Two places in the news this fall show how much an archaeological site can still tell us about objects that left it long ago. At Cerveteri, archaeologists have proposed that roof ornaments now in Berlin and Copenhagen perhaps originated from a newly excavated Etruscan temple. At Boubon, in southwestern Türkiye, evidence from the site helped send a Roman bronze home from Cleveland.
The news from Cerveteri concerned a monumental temple at Vigna Marini Vitalini. A Queen’s University team uncovered its foundations in 2024 and dated the temple to the early fifth century BCE. The detail that caught my attention was in the excavation report. Earlier digs in the nineteenth century had sent architectural terracottas from the site into museum collections. The archaeologists identified three antefixes, ornaments that capped the ends of roof tiles, now in Berlin and Copenhagen. Archival records put them in the same area as the new excavation. Their date, clay, and decoration suggest they may have belonged to the temple’s roof.
A second Cerveteri story from this month shows the other way objects leave a site. At Monte Abatone, one of Caere’s (as it would have been called in ancient times) main cemeteries, emergency work to shore up collapsing tufa chambers turned up rock-cut thrones, walls with wide patches of red paint, and a nearly intact stamnos decorated with incised animals. Nobody planned a discovery. The tombs had been looted at some point in the past, and the jar survived only because the diggers missed it. The regional archaeological superintendency says it will go on display after conservation.
Taken together, the two Cerveteri finds show why the manner of an object’s removal matters as much as where it ended up. The nineteenth-century diggers at Vigna Marini Vitalini were not careful by modern standards. Still, they left enough of a paper trail that archaeologists can now trace three antefixes back to a single roof. Whoever emptied the Monte Abatone tombs left a damaged chamber and the pot they overlooked. Whatever they took is now somewhere without a findspot, and no archive will ever connect it to the thrones it was buried beside. Cerveteri has drawn this kind of digging for a long time. The Euphronios krater, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art returned to Italy in 2008, was dug out of a tomb near the town in 1971.
On November 2, the Istanbul Archaeological Museums opened No Escape: Boubon, an exhibition that brings together Roman imperial bronzes and fragments dispersed after looting in the 1960s. The sculptures once stood in the city’s Sebasteion, a sanctuary dedicated to the emperors and the imperial family. As Elizabeth Marlowe has explained, villagers found the bronzes in the 1960s and sold them to traffickers. When Turkish authorities arrived in 1967, mostly empty pedestals remained, inscribed with the names of fourteen emperors and empresses. The Turkish archaeologist Jale İnan spent years working with other scholars to match those bases to bronzes scattered across foreign collections.
One of those bronzes, a headless draped figure, spent nearly four decades at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland bought it in 1986 from the dealer Charles Lipson, who sold three of the four other Boubon pieces seized in the United States since 2022. For years its label read “The Emperor as Philosopher, probably Marcus Aurelius,” from “Bubon(?)” in Lycia. When the statue debuted in 1987, the museum displayed photographs of other Boubon statues beside it. By the time Manhattan prosecutors seized it in 2023, Cleveland had renamed it “Draped Male Figure” and said its identity “remains unknown.” Marlowe argued in The Art Newspaper that these erasures were “a defensive response by the museum.” Cleveland challenged the seizure, then agreed in February 2025 to transfer the statue after new scientific testing. Among the evidence linking the figure to Boubon was the fit between molds of its feet and the recesses in a stone pedestal at the site. Cleveland’s 2025 release still says the statue is probably not Marcus Aurelius but a Greek philosopher. The Turkish announcement calls it the Marcus Aurelius statue.
Cleveland was not the only museum to hold on to a Boubon bronze. In a guest post here, Marlowe took on the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek’s over-life-size head of Septimius Severus. Robert Hecht first sold the head, and the museum bought it in 1970. Whether it fit a body seized from the Metropolitan Museum was, she argued, a secondary matter. The real issue was whether the head came from Boubon. On her three criteria, it plainly did: it depicts an emperor, it surfaced on the market between 1964 and the early 1970s, and it has square bronze repair patches. The Glyptotek returned the head to Türkiye in late 2024.
There was an even closer parallel to Cerveteri at the Istanbul opening. Türkiye also presented 100 antiquities returned from the United States, among them 44 architectural terracotta fragments from Düver that the Getty had acquired between 1977 and 1979. Those roof fragments came from a different site than the Boubon bronzes. Türkiye has already brought home other Düver pieces, from the United States in 2022, Denmark in 2024, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2025. I’d be interested to see what researchers can learn about the buildings at Düver once they can study these fragments alongside pieces already returned.
These stories raise different questions about ownership. At Cerveteri, the proposed match gives Berlin and Copenhagen a reason to revisit how they catalogue and display the roof ornaments. At Boubon, evidence from the site helped resolve a contested seizure. The Glyptotek has been involved in both stories. It returned its Boubon head in 2024, and it still holds a Cerveteri antefix whose nineteenth-century excavation left enough of a record to trace. Monte Abatone shows what happens when there is no record at all. Little that the looters took from those tombs can be matched back to them. These stories make a case for putting excavation records, archival photographs, and museum files in conversation. A catalogue can tell us when an object entered a museum. The clay of an antefix or the recesses in a stone base can tell us where it was before it got there.
Fabio Colivicchi et al., The 2024 Field Season at Caere, Vigna Marini Vitalini: A New Etruscan Temple and Its Surroundings, 28 Etruscan & Italic Stud. 158 (2025), https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12645824/;
Tutte le nuove scoperte archeologiche di ottobre 2026. Dal relitto romano fantasma al ricco guerriero dei Balcani, Artribune (Nov. 4, 2026), https://www.artribune.com/arti-visive/archeologia-arte-antica/2026/11/nuove-scoperte-archeologiche-ottobre-2026-balcani-cerveteri-liguria/;
Antefix with silenus head, HIN 55, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Tracking Colour, http://trackingcolour.com/objects/122 (last visited Nov. 11, 2026).
Dario Radley, Emergency repairs at an Etruscan cemetery in Italy uncover carved thrones, painted walls and a nearly intact jar, Archaeology News (Nov. 8, 2026), https://archaeologymag.com/2026/11/etruscan-cemetery-in-italy-carved-thrones-and-jar/.
‘No Escape: Boubon’ exhibition brings scattered heritage together, Hürriyet Daily News (Nov. 3, 2026), https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/amp/no-escape-boubon-exhibition-brings-scattered-heritage-together-228916.
Elizabeth Marlowe, Bronze Roman statue, believed to have been looted from Turkey, seized from Cleveland Museum of Art, The Art Newspaper (Aug. 31, 2023), https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/08/31/cleveland-museum-art-roman-bronze-turkey-loot-seized.
Elizabeth Marlowe, Marlowe on the Real Issue with the Glyptotek Head, Illicit Cultural Property, http://illicitculturalproperty.com/marlow-on-the-real-issue-with-the-glyptotek-head/.
Danish Museum returns Roman Bronze Portrait to Türkiye, ArtDependence (Dec. 3, 2024), https://artdependence.com/articles/danish-museum-returns-roman-bronze-portrait-to-tuerkiye/.
Press Release, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art and District Attorney of New York Reach Agreement on Draped Male Figure (the Philosopher) (Feb. 14, 2025), https://www.clevelandart.org/about/press/cleveland-museum-art-and-district-attorney-new-york-reach-agreement-draped-male-figure.
Press Release, Getty, Statement from Getty Regarding Return of Fragments to Türkiye (June 24, 2026), https://www.getty.edu/news/getty-fragment-return-turkiye/.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com
