A French family was due to return a monumental Olmec sculpture to Mexico as we went to press. They inherited the piece, a 3,000-year old, 2m-high limestone carving of a man-jaguar, and were unaware of its importance or provenance.
The work, originally from a forest site in the eastern part of the state of Chiapas, has been known to scholars since the 1920s. In 1968, the specialist Susanna Ekholm studied the carving in Mexico but was appalled to find the figure had been torn away from the rock when she returned to the site five years later.
In a study on the “magnificent” rock-carving, published in 1973, she said it was a unique Olmec relic far from the people’s traditional heartland. The French family who have possession of it were informed by the auctioneer Jean-Claude Binoche and the expert Jacques Blazy that the piece had been looted around 40 years ago; the family voluntarily agreed to return it to Mexico.
