Artifacts

A former Santa Barbara art dealer was sentenced in Los Angeles to six months in prison Monday for smuggling pre-Columbian artifacts into the United States from Peru. David R. Swetnam, 31, who now lives in Healdsburg in Sonoma County, admitted in May that he engaged in illegal smuggling by failing to properly declare the jewelry, ceramic vases and miniature stone mortars as artifacts in papers submitted to U.S. Customs officials. Swetnam, who previously ran a gallery and art restoration business in Santa Barbara, pleaded guilty to three counts of receiving and causing the importation of smuggled goods in 1986 and 1987.

In a move to expand beyond 3-D cinema, Beverly Hills-based RealD Inc. is touting a new technology that it says will sharply improve the image quality on movies, whether they are shown in theaters or in the home. The technology, called RealD TrueImage, eliminates blemishes and artifacts (often called noise) when film and TV images are processed, creating a sharper and more detailed picture that is closer to what the filmmaker intended. The proprietary process already has the backing of one notable director, Peter Jackson, who used it for the recent release, "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug," both in 2-D and 3-D formats.

A small wooden cabinet went up for auction on EBay. Inside were two locks of hair, one granite slab, one dried rosebud, one goblet, two wheat pennies, one candlestick and, allegedly, one "dibbuk," a kind of spirit popular in Yiddish folklore. The seller, a Missouri college student named Iosif Nietzke, described the container as a "haunted Jewish wine cabinet box" that had plagued several owners with rotten luck and a spate of bizarre paranormal stunts.

A state coastal agency could soon decide whether Huntington Beach can rezone a site in the Bolsa Chica mesa, an area that opponents say is home to Native American artifacts and remains, to allow for a housing development. The California Coastal Commission is set to vote Wednesday on whether the city can amend its Local Coastal Program - local governments' guide to development in the coastal zone - to allow for new homes on the northwest portion of Bolsa Chica. In a report, commission staff recommends denying amendments because the changes would "eliminate a higher priority land use designation and does not assure that significant culture resources and sensitive habitats will be protected" under the California Coastal Act. The move would also violate a part of the Local Coastal Program that the commission has already approved.

A massive cache of 15,500-year-old artifacts from a Texas flood plain is providing what archaeologists are calling the first unequivocal evidence that the people of the well-known Clovis culture, long thought to be the first humans to inhabit North America, were not. Archaeologists had previously found several sites, such as the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania and the Paisley Caves in Oregon, that appeared to predate the Clovis culture and...

Striking at a longtime practice in the Four Corners area, federal authorities Wednesday unsealed indictments against 24 people in what they called the largest investigation ever into the looting of Native American artifacts on public lands. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the charges at a Salt Lake City news conference and said in a telephone interview that many of the stolen items, valued at $335,000, came from sacred burial sites.

Re "Stop stealing history," Opinion, Jan. 29 Caravan loads of treasures were taken away from the ancient sites and centers of pilgrimage on the Silk Route in Central Asia in the early 1900s. Those who removed them and the governments that encouraged them had few qualms. Where the artifacts could not be removed, the local religious fanatics either defaced or destroyed them -- a recent example was the blasting of the centuries-old Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. The Diamond Sutra, the earliest known printed book, dated 868, was taken away by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, an archeologist, and is now in the British Museum.

Mission artifacts that could be more than 200 years old were discovered during an archaeological survey near the San Gabriel Mission, an environmental consultant said Wednesday. Pottery, brick, livestock bones and remnants of a masonry waterway associated with a mill built in 1823 were among the artifacts discovered Tuesday during the dig. Archaeologists also recovered items linked with the building of the Union Pacific Railroad in the late 1800s.

A historic quill and lap desk used to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo will be auctioned Sept. 7 in Nebraska. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed Feb. 2, 1848, and brought an end to the Mexican-American war. California as we know it would not exist without it. The treaty handed over 525,000 square miles of land to the U.S. It encompassed all of what are now the states of California, Utah and Nevada and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming. It was America's second-largest land acquisition, after the Louisiana Purchase.

The wife of a southern Utah doctor who killed himself after his arrest on charges of stealing Native American artifacts from public lands pleaded guilty on Monday to similar charges. As part of a plea agreement, Jeanne Redd, 59, pleaded guilty to seven counts of theft of government and tribal property and trafficking in stolen artifacts. Federal prosecutors agreed to seek a lesser penalty at her September sentencing than the maximum 10 years in prison provided for under the charges.

