NEW YORK, NY.- In the 1960s, Susan Womer Katzev, a marine illustrator, and her husband, archaeologist Michael L. Katzev, spent two summers diving with a team beneath the lapping waves of the Mediterranean off Cyprus.

Their quarry was an ancient shipwreck on the sandy ocean floor discovered just years earlier by a man foraging for sponge. It would become a startling find.

Before it sank in the third century B.C., the Kyrenia had traded food, iron and millstones out of its home port, thought to be the island of Rhodes. After more than 2,000 years underwater, much of its hull and cargo — old plates, coins, amphoras that once held wine and others that still held almonds — were remarkably intact.

Susan Katzev’s drawings and photographs helped document a discovery that revealed not only ancient trading behaviors but a wealth of information about how the Greeks built ships. For decades, her and her husband’s efforts have been heralded for their central role in establishing nautical archaeology as a field.

This year, about two decades after her husband’s death, Susan Katzev and a co-editor won plaudits for a definitive account of the ship’s excavation, a 421-page first volume that won a major award in January from the Archaeological Institute of America.

Few knew at the time, though, that federal investigators had just months before been to Susan Katzev’s house in Maine, searching for evidence of looted items among artifacts she had collected in recent decades. Customs inspectors had found suspect items in five packages mailed to her by a dealer, according to court papers. The investigators returned to her home in May, unannounced, and seized 62 items from her collection, asserting they had probably been stolen from Iran and Iraq.

“Probable cause exists to believe,” an investigator wrote in an affidavit this April, that the seized items “were, or may have been, imported into the United States in violation of the law.”

Susan Katzev, now 84, has not been accused of any wrongdoing. But the cloud over some of her artifacts has cast a shadow over a life spent on efforts to broaden our understanding of the ancient world. She defended her collecting in a recent interview, saying she had no clue there was any question about the objects that were seized, nearly all of which are listed in the court papers as having come from the same dealer in London.

“I thought these were imported properly, legally, in the correct way,” she said. “I would not have bought something knowing it had been looted.”

She asked if it was reasonable to expect collectors such as herself to fully determine whether objects had been stolen. “You would spend the rest of your life trying to check each of your pieces,” she said. “That’s asking a lot from the buyer.”

A Life Devoted to Ancient Treasures

Antiquities collecting today is, indeed, not for the faint of heart.

After decades in which artifacts arrived at galleries, and at times museums, with sparse details about where they had come from, antiquities have for years now become the sort of thing that cannot just show up in an auction catalog with a name, a date and a price. Countries display increasing concern for the return of their patrimony. Law enforcement officials enforce stricter policies against looting. Museums employ in-house experts to help spot suspect items among the many objects they own.

Investigators have shown that in some cases wealthy collectors displayed little concern for the slim provenance of items that they bought and later surrendered because of evidence they were stolen. Friends of Susan Katzev’s say she is not that kind of collector.

Rather, they argue, she is someone who focused on the beauty of ancient objects, rather than their origins.

Trained as a sculptor, she is drawn, they say, to their offbeat, unusual, even quirky forms, and that she enjoys imagining the lives of the artists who fashioned them.

Gordon Moore, a friend and professor at Harvard Medical School, described her as a meticulous collector, who affixed notes to items with all the information she had about them and their purchase, but did not necessarily press to know exactly where they had come from.

“Her collecting was a tremendously important, emotionally, socially, intellectually rigorous activity for her,” he said.

She said she has been interested in ancient art all her life. Her parents collected it, she said, and she remembers being intrigued during a visit to the Middle East with her parents when her mother bought an ancient wine carrier.

Her interest in the ancient world led her to assist in the 1960s in the underwater excavations of Roman and Byzantine shipwrecks off the coast of Turkey. There, she met Katzev, and together they helped to rescue the Kyrenia, diving deep to explore the single-masted merchant ship that sank around 280 B.C., possibly because it had been holed by pirates.

“My husband and I went down, and honestly, it was for both of us probably the most beautiful thing we had ever experienced and seen,” she said in the interview.

In “With Captain Sailors Three,” a documentary she wrote and directed about the excavation, she described the excitement of her work. “In each of us, there is an expectancy, wondering that day what may turn up on the bottom, and it’s a terrific thrill to be the first person to handle, or just see a glimpse of a piece of pottery,” she said.

The hull was also rescued, and after years of restoration was exhibited at a museum in Cyprus. Its timbers served as the blueprint for a replica vessel, Kyrenia II, that helped to illustrate what ancient seafaring had looked like. In 1986, during centennial celebrations for the Statue of Liberty, the replica sailed in New York’s parade of ships and her husband was on board.

Sturt Manning, a Cornell University professor whose research team recently clarified the date when the original Kyrenia sunk, said it was hard to overstate the significance of the work that the Katzevs took part in.

“This was the first time we started to get rich information about an amazingly preserved ship,” he said. “It is like a mini-Pompeii.”

Untruths in Packaging

Susan Katzev first came to the attention of U.S. Homeland Security Investigations in July 2022 when a package addressed to her arrived at a FedEx facility at Indianapolis International Airport. Customs and border officials, trained to scan for illicit cultural artifacts, reviewed the package, which had been shipped to Susan Katzev by a dealer in Britain.

