Turkey Adds AI to Its Antiquities Hunt as 100 Objects Return from the US

Turkey unveiled 100 cultural artefacts repatriated from the United States at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums on 2 November. Presented by the culture and tourism minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, the event also opened No Escape: Boubon, an exhibition on the country’s campaign against the illegal trade in antiquities.

Most of the returned material consists of 40 Bronze Age objects, dating to 2300–2000 BCE, and 44 terracotta architectural panels, dating to 700–480 BCE and handed back by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. 

The exhibition centres on Boubon, a small city in ancient Lycia, southwestern Turkey. Its Sebasteion, a sanctuary dedicated to the Roman imperial cult, housed around a dozen life-size bronze statues of emperors and their relatives – an unusually complete group, since bronze was normally melted down for reuse and the building appears to have been buried and left undisturbed in antiquity.

Villagers dug the site illegally during the 1960s, breaking statues apart and selling them onto the American and European markets through dealers. Turkish authorities learned of the looting in 1967, when a confiscated torso prompted a rescue excavation that recorded the statues’ inscribed stone bases. The archaeologist Jale İnan spent decades matching dispersed bronzes to those bases, research that still underpins Turkey’s claims. Excavation at Boubon resumed in 2023.

The latest returns followed documentation Turkey submitted to the Manhattan district attorney’s office and US Homeland Security Investigations in May 2026, which stopped an auction sale of Anatolian objects. Scientific evidence in the Boubon cases has included lead-isotope analysis, which identifies where ancient bronze was smelted, and matching statues to the bases they once stood on.

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism also runs TraceART, an AI system launched in 2025 that scans auction listings and social media for trafficked Turkish objects.

Turkey says more than 26,700 artefacts have returned since 1980.