All posts tagged: Artifacts

Manhattan D.A. Returns More Than 650 Looted Artifacts to India

Manhattan D.A. Returns More Than 650 Looted Artifacts to India

Published by Jenni Sidey

On April 28, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., announced the return of 657 trafficked antiquities to the people of India. The items, valued at nearly $14 million, were recovered in the course of ongoing investigations by the D.A.’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit and Homeland Security Investigations. The items were formally returned at a ceremony in New York, which was attended by representatives from the D.A.’s office and the Consulate General of India. “The scale of the trafficking networks that targeted cultural heritage in India is massive, as demonstrated by the return of more than 600 pieces today,” said District Attorney Bragg. “There is unfortunately more work to be done to return stolen artifacts back to India, and I thank our team for their persistent efforts.” Related Articles Among the recovered pieces is a bronze figure of the Buddhist deity Avalokiteshvara, valued at $2 million. One of a trove of 7th–8th century bronzes found in 1939 at the Sirpur archeological site in India, it later entered the collection of the Mahant Ghasidas Memorial Museum in Raipur. …

Native Americans Used Dice Earlier Than Previously Known, Study Shows

Native Americans Used Dice Earlier Than Previously Known, Study Shows

Published by José Betancourt

Native Americans were using dice for gaming long before Bronze Age societies in the Old World, according to a new Colorado State University study. Research published in the journal American Antiquity by Robert J. Madden, a PhD student at CSU, presents evidence that dice were made by hunter-gatherers on the western Great Plains more than 12,000 years ago. Dice games are considered humanity’s earliest structured engagement with the idea of randomness, the intellectual precursor to probabilistic thinking. Until now, dice games were thought to have originated in the complex societies of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley beginning around 5,500 years ago. Related Articles Aware that Native Americans have a long history of dice games, Madden created a checklist of specific attributes of historic Native American dice to reclassify older artifacts. “We had a body of literature that carried [the use of dice] all the way back to about 2,000 years before the present,” Madden told CSU’s The Audit podcast, “but it broke down at that point. That got me interested in seeing what I could do to trace this back. How …

Mexico Calls on eBay to Halt Sales of Pre-Columbian Artifacts

Mexico Calls on eBay to Halt Sales of Pre-Columbian Artifacts

Published by José Betancourt

The culture ministry of Mexico has called on eBay to remove sale listings for 195 pre-Colombian artifacts, claiming they were obtained by way of “illicit extraction” and that they should be returned to their country of origin. As reported by The Art Newspaper, the case was made public when Mexico’s secretary of culture, Claudia Curiel de Icaza, wrote in a posting on X that the Orlando, Florida–based enterprise Coins Artifacts was selling objects deemed part of Mexico’s cultural heritage by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). In a letter sent to eBay, Curiel de Icaza demanded that the company “immediately suspend the sale and return the items to the Mexican government,” adding that the export of such objects has been illegal since 1827. Related Articles INAH’s legal department “filed a complaint with the office of Mexico’s Attorney General and notified its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as Interpol and US authorities including Homeland Security Investigations in an effort to halt the sale,” according to TAN. But a confidentiality policy related to the …

Australian Police Catch Thief Behind Heist of Egyptian Artifacts

Australian Police Catch Thief Behind Heist of Egyptian Artifacts

Published by José Betancourt

Police in Queensland, Australia, have arrested a man suspected of stealing precious Egyptian artifacts from a museum outside of Brisbane. According to local reports, the 52-year-old man was arrested Saturday on Russell Island in Moreton Bay after police discovered part of the stolen haul in a camper van parked at a ferry terminal. Among the recovered items was a 2,600-year-old wooden cat figure from Egypt’s 26th Dynasty, the last dynasty ruled by a native Egyptian pharaoh before the Persian conquest. Police apprehended the suspect within two days and returned most of the artifacts to the Abbey Museum of Art and Archaeology in Caboolture. Authorities said he entered through a smashed window facing its ancient Egyptian exhibition on Friday in what investigators described as a brazen break-in reminiscent of the 2025 Louvre heist. The artifacts stolen in Caboolture also included a 3,300-year-old necklace and a mummy mask, later discovered inside the camper wrapped in a Venezuelan flag. Both objects have since been recovered and appear to have suffered only minor damage. Police arrested the suspect Sunday and charged …

French Sénat adopts a bill to ease the return of colonial-era artifacts to their countries of origin

French Sénat adopts a bill to ease the return of colonial-era artifacts to their countries of origin

