescreen to cover up his own transgressions? Without a mea culpa, answers to these questions will continue to elude us, yet a close reading of Boban's life allows for thoughtful speculation and adds to the growing literature on forgers in general and forgers of precolumbian artifacts in particular; in museum storerooms and display cases, the true extent of the fraud is just beginning to be revealed. While the crystal skull story is a fascinating one, the impact of this book goes far beyond it: it is a must-read for anyone who wants to explore the murky world of nineteenth-century archaeological collecting and museums.