Artifacts

A spectacular array of totem poles greeted me as I stepped from the bus at Thunderbird Park, a prime tourist attraction in downtown Victoria. Not far away, at the Royal British Columbia Museum, I found another collection -- among them some of the world's oldest known totem poles. It was my first encounter with this fascinating world of aboriginal culture and art.

Archeologists working near Stonehenge in England have discovered what appears to be an ancient religious complex containing a wealth of artifacts that may finally illuminate the lives and religious practices of the people who built the mysterious monument 4,600 years ago.

For three decades, the Linda Lea theater sat empty and boarded up on the edge of Little Tokyo, with the image of a kimono-clad woman looking down like a ghost from the marquee. In its heyday, the theater was among the nation's premier exhibitors of Japanese movies. But as downtown L.A. declined, so did the Linda Lea. Crews completed demolition of the theater this week, and the act marks both an end and a beginning.

The Autry National Center has received a $340,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitally catalog 15,000 California Indian objects. The two-year project, to be announced Monday, will deal with ethnographic objects, archeological artifacts and sound recordings collected by the Southwest Museum, which merged with the Autry in 2003. "This grant fits very well with two of our initiatives," NEH Chairman Bruce Cole said on a recent visit to the Autry.

More than 1,400 artifacts that had been protected from looters and civil war since 1999 at a museum-in-exile in Switzerland were handed over Saturday to the National Museum of Afghanistan. The collection, which includes a piece from a foundation stone said to have been touched by Alexander the Great and several items thousands of years old, was assembled in Switzerland by Afghans who wanted to save their cultural heritage during decades of war.

Fourteen years after the J. Paul Getty Museum purchased a 4th century BC Greek funerary wreath for $1.15 million from a Swiss art dealer, 17 months after the Greek government formally demanded its return and eight months after the museum agreed to do so, the delicate gold headpiece is about to go home.

AFGHANISTAN is far from the only country to suffer from looting and illicit trafficking of its cultural heritage, but it is going under a spotlight. The "Red List of Afghanistan Antiquities at Risk," an illustrated guide to endangered objects published by the Paris-based International Council of Museums, will be launched by the U.S. Committee of ICOM and the American Assn. of Museums today in Washington, D.C.

Greece displayed two ancient artifacts Thursday that had been returned from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Getty gave back a 4th century BC gold funerary wreath believed to come from Macedonia and a 6th century marble statue of a woman as part of its deal with Greece to return four objects from its collection that investigations concluded had been smuggled and sold illegally.

Locks of 3,200-year-old hair from the pharaoh Ramses II were unveiled at the Egyptian Museum on Tuesday, returned to Egypt after being stolen 30 years ago in France and put up for sale on the Internet. The small tufts of brown hair were displayed alongside pieces of linen bandages and 11 pieces of resin used in the mummification of Ramses and his son Merneptah in a glass display case. Photographers mobbed the case as Egypt's culture minister and antiquities chief showed off the returned items.

The explosives-laden wreck of a World War II torpedo boat has risen from the Pacific Ocean off the Solomon Islands, pushed above the water by a powerful earthquake, an official said Friday. The boat was exposed when reefs rose 10 feet above sea level during a magnitude 8.1 quake that caused a tsunami early this month, killing 52 people, said Jay Waura of the Solomons' National Disaster Management Office.