Surveillance footage timestamps the theft at 1:00 AM on Wednesday. For reasons still unclear, a silent alarm connected to the display never sounded. Authorities are investigating whether the alarm was intentionally disabled in some way or whether it simply malfunctioned. An attempted theft in 1979 was deterred by the silent alarm; the thief stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of nugget, but was caught by police just a few blocks away. After that theft, the glass was replaced with even thicker glass and a new alarm installed.

The County Treasurer/Tax Collector Wayne Hammar is the official in charge of the gold. He and his team will inventory the remaining gold to sort out exactly what is left. According to the Sheriff’s office, an estimated third to a half of the gold was stolen, including a famously huge nugget known as the “slipper” or “shoe” because of its shoe-like shape.

The Siskiyou County Courthouse gold was donated to the county over the years since 1851 by miners who lived and worked there. It is (was?) the largest gold display in the continental United States and was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco’s Treasure Island. The locals, many of whom have been involved in the mining industry for generations, are deeply connected to these artifacts so dazzlingly symbolic of their history.

That connection is so profound that when faced with a dismal economy the county refused to cash in on their gigantic hoard. They had 20% unemployment in 2010; the county budget was getting slashed left and right. Still, even under that kind of pressure they refused to sell their gold display, worth almost $1,300,000 in gold weight alone and estimated to be worth $3,000,000 because of its historical significance and because the gold is in its natural form rather than melted down into generic ingots.

There’s a very-sad-in-hindsight video of the gold display at the courthouse from 2007 when the Huell Howser PBS show “California’s Gold” filmed a segment there:

Here’s the surveillance video from Wednesday night:

If you have any information about the theft, please contact the Sheriff’s office at 530-841-2900.

The head belongs to a statue of Flavia Domitilla Minor, the daughter of the emperor Vespasian and sister of emperors Titus and Domitian. The statue was excavated from the UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site of Sabratha and was on display at Sabratha’s Roman museum in 1990 when thieves broke the head off of the body and absconded with it. (Some of the news stories are saying it was stolen in the 1960s, but I think that’s just one of the AP’s trademark typos getting passed around like a game of telephone.)

It turned up last year as lot #261 of the April 14 Antiques sale at Christie’s London. I will give you one guess as to the provenance they claimed on the piece. Oh yeah. It’s our old friend the Swiss private collection. They removed the lot from their website after they got busted, but this article quotes their original lot notes: “private collection, Switzerland, circa 1975; acquired by the present owner in Switzerland in 1988.” It was still attached to its body in a Libyan museum in 1988. Such a blatant lie.

London-based Libyan archaeologist Hafed Walda saw the lot before the auction and alerted Christie’s that it was the Domitilla head stolen from the Sabratha Museum. They ignored him and sold it to an Italian buyer for £91,250 ($142,000). Archaeologist and brilliant blogger Dorothy King also tried to get Christie’s attention but they blew her off too.

My experience of Christie’s is that that’s par for the course, but just in case … I knew they couldn’t give me the buyer’s details, so I asked the head of department, Ms Georgina Aitken, to pass mine on to the buyer as I had some information about the history of the piece. Ms Aitken said she would not do so unless I told her what the information was. I briefly explained that there was evidence to suggest that the head might have been looted and that the provenance was faked, and that Christie’s were aware of this and did nothing. There are more chances of pigs flying than of this information being passed on to the buyer.

Said buyer took his purchase home only to voluntarily relinquish it a few months later to the Carabinieri Art Squad. Christie’s had the audacity to respond thus:

A Christie’s spokesman said: “Additional information was brought to our attention after the auction. We subsequently cancelled the sale and are assisting all relevant bodies with the return of this object.”

See how weaselly that “additional information” bit is? Because Hafed Walda told them where that head really came from before the auction so they couldn’t say they had no idea they were selling stolen goods again. No, they just got additional info long after the fact, you see, that really clinched it for them. Please. Anyway they just reimbursed the buyer and that’s the end of that. No consequences. This is why they keep selling artifacts from “Swiss private collections” over and over again, even when there’s hard evidence that they were stolen.

To close on a less enraging note, here’s a fun fact about Flavia Domitilla Minor: she died at just 21 years old three years before her father Vespasian became emperor in 69 A.D. Twelve years after that, her younger brother Domitian became emperor. He deified her and granted her the title of Augusta.