The paperwork said it held an “Antique Stone Vase” valued at $150. But inside was a small, dark-colored bowl decorated with eagles and dragons, and it was more “ancient” than “antique.” Experts thought it to be 4,000 years old and probably made in an area of the Middle East where ancient graveyards were plundered, beginning in 2000.

It was also not worth $150, as represented on the paperwork. The dealer’s own online catalog had listed the bowl with a price of $4,500.

“The overall conclusion from the experts,” Special Agent David C. Fife of Homeland Security Investigations later wrote in court papers, “was that the piece most likely originated from modern-day Iran and had likely been looted.”

The package was seized.

Two months later, investigators intercepted a second package addressed to her at a mail sorting facility in Maine, not far from her home. Like the first, it had come from Artemission, an online gallery based in London that is a member of the Association of International Antiquities Dealers. The gallery, which also operates as Atticart Ltd., specializes in “authentic ancient art from Egypt, the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia and Islamic Art,” according to its website.

The packaging described the contents as an “Antique Amulet over 250 years old,” with a declared value of $150. Inside, however, was a carved stone ram seal thought to be 5,000 years old. An invoice inside listed the value at $792, according to court papers.

A third package was seized weeks later. Again, the packaging described an object younger and less valuable than what was inside: a bronze ibex figurine, which experts dated to the first millennium B.C. and that an invoice inside said was valued at $2,464.

According to court papers, experts said that all three artifacts were from Iran or Iraq, two nations that Americans are restricted from importing antiquities from under either national patrimony law or U.S. law. (Iraq suffered rampant looting during a period of political turmoil after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.)

Fife said in court papers that Artemission was vague in discussing the artifacts it sold. He said a gallery representative, asked about the origins of one item, told him it had been acquired “in the 1980s and 1990s,” when provenance paperwork for such items was “not required.”

In some cases, the investigator reported, the business had told Katzev that pieces she bought had previously been the property of a “prince” or other unnamed British “aristocrats,” a premise he described as seemingly implausible.

Artemission did not return calls for comment for this article. In total, investigators seized five packages destined for Katzev, according to court papers. Then they began showing up at her home with search warrants.

During their first visit, investigators confiscated papers associated with Katzev’s antiquities purchases and, while there, showed images over their phone of artifacts in her house to experts from the Smithsonian Institution and Rutgers University. During the second visit, they seized items, some of which had been bought as far back as 2006.

Katzev’s friends view her as someone swept up in the shifting tide of attitudes toward antiquity collecting, someone whose passion for protecting the past is evident and who would never be a willing participant in the black market.

Moore said Katzev has been caught up in a somewhat painful fashion in what in the end is a necessary reform in the antiquities collecting world.

“I think,” he said, “when there is change in the world, oftentimes it happens with very broad rules and it means that innocent or irrelevant stuff will be swept in. It’s part of the learning process.”

But of her innocence, he had no question.

“She is a very ethical person in all domains, politics, art, and I would be shocked if she had been dealing to get these things knowingly,” Moore said.

“She does not collect for show,” he added. “She does not collect for money. She collects for love.”

Katzev has donated many items she has collected. Bowdoin College, nearby in Maine, has received more than 90 gifts from her and her husband, primarily more modern lithographs, etchings and drawings. She said in the interview that she has also decided to donate the rest of her collection to museums.

The court papers do not portray Katzev as sympathetically as her friends do. An affidavit by Fife notes that in the Katzev home investigators found articles about, and a book by, Matthew Bogdanos, chief of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the Manhattan district attorney’s office whose work has led to multiple seizures of looted antiquities.

He also noted that Susan Katzev expressed frustration when told that some of her objects may need to be returned if found to have been looted. She noted, the affidavit said, the difficulty of applying precise standards to objects that often do not have a clear provenance.

“Katzev responded in exasperation that, ‘everything is looted, it’s all looted,’” Fife wrote in court papers. He said he believed Katzev was “referencing the generalized argument that much of the cultural property found throughout the world was at one point taken from the original culture by nameless invaders, occupiers, or smugglers.”

Michael McCullough, an art market lawyer who has represented collectors, said: “There are two ways of looking at it. The law is the law. They had reason to believe she had stolen property and they had the right to go in and take it. The other side of the coin is she is an 80-year-old person and these are antiquities. They are not importing arms.”

James Higginbotham, a professor and curator at Bowdoin who has reviewed much of Katzev’s collection, described her as a person of great integrity whose collecting instincts were honed in an era when gaps in provenance were not uncommon. “When she began to acquire ancient art in particular,” he said, “the attitudes were different and they evolved over time.”

Investigators said they could not comment further on the case while their review is continuing, but noted that the seized objects are being examined to determine whether they should be returned to countries of origin.

Katzev declined to comment beyond what she had said in the initial interview.

Instead, she released a statement.

“I’m in my 80s, and have memory issues,” she said. “I plan to donate everything I’ve collected to museums. I’ve always been drawn to the beauty of art and artifacts.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.