A protest museum tour of the British Museum organised by BP or not BP? in 2018.
ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo
The British Museum is celebrating recovered items in its new exhibition, but it continues to refuse to return historically looted items in its own collection to countries of origin.
(Left to right) A Roman shield, a copper alloy Roman legionary helmet, an iron sword with gilded bronze scabbard, a suit of parade armour made from crocodile skin and a bronze head depicting the first Roman emperor, Augustus.
Yale University Art Gallery/British Museum
There are some incredible rare finds on show at this exhibition but it fails to depict a more diverse life in and around Rome’s armies.
Looted ornaments from the Asante empire are held in several European museums.
Victoria & Albert Museum
A loan deal for the Asante artefacts offers an opportunity for these objects to return home.
Visitors walk by the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum.
Shutterstock/IR Stone
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.
Lady Li, unknown artist, circa 1876.
Harp Ming / British Museum
Curators have concentrated on the small and everyday to communicate a sense of life in 19th century China.
Interior of the British Museum.
MarkLG/Shutterstock
Translators work has historically received little acknowledgement.
Increasingly, the mood in the UK is leaning towards repatriating the Parthenon Marbles.
Justin Norris/Creative Commons
An international legal expert explains why the Greeks are right to be wary of the British Museum’s offer to loan them the Parthenon marbles.
The Parthenon Marbles collection on display at London’s British Museum.
Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
The British Museum appears close to a decision on returning the Elgin marbles – here’s how it might navigate the legal challenges.
This wooden dish from Broome, pre-1892, was made by Yawuru people, collected by police and later presented by the Commissioner of Police, Colonel Phillips, to the WA Museum.
Courtesy of the WA museum
A spear-thrower, a shell, a bowl, a vase, a bucket. Five very different items tell us much about the history of collecting, the role of Indigenous experts and the shadow of colonial violence.
Takashi Images/Shutterstock
Understanding the different types of visitors and how they navigate museums can help these institutions reopen safely.
One of Britain’s great cultural institutions: the British Museum in London.
Claudio Divizia via Shutterstock
The government must respect the arm’s-length principle which ensures institutions like the British Museum are independent from government control.
A mummy of the Ancient Egyptian Priestess “Tamut” (900 BC) on display at British Museum in London, in 2014.
EPA/Facundo Arrizabalaga
The power to select, name and decide the meaning of these items makes Europeans the authors of African history.
Hoa Hakananai'a.
Wikimedia
The indigenous Rapa Nui say the statue is one of their most spiritually important.
One of the plundered Benin plaques, at the British Museum.
Shutterstock.
Colonial powers plundered the heritage of countries all over the world – restitution is long overdue.
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What’s needed is a comprehensive international strategy to combat the illicit trade in antiquities.
Ethiopian books and other materials, such as this ancient Bible, are in great demand.
Shutterstock
For Ethiopia, there is no connection between the Maqdala war in 1868 and the stolen treasures at Maqdala
Danny Lawson/PA
An ivory ban in the US had a series of unintended consequences.
Aboriginal elder Major Sumner sits outside Liverpool’s World Museum with a box containing the skull of an Australian indigenous person, taken from Australia between 1902 and 1904.
Phil Noble/Reuters
The question of repatriating objects is clearly more complex than returning human remains. It needs more debate, and more creative interventions to move beyond the current impasse.
Detail of Mungurrawuy Yunipingu (Gumatj), Macassan Prau 1946.
Berndt Collection, Berndt Museum, The University of Western Australia
For centuries, fishing fleets from Sulawesi regularly visited Australia in search of trepang. Their visits were recorded orally and have been depicted in detailed artworks.
Shell Necklace, Displayed at the Great Exhibition, London, 1851. Maireener shell and fibre. Oyster Cove, Tasmania, before 1851
© The Trustees of the British Museum.
It hovers uneasily between being a fine-art exhibition showing the diversity and sheer visual and sociocultural potency of contemporary Australian visual art practice, and an older-style ethnographic survey.