Her daughter Flavia Domitilla converted to Judaism/Christianity (the Talmud claims the former, Eusebius the latter) and was exiled to the island of Pandataria by her uncle Domitian for her “atheism” which included a refusal to worship her own mother along with the rest of the imperial family and traditional Roman pantheon. She is now a Christian saint and her former property is the exquisite catacomb of Santa Domitilla.

It was commissioned by King Jayavarman VII in honor of a Crown Prince, probably his son Indravarman. An inscription found at the site describes how four royal servants saved the prince’s life on two separate occasions. The inscription says they died protecting him and thus their images were placed in the four corners of the shrine. The temple is rich with bas-reliefs depicting deities, history and legend of Khmer culture. Angkor Wat has almost no bas-reliefs.

Despite its historical, religious and artistic importance, however, Banteay Chhmar’s remote location and climatological challenges resulted in eight centuries of neglect. The Khmer Rouge used it as a stronghold and mined the perimeter heavily. After the Khmer Rouge left, looters braved the minefields. In one such shameless and depraved act, Cambodian soldiers drove pickup trucks to the temple walls and used jackhammers to remove entire sections of the bas-relief. The theft was only discovered because by random coincidence a French expert who had worked on Banteay Chhmar found a section of the stolen wall in an antiques store in Thailand and called the cops.

In 2007, the KR mines were finally cleared which gave researchers and very adventurous tourists access to the site. The next year California-based Global Heritage Fund (GHF) began working with the local community under the aegis of Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture to conserve the crumbling structures. Their aim is not to put it all back together like new, but rather to address underlying structural issues and damaging plant growth and turn as many piles of stone blocks back into walls, temples and galleries as possible to ensure the long-term survival of this architectural marvel.

What they don’t want is to make Banteay Chhmar the new Angkor Wat, swarmed by a crushing average of 7,000 visitors a day. Right now Banteay Chhmar averages exactly two visitors a day. The local economy, already bolstered by the construction work on the temple, could benefit enormously from the temple’s becoming more popular, but not too popular.

Sustainable tourism is very much a priority for the Global Heritage Fund and for Banteay Chhmar Community-Based Tourism (CBT), an organization of local villagers dedicated to preservation of local heritage for the benefit of the people who live there. There are no hotels in the area, so if you want to visit the CBT has six homestays in Banteay Chhmar village where you can get a room for $7 a night, and you’ll know all that money stays with the villagers instead of lining Paris Hilton’s trust fund. Five bucks will get you entry to the entire temple complex including all the satellite temples over multiple days.

It’s that kind of local investment in the temple’s well-being that will keep it from becoming the victim of unscrupulous looters, tourist exploitation and its own harsh environment.

You can see footage of the conservation work being done on the temple and the marks looters left behind in this short video from the GHF:

If you have time on your hands, watch this fascinating lecture by Banteay Chhmar expert Dr. Olivier Cunin. He’s got architectural reconstructions of how the temple looked when first built and everything.

There is no guard during the winter. The door is padlocked and when tourists come they call a number and someone ambles over to let them in and show them the remains. All the looters had to do to get in is break a couple of the wooden slats. The mosaic was intact when the previous tour was given December 23rd, so the thieves must have broken in some time during that week. Mayor Lorenzo Izcara thinks it went down the night of December 27th, just before the tourists discovered the theft.

The loss is irreparable. The looters used a hammer and chisel to crudely bust out the three panels: a central figurative scene that depicts Bacchus in Triumph standing in his chariot being pulled by a pair of panthers, a hunting scene of a dog chasing a deer labeled “Notus,” the Greek name for the south wind, and another scene of a dog chasing a doe labeled “Boreas,” Greek for the north wind.

The entire mosaic takes up 66 square meters, and the mayor says that considering the enormous size of one of the stolen portions, the criminals must have cut it up in pieces “because it would not have fitted through the hole they made to get in.”

This is not the first time the site has been vandalized. In November, several individuals broke in and destroyed a few square centimeters of the mosaic, forcing authorities to change the locks and adopt a few additional security measures. “The restorer told me then that the mosaic would be very difficult to steal because it had reinforced concrete, but they’ve stolen it all right,” says the mayor, who had already warned the regional government of Castilla y León about the need to improve the site’s surveillance system.

