![]() ![]() The rhetoric is that they are part of the story which the communities in London and visitors representing all the cultures of the world continue to benefit from. The British Museum has long justified its continued possession of the Parthenon Sculptures with reference to how its stewardship since 1817 has enhanced their intrinsic aesthetic and cultural value. These museums exhibit artifacts from a variety of cultures alongside each other for a comprehensive overview that contributes to a cross-cultural interpretation of a set of universal cultural values unconfined by borders. The idea of the universal museum was part of the aspiration of the Enlightenment to ensure public access to artistic achievements of the present and the past. The dispute has implications for understanding the role of the universal museum in our society and of encyclopaedic museums in the west. Restitution claims for their return have been forthcoming since 1835, and in 1983 an official claim was made against the UK government. They symbolize the essence, aspirations, and sacrifice of the Greeks, as Melina Mercouri declared at the Oxford Union on June 12, 1986. The Parthenon Marbles continue to stoke debate about the return of valuable and sacred cultural property and heritage. The IDA expects the reconstructions based on scans obtained in April 2022 to be high quality even without access to the top and back edges of the stonework. It wants to ensure that these decisions are taken even-handedly. ![]() The IDA announced its intention to seek an injunction to order the British Museum to allow scanning to raise public awareness about the decision-making process concerning access and the making of the scans. The British Museum’s refusal to collaborate with a recent proposal by the Institute of Digital Archaeology (IDA), one of the UK’s top organizations for heritage preservation, came to the attention of the public at the end of March 2022. Pressure has been mounting on the British Museum to permit 3-D scans of the Parthenon Sculptures as a form of digital reunification to return the originals to Greece, where a “robot sculptor” would carve near-perfect replicas of the original set. Successful digital restitution provides a way to visualize and study a collection in a comprehensive manner. It reassembles and consolidates the cultural material and associated records that originate from the same location or that share a common provenance. In 2020, the Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni declared that the ancient masterpiece’s displacement from Greece was a “blatant act of serial theft … motivated by financial gain.”ĭigital reunification is a digitized representation of scattered artifacts and archival records in physically dispersed heritage collections. To explore this ethical dilemma, this article examines the case of the Parthenon Sculptures housed in the British Museum for the past two centuries. Moreover, digital technology on its own cannot unlock the full meaning of the sacrifice heritage embodies. For the question of rightful ownership and custody, however, access is not the appropriate determinant. Digital technology could widen public and research access to information about or images of cultural property and heritage that had been removed. The physical forms of cultural heritage encompass material or corporeal artifacts and even digital artifacts, but the intangible heritage is embodied in people and the generations they give life to. What role can digital technologies play in tackling the issue of stolen cultural heritage and questions about restitution and repatriation? Reports in digital media regularly suggest that virtual reality, 3-D printing, and related technologies could render the physical location of ancient artifacts less important and prompt the imagining of “a new kind of museum.” Ancient sculptures can be recreated in 3-D through LiDAR scanners or even replicated in the same stone as their originals with stone-carving robots. It is therefore worthwhile to consider this issue in a more creative, even “global” manner. This process, however, would be costly and time-consuming if applied to every contentious item. To determine whether a museum is justified in keeping an individual collection item, provenance research may be undertaken to establish several factors such as: the conditions under which an individual object was collected from and by whom it had been taken in the ownership chain from where the item had been removed and how long it had been in that location. A vast corpus of museum collections around the world contain items that were stolen, looted, or smuggled from their original sources and owners.
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