Shared Group Identity

Over the past several years I have frequently encountered the view that repatriation of cultural objects is ethically the "right" thing to do. That is a claim loaded with philosophical nuances that have been, are being and will continue to be hotly debated. One might think that the views are consistent and polarized between two extremes, and typically that is true. There are cases, however, where one simply cannot find a logical and consistent thread.

The archaeological community has consistently supported repatriation of unprovenanced artifacts to countries of origin and heralds every known case of such, no matter how seemingly insignificant. It is a rare press report that does not identify even mundane artifacts as "priceless historical treasures". The return of even a few low grade and insignificant coins to the embassy of some foreign nation is often cause for an official ceremony with plenty of back-patting and media coverage. It is, after all, the preservation of cultural heritage at work -- is it not? Without going into a dissertation about what is or is not cultural heritage, it seems intuitively obvious that the most important form of any culture's heritage is that culture's ancestry. The human remains of any culture ought to greatly outweigh in significance any object created by those humans. Why then did the Society for American Archaeology and others file amici briefs arguing that Kennewick Man should not be returned to a native American tribe for burial?

A core element of the SAA brief was that the tribe seeking repatriation of Kennewick Man's remains failed to prove a "shared group identity" and thereby had no legitimate claim to the remains. The SAA argued, "even if it could be shown that contemporary Native American residents of an area were descended from earlier residents who lived in the same area 10,000 years ago, that in itself would not be sufficient to show shared group identity between modern tribes and ancient remains or objects." This is a 180 degree turn-about from the view that comes from archaeologists who work in the classical field. Where is the shared group identity between modern day Turks and the Greek people who produced coins in autonomous Anatolian cities during the Roman era? Does the failure to return coins of this type to the Turkish government constitute a deprivation of cultural heritage? Is it the right thing ethically to repatriate artifacts without direct cultural connection, but not human remains?

The court decided in 2004 that a cultural link had not been met and that scientists (archaeologists) did not have to repatriate the Kennewick Man remains. If the remains of a Native American who had been buried for some 5,000 to 8,000 years have no cultural link to modern Native Americans now living in that region, then surely the coins mentioned above cannot be considered the cultural heritage of Turkey. Of course Turkey is only one of many countries that today are populated by people with no shared group identity to those who struck coins at the same geographical place in antiquity. The inconsistency of arguments in these two cases illustrates all too well it seems that the ethics and principles that are highly touted as a basis for action are really secondary to the ends being served by the arguments.