A regional official will be visiting the site this month. Perhaps the immediate horror will get some much-needed investment in security for these off-the-beaten-track gems, but the overall problem remains a knot of Gordian dimensions: 23,000 archaeological sites to protect in the region, no money and personnel to protect them.

It was one of the best preserved Roman mosaics in the country, rare for its immense size (710 square feet), its excellent condition and for the rare combination of Bacchic scenes depicting both the god’s betrothal to Ariadne and his Triumph. Only two other known mosaics depict both those scenes.

The stolen pieces will be almost impossible to sell openly because of how recognizable they are. The police and mayor think the theft was commissioned by an unscrupulous private collector/rapist. I don’t know how likely that is. Art thefts often get chalked up to shady commissions, then you find the Picassos in the trunk of a car years later because the thieves were unable to sell their ill-gotten gain. Also, I don’t really see this artsy Blofeld being thrilled when his minions hand over hacked out chunks of mosaic. If someone is commissioning thefts of antiquities, they probably require their stuff be handled with care or else it’s into the pool with the sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their frickin’ heads.

The Roman villa of Santa Cruz was unearthed in November of 1972 during farm work. Excavations ended after a few years with only an estimated fourth of the site uncovered, including the Bacchic mosaic. The digs revealed an elaborate villa with at least 10 rooms, including baths heated by a hypocaust system, and four halls. The home is typical of late Imperial period (between the fourth and sixth centuries) latifundia, great agricultural estates manned by vast numbers of slaves and owned by absentee landlords.

So superb, in fact, that Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva, who along with his wife Susana Meneses discovered the spectacular Moche Lord of Sipán tomb in 1987, thought it looked a little too familiar when he saw it on display at the Art of Ancient America exhibit in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe in 1998. The Sipán tomb, which Alva had discovered intact, was looted shortly after its discovery by brothers Juan, Samuel, Emilio, and Ernil Bernal. They dragged dozens of sacks full of gold from the tomb to their house, buried the loot in their backyard and then sold it all off to eager collectors who, as usual, asked no questions.

The monkey was purchased by collector John Bourne in the late 80s along with a number of other Moche artifacts for $120,000. He donated it to the New Mexico History Museum in 1995. He also loaned two Moche ear spools and a gold rattle for the 1998 exhibit, although he retained ownership of those items. Bourne denied that the monkey’s head (or the other pieces) came from Sipán. He claimed instead that it came from La Mina, another Moche archaeological site in north Peru which was looted in 1988. This is no rebuttal to the charge that Bourne bought stolen goods, of course, since even if it did come from La Mina its theft and export were just as illegal as they would have been had the artifact come from the more famous Sipán site. As a legal maneuver, however, it was damned effective because establishing which site an artifact was stolen from is a basic requirement of making the case in a court of law.

The Peruvian government officially requested that the artifact be repatriated since it had been looted from the Sipán archaeological site and exported against Peruvian law. Alva went directly to the FBI, which opened an investigation in September of 1998. Citing the National Stolen Property Act, the FBI seized the monkey, ear spools and rattle, but since experts disagreed on whether they had been stolen from Sipán (as Alva and Peru alleged) or from La Mina (as Bourne claimed), in 2000 the U.S. Attorney General’s office in Albuquerque declined to prosecute. The pieces went back to the museum where they remained on display until 2008 and then the loaned objects were returned to Bourne.

That’s where things stood until this Spring. In May of this year, Peru wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder asking the Department of Justice to look into the situation. In October, the Board of Regents of the Museum of New Mexico voted to return the monkey head to Peru.

Pet peeve time. U.S. Attorney Charles M. Oberly III made the following statement about the return of the gold monkey:

“This repatriation is the result of the joint efforts of this office, the FBI Art Crime Team, the Department of Justice Office of International Affairs, the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office and the Museum of New Mexico. I commend all parties for their efforts in producing this positive outcome. In particular, I commend the Museum of New Mexico for its selfless and noble action in returning this invaluable artifact to Peru. Artifacts like this Moche monkey head represent the history not only of the source country, in this case Peru, but the history of all mankind. We hope that this repatriation will help repair at least some of the damage caused by the looting of Moche sites.”

What is with the legal authorities kissing the ass of museums and collectors who finally return the stolen goods they refused to cough up for decades? The Museum of New Mexico was not selfless and noble in returning this invaluable artifact they KNEW was stolen all along.