Happy endings are rare for looted archaeological materials. This may well be why a private ceremony at the British Museum on Aug. 10 grabbed headlines around the world. Eight objects from Iraq, five of them inscribed in Sumerian cuneiform, were handed over to Salih Husain Ali, Iraqi ambassador to the UK. In a matter of months, they will arrive at the Iraq Museum, where they will likely be put on display.

For archaeologists, it is very hard to accurately establish the provenance of looted objects. Vital contextual information — information that provides insights into an object's creation, meaning and use — is usually painstakingly gathered during excavations. When objects are looted, this information is missing; when this information is missing, ancient materials can easily be misidentified.

Until now, this was the case for eight objects from Iraq. The objects — including three inscribed fired clay cones; a polished and inscribed river pebble; an inscribed white gypsum mace-head; a marble amulet pendant and a red marble square stamp seal, both dating from the Jemdet Nasr period (circa 3000 B.C.); and an Achaemenid-period white chalcedony "sphinx" stamp seal — had been looted after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The objects subsequently found their way to a London-based antiquities dealer and were seized by the police in May of that year.

However, this year, archaeologists working with the British Museum’s Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme, known as the Iraq Scheme, have been able to establish the objects' original location with astonishing accuracy: They are from the ancient Sumerian site of Girsu, modern Tello, in southern Iraq.