“These basic points will not make any legal claims in Germany easier,” he said in an interview. A major hurdle for legal claims is the question of who can represent groups of peoples, tribes or families who owned the artifacts more than a century ago. Last year, Berlin’s state museums returned nine artifacts to indigenous groups in Alaska. The Humboldt Forum, a state-funded museum that is set to open this fall with large archaeological and ethnological collections, is at the center of the debate about restitution in Germany. It has drawn protests from activists who say the museum has not done enough to research the provenance of objects in its collection.

Source: New York Times March 15, 2019 15:11 UTC