Treasure hunt hits the Web
State hopes to find stolen Indian art

August 21, 2002

By MIKE TONER
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

Georgia parks officials are turning to the Internet in an effort to track missing "hot pots" -- a collection of 1,500-year-old Native American artifacts stolen from a South Georgia museum nearly 30 years ago.

After years of efforts to solve the state's most notorious archaeological heist, officials have decided to pursue the stolen goods instead of the thieves. By posting "wanted" photos of more than 100 ancient artifacts, they hope a public appeal will help recover the missing pieces.

"We're not all that interested in prosecuting the people responsible," said Eric Bentley, superintendent of Kolomoki Mounds State Historic Park in Blakely, where the artifacts once resided. "We just want our pots back, no questions asked. I'd be happy to come to work some morning and find them in a box on our doorstep." [Note added on 5/11/2006: Matt Bruner superseded Eric Bentley as park superintendent.]

Interpol and the international art community have used the Internet successfully for years to help locate stolen artworks and antiquities, but the venture into cyberspace is a first for Georgia officials. It's also an admission that, after 28 years, the trail of the hot pots is so cold, there is little else authorities can do but plead for their return.

"We believe they're still out there -- on someone's shelf or for sale in some flea market or artifact show," Bentley says. "But after all these years, they have probably changed hands so many times that the current owners may not even know they were stolen."

The missing artifacts listed on the park's Web site -- www.georgiaplanning.com/history/kolomoki/ -- don't have the dazzle of pre-Colombian gold or Roman marble statuary. But the intricately shaped clay bowls and animal effigies are among the most revered relics of prehistoric Georgia and its inhabitants.

When the 129 artifacts were stolen in a 1974 nighttime burglary of Kolomoki's unguarded museum, their street value was estimated at $400,000.

The missing artifacts, everything the museum had on display, constitute at least one-third of all known objects from the Weeden Island culture, mound builders who inhabited North Florida and South Georgia between 300 and 800 A.D.

Later mound builders, including those who built Etowah in North Georgia and Ocmulgee near Macon, have been more extensively studied. But recent archaeological excavations at Kolomoki suggest the complex of earthen mounds there mark what may have the largest population center in North America outside Mexico.

The distinctive style of Kolomoki's artisans -- the complex patterns of stylistic incising and stippled cuts in clay, along with a penchant for elaborate animal effigies -- has made it harder for them to vanish into the black market.

Over the years, a few of the pots have surfaced in unexpected places -- just enough to demonstrate how convoluted the stolen artifact trail can be.

In 1978, Georgia and Florida law enforcement officials seized 12 pots at the home of an amateur archaeologist in North Miami. Unaware that they were stolen, the collector had acquired them at a Miami Beach rock and gem show. Police traced the seller as far as Tallahassee, but there the trail went cold.

The pots were returned to Kolomoki for safekeeping, but had to be stored in a cell at the Early County Jail until Georgia could build a more secure museum.

In 1979, a Columbus collector identified a Kolomoki pot at an artifact show in Pennsylvania. He bought it and donated it to the museum. No one ever learned how it got to Pennsylvania.

In 1996, a Florida taxidermist took pictures of two carefully crafted clay effigies -- a wood duck and a quail in the Weeden Island style -- to the Florida Museum of Natural History for an appraisal.

Museum officials identified them and eventually recovered the artifacts from a St. Petersburg collector who got them as a gift from his mother. She had bought them at a Gulfport flea market for $45. The museum's identifying numbers were still painted on the inside of the pots.

In all, 16 of the 127 stolen objects have been found and returned to Kolomoki.

"Anything we recover will count as success," says Bentley.