Decolonizing Archaeological Epistemologies, 2025

Repatriating Meaning: The Benin Bronzes, Decolonial Pedagogy, and the Future of African Heritage in Public Space

The recent repatriation of the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria after decades of agitation marks a pivotal moment in the global discourse on restitution, historical justice, and decolonial museology. This paper critically engages the return of these artefacts not merely as a diplomatic gesture or curatorial correction, but as a decolonial pedagogical act with transformative implications for heritage, memory, and public space in Africa. Drawing on African philosophical perspectives on custodianship, memory and sacred objects, I explore how the return of looted cultural heritage can serve as a catalyst for rethinking the place of museums and heritage institutions in postcolonial societies.

My analysis foregrounds the symbolic and practical tensions surrounding the Benin Bronzes, particularly the competing claims of the Oba’s palace and state institutions, as well as the debates over where, how and by whom these artefacts should be exhibited. These tensions reveal broader questions about power, voice and legitimacy in heritage practices, and call for a shift toward community-based, Afrocentric and participatory approaches to restitution and display.

Situating this case within wider frameworks of decolonial theory, I argue that repatriation must be accompanied by epistemic reorientation: a move beyond the object-as-commodity or trophy, toward re-inscribing artefacts within their lived, cosmological and historical contexts. Ultimately, this paper proposes that African heritage spaces can evolve into critical sites of healing, activism and emancipatory knowledge production thereby countering extractive legacies and fostering futures rooted in dignity and cultural sovereignty.

Colonial Museum Exhibition Strategies: Rethinking Representation, Voice, and Resistance – Case Studies in Bangladesh

Museums in South Asia, including Bangladesh, often inherit and reproduce exhibition logics shaped by colonial epistemologies. These strategies, developed under British rule, constructed a visual regime that silenced subaltern voices, essentialized indigenous cultures, and glorified imperial power. This paper critically examines how these colonial exhibition strategies continue to shape museological practices in contemporary Bangladesh, and how they are being challenged, resisted, or reimagined.
Drawing on case studies from the Bangladesh National Museum (Dhaka), Varendra Research Museum (Rajshahi), and Chittagong University Museum (Dhaka), the paper traces the continuity of colonial-era display conventions—taxonomic object classification, heroic nationalist framing, and exclusion of marginal voices. While the Liberation War Museum adopts a postcolonial nationalist narrative, it too often sidelines regional, indigenous, and gendered experiences of war and resistance.
The paper explores how alternative curatorial practices—such as community-led exhibits, participatory oral history installations, and digital storytelling—are beginning to challenge these colonial frameworks. It also investigates efforts by independent curators and institutions to reclaim folk traditions, peasant memory, and suppressed histories (e.g., of famine, colonial policing, or anti-imperial peasant revolts).
The paper argues that a rethinking of museum representation in Bangladesh requires counter-colonial strategies that go beyond inclusion to restructure the curatorial voice, unsettle dominant historical timelines, and foreground erased perspectives. Ultimately, the paper calls for a museology of resistance—one that embraces plurality, contestation, and narrative justice.

Beyond the Artifact: Memory, Silenced Histories, and Resistance in Postcolonial Indian Museology

This paper examines how the Partition Museum and the Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti in India disrupt colonial museological frameworks by privileging silenced histories over artifact, memory over monument, and community experience over extractive spectacle. These two institutions reflect a counter-colonial shift in how material culture and public history are curated.
The Partition Museum mobilizes personal belongings, oral histories, and digital storytelling to centre the trauma of displacement, challenging conventional object-based epistemologies. Rather than showcasing treasure or conquest, it emphasizes loss, migration, and belonging, democratizing who gets to narrate the past. Similarly, Gandhi Smriti resists monumentalization by foregrounding the ethical and political legacies of nonviolence and civil disobedience. Through minimalism, experiential exhibits, and contextual storytelling, it reimagines the museum as a site of reflection and moral engagement, not artifact display.
Both institutions question what constitutes an “object” of value, shifting emphasis from static relics to intangible, affective, and narrative-driven forms of heritage. They suggest a museology rooted not in possession but in repair, memory, and resistance—aligning with broader calls to decolonize archaeological epistemologies. Drawing from ethnographic observation and curatorial interviews, this paper argues that these museums offer critical models for rethinking the status of the historical object, and for constructing more inclusive, postcolonial frameworks of public history and heritage.

Digital Activism and Decolonized Archaeology: Kenyan Gen Z’s Social Media Advocacy for Artifact Restitution

Colonial archaeological frameworks often frame African artifacts as global “treasures,” marginalizing local claims to cultural heritage. This paper examines how Kenyan Gen Z’s digital activism, particularly during the 2024 anti-Finance Bill protests, leverages social media to advocate for the restitution of looted African artifacts, challenging colonial museological norms. Using communication theory and content analysis of platforms like X and TikTok, it explores how youth connect colonial looting to ongoing socio-economic injustices, aligning with Panel 5 (digital approaches) and Panel 6 (restitution discourses). In Kenya, where colonial dispossession of land and culture remains contentious, digital campaigns amplify demands for returning artifacts held in European museums, redefining them as living heritage. This activism mirrors counter-colonial strategies by prioritizing community voices over Western academic narratives. By analyzing digital campaigns alongside historical restitution efforts, the study argues that social media fosters democratic, ephemeral approaches to archaeological collections, challenging extractive epistemologies. It contributes a Kenyan perspective to decolonizing archaeology, advocating for liberatory practices that empower communities to reclaim their past in the public eye, reshaping global heritage narratives.

