Man rescues 1,132 ancient Mexican artefacts from Massachusetts dumpster
More than 40 Connecticut high school students spent nearly two years cataloguing the pre-Hispanic items before their return to Mexico.
A man searching a dumpster during a house clearance in western Massachusetts rescued 1,132 ancient Mexican artefacts that were nearly sent to a landfill, according to the Times of India.
Matthew Pioggia noticed the unusual objects while clearing an old house and sent photographs to his relative by marriage, archaeologist Jeremy Pilver, to identify them.
Pilver, an archaeology teacher at Farmington High School in Connecticut, recognised the items as genuine archaeological material and urged Pioggia to retrieve them.
Pioggia spent approximately four hours digging through the waste and recovered around 50 box tops of material mixed with household debris and animal waste.
Pilver enlisted more than 40 students to help clean, classify, and catalogue the collection over nearly two years, creating a digital inventory and database.
The collection, which includes 1,053 ceramic fragments, two spindle whorls, 18 figurine fragments, and obsidian flakes, was identified by specialists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) as pre-Hispanic material from southeastern Mexico.
All 1,132 objects were returned to the Mexican Consulate in Boston in August 2026 following a joint announcement by Mexico's Foreign Affairs and Culture ministries.