Whose Artifact Is It?
For years, the Greek government has tried to get the British Museum to return to Athens various antiquities — most famously the Elgin Marbles — that Greece and others believe were inappropriately removed in the early 19th century. And this year, two of the most prominent museums in the United States — the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum — find themselves in increasingly messy debates over whether some priceless items in their collections were once stolen from collections in Italy.
With less public attention, three universities are enmeshed in international disputes over significant holdings in their collections. Italian authorities maintain that two ancient Greek vases at the Princeton University Art Museum were illegally taken from Italy. Peru is threatening to sue Yale University for the recovery of artifacts from Machu Picchu. And a group of terrorism victims who have been suing Iran for damages are now trying to obtain ownership of invaluable objects currently in a museum at the University of Chicago.
Debates over the ownership of objects in museum collections are not new, of course. And many American college museums have returned to Native American tribes artifacts or bones that were collected over the years. Some experts believe that the cases in the news this month suggest that some academic museums may soon have their hands full with international ownership disputes.
“The visibility of these cases means that more people are going to be dealing with them, and we all need to be talking about this,” said Lisa Hanover, president of the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries.
Others warned that universities and other museums shouldn’t assume that having dealt with the issue of Native American artifacts will allow them to handle these conflicts with ease. “It’s some of the same core ethical issues, but the international context makes it much, much more complicated,” said Alex Barker, chair of the ethics committee of the Society for American Archaeology, who stressed that he was speaking for himself and not that panel.
The cases at the three universities show some of the complexities in that the disputes all involve art that is of great scholarly and artistic importance — and to the extent that there are “bad guys” in these stories, they are people who are either not at the universities, not alive, or both. But that doesn’t mean the universities don’t face a messy situation....
Read entire article at Inside Higher Ed
With less public attention, three universities are enmeshed in international disputes over significant holdings in their collections. Italian authorities maintain that two ancient Greek vases at the Princeton University Art Museum were illegally taken from Italy. Peru is threatening to sue Yale University for the recovery of artifacts from Machu Picchu. And a group of terrorism victims who have been suing Iran for damages are now trying to obtain ownership of invaluable objects currently in a museum at the University of Chicago.
Debates over the ownership of objects in museum collections are not new, of course. And many American college museums have returned to Native American tribes artifacts or bones that were collected over the years. Some experts believe that the cases in the news this month suggest that some academic museums may soon have their hands full with international ownership disputes.
“The visibility of these cases means that more people are going to be dealing with them, and we all need to be talking about this,” said Lisa Hanover, president of the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries.
Others warned that universities and other museums shouldn’t assume that having dealt with the issue of Native American artifacts will allow them to handle these conflicts with ease. “It’s some of the same core ethical issues, but the international context makes it much, much more complicated,” said Alex Barker, chair of the ethics committee of the Society for American Archaeology, who stressed that he was speaking for himself and not that panel.
The cases at the three universities show some of the complexities in that the disputes all involve art that is of great scholarly and artistic importance — and to the extent that there are “bad guys” in these stories, they are people who are either not at the universities, not alive, or both. But that doesn’t mean the universities don’t face a messy situation....