The necklace, dated between 550 and 450 BCE, was acquired in 1982 and has been on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
The museum has pledged to return the necklace, which was believed to have been stolen from a Turkish archaeological site in 1976.
Victoria Reed, senior curator for provenance, told the Boston Globe that the museum takes matters such as these seriously.
“For many years, participants in the art trade really didn’t ask a lot of questions about provenance,” she said.
“It’s not unusual in the 1980s for us to have acquired — for any museum to have acquired — something without really probing more deeply into its ownership history. And jewellery, in particular, is very, very hard to trace.”
Several years ago, an anonymous scholar noticed similarities between the necklace in Boston and similar jewellery found at Bintepeler, an archaeological site in Turkey with more than 100 burial mounds.
Hilal Demirel, attaché for cultural affairs and promotion at the Turkish culture ministry, said that the return of the necklace was a ‘strong message’ to the rest of the world regarding the importance of international cooperation in preserving cultural heritage.
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