Across the world, museums, universities, governments, and private collectors are being asked difficult questions: Who owns the past? Who has the right to display it? And what does justice look like when an object—or an ancestor—has been taken far from home?
Discovered in 1908 at the Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete, the Phaistos Disc remains one of archaeology’s most stubborn mysteries. The small clay disc is stamped with 241 symbols arranged in spirals on both sides, including human figures, animals, tools, weapons,...
Artifact Watch—More than 3,900 years after it was created, this remarkable artifact has finally returned home. After a year-long investigation, Cyprus has successfully reclaimed an ancient ceramic vessel dating to approximately 1900 B.C. The engraved black-polished...
Four Hawaiian cultural artifacts are finally making the journey home. The Martha's Vineyard Museum has agreed to return a traditional canoe, poi pounder, tapa cloth, and grass skirt to Hawaii following a repatriation request from Hui Iwi Kuamo'o, a Native Hawaiian...
When I prepared to release my second novel featuring Latina protagonist Victoria Barrón, I expected the usual publishing challenges: marketing, discoverability, visibility. What I did not expect was discovering that Amazon KDP does not have a dedicated category for...
On January 7, 2026, news broke that the United States repatriated seven ancient Egyptian objects that had been seized years earlier by U.S. authorities. The list wasn’t flashy in the way blockbuster museum icons are, but it mattered: pieces like a mummified fish and a...
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons In the early twentieth century, few figures loomed larger over American anthropology than Aleš Hrdlička. (I admit, I’m still working on the pronunciation). As curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution,...
For much of the twentieth century, archaeology in North America operated within a reassuringly narrow window. The prevailing view held that humans arrived near the end of the last Ice Age, roughly 13,000 years ago, spreading rapidly across the continent once...
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