The "Skull of Doom" is a carved crystal skull that explorer Frederick Mitchell-Hedges claimed his adopted daughter Anna found inside a Mayan temple in British Honduras in the 1920s, and this film traces the object from that jungle discovery to its life as a pop-culture legend. It lays out what is verifiable about Mitchell-Hedges himself, a self-styled adventurer whose own account of the find shifted over the years, and sets his skull alongside similar carved-crystal pieces held in museum collections in London, Washington, and Paris. The film uses that comparison to weigh the claims made about the skulls' age and supposed mystical powers against what museum conservators and archaeologists have actually determined about how they were made. It also connects the story directly to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, showing how Mitchell-Hedges's tale became the inspiration for the film's fictional version. Along the way it raises a plainer question about Western explorers carrying artifacts out of Central America and what that history of removal cost the cultures they came from.