The first of 16 Maori heads has been returned to New Zealand by French authorities. Such tattooed, mummified heads were sought by European collectors and explorers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “This is a great step forward in a vital ethical debate over our museum collections, and above all over human remains that were at times acquired illegitimately,” said Valerie Fourneyron, mayor of Rouen.

The Telegraph has used the occasion of France’s return of the Maori head to discuss a few other contested cultural artifacts.

Fracking, the process of extracting natural gas from Marcellus Shale, has destroyed archaeological sites in Pennsylvania. “A bulldozer can destroy 9,000 years of history in 15 minutes,” explained concerned local farmer Mike Kotz.

A team from Bournemouth University will bring part of the hull of a 400-year-old shipwreck, located off England’s Dorset coast, to the surface and preserve it. “It’s been buried until now, but in the last four or five years it’s become exposed. The longer the wreck is exposed, the more damaged it will be. If nothing were done within the next five years there’d be nothing left,” said marine archaeologist David Payton.

Traces of an eighteenth-century mission to the Chumash Indians, including thick walls, terra cotta floor tiles, and an irrigation channel, have been uncovered in Ventura, California. Shell beads, a stone bowl, and cattle bones were also found. A hotel occupied the site in the late nineteenth century.

Jeanne Arnold of the University of California Los Angeles has found sites on the Channel Islands where she thinks Chumash children learned to craft shell beads. “Originally, I thought these were new, experimental forms executed by virtuoso bead-makers,” she said.

Some of the artifacts stolen from a museum in Mexico in 2008 were recovered from a known dealer during a bust at a steak house in West Texas.

An Aboriginal spear thrower was stolen from Australia’s Melbourne Museum during the early morning hours of May 7.

In northern Spain, archaeologists discovered 25,000-year-old cave paintings while looking for ancient settlements. The images depict horses and human hands. 

Homo heidelbergensis may have been the last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, according to a new study conducted by a team made up of Silvana Condemi, Aurelien Mounier, and Giorgio Manzi of the University of Marseille. Scientists still don’t know exactly where the evolutionary split took place. 

The wreck of the Quedagh Merchant will be dedicated a “Living Museum of the Sea” by Indiana University and the Dominican Republic later this month. The accused pirate, Captain Kidd, captured the ship in 1699 off the west coast of India, but his men later abandoned it in the Caribbean. “All the evidence that we find underwater is consistent with what we know from historical documentation, which is extensive. Through rigorous archaeological investigations, we have conclusively proven that this is the Captain Kidd shipwreck,” said Geoffrey Conrad of Indiana University. 

Archaeologists are investigating a boat-building site on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, where they have found 1,000-year-old boat timbers and a canal.