“The antiques were given back to Italian authorities today,” a statement from Geneva's public prosecutor's office said.
Italy had asked the wealthy Alpine country for assistance in 2014 to track down a stolen Etruscan sarcophagus that was believed to have transited through the toll and customs-free zone that makes up the Geneva Free Ports.
“The search led by prosecutor Claudio Mascotto … at the Geneva Free Ports revealed an unexpected treasure,” the statement said.
Two rare Etruscan earthenware sarcophaguses, with beautifully sculptured lids representing a reclined man and woman, were found in a warehouse at the Free Ports, along side “many other invaluable archaeological remains”.
“The prosecutor ordered the seizure of the sarcophaguses first, then extended the decision to all items, considering their suspected illegal provenance,” it said.
Among the items were delicately painted bas-reliefs, vases and fragments of decorated vases, frescoes, heads, busts, and several other votive or religious pieces, it added.
The mysterious, seafaring Etruscan civilization ruled swathes of the Mediterranean until it was swallowed up by Rome in the first century BC.
The antiques had been brought to Geneva by a former high-profile British art dealer, previously linked to trading looted antiquities, the prosecutor's office said, without divulging the art dealer's name.
The artefacts had remained stored in the warehouse for more than 15 years, registered under the name of an offshore company, it said.
An Italian expert had concluded that the artefacts came from illegal excavations mainly carried out in the Umbria and Lazio regions, and Italian investigators linked some of the items to so-called tombaroli, or tomb raiders, they already had in their sights.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Switzerland returns looted Etruscan treasures to Italy
Switzerland has returned to Italy 45 boxes of ancient Etruscan art stolen during illegal excavations and stashed away for more than 15 years, including two rare sarcophaguses, authorities said on Thursday.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Study confirms ancient cave art in southern Spain was created by Neanderthals
Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday.
The issue had roiled the paleoarchaeology community ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva de Ardales (Malaga province) to our extinct “cousin” species.
The dating suggested the art was at least 64,800 years old, made at a time when modern humans did not inhabit the continent.
But the finding was contentious, and “a scientific article said that perhaps these pigments were a natural thing,” a result of iron oxide flow, Francesco d’Errico, co-author of a new paper in the journal PNAS told AFP.
A new analysis revealed the composition and placement of the pigments were not consistent with natural processes — instead, the pigments were applied through splattering and blowing.
(Photo by JORGE GUERRERO / AFP)
What’s more, their texture did not match natural samples taken from the caves, suggesting the pigments came from an external source.
More detailed dating showed that the pigments were applied at different points in time, separated by more than ten thousand years.This “supports the hypothesis that the Neanderthals came on several occasions, over several thousand years, to mark the cave with pigments,” said d’Errico, of the University of Bordeaux.
It is difficult to compare the Neanderthal “art” to wall paintings made by prehistoric modern humans, such as those found in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave of France, more 30,000 years old.
But the new finding adds to increasing evidence that Neanderthals, whose lineage went extinct around 40,000 years ago, were not the boorish relatives of Homo sapiens they were long portrayed to be.
The cave-paintings found in three caves in Spain, one of them in Ardales, are throught to have been created between 43,000 and 65,000 years ago, 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe. (Photo by JORGE GUERRERO / AFP)
The team wrote that the pigments are not “art” in the narrow sense of the word “but rather the result of graphic behaviors intent on perpetuating the symbolic significance of a space.”
The cave formations “played a fundamental role in the symbolic systems of some Neanderthal communities,” though what those symbols meant remains a mystery for now.
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