CfP “Natural Heritage as Cultural Property”

Created on July 28, 2026

2026

I have been researching the legal regulation of palaeontology for a few years now, and one of the things that have struck me from the beginning and continue to frustrate me is that natural history specimens, collections, and museums keep getting disregarded in debates about the protection of cultural property. It is for that reason that I am all the more excited to announce that, together with my supervisor Donna Yates, I will be editing a special issue in the International Journal of Cultural Property that tries to bring these two worlds in contact with each other.

Our special issue is titled “Natural Heritage as Cultural Property. Legal and social dimensions to the collection, display, and sale of natural history specimens.” With it, we want to put natural history specimens and collections on the radar of cultural property discussion and hope for contributions from scholars from different fields, world regions, and career stages.

Download the CfP here or read it below—and if you have questions about it, please reach out to me!

Contemporary discourses concerning cultural property have focused on that which is easily defined as ‘cultural’: artworks and antiquities, sacred artifacts, perhaps ancestral human remains or ethnological collections. The predominance of decidedly human-made objects within this field and overshadow other categories of objects that have a strong cultural component to their collection, preservation, study, and valuation. Natural history specimens are one such overlooked class of heritage object. They are held in museums, traded on the market, governed by law, and prised by humanity, and yet are nearly absent from our academic and practical conceptions of cultural property.

In its first sub-paragraph, Article 1 of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property defines “Rare collections and specimens of fauna, flora, minerals and anatomy, and objects of palaeontological interest” as cultural property. Despite having a front-row seat in such an influential legal definition of cultural property, natural history objects such as fossils, minerals, taxidermies, or botanical collections appear only rarely in over five decades of academic inquiry into cultural property. Natural history museums remain largely unaffected by many of the legal and political issues of ownership, stewardship, conservation, and justice which have begun to concern museum staff, civil society, and governments in the Global North and Global South alike. Palaeontologists, geologists, and natural history specialists are never invited to the countless academic and IGO-sponsored workshops and conferences that have proliferated in the cultural property field. Natural history has not been invited to the table.

This uneven distribution of attention is unjustified and perplexing. Natural history has been entwined with colonial agendas, and more and more restitution claims target natural history museums. Moreover, the market for natural history objects continues to expand, with prices for especially fossils and meteorites growing into the millions. The resulting demand for provenance research into these types of objects calls for the development of more specialist expertise. This is even more pertinent since both licit and illicit channels fuel this emerging market.

This theme for the 2027 volume of the International Journal of Cultural Property puts a spotlight on natural history specimens and collections as an important category of cultural property. We invite contributions that discuss issues of cultural property protections such as crime, provenance research, or restitution in the context of natural history as well as theoretical pieces that reflect on relationship between natural history specimens and ‘traditional’ cultural objects. We also invite research into the legal and social dimensions of natural history specimens as cultural objects.

We encourage submissions from scholars in all career stages and world regions, and from multiple disciplines with a connection to cultural heritage and from the natural sciences.

The call for papers welcomes proposals on the following topics:

  • Collecting natural history in contexts of injustice (e.g., colonial rule, military occupation)
  • Theft, fraud, trafficking, and other crimes related to natural heritage objects
  • Studies into demand, ownership, transfer, and the market for natural history specimens
  • Restitution of natural history specimens and collections
  • The relationship between conceptions of natural and cultural heritage in the context of moveable objects
  • Definition(s) of cultural property
  • Provenance research in natural history collections
  • Unlawful excavations in archaeology and palaeontology
  • Interactions between cultural heritage law and biodiversity law
  • Ownership disputes over palaeontological and geological specimens
  • Cultural, spiritual, or economic value of natural history specimens and collections

Submission details

The publication will be a theme of the International Journal of Cultural Property, an international peer-reviewed journal published by Cambridge University Press.

Deadline for submission of a 300-word abstract for either articles or case notes: 31 October 2026

Please send your proposal, including your name, contact information, short biography, and the title of the proposal, to Paul Stewens (paul.stewens@maastrichtuniversity.nl). By 16 November 2026, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for peer review.

The deadline for submitting the article for peer review is 28 February 2027. Full drafts should be around 8,000 words (including endnotes and references) for articles and 3,000 words for case notes. They will be anonymously peer-reviewed following the process outlined here. Please follow the instructions for authors.

Should you have any further questions about this theme of the IJCP please contact the Guest Editor at paul.stewens@maastrichtuniversity.nl.

Paul P. Stewens, Affiliated Researcher, UNESCO Chair in Cultural Heritage and Emerging Crime, Maastricht University

Prof Donna Yates, Chair, UNESCO Chair in Cultural Heritage and Emerging Crime, Maastricht University