The Victorian company Palmanova said the object to have come from the ruins of Tiwanaku, an ancient city in Bolivia near Lake Titicaca, which thrived between 600 and 1,000AD.
But in 1906, Bolivia made it illegal to export objects from the ruins and in 1987, Australia introduced a law imposing a ban on the import of objects that were unlawfully taken from their original home.
In the initial Federal Court case, the Commonwealth suggested two theories about how the object could have been removed, including that it was excavated by an archaeologist, Dr Eduardo Casanova, from one of 25 pits dug in the cemetery area of the city in 1934.
The second was that it was taken around 1950, when there was a surge of looting of Tiwanaku artefacts.
Palmanova’s lawyers had even more colourful theories.
“The applicant’s initial position was that the artefact was a modern fake or pastiche crudely assembled from at least two pieces of basalt but this case was abandoned in the face of scientific evidence which showed that the artefact was at least several hundred years old and made from a single piece of basalt,”
the judgment said.
