This article examines how openly sharing data online can continue the dehumanizing work of 19th century “collectors” who stole the bodies of colonized peoples. It addresses the ongoing controversies at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (“Penn Museum“), regarding the interlinked weaponization of over one thousand crania used by racial scientist Samuel George Morton, and the remains of two Black children murdered by the police in the 1985 MOVE bombing, and asks, how can descendant communities regain their kin and take control of the data the museum has extracted from them? And how can scholars and other heritage workers within colonial institutions support them?

As European nations address their legacy of colonialism, many museums in France, Germany, Great Britain, and elsewhere in Western Europe are examining the provenance of objects in their collections that were removed during periods of colonial occupation and, in some cases, have developed plans for their restitution. As of 2022, few museums in the United States have announced similar objectives. This article offers specific suggestions for American art museums to proceed proactively and transparently with colonial-era provenance research projects. I propose that museums identify objects in their collections that were displaced in one of two ways: either looted during a post-Napoleonic military conflict or stolen or traded by force under a period of colonial occupation. These works of art should be prioritized for provenance research and listed or otherwise made discoverable online. By listing these objects on their websites, museums will acknowledge the contentious histories of works of art in their collections and signal an openness to engaging with source communities, whether about the return of an object, loans, storage, display, educational initiatives, or other matters of care.

This article explores the decolonization of heritage politics in 1970s Hong Kong. It firstly revisits recent scholars’ work on Hong Kong heritage politics and the transformation of Hong Kong’s cultural identity. It shows how people’s perceptions of their colonial heritage and history in Hong Kong have changed since the 1970s. Secondly, it outlines the city’s cultural heritage policy framework after the 1967 Riots, inspired by the Cultural Revolution. It analyses how the colonial government intentionally rebranded the city’s colonial heritage as an anachronism to justify its new narrative of Hong Kong and its cultural identity in the 1970s. It also employs the demolition of the former Kowloon Railway Station building in the 1970s as a case study to discuss how the colonial government decolonized local colonial structures through its new cultural heritage policy approach after the Riots. Finally, by employing the case study of the demolished Central Star Ferry Pier in the 2000s, this article argues there was a change in people’s perceptions of the city’s colonial history in the early postcolonial period of Hong Kong. A more active notion of Hong Kong’s cultural identity is also being articulated in the uncertain future due to the city’s recent rapid political and social changes influenced by the mainland authority.

The bust of Nefertiti symbolizes the transformation of the Egyptian heritage where the West has become the rightful heir of Ancient Egypt through a system of knowledge production that controls the Egyptian cultural heritage in Western Museum collections. This article explores the intricacies of the entanglement of cultural property with heritage politics projected on the famous bust. It is the best example to discuss decolonization and its ethical implications on museum practice in the twenty-first century and Egyptology as an area study. The article discusses the legal and ethical framework of the bust of Nefertiti’s discovery, export, and current exhibition and its complex receptions in Germany and Egypt.

The impetus for this study was a review of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) 86th Annual Meeting program in 2021. Finding that no single poster or presentation referenced looting or antiquities trafficking despite these issues being ethical considerations that all SAA members are expected to recognize, we sought to investigate whether this was an irregularity – perhaps due to the virtual format of the meeting – or whether it was more common than not. For a broader understanding of if, how, and where these topics are discussed by archaeologists outside of the SAA, we expanded the investigation and studied the archives of 14 other archaeological and anthropological conferences. The results of the study show that despite there being an overall increase in mentioning looting and antiquities trafficking at conferences, it remains a niche and infrequently discussed topic.1

This article maps the field of cultural heritage law, arguing for the need for its renewal, even if at the cost of some iconoclasm of notions we hold dear in our conceptual thinking about heritage. The article pursues this thesis by excavating a conceptual archaeology (broadly in the Foucauldian sense) of four key assumptions or conceptual pillars of cultural heritage law, which are the assumption of inherent value of cultural heritage; the pillar of authenticity; the assumption that human rights can work as a panacea for the renewal of the field; and the pillar of expertise. The archaeology of these ideas shows how much of what we take for granted in cultural heritage law is no longer fit for purpose, and the article shows those stakes by contrasting the work of these pillars and assumptions against some of the key challenges to the field: interdisciplinarity; the Anthropocene; enforcement; and the growing use of heritage as an ideological target in armed conflicts.

In this article, we consider the role that academics play in the global illicit trade in cultural objects. Academics connect sources to buyers and influence market values by publishing looted and stolen cultural objects (passive facilitation) and by collaborating with market players, including by collecting artifacts themselves (active facilitation). Their actions shape market desire, changing what is targeted for looting, theft, and illicit trading across borders. However, this crucial facilitative role often goes unnoticed or unaddressed in scholarship on collecting, white collar crime, and the illicit market in cultural objects. This article explores the importance of academic facilitation through a case study of the career of Mary Slusser, a renowned American scholar of Nepali art and art history.