Published by Sam Flores

French senators adopted a bill on Wednesday, January 28, to simplify the return of artworks looted during the colonial era to their countries of origin. The draft legislation was unanimously approved by the upper house and will next be sent to the Assemblée Nationale before it can become law. France still has in its possession tens of thousands of artworks and other prized artifacts that it looted from its colonial empire. President Emmanuel Macron has gone further than his predecessors in admitting past French abuses in Africa. Speaking during a visit to the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, shortly after taking office in 2017, Macron vowed that France would never again interfere in its former colonies and promised to facilitate the return of African cultural heritage within five years. Read more Subscribers only In Senegal, 150 years after being seized by French colonizers, the ‘spoils’ of Samba Sadio go on display Former colonial powers in Europe have slowly been moving to send back some artworks obtained during their imperial conquests, but France is hindered by …

Scientists Find the Oldest Wooden Tools to Date in Greece

Scientists Find the Oldest Wooden Tools to Date in Greece

Published by José Betancourt

Two objects unearthed at an archeological site in southern Greece are the oldest wooden tools yet found, according to a paper published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The objects came from the site Marathousa 1, once a lakeshore during the Middle Pleistocene. Other discoveries at the site, including stone tools and animal bones, go back 430,000 years, giving a probable date for the new finds. The artifacts include a 2.5-foot-long stick likely employed for digging and a handheld piece of poplar or maple that might have been used to shape stone implements. They offer insight into a little-known aspect of the technology of early humans, study author Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, said in an email to phys.org. Related Articles It is thought that hominins of the Middle Pleistocene used implements made from a wide range of materials. Wood, however, is susceptible to rot unless in an airless environment, making it difficult to find evidence of wooden tools. Researchers believe that the …

The Search for Alien Artifacts Is Coming Into Focus

The Search for Alien Artifacts Is Coming Into Focus

Published by skeptic

There’s no denying the allure of alien artifacts. Science fiction is awash in the material remnants of extraterrestrial civilizations, which surface in everything from the classic books of Arthur C. Clarke to game franchises like Mass Effect and Outer Wilds. The discovery of the first interstellar objects in the solar system within the past decade has sparked speculation that they could be alien artifacts or spaceships, though the scientific consensus remains that all three of these visitors have natural explanations. That said, scientists have been anticipating the possibility of encountering alien artifacts since the dawn of the space age. “In the history of technosignatures, the possibility that there could be artifacts in the solar system has been around for a long time,” says Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester. “We’ve been thinking about this for decades. We’ve been waiting for this to happen,” he continues. “But being responsible scientists means holding to the highest standards of evidence and also not crying wolf.” That raises some tantalizing questions: What is the …

Archaeologists Find an Unusual 2500-year-old Stylus in Sicily 

Archaeologists Find an Unusual 2500-year-old Stylus in Sicily 

Published by Jenni Sidey

An archeological operation conducted in advance of a construction project in Gela, Sicily, has uncovered an unusual carved bone stylus—a sharp tool used to inscribe clay before firing—that, according to excavation director Gianluca Calà, may have had a symbolic purpose. The news was reported by the Spanish magazine La Brújula Verde. The stylus was discovered during a survey of the building site for a new Palace of Culture; such investigations are not uncommon in areas known to have potential archeological value, and Gela, once a powerful ancient Greek city, is known for its extensive ruins. A bit more than five inches long, the stylus dates to the 5th century BC and was found in the remains of a Hellenistic-period center for artisanal production. Its design is out of the ordinary, with a quadrangular handle featuring, at the top, the face of the Greek god Dionysus and, midway down, a finely rendered erect phallus. The form of the handle mimics that of an ancient Greek herm—a squared stone pillar surmounted by a bust and sometimes decorated …

The U.S. Repatriated Seven Ancient Artifacts to Egypt

The U.S. Repatriated Seven Ancient Artifacts to Egypt

Published by Jenni Sidey

Thanks to the collaboration of several government organizations in the United States and Egypt, seven artifacts were recently repatriated to Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The objects had been smuggled from the country in separate cases and are from different time periods, according to Shaaban Abdel Gawad, director-general of the Repatriation of Antiquities Department and supervisor of the Antiquities Units in Ports. The news was first reported in Egyptian news outlet Ahram Online. Five of the objects in question were initially smuggled out of Egypt in 2017 (two mummified fish and a falcon head from the Ptolemaic period) and 2018 (a bronze amulet of Set, the ancient Egyptian god of deserts, storms, disorder, violence, and foreigners; a basald scarab; and a carved face). Related Articles The other two items—a painted wooden funerary figurine and a stone head from a statue—were given to the Egyptian embassy in Washington by an unnamed American citizen who felt they should be returned to Egypt. The repatriated objects were handed over to Ambassador Wael el-Naggar, assistant foreign minister for …