Police in Italy have sealed off an illegal archaeological dig and have recovered 108 stolen artifacts.

The artefacts were excavated from tombs dating to the Daunian era, which preceded the Roman empire, in the southern region of Puglia.

The pieces were expected to be trafficked on the illegal antiquities market.

Several sites were sealed off by police near the town of Rodi Garganico, in the province of Foggia on the Adriatic coast after routine checks by the Italian tax police, Corrado Palmiotti told AKI.

“It’s an area rich in archaeology,” he said.

Police said they had made no arrests.

Several vases, ornamental objects and spearheads were recovered by police on the Gargano peninsula. The objects date from between the 6th and 4th-centuries BC.

Daunia refers to the civilisation that dominated northern Puglia for more than 1,000 years until around the 4th century BC.

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A nail-pierced skull belonged to the medieval pirate Klaus Störtebeker has been stolen from a museum in Hamburg, Germany. [Thx @deep470]

“We are all very upset about the theft,” museum director Lisa Kosok said in the press release. “We very much hope that it will either be returned or found.”

The museum said it was offering a reward of several thousand euros for information leading to the recovery of the skull, but didn’t give an exact amount

The skull, impaled on a large rusty nail, was discovered in 1878 during construction for a warehouse district in an area where pirates had earlier been beheaded and their heads displayed on spikes as a warning against other pirates.

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A Claude Monet painting worth millions of dollars, the Beach at Pourville, stolen nine years ago, has been found in Poland. (Thx @Umajja)

Beach at Pourville was stolen on 19 September 2000 from the National Museum in the western city of Poznan. The painting, worth from 3 to 7 million dollars, located in the Monet exhibition room, was not properly protected – there were no CCTV cameras in the room and the paintings were not in glass cases. The thief cut the painting out of the frame and replaced it with a forgery.

Beach at Pourville is the only painting by Claude Monet in a Polish art collections. It was painted in 1882 and is one of a series of canvases that depict a seascape of Pourville. The museum in Poznan, then in Germany, bought the painting in 1906

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The infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign which was stolen from the gate to Auschwitz earlier this week has been recovered.

Polish police found the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign that was stolen from the gate of the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz after an intensive three-day hunt and arrested five suspects, police said early Monday. The sign was found cut into three pieces.

Police spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo told The Associated Press that the sign was found Sunday night in northern Poland, the other end of the country from the southern Polish town where the Auschwitz memorial museum is located and where it disappeared before dawn Friday.

Padlo said police detained five men between the ages of 25 and 39 and took them for questioning to Krakow, which is the regional command of the area that includes the Auschwitz museum.

Another police spokesman, Dariusz Nowak, said the 16-foot (5-meter) sign, made of hollow steel, was found cut into three pieces, each containing one of the words. The cruelly ironic phrase means “Work Sets You Free” and ran completely counter to the purpose of Auschwitz, which began as a concentration camp for political prisoners during the Nazi occupation of Poland and evolved into anextermination camp where Jews were gassed to death in factory-like fashion.

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English Heritage has launched an appeal to track down one of Charles Darwin’s Galapagos notebook, which was probably stolen in the early 1980s.

Sadly, the Galapagos notebook has never been seen since its disappearance from Darwin’s Kent home, Down House near Orpington. It is likely a visitor took the opportunity to steal the Galapagos book while they were on public display.

The naturalist’s great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes, said it was “almost certainly stolen”.

He said: “Our family always felt that the best Darwin material should be at Down House so that the public could see it in his home. The Galapagos notebook is of outstanding value for the history of science.

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