Crime groups are drawn to stealing heritage and cultural property because the thefts can be less dangerous than other illicit activities and there can be a lower chance of detection. In addition, there are financial opportunities such as selling the objects, using them as currency and collateral in illicit markets, and through rewards and ransoms. While these factors remain, crime groups operating as criminal entrepreneurs will continue to be attracted to this type of theft even if situational crime prevention strategies are implemented at locations. Unique and irreplaceable heritage and cultural property will be stolen, and societies will lose in artistic, cultural, heritage, historical, and financial terms. This article argues that, while people tasked with the policing and security of heritage and cultural property should focus on the potential thefts, policing agencies also need to focus on the crime groups, especially as heritage and cultural property thefts can be crime groups’ “Achilles’ heel.”

This article inquiries into Poland’s current approach to the implementation of the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art. It argues that it is more focused on the recovery of national heritage than on providing justice to Holocaust victims and their heirs. First, it discusses the outputs of the Expert Group established in 2009 to implement provenance research in line with the Washington Principles’s recommendations. It explains the failure of this initiative by bringing into focus the wider context of the inheritance of the war-time displacements and splitting of collections. It argues that Holocaust victims’ assets are one of many problematic items in Polish memory institutions and that the unresolved issue of post-war nationalizations are often perceived as an argument that hinders the Washington Principles’s implementation. It outlines the notions of “Polish war losses” and “national cultural goods” and discusses in detail the Polish provenance research databases. It notices that restitution in Poland is increasingly considered as an important national identity-building tool and analyzes several recent educational and branding initiatives of this kind.

This paper discusses some of the major ethical issues that arise in connection with the widespread holding of cultural heritage by private collectors. If, as many people believe, and UNESCO has affirmed, cultural heritage is, in some morally significant sense, everyone’s heritage, then the private acquisition of cultural heritage, although widely permitted in law, raises some significant ethical questions. I discuss the nature of the tension between public heritage and private ownership of heritage items and the possibility that more might be done by law to regulate the activities of private collectors before arguing the merits of a shift in the mindset of collectors from thinking of themselves as the unfettered owners of the heritage they acquire towards conceiving themselves primarily as stewards who protect and preserve that heritage on behalf of the wider community. There follows a detailed examination of practical ways in which collectors can discharge their stewardship role to the best effect, emphasizing, in particular, the fresh opportunities for doing so afforded to collectors by the new digital environment.

In July 2021, Liverpool was removed from the prestigious List of World Heritage Sites, sending shockwaves around the global heritage community. More recently, the spotlight has shifted to another world famous site also located in the United Kingdom. During the same 44th Session of the World Heritage Committee, UNESCO threatened to place Stonehenge on the List in Danger if the required changes to a significant billion-pound road enhancement project were not implemented. Given what happened in Liverpool, there are fears that Stonehenge is in danger of moving towards delisting. An interesting critical line of inquiry to emerge from Liverpool, and other World Heritage Sites, concerns the local, national, and international ‘politics at the site’. This article develops this debate by analysing the role of different scalar actors involved in the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. More specifically, our article examines how the Stonehenge Alliance sought to engage in, what we define as, scalar manoeuvres that is evidenced by scale jumping and scalar alignments with more powerful players further up the heritage hierarchy in order to effect leverage over the future status of the World Heritage Site.

The legal literature on refugee cultural heritage is limited, and cultural rights are part of the law that appropriately addresses refugee cultural heritage issues. Cultural heritage is integral to the definition of refugees; refugee protection must include safeguarding refugee cultural heritage.1 This Article reviews international law around refugees’ intangible cultural heritage, which incorporates refugee relationships with their tangible cultural heritage.2 It also frames the discussion around refugee intangible cultural heritage in a holistic paradigm that consolidates “refugee home heritage” (refugee intangible cultural heritage of home country) and “refuge heritage” (refugee intangible cultural heritage of refugee journey from persecution or conflict to resettlement or return). The Article finds that, whereas the international law framework lays the groundwork for such a holistic paradigm, international and national laws and state policy approaches must be reformed to achieve refugee protection in line with international obligations.

While disputes concerning the return of antiquities and artworks have become increasingly prevalent and receive public attention, the parallel issue of returning unlawfully exported fossils is rarely discussed. The fossils of “Ubirajara jubatus” and Irritator challengeri are prime examples of such disputes: they were taken from Brazil unlawfully, as Brazilian researchers allege, and displayed in German museums. The return disputes were characterized by both parties relying on arguments based almost exclusively on public (international) law. This Article explores private law as an alternative approach to these and similar disputes, discussing whether the fossils are the property of Brazil and could, therefore, be claimed in an action for restitution under German law. It finds that both fossils belong to Brazil since the museums did not acquire good title through a good faith purchase or acquisitive prescription.

