Skulls are humanity’s foremost symbol of death, and a powerful icon in the visual vocabularies of cultures all over the globe. Thirteen crystal skulls of apparently ancient origin have been found in parts of Mexico, Central America and South America, comprising one of the most fascinating subjects of 20th Century archaeology.

This documentary takes a look at the history of all four known skulls and discover their age and origin. We discover how each was found, who it was owned by and passed to over the last hundred years.

The two most famous of these skulls, originally misidentified as Aztec, and for years shown in the British Museum and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, have long been known to owe their provenance to nothing more exotic than a French antiquities dealer called Eugène Boban. But this has not stopped the gurus of nonsense from making preposterous claims for similar artefacts. There are, they will tell you, 13 of them and one day they will meet and reveal, talking head to talking head, the secrets of the Universe.