Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has returned the top half of the sculpture known as “Weary Herakles” to Turkey after 20 years of negotiations. The bottom half of the 1,800-year-old statue is in the Antalya Museum. The statue was transported home yesterday, on a government flight.

In 1996, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City returned the 2,500-year-old gold jewelry and silver pots known as the Lydian Hoard to Turkey. This article in Today’s Zaman recounts the tale in terms of “the curse of the treasure.”

A 2,000-year-old, two-story home has been found near a road in the central part of Smyrna, Turkey. “The fact that the residence was built alongside this historical road, and that it contains a kitchen and a restroom, which is not common for houses of that period, indicate that the house was owned by a rich family,” said Akin Ersoy of Dokuz Eylül University.

The bones of a woman whose jaw had been nailed to the ground have been found in a cemetery in Italy’s Tuscany region. “This indicates to me that it was an attempt to make sure the woman even though she was dead did not rise from the dead and unnerve the locals who were no doubt convinced she was a witch with evil powers,” said archaeologist Alfonso Forgione of L’Aquila University.

In 2003, the remains of eight individuals were exhumed from the eighteenth-century African Burying Ground in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The bones show evidence of manual labor and poor nutrition, in addition to disease and chronic infections.

Here’s a wrap-up of the federal artifacts sting that ended in the arrest of 25 people in the Four Corners region in June 2009. Two of the defendants killed themselves, two cases are pending, and 21 have pleaded guilty to charges related to digging, stealing, selling, or trafficking in American Indian objects.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, September 26, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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