Mexico receives 428 archaeological pieces recovered by US authorities – 02/08/2022

The Ministry of Culture reported on Tuesday (2) that the Mexican government has received 428 archaeological pieces belonging to ancient cultures in the north of the country that were recovered by US authorities.

The collection “dates from the end of the Postclassic period, 900-1600 AD, and is associated with human groups from desert cultures who settled in the territories now occupied by northern Mexico and the southern United States.” He explained. folder in a report.

The items were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and delivered to the Mexican embassy in Portland, Oregon, which did not specify the circumstances of the seizure.

Subsequently, the Presidency handed over the objects to Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), which carried out a preliminary evaluation of the recovered heritage.

Included are projectile points and scrapers made of stone chips, shell and bone artifacts, and two knives that preserve their original handles.

“They are representatives of semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer communities,” said archaeologist Alejandro Bautista, INAH’s deputy director of archaeological monuments, quoted in the document.

Among the objects presented, two organic objects stand out: a huarache (a type of sandal) and a fragment of a bag in a typical preservation position.

Also returned to Mexico were “many marine fossils of the genus Exogra, (…) estimated to be 60 million years old,” said the culture secretary.

Last week, the Mexican government announced the recovery of 2,522 pre-Hispanic pieces that belonged to the Spanish family and are now on display at the Templo Mayor Museum in Mexico City.

The two deliveries took place as part of a campaign to reclaim Mexico’s historic heritage that had been illegally removed from the country.

The government of leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador has recovered 8,970 archaeological sites since December 2018.

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© Agence France-Presse