Cyprus, an island nation situated in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, counts among the states that elected not to adopt the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage (henceforth: the 2001 UNESCO Convention), although recognizing its merits. With a coastline of 648 km, Cyprus’ seafloor holds an abundance of underwater cultural heritage. Despite that wealth, one searches in vain for a comprehensive study on the legal protection of its underwater cultural heritage. Instead, sporadic references to some of its provisions can be traced throughout the scholarly research surrounding the legal protection of underwater cultural heritage1 and maritime archaeology.2 Against this background, this article stands as the first thorough effort to reflect on Cyprus’ legal protection of its underwater cultural heritage.

Sophie Vigneron, incoming editor of the International Journal of Cultural Property, interviewed Alex Bauer, who was the journal’s editor from 2003 to 2023. Alex is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Associate Director of the Sinop Region Archaeological Project, an interdisciplinary archaeological and heritage project on the landscapes and seascapes of the Black Sea coastal community of Sinop (Turkey).

Much of today’s academic scholarship of international cultural heritage law circles around cultural heritage’s protection for the benefit of future generations. Despite this, the efforts to systematically examine the concept in more detail are scarcer. This paper seeks to fill this gap by taking a closer look at the ways in which the notion of future generations features in the body of international cultural heritage law. This contribution firstly illustrates how central the idea of protecting cultural heritage for the benefit of future generations is in international cultural heritage law. Despite this centrality, evidenced by an extensive analysis of international and regional hard and soft law, national law, case law, and policy options, its precisely contours the second argument of this paper, is that they remain elusive. Finally, skepticism is voiced over the concept’s potential ambivalent use with respect to the protection of cultural heritage.

Given the varying degrees of importance that a holy place holds for different parties and the variety of laws used to regulate them, laws pertaining to holy places integrate a broad array of legal, political, social, religious, and economic interests. Acknowledging the difficulty of capturing a singular standard of protection merits examining different existing modalities to discern the means of protection for holy places.

A 2022 Israeli District Court case concerning ownership rights over a Russian Orthodox church in the Old City of Jerusalem shall provide the platform for scrutinizing the relevant laws and variety of interests at play for holy places in Israel, providing insights into the importance of accounting for divergent interests in the cultural heritage protection milieu. This article shall highlight the approaches used towards holy place protection in a difficult and complex context, Israel, to better understand heritage protection methods for unique or significant cultural sites in other regions.

In May 2021 a group of 96 classical antiquities was seized from Fordham University where they had formed part of their museum collection. The seizure was directly linked to the investigation by US authorities of objects that had been handled by the dealer Edoardo Almagià. The Fordham material was dominated by objects derived from Italy: Apulian, Campanian, and Paestan figure-decorated pottery; red-on-white ware associated with Crustumerium in Lazio; and Etruscan pottery, architectural terracottas, and terracotta votives. The objects were all donated to Fordham by William D. Walsh and had largely been acquired at auctions or through a narrow group of Manhattan galleries.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

International cultural heritage regimes such as the World Heritage Convention have faced increasing scrutiny with regard to the impact of heritage governance on local communities. An oft-posited solution to this problem is to increase the possibilities for these communities to participate in decisions that will potentially affect the heritage they live in, with, or around. For international lawyers, this discussion is usually framed through the lens of the right to take part in cultural life guaranteed by human rights law. This case note reflects on the Final Report of the International Law Association’s Committee on Participation in Global Cultural Heritage Governance, which analyzes the current state of the law on these issues and formulates several proposals for its future development. The case note underlines the potentialities of human rights-based approaches to heritage management and the importance of adopting a cross-sectoral approach to participation in international governance.

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 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.

Studies on antiquities trafficking have often been overshadowed by research looking at the trafficking of human beings, drugs, and weapons, a fact partly motivated by the arguably higher relevance and greater security implications involved in these other forms of illicit trade. However, the past decade of conflicts in the Middle East has revived an interest in the study of antiquities trafficking networks. 1 The association between the growing size of the illicit antiquities market and conflicts in the region did not go unnoticed by crime scientists and criminologists looking deeper at the relation between the trafficking of antiquities and transnational organized crime. 2

This article considers the fiftieth anniversary of the 1972 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention in light of climate change, offering a state of the field review of climate responses for World Heritage sites (WHS). Opening with a brief review of UNESCO World Heritage activities around climate change, we then detail the primary impacts and risks that climate change pose for WHS and the reporting and monitoring systems in place to document and track these impacts. Looking forward, we examine the most promising pathways for World Heritage to advance in the domains of climate mitigation, adaptation, climate communication, and climate action.

This article examines Indigenous peoples’ experiences with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention against the backdrop of their rights as recognized in the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and reviews the efforts of Indigenous peoples and human rights mechanisms to ensure respect for Indigenous peoples’ rights, cultures, and values in World Heritage sites. Although the Convention’s governing bodies have adopted policy and operational guidelines “encouraging” states parties to respect Indigenous peoples’ rights, many nomination, management, and protection processes of World Heritage sites continue to be marked by an exclusion of Indigenous peoples from decision making, a lack of respect for their relationship to the land, and disregard for their traditional livelihoods and cultural heritage. Human rights violations against Indigenous peoples continue to occur unabated in many sites and are in many ways enabled, and sometimes even driven, by decision making under the Convention. This article argues that there is an unacceptable disconnect between this Convention and the UN human rights system, with significant implications for the Convention’s and UNESCO’s credibility, and that a concerted effort should be made to align this UN Convention with the UNDRIP and the human rights purposes of the UN Charter and the UNESCO Constitution.