Why Maven is looking for .pom file when .jar is present in the repository?

I have the following dependency in my pom.xml

<dependency>
    <groupId>aGroup</groupId>
    <artifactId>anArtifact</artifactId>
    <version>aVersion</version>
</dependency>

I also have the anArtifact-aVersion.jar file in ~/.m2/repository/aGroup/anArtifact/aVersion directory.

When I start building the project, maven looks for a .pom file instead of using the .jar file and attempts to download the following

http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/aGroup/anArtifact/aVersion/anArtifact-aVersion.pom

How can I configure maven to use the existing .jar file?