Monument 9 on view at the Museo Regional de los Pueblos de Morelos in Cuernavaca, not far from the archaeological zone from which it was looted six decades ago.
The New York Times has a story about how Mexico is working to restore and preserve its cultural heritage. American officials are helping to track down and restore stolen antiquities from Mexico and restore the items to their rightful owners. Many of the artifacts, stolen years ago, sell to collectors for upwards of a million dollars.
Mesoamerican archaeologists know it as Monument 9: a 2,600-year-old carving in stone of a jaguar’s gaping face, roughly five feet wide and tall and weighing one ton. Nearly 60 years ago the relic was looted from the ruins of Chalcatzingo, an Olmec site south of modern-day Mexico City, and smuggled into the United States, where it disappeared into a network of private collections.
The absence of the relic, constructed between 700 B.C. and 500 B.C., long vexed Mexican scholars. In its time the stone would have been used as a portal for priests and rulers to pass into the underworld, but the few photos that existed of Monument 9 could not fully convey its symbolic heft.
In March, however, U.S. authorities notified Mexican officials that they had seized the stone after tracking it to a warehouse in Denver. And in May the carving returned home in style, escorted by military vehicles from the airport in Cuernavaca, Mexico, to a nearby regional museum.
