Why nobody talks about restitution in natural history museums

The restitution of cultural property has become a hot topic. The Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets in 1998 breathed new life in the return of Nazi-looted art, and Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 speech in Ouagadougu and the 2018 Sarr-Savoy Report made the return of colonial loot a new priority. Ever since, the topic of restitution has become mainstream: the presence of stolen objects in the British Museum has become an official online meme, the video game Relooted lets players steal back plundered African artifacts, and museums grapple with restitution claims and colonial legacies. Did I say museums? I meant to say: cultural museums that house artworks, antiquities, or ethnological collections. Natural history museums, on the other hand, have barely been touched by the general turn to restitution. Why is that? Why does nobody talk about restitution in natural history museums?

Status Quo: Restitution and the Natural/Cultural Divide

I’ve been asking myself that question for a while now. When I started looking into the legal issues surrounding Burmese amber back in 2021, I soon found out that under international law, fossils (and other natural history specimens) are considered cultural property. Put differently, there is not much of a legal difference between a Roman bust, a Benin bronze, a Picasso, and a T. rex skull.¹ And yet, the issue of restitution has become so prevalent regarding ‘traditional’ cultural objects while leaving natural history collections virtually untouched. I felt strongly enough about this to write another blog post in March 2022 whose final section “Joining the Debates, Advancing the Cause” made a case for doing away which a natural/cultural divide that isn’t rooted in the law.

It was also around that time that I travelled to Vienna: to visit a friend, and to go back to my comfort museum. The Naturhistorisches Museum was my first natural history museum where my parents took me during a city trip back in 2011, and I go back every time I come to Vienna. When I went in February 2022, the square where the museum is located felt like the embodiment of the rift that I was perceiving in the restitution debate.

On Maria-Theresien-Platz, the Naturhistorisches Museum and the Kunsthistorisches Museum face each other. The architecture of both museums is almost identical (save some ornaments on the façades) but once you enter, you’re in the kingdom of nature or the realm of the arts, respectively. These museums are parallel but separate.

That impression stuck with me, and “A Tale of Two Museums” became an early working title of our paper on the return of colonial looted fossils which was ultimately published under the title “The Return of Fossils Removed Under Colonial Rule.” In the following years, I tried to push back against the exclusion of natural history specimens from the restitution debate. I explored the reasons behind the inclusion of fossils in the cultural property definitions of international law, we formulated a research agenda for the intersection between law and palaeontology, and I called out this “distinction without a difference” in a talk for the Museum für Naturkunde.

How We Got Here: Genealogy of a False Dichotomy

As I was arguing against this natural/cultural divide, I began to realise that I had never stopped to ask why it was there in the first place. An invitation to speak at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in June 2025 gave me a first excuse to look into that, and I spent the following months trying to figure out why natural history museums and cultural museums feel like such different, disconnected worlds—even though the law treats all of their objects as cultural property.

My answer has now been published as an article in the International Journal of Cultural Policy. It is titled “A Tale of Two Museums: Restitution and the Genealogy of the False Dichotomy between Natural History Museums and Cultural Museums,” and is my biggest contribution to the restitution debate across domains to date.

I trace the genealogy of the present-day museum landscape back to the eclectic cabinet of curiosities of the Renaissance which contained all kinds of objects but eventually disintegrated as the turn to taxonomy and rationalism drove different classes of objects into different collections. This is a history of progressive fragmentation, driven by a changing structure of knowledge and the desire to exercise control over the material world through the acts of collection, curation, and exhibition. The legal history of cultural property protection, on the other hand, has always applied a comprehensive scope that covered works of arts and sciences alike—on account of the special appreciation which humans have for them. These two process—one of fragmentation, one of consistent comprehensiveness—have brought us to a point where the law does not make a distinction between museum collections although they feel like entirely different worlds.

How I Got Here: 15 Years of Museum Visits

This is the first full article that I have written after starting my PhD, and yet, it feels like a culmination of many thoughts, observations, and experiences I’ve had in the past years. I finally got to use the title I had drafted after going to Vienna in 2022; I got to step back from the arguments that I had been repeating for years to better understand what I’m actually arguing against; and I got to draw on my impressions from my countless museum visits. The idea of a cabinet of curiosities breaking apart first came to my mind after I saw objects from the Gabinete Real de Historia Natural (dissolved in 1815) across all kinds of museums in Madrid, I’ve visisted most of the other museums that I use as examples thoughout the paper, and the Vienna example is the one driving my central argument home.

And in a sense, I’ve come full circle: from being a 12-year-old boy wandering what felt like neverending halls in the Naturhistorisches Museum in uncontainable awe and excitement, to a researcher trying to use the example of that institution to advocate for an integrated restitution debate that pursues justice and equity across all areas of cultural property.

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