The debates on the ownership of contested cultural objects bring forth questions regarding the representation of history. But might these debates also lead to the fabrication of history? Previous research has analyzed how the British Museum’s anti-restitution position contributes to its distortion of British (Museum) history. Instead, this article considers if – and, if so, how – history is distorted to argue for restitution. It examines the eulogized publication The Brutish Museums (2000) by Oxford professor Dan Hicks asking whether his claims regarding British mass atrocities in the conquest of Benin in 1897 can be substantiated by the documentary evidence. The investigation shows that this is not the case. The article also scrutinizes what the source material reveals about the death toll of the events of 1897. The results of the inquiry question oversimplified notions about culprits and victims in the wake of colonial conquest. It is argued that an incomplete understanding of the past impairs efforts to repair past wrongs and that questions about the ownership of colonial collections could productively be linked with questions about the representation of history, such as whose and which histories are told – or not – through contested objects.

During the Syrian war, many archaeological sites were subjected to systematic looting and destruction, often on a massive scale. Among the casualties of this looting is a colossal basalt statue of a lion that was located at the archaeological site of Ain Dara in northwest Syria. The lion of Ain Dara is a prominent local symbol and of great importance for the collective memory of northwest Syria, especially for the people of Wadi Afrin. Its disappearance will also have serious repercussions for the local economy as it was, in the past, an important tourist attraction. In this article, we investigate how the statue was stolen, why it was stolen, and where it is now. By using the lion statue of Ain Dara as a case study, we aim to shed more general light on the networks responsible for looting and trafficking Syrian antiquities, the factors that have enabled their growth during the conflict, and the role of civil society organizations in reducing their harmful impact on the cultural community of the Syrian people.

The so-called “Prakhon Chai Hoard” is one of Southeast Asia’s most infamous cases of looting. The story begins in 1964 when a cache of Buddhist bronzes from Northeast Thailand appeared on the international art market via the auction house Spink & Son, London. They quickly ended up in museums and private collections throughout the US and Europe. The exact findspot was unclear but soon became associated with an unidentified temple in Prakhon Chai district in Buriram province. The moniker “Prakhon Chai Hoard/bronzes” subsequently took hold, becoming commonplace in museum displays, dealer/auction house catalogs, and art historical discourse. However, in 2002, it was revealed the temple in question was Plai Bat II in Lahan Sai district.

This article untangles the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding this act of looting. It does so by reviewing the extant literature in light of information revealed by criminal investigations into the late Douglas Latchford from 2012 onwards, and presenting conclusions drawn from our decade-long documentation of villager testimonies at Plai Bat II (2014–2024).

The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage is designed to secure the protection of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) worldwide.1 The Convention aims to safeguard and ensure respect for ICH of communities, groups, and persons and promote awareness of their significance and international protection in that regard.2 The Convention outlines intangible cultural heritage (ICH) in terms of oral traditions and expressions, including, but not limited to, epics, tales, and stories, and performing arts categories such as music, song, dance, puppetry, and theatre. Other forms of ICH under the Convention include social practices, rituals, and festive events. In its inherently nuanced nature, ICH also includes knowledge and practices relating to nature and the universe. In these categories are folk medicines, folk astronomy, and various natural phenomena. ICH’s wide and nuanced ambit encompasses traditional craftsmanship as well as the sites and spaces in which culturally significant activities and events occur.3 ICH forms part of the daily life and lived realities of people in virtually all parts of the world. It is the beliefs and perspectives, ephemeral performances, and events that are not tangible objects of culture, such as monuments or paintings. ICH is often described as the underlying “spirit” of a cultural group,4 which cannot be detailed in all subtleties.

This article examines how Indigenous Peoples who depend on World Heritage sites for their culture and livelihood can appeal to the Committee when State Parties fail to comply with their obligations. While scholars criticize the World Heritage Convention for the lack of participation of Indigenous Peoples, particularly in the inscription and management processes, the framework of the Convention also allows representation and visibility. Indeed, compliance mechanisms offer opportunities for Indigenous advocates to negotiate Land sovereignty and environmental protection. TWAIL, which places the worldview of Indigenous Peoples at the center of legal practice, is crucial to understanding the interactions between Indigenous Peoples and the 1972 UNESCO Convention. TWAILers highlight how international law historically denies sovereignty rights to Indigenous Peoples. Article 6(1) echoes this absence of sovereignty. This article examines three cases in which Indigenous advocates petition to protect Native Lands against environmental degradations and colonization: Kakadu, Wood Buffalo, and Uluru. Ultimately, the challenges of Indigenous activists in their quest to preserve nature and culture reveal that the absence of sovereignty prerogatives remains a substantial issue. While the Convention provides a venue for advocacy and international awareness, Indigenous Peoples still must negotiate Land autonomy and cultural sovereignty with the State.

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.