SEATTLE — From Seattle to Mexico, soon, pieces of pottery and other household items that are thousands of years old will be headed home.
On Tuesday, at the Mexican consulate in Seattle, Homeland Security Investigations special agents started unwrapping an unsuspecting box.
Inside, wrapped in tissue paper sat artifacts estimated to be thousands of years old.
"These things-- they were Mexican before Mexico was Mexico," Mexico's head consul, Hector Godoy, said.
The different pieces of pottery and figurines caught the eyes of Homeland Security Investigations when the most recent owner turned them in.
"These things have been passed along from family to family; these things have obviously been on the earth for almost 2,000 years. They've changed hands several times," HSI Special Agent Robert Hammer said. "Sometimes good citizens come forward and say we've come into these things, and we're not supposed to have these things and we'd like to make it right."
Godoy said he can probably guess how ancient items from Mesoamerica ended up in Seattle.
"I think there was more of a laissez-faire attitude towards archeological pieces in the early 1900s, which meant that many of these very valuable pieces were actually-- left Mexico and come into the hands of private individuals," Godoy said.
In fact, an article from the Sunday News Tribune in 1960 showcases these artifacts under the sub-headline "2 Lakewood Explorers Find Artifacts On Mexican Trip."
The picture accompanying the article bears the caption that says a Tacoma explorer named Arnold Snell "brought back" the items from "remote Chiapas province in Mexico."
Godoy said repatriating the items is a step forward for Mexico to reckon with its own violent past with indigenous folks.
"We now recognize that there was an incredible degree of violence that was enacted on our indigenous population through the process of the conquistadors," Godoy said.
He added that he hopes some questions will be answered about the time in Mexico, before it was Mexico.
"Bring back and fix some of those problems that were actually present in the past," he said. "Which was that there was a high degree of willful destruction of Mesoamerican artifacts during Mexico's history, being able to recover these artifacts begins to heal that gap."
Once the artifacts arrive in Mexico, they will be analyzed and may end up in a museum.