Archaeology
The ax and other objects of the Mississippian culture, which goes back to roughly 1400, were excavated at the Etowah and Little Egypt sites in Georgia in the 1920 s by Warren K. Moorehead, then-director of the Peabody, according to the declaration.
” The circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the Etowah and Little Egypt artifacts stay a secret,” stated Peabody director Ryan Wheeler in the October statement. “However we are grateful to Mr. Morgan, [collector Thomas] Rachels, and others associated with restoring these collections, in addition to the Andover cops workers and FBI representatives who located the missing out on objects.”
Peabody personnel at first discovered that the ax and other artifacts had actually vanished from the collection in the 1990 s, according to the school.
Wheeler said Wednesday in a follow-up e-mail that Morgan purchased the ax from Kentucky-based Davis Artifacts.
” We are uncertain how the ax (and other artifacts from the Etowah site and websites in Maine) left here, though we think it occurred in the 1980 s,” Wheeler composed. “The last evidence we have of the ax being here is in 1976 when it was photographed in a display case.”
Wheeler said Peabody personnel “searched our records and find no evidence that it (or other artifacts) [were] lawfully offered, transferred, or talented to private people or other museums. The story that we have actually spoken with the gathering neighborhood is that somebody that worked here offered the items, though we don’t have any names or sense of who that was.”
In a later phone interview, Wheeler stated 2 personalized shell disks and a ceramic smoking cigarettes pipe are still missing, and the museum hopes media attention “assists facilitate” their return.
‘ Whoever took these things back then, they were a bit of a lover,” Wheeler said, including that appraisers have valued the ax at $450,000
There was one high-profile theft at the museum in the 1980 s.
In 1988, George B. McLaughlin, then a 48- year-old Oxford resident, was sentenced to four years’ probation for swiping products from a number of New England museums, consisting of 13 artifacts from the Peabody, the Associated Press reported at the time.
” It is unclear if Mr. McLaughlin was involved in the monolithic ax going missing,” Wheeler said in an e-mail message. “Our previous director Jim Bradley thinks there were several events. I would tend to agree, as the items targeted were different and our current recoveries have mostly kept catalog numbers.”
A call to a number listed for McLaughlin wasn’t immediately returned Wednesday.
A break in the ax case came in January 2018, when Rachels, of Georgia, contacted Wheeler after buying a spatulate stone celt weapon that likewise came from at the Etowah site and that was amongst the items missing from the Peabody collection, the school’s statement stated.
Andover polices and the FBI Art Criminal Activity Group in Boston utilized info from that healing to “effect the return of a missing shell disk and eventually locate the monolithic ax,” the release stated.
Kristen Setera, an FBI spokeswoman, stated in an email that the bureau is “delighted to be able to return these uncommon, valuable artifacts to their rightful owner through the support of the FBI’s art crime group and their network of contacts in the art and cultural arena.”
The Etowah and Little Egypt websites date all the way back to approximately 1000 to 1550, the declaration stated. Such sites in the Southeastern United States belong to the Mississippian culture, which is linked to “modern-day Native American people through the Creek language,” the release stated.
” A lot of the items from these websites are funerary belongings and subject to repatriation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA),” the declaration stated. “The affiliated Southeastern people have been informed about the return of the artifacts.”
The National Park Service website states the act resolves the “treatment, repatriation, and personality of Native American human remains, funerary items, sacred objects, and items of cultural patrimony, referred to jointly in the statute as cultural items, with which they can show a relationship of lineal descent or cultural affiliation.”
According to the Park Service, the act requires federal companies and museums to “seek advice from Indian People and Native Hawaiian organizations to attempt to reach agreements on the repatriation or other disposition of these remains and items.”
Travis Andersen can be reached at tandersen@globe.com Follow him on Twitter @TAGlobe
