Mexican officials say they have recovered a massive carved statue from the Olmec period that they say was stolen decades ago. Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s foreign secretary, said the sculpture had been recovered and would “soon return to its home, from where it should never have been stolen,” according to a statement. posted on Twitter last week. Mexico’s Consul General in New York City, Jorge Islas, was told the piece had been recovered by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office Antiquities Trafficking Unit, but no further details on the sculpture’s recovery are available. ‘has been published.
The sculpted statue, known as Monument 9, is 1.8 meters high, 1.5 meters wide and weighs about a ton, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said. . A declaration. The carving depicts an “earthly monster,” which scholars say is a common motif in Olmec iconography, and likely dates to the Middle Preclassic period (800BCE-400BCE). The statue is from Chalcatzingoa large archaeological site in the state of Morelos, in south-central Mexico.
A specialist in the Chalcatzingo Archaeological Project said the figure’s open jaws symbolized a doorway to the underworld and that three bands surrounding its mouth represented access to a cave. At the corner of the figure’s mouth are images of branches of a bromeliad plant, characteristic of the iconography of the Chalcatzingo region, the specialist said.
Although it remains unclear how the sculpture was removed from Chalcatzingo, officials said its removal was illegal. Monument 9 was probably already in the United States in 1950, according to INAH, and the sculpture was registered in 1968 by an archaeologist in an issue of Magazine of American Antiquity.
“This monument is a centerpiece for research on Olmec iconography, which is why we receive this news with joy and enthusiasm,” archaeologist Mario Córdova Tello said in an INAH statement.
The Olmec statue is the latest (and possibly the largest) of thousands of archaeological objects to be returned to Mexico from around the world in recent years. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is a strong supporter of repatriation as a foreign policy priority, and his administration has launched a campaign calling for the repatriation of Mexico’s cultural heritage using the social media hashtag #MiPatrimonioNoSeVende (“My heritage does not is not for sale”).
Just last week, authorities in France, Italy and Germany income a total of 86 cultural objects in Mexico. At the beginning of last month, Italy income 43 objects in Mexico that had been recovered by the Italian Carabinieri Art Squad, the branch of the police specializing in crimes related to art and antiquities. The Netherlands are back 223 artifacts last December.
In March, Mexican authorities pressured Millon, an auction house in Paris, to return 83 pre-Columbian objects they claimed to be protected by Mexican cultural heritage laws. Despite calls from Mexico to suspend the sale, the auction went ahead as planned on Monday April 3.
