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USA Museum to return jade Maya pieces to Mexico
AP El Universal Ciudad de Mιxico December 2008.
 The director of the Peabody museum of Harvard wants to return to Mexico around 50 Maya pieces carved in green jade, almost a century since an American consulate extracted them from a sacred “cenote” (in Maya: a type of round sinkhole containing groundwater) next to the ruins of Chichen Itzá.
The artifacts were among hundreds of pieces taken to the United States by consulate Edward Herbert Thompson, who dredged the bottom of the “cenote” between 1904 and 1910 to recuperate the offers there deposited by the Maya.
 William Fash, director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the idea must be approved by the university and museum authorities, but considered that the return of the artifacts could help the Mexican specialists to better understand the artistic and religious importance these pieces of jade and similar stones had for the Maya.
"I think it is important that many of the jades be studied here in Mexico by the people who are undertaking careful studies of the jades”, many of which were brought from distant sites by antique pilgrims all the way to Chichen Itzá, in the Yucatán peninsula, in Mexico’s southeast, said Fash.
Such pieces could tell much about commerce, exchange and artistic concepts of the pre-Hispanic world .
With the return of the artifacts —many of which were rebuilt from fragments by the famous researcher Tatiana Proskouriakoff before her death in 1985— an exhibition could also be set up in a museum near the site where the pieces were originally found, said Fash.
The director explained that the planned return of the pieces is part of a growing tendency by which museums make the necessary arrangements to return the artifacts to their countries of origin in exchange for short-term loans of other pieces. “This way both institutions win” he added.
The Thompson Collection has for a long time been a subject of dispute, along with another important artifact: a five-century old plumed headdress that supposedly belonged to the Aztec emperor Montezuma. The headdress rests at the Ethnologic Museum of Vienna, which has never agreed to return it to Mexico. Email to a friend
Source: http://www.presidencia.gob.mx/
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