A pair of 1,000-year-old religious relics, which US investigators say were illegally taken from Thailand, have been returned after more than five decades.
The stone lintels had been housed at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum since the 1960s. But the city formally handed the artifacts back to Thai officials at a ceremony in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
Each weighing around 1,500 pounds, the sandstone items date back to the late 10th and 11th centuries, according to the Asian Art Museum. They originated from ancient temples in northeast Thailand, and were acquired by the museum in the 1960s via Avery Brundage, a former president of the International Olympic Committee and an avid collector of Asian art.
In 2017, however, the Department of Justice learned that the items had been “illegally taken” from Thailand, which outlaws the unauthorized export of historical…
