A necklace that has been in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s collection since the 1980s, will soon be returned to Turkey after museum officials determined it had been looted from a tomb there.
The necklace, made of gold and carnelian, a reddish stone, is believed to have been stolen from a tomb near the village of Kendirlik, Bintepeler, in 1976, the museum announced Wednesday.
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The museum purchased the necklace from a dealer in London in 1982 and was told that it came from Asia Minor, another name for the ancient region of Anatolia, now known as Turkey. No other history of its ownership was shared at the time, museum officials said Wednesday.
According to the museum, curators were alerted to the potential looting by scholars who shared literature about a 1976 archaeological excavation at Bintepeler, a site with more than 100 burial mounds known as tumuli. The excavation by Manisa Museum, an archaeological museum in the nearby city of Manisa, was conducted after the museum received reports of looting at Bintepeler.
“From the burial site and from a local inhabitant, archaeologists recovered beads and other fittings that are nearly identical to those in the MFA necklace,” museum officials said. “It is likely that the MFA necklace originated at the same tumulus.”
The beads found in 1976 are currently housed at Manisa Museum, but the necklace is believed to have been smuggled out of the country.
Museum of Fine Arts Boston curators conducted their own research about the necklace and last fall, they contacted the Turkish Ministry of Culture of the Republic through the Turkish Consul General in Boston. Experts in Turkey conducted their own scientific and archival research and concluded that the necklace had likely come from Bintepeler.