This article examines the determination of cultural objects as “national treasures” in the United Kingdom and proposes a heretofore unidentified theoretical space in which such designations are made. Utilizing Foucauldian genealogies of the museum posited by both Tony Bennett and Eilean Hooper-Greenhill as a frame for spaces in which cultural and national identities are curated (which some commentators suggest are outdated, but prove very helpful in the current enterprise), this article develops the argument that designations of items as “national treasures” are made within a specific institutional space – hereinafter termed the “National Treasure Space.” Through the interpretation of the object in this institutional space, it is possible to characterize it as other than the sum of its parts; certain aspects of the object that exist when it is outside of this space are suspended once it is within. As a result, the problematic determination of the object as a national treasure is exacerbated, impacting important relational elements of the object to its owner(s) (both private and public) and the understanding of the object as significant in its representation of the nation.

The year 2022 marks 15 years since the entry into force of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Among its objectives, this treaty aims at acknowledging the specific nature – economic and cultural – of cultural activities, goods, and services, reaffirming the sovereign right of states to adopt or implement measures they deem appropriate for the protection and the promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions as well as reinforcing international cooperation for more balanced cultural exchanges. Since its adoption, this treaty has been criticized for its low level of constraint. However, data collected over the years show that parties rely extensively on the Convention to undertake diverse initiatives to achieve the treaty’s objectives. Based on concrete examples, this article aims to show that the effectivity of a legal instrument does not only rely on its degree of constraint but also on other factors, including monitoring mechanisms put in place in the context of its implementation.

In this paper we present T. rex fossils as disruptive objects that can drastically influence the actions and reactions of humans that encounter them. We present a vision of the T. rex as being a key node within a web of human and object associations that ultimately produces, first, extreme desire in humans, and then a breakdown in human relationships resulting in disagreements, disputes, lawsuits, and the committing of crime. From there we bring these T. rex fossils into the concept of desirescape which sees a network of object/object and object/human reactions provoking irresistible desire in humans. We argue that this desire can push humans to violate law or social norms or, in several T. rex cases, sue each other. How then should we humans approach T. rex and other disruptive objects? Cautiously, and with the knowledge that these objects may be more powerful than we are.

This article focuses on the ancestral human remains of Indigenous peoples that were taken by European invaders during the colonial era. It begins by considering the notion of human remains. It then describes the two types of heritage that result from the removal of human remains: the tangible heritage made of the remains exhibited or stored in the museums or universities of former colonial States, and the intangible heritage made of the collective memories of the surviving communities and their descendants about the removal (and the absence) of the stolen remains. The article next examines the role of national and international laws with respect to the restitution of human remains by exploring the concept of transitional justice. This article argues that transitional justice can facilitate the meaningful repatriation of ancestral human remains and hence the healing of past injustice.

Even though places of worship are protected by the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, they often become targets. To safeguard the cultural property of religious communities, it is necessary to plan for wartime protection under peaceful conditions, but studies of how this planning was conducted after 1945 are largely missing. This Article compares how the cultural property of the Church of Sweden (Lutheran) has been planned for protection up until 2023. Cultural property protection was first introduced in World War II, but the Church had to plan and carry out most protective measures without state support. During the Cold War, a system for protecting movable property was developed that lasted until it was replaced in the 1980s by cultural protection plans that employed a more holistic approach to risk mitigation in peace as well as in war. Finally, the recent development and future challenges are discussed in relation to the 1954 Hague Convention and the reconstruction of a Swedish total defense due to the Russo-Ukrainian War.

The illicit antiquities trade relies on various academic experts for its operations and legitimization. To counter this involvement, academics need to be made aware of how their services might support the trade. A suitable venue for future generations of professionals to obtain this knowledge is their university education. Hence, it is of interest to ask what is taught in university programs in relevant disciplines about the illicit antiquities trade and the forms of academic entanglement within it. This article focuses on course literature in university programs for conservators. It looks at both the official curriculum (explicit and intended teaching) and the hidden curriculum (implicit and unintended teaching) concerning illicit antiquities trade and conservators’ responsibilities vis-à-vis this trade. It finds that the coverage is limited and partly outdated. Further, textbooks might signal that it is acceptable to undertake the treatment of unprovenanced archaeological objects. The study suggests that it is relevant to ask not only if, but also how, the topic of professional responsibility is taught, and it argues that higher education, apart from teaching how to keep clear of activities that promote the trade, should provide the knowledge and skills to actively oppose it.

The Black Sea is a substantial inland sea and has a very fascinating border on the east and west. It reaches into the Mediterranean through the straits, into Europe via rivers, and toward Asia via the Caucasus. The human relations developed through this network has led to the emergence of cultural landscape elements in the region. The natural landscape elements that have developed inherently in the natural beauty of the region have also become one of the most important pieces of heritage in the region. In this region, many uncontrolled practices that have taken place in recent years have rapidly degraded the cultural and natural landscape. The purpose of this study is to emphasize the beauty of nature, which makes the Eastern Black Sea region one of the most significant cultural and natural heritage areas of the world, and to explore its impact on human life in the context of water heritage as well as to address the dynamic risks of losing this beauty. In this study, the recognition of water as a heritage component is conceptually discussed in the context of the inherent cultural heritage and natural heritage. The unifying and integrative power of the multicultural water heritage that the region possesses is explicated.