Islamic art in Turkish mosques and museums has become a prime target for thieves. “You have gangs of three or four people stealing from museums or mosques and they bring the artifacts to the Grand Bazaar, where there are dealers who have contacts in Europe,” explained Ismail Sahin of the Istanbul Police Department.

A Hungarian collector has returned a silver plate  that was once adorned with eight lotus flowers to Cambodia. “Through the scripts on the plate, they can recognize that the object came from the Angkorian era,” said Tit Sokha of the National Museum in Phnom Penh.

And a collector from Missouri made sure that a basket he’d purchased was returned to the Pacific Northwest Yakama tribe when he found out it had been stolen from a museum.

Italian newspapers reported that a Russian billionaire is interested in purchasing the Valley of the Temples, a World Heritage site in Sicily. “It’s not for sale,” said Marco Zambuto, mayor of the nearby town of Agrigento.

Canadian and American archaeologists continue to investigate what could be a 10,000-year-old caribou kill site  on the bottom of Lake Huron. “It seems we’re narrowing in on people, but of course forest fires could have created the charcoal as well as cooking fires. So we need to wait for the analyses to be sure about what we’ve got here,” said John O’Shea of the University of Michigan.

Archaeologist Dawn Johnson was instrumental in securing the skeletal remains of her uncle, 2^nd Lt. Hilding Roy Johnson, who was killed in 1944 when his fighter plane crashed in Belgium. The crash site was discovered by a German archaeologist in 2006. “I was very close to my grandmother, and the thought that her son would be left lying on a hillside was not something I could rest with,” she said.

The partial remains of a human skeleton were uncovered in a backyard in South Africa. The homeowners are still trying to get a permit so that archaeologists can investigate the burial.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, January 9, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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