Posted on: June 17, 2020 by Elizabeth Pearson
The destruction of 46,000-year-old sacred Aboriginal rock shelters in Western Australia has prompted a national inquiry and calls for urgent reform of Indigenous cultural heritage law. During a mine expansion project, Rio Tinto detonated explosives in the Juukan Gorge in May, destroying two deep cave sites of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura People (PKKP). […]
Posted on: July 8, 2019 by Emily Gould
A fascinating day was enjoyed by all who braved London’s hottest day so far this year to attend IAL’s latest Study Forum held on 29th June. Topics ranged from the origins of modern copyright law to international laws on restitution to the treatment of human remains. Dr Elena Cooper (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, CREATe) gave a […]
Posted on: March 4, 2019 by Rebecca Hawkes-Reynolds
Laws and guidance notes are rarely retrospective as this would go against fairness and justice. As regards laws such as the Treasure Act 1996 and guidance notes dealing with human remains and archaeological excavation, however, many archaeologists, Anglo-Saxon specialists and museum curators probably wish that they could be. Hansons Auctioneers recently announced it would be […]
Posted on: March 4, 2016 by Emily Gould
Last week I was musing on the way in which the same themes seem to pervade many different areas of the shady world of art crime. Continuing along this track, I wanted to offer a few thoughts on the role technology is increasingly playing here, from revealing forgeries to assessing damage from looting. While scientific […]
Posted on: November 6, 2015 by Richard Harwood QC
“Alas poor William… or whoever.” There is a local tradition that a skull in a vault in St Leonard’s Church, Beoley (which is now part of Redditch) is that of William Shakespeare. Two late Nineteenth Century articles said that Dr Frank Chambers, a local doctor, heard at a dinner at Ragley Hall in 1794 that […]
Posted on: November 5, 2015 by Ruth Redmond-Cooper
A One-Day Conference Saturday, 28 November 2015 9:30 am to 5:00 pm NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY, LONDON CAMPUS 1 SUFFOLK STREET, LONDON SW1Y 4HX (NEXT TO TRAFALGAR SQUARE) Including the following presentations: Litigating street art: the story of the Folkestone Banksy and its return from America Tim Maxwell, Partner, Boodle Hatfield LLP Keeping it “street”: the […]
Posted on: October 29, 2015 by Ruth Redmond-Cooper
We are happy to announce an upcoming one-day conference to be held in London on 28th November 2015 entitled Recent Developments in Art and Cultural Property Law (pdf flyer here). The conference will cover a number of new and exciting legal trends in the area involving: the new sentencing guidelines for heritage crimes the new Museums Association Code of […]
Posted on: September 7, 2015 by Alexander Herman
There was a story this morning in the Guardian which once again brought to light the requests by Ethiopia for the return of the remains of one of the country’s royal princes, Prince Alemayehu, currently buried at Windsor Castle near London. The young prince had been brought to England in 1868 following the destruction of the Abyssinian fortress town of Magdala at […]
Posted on: July 1, 2015 by Alexander Herman
An article published on 18 June 2015 in the scientific weekly Nature has given the world a new appreciation of the origins of the human remains known as ‘Kennewick Man’. The remains were discovered in the State of Washington in 1996 and preliminary studies showed that Kennewick Man was roughly 9,000 years old and had no noticeable morphological connection […]
Posted on: April 15, 2015 by Alexander Herman
A book has recently been published by the team from Leicester University that uncovered the bones of Richard III in a Leicester car park in February 2013. Entitled The Bones of a King: Richard III Rediscovered, it was written by the Greyfriars research team with Maev Kennedy and Len Foxhall. Of course we have commented on […]