They were two veteran emissaries for a Los Angeles-based philanthropy, tasked with staging a clandestine operation to rescue a series of Native American spiritual artifacts from public sale half a world away. This month, Annenberg Foundation staffers Allison Gister and Carol Laumen found themselves making anonymous telephone bids at a Paris auction to secure rarities considered sacred by the Hopi and San Carlos Apache tribes in Arizona, including exotic mask-like visages that had been lost - some say looted - over the last century.

WASHINGTON - Harold Rhode still recalls the euphoria he felt a decade ago after finding thousands of dripping, moldy artifacts of Iraq's once-vibrant Jewish community in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein's intelligence service headquarters in Baghdad. "How do you describe it? An enormous elation, a deep connection, but also shock: Why would this be here?" says the 64-year-old former Pentagon official, an Orthodox Jew who discovered the purloined archive in the bombed-out building days after he arrived in the Iraqi capital with the U.S. invasion force in the spring of 2003.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, firefighters from Engine 54, Ladder 4 and Battalion 9 responded to the call that the World Trade Center had been attacked. None survived. In the following days, a 10 1/2-foot Statue of Liberty replica was mysteriously placed among the flowers and items of commemoration around the firehouse on 8th Avenue and 49th street. Soon Lady Liberty was covered in hundreds of memorial tokens including origami cranes, flags and badges from around the world, children's drawings and photos of the fallen.

On Maryland's Eastern Shore, a previously untold story of free African Americans is being told through newly discovered bits of glass, shards of pottery and oyster shells. Piece by piece, archaeologists and historians from two universities and the local community are uncovering the history of The Hill, a part of the town of Easton believed to be the earliest community of free blacks in the United States, dating to 1790. It also could have been the largest community of free blacks in the Chesapeake region.

In 1974, Berkeley's distinguished anthropologist Robert Heizer issued a public mea culpa for the practices of his profession in treating "California Indians as though they were objects. " In particular, he apologized for the "continued digging up of the graves of their ancestors. " In 1999, the department of anthropology at Berkeley issued an apology to the cultural descendants of Ishi, a Yahi native, for sending his brain to the Smithsonian after his death in 1916. "We regret our department's role in what happened to Ishi, a man who had already lost all that was dear to him. " This was a good beginning to a journey of accountability and reconciliation.

LONE PINE, Calif. - Oral histories of Native Americans and U.S. Cavalry records offer insights into a horrific massacre here in 1863: Thirty-five Paiute Indians were chased into Owens Lake by settlers and soldiers to drown or be gunned down. But the records are silent on one important point. Exactly where did the massacre occur on the moonlit night of March 19, 1863? An archaeological find in what is today a vast alkali playa has revealed a cache of bullets, musket balls, cavalry uniform buttons and Native American artifacts that Paiute tribal members and researchers believe are evidence of the grim chapter in Owens Valley history.

The life and career of President Obama will become a major part of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum, which is scheduled to open in 2015, has been collecting Obama-related artifacts since his nomination as the 2008 Democratic candidate, according to reports.   The museum began construction in 2012 and will be completed in 2015. The president attended the groundbreaking ceremony of the museum and delivered an address. At the time, the museum had an estimated price tag of $500 million.

Shortly after sunrise last week, a squad of flak-jacketed federal agents surrounded the remote home of Dr. James Redd, arrested his wife and then stopped the 60-year-old doctor as he returned from his morning rounds to arrest him as well.

When hundreds of federal agents raided four Southern California museums early one January morning in 2008, it set the art world ablaze, suggesting that even amid an international looting scandal, museums had continued to do business with the black market in stolen antiquities. Acting on evidence gathered during a five-year undercover probe, investigators seized more than 10,000 artifacts at the museums and more than half a dozen other locations in California and Illinois. The objects had allegedly been illegally excavated from sites across Southeast Asia, smuggled into Los Angeles and donated to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the Mingei Museum in San Diego and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, according to search warrant affidavits.

SACRAMENTO - Almost three decades ago, as heavy rain threatened to breach the levees protecting the Sacramento area, the state parks department urgently dispatched workers to warehouses holding some of California's most important heirlooms - gold-mining tools, pioneer pottery, antique rifles. They were prepared to load the objects onto trucks and drive them to safety if disaster struck. As luck would have it, the levees held. But despite that scare, the state left much of its collection in those aging warehouses in the West Sacramento flood plain, where it has languished without adequate protection from heat and humidity.