From the British Museum in London to the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin, museums across Europe are filled with precious ancient artifacts sourced from around the world. But how those artifacts actually ended up in the collections of these museums is, more often than not, connected to stories of colonial conquest, war and violence – something that up until relatively recently was largely forgotten or ignored. But two professors are hoping to change that. 

Dan Hicks is an archeology professor at the University of Oxford, Bénédicte Savoy is an art historian based at Technische Universtiät Berlin, and together they are working on a project funded by the Oxford Berlin Research Partnership. 

The project is called The Restitution of Knowledge and aims to uncover, document, and share the knowledge of the unjust means by which many of these artifacts came to be sitting in European museums. We discuss what their research has uncovered, what it means for museums, and what they think should happen to the objects that have been found to have been taken in illegitimate ways