US museum head says Mexico should get Mayan jade

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The director of Harvard's Peabody Museum said Tuesday he wants to return about 50 ancient carved Mayan jade pieces to Mexico, almost a century after a U.S. consul dredged the artifacts from the sacred lake at the ruins of Chichen Itza.

The artifacts were among hundreds of pieces taken to the United States by American consul Edward Herbert Thompson, who dredged up the bottom of the sacred lake between 1904 and 1910 to recover offerings deposited there by the Mayas.

William Fash, director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, said the idea would still have to be approved by authorities at the university and the museum, but that returning the artifacts could help scholars studying jade and jade-like stones which held both artistic and religious significance for the Mayas.

"It is important, I think, for many of the jades to be studied here in Mexico by people who are now doing careful studies of jades," many of which were brought long distances to Chichen Itza in Mexico's southern Yucatan peninsula by ancient pilgrims, Fash told The Associated Press.

Such pieces could say a lot about trade, commerce and artistic patterns in the pre-Hispanic world.

The return of the artifacts _ many of which were pieced together from fragments by famed researcher Tatiana Proskouriakoff before her death in 1985 _ could also be displayed at a museum near the site where they were originally found.

"This would be something I think they would be very pleased to exhibit," said Fash.

He said it was part of a growing trend where museums are making arrangements to return pieces to their countries of origin in exchange for short term loans of other artifacts, noting that "in this way both institutions win."

The Thompson collection has long been a bone of contention, along with another major artifact, a five-century-old feathered headdress that purportedly belonged to the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma. The headdress is held at Vienna's Ethnological Museum, which has never agreed to return it.

The Mexican government accused Thompson of having taken the Mayan artifacts out of the country illegally and filed suit to have them returned, but those efforts were not successful. Thompson had bought the ranch that contained the ruins before dredging the lake.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Peabody museum did return two sets of artifacts, which Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said were rare surviving pieces of wood and gold.

Fash said "the most valuable pieces were already returned."

The remainder of the collection remains on display or in storage at the Peabody museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Many see the return of the Thompson artifacts as simple justice.

Bill Mellish, a retired telecommunications employee from Saint Louis, Missouri, says he wants to return two Chichen Itza artifacts that Thompson gave to his grandmother, whose family were friends of Thompson.

"It's the right thing to do," Mellish said