Despite its name, this sandstone slab is not a simple stone. It was once part of a monument, an ancient epigraph measuring three by three metres carrying about 50 lines of text.
U.S. laws on the repatriation of Indigenous artifacts and remains still uphold inequities in the relationships between Indigenous people and the agencies holding their materials.
In addition to destroyed buildings, there’s an entire underground world – filled with untold numbers of artifacts, bones and ruins – that are exposed and damaged by the digging of trenches.
The elephant in the room is the existing legal framework, forged in period of decolonisation and diminishing western influence, that forbids the repatriation of antiquities.
Especially in a time when trust in political leaders and institutions wanes, arts leaders, patrons, policymakers and artists face daunting but critical questions about the value and role of artists.
From ill-thought renovation schemes to the latest row over the repatriation of the Parthenon marbles, this is not the first time the British Museum reckons with a custodianship crisis.
The Victorian Supreme Court has determined the descendants of Ned Kelly’s family are not a distinctive cultural group with the right to protections of their ‘intangible cultural heritage’.
The final Indiana Jones movie is coming out June 30. The fifth in a series over 42 years, many of its ideas are taken from 19th-century orientalist and racist archaeology.