Parthenon Museum in Nashville Returns 500-Year-Old Mexican Artifacts

The Parthenon Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, is returning over 250 ancient Mexican artifacts this month after holding them for more than five decades.

The pre-Columbian tools, instruments, ceramic pots, and clay animal sculptures (including a grinning Mexican hairless dog) are being voluntarily returned to Mexico City by the museum following a special exhibition highlighting the effects of cultural looting in the art and antiquities trade.

“For Metro Parks, the repatriation of these artifacts is a cultural obligation as well as a moral responsibility,” Metro Parks director Monique Horton Odom said in a press statement. “These artifacts have value and meaning to the people of Mexico and should be housed where they will have a dynamic impact on understanding the people and culture of the past.”

Bonnie Seymour, a registrar and assistant curator at the museum, told NPR that returning the artifacts was important because they are a part of Mexico’s history. “They represent someone’s ancestors, and we’re not them,” she explained.

According to the New York Times, the donations were given to the museum from private collectors John L. Montgomery and Edgar York during the 1960s and ’70s. The artifacts were sold by farmers in western Mexico who mistook them for junk and offered them for low prices. Many of the artifacts were excavated without permission from officials. They were not on display at the Parthenon Museum.

Seymour led the museum’s repatriation effort, including researching the provenance of each artifact in the collection, finding a Mexican institution who would accept them, and consulting the Mexican Consulate in Atlanta.

On May 7, the Nashville Metropolitan Council passed an ordinance that allowed the Parthenon Museum to deaccession the collection of pre-Columbian artifacts and enable their repatriation to Mexico.

After the recent closure of the exhibition “Repatriation & Its Impact” on July 14, the pre-Columbian artifacts will be delivered to the Institute of Anthropology and History Museum in Mexico City.