Saving Antiquities for Everyone

The Cambridge University Yemen Society is hosting an online event regarding Yemen's Cultural Heritage: Threats and Solutions this Thursday. Hope to see you there!

"Saving Antiquities for Everyone firmly condemns these threats and any intentional targeting of cultural heritage sites in Iran. The impact of devastated cultural heritage goes well beyond the loss of history and context of the site itself. Purposefully targeting and destroying cultural heritage sites during times of conflict is directly linked to the financing of terrorist organizations, most recently ISIS, across the Middle East and North Africa through antiquities trafficking."

"Two artefacts, linked to one of the world’s largest smuggling rings, have been repatriated to India through a joint US-UK operation. http://ow.ly/v5Be50vzLhU

"It has now been discovered that the mask was brought to France after the Second World War by the world-renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and sold at auction in 1951 to collector Pierre Vérité. His son, Claude Vérité, inherited it and offered the mask at Christie’s, according to another collector, Pierre Amrouche. Mr. Amrouche, who lives in Paris and Togo, says Claude gave it to him in 2017, after which he kept it in his Paris living room." http://ow.ly/F2Gt50vtC6H

"Involving a foreign museum and no direct claimant, the Beothuk repatriation is a particularly twisting example of the work required if Indigenous people, museums and governments are to undo the decades of colonial treasure hunting and voracious archeological digging that deposited human bones in institutions across Canada and abroad. From Victorian collectors who considered a skull an exotic bibelot to 20th-century archeologists who uncovered the evidence of human habitation in North America dating back thousands of years, there is nothing new about gathering up old bones. What is new, however, is that museums and universities have changed their attitudes and no longer want to keep the hoard." http://ow.ly/zeEg50vtC3H