Ritual Without Return: Decolonising the Desire for Repatriation

What if the call for repatriation, widely embraced as a form of historical justice, remains bound to the very colonial logics it claims to oppose? This paper challenges the assumption that the return of looted objects is inherently reparative. It asks how sacred life continues in the prolonged absence of ritual objects removed under colonial regimes, particularly in cases where return is impossible or undesirable. Focusing on temple icons taken from Odisha, India, many of which remain untraceable or permanently housed in museums abroad, it examines how communities sustain ritual authority, spiritual presence, and cosmological order without the object’s physical return. Rather than treating absence as rupture or loss, these practices assert a living epistemology grounded in ritual continuity. The paper proposes an ethics of non-return, resisting the demand to translate absence into legal, curatorial, or institutional frames. It critiques the ontological dominance of the artifact in heritage discourse and foregrounds ritual as a form of counter-colonial knowledge. Drawing from postcolonial memory studies, decolonial theory, and the anthropology of the sacred, the paper presents a South Asian case that reframes debates on restitution and repair. It argues that the desire for return may itself reproduce the extractive logics of museology and colonial possession. In its place, it calls for alternative forms of ethical presence rooted in refusal, endurance, and the sovereignty of ritual worlds. This rethinking invites a broader conversation on what it means to care for histories that remain materially unreturned but spiritually unforgotten.

Keywords: Ritual epistemology, Repatriation, Decolonial heritage, Sacred geographies, Archaeological absence

“Decolonizing the Narrative: Egyptian Antiquities Between Western Display and Local Voice“

This presentation explores the persistent colonial frameworks through which Egyptian antiquities are
interpreted, displayed, and consumed in major Western museums. Despite growing awareness of restitution debates, many institutions continue to present ancient Egyptian objects through narratives that prioritize aesthetics, exoticism, and discovery, while silencing the cultural, spiritual, and historical ties those objects retain within Egypt.

Using case studies from the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Neues Museum, the paper critically analyzes how object labels, exhibit arrangements, and digital platforms contribute to a museological discourse rooted in imperial extraction and epistemic domination. The framing of these objects as “artifacts,” “masterpieces,” or “universal heritage” decontextualizes them and obscures the histories of their removal and the communities they once belonged to.

In response, this presentation proposes a decolonial methodology that centers Egyptian voices—scholars, students, and local heritage activists—through initiatives of digital restitution, community-curated exhibitions, and bilingual interpretation strategies. By highlighting current projects in Egypt that use 3D scanning, augmented reality, and local storytelling, the presentation argues for an ethical shift in how ancient material culture is accessed and narrated.

Ultimately, this paper calls for a transformation in archaeological epistemology: from a system that privileges Western institutions and knowledge producers to one that recognizes the legitimacy of multiple ways of knowing, remembering, and relating to the past. In doing so, it contributes to broader efforts to make archaeology more democratic, inclusive, and accountable to the people whose histories it engages.”

The Archaeological Survey of India’s Epistemic Repairs: Reading the Interdependence of Ancient Architecture and a Modern Dam Project

Around the time UNESCO’s Nubian Campaign (1959-1980) reached its crescendo, India’s hydroelectric projects, notably, after its Independence in 1947, became the signposts of ‘modernity’ for the new nation.
One such project, the Srisailam Dam, constructed on the Krishna River in South India, emerged as a ‘modern crisis’ considering the displacement of numerous rural settlements and ancient temple structures ranging from the 6th to the 11th century. Responding to this crisis, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), founded in 1861 with its roots in imperial archaeology, was involved in executing the tasks of documenting, dismantling, and relocating these temples, along with the museumification of archaeological objects in the region.

Drawing from my fieldwork and archival research, this paper foregrounds questions that revolve around the methodological scope of archaeological evidence in the context of decolonisation. I posit two arguments. The first is how archaeological documentation and ancient monuments interdependently form an inclusive epistemic mechanism of their survival, which I discuss as an ‘archaeology of repair’. Second, how layers of photographs, drawings, maps, textual records and on-site developments constitute a ‘material community’, that open up possibilities to understand forgotten archaeological inventories and indexical records. Approaching repair and re-modifications as a ‘right to be known’, I view how these varied materials go beyond representing state power—instead as an entangled navigation of governmental mandates alongside public pressures, shaped by situational imperatives. I argue these entanglements, witnessed through the materials, are registers of both spectres of coloniality and forms of reclamations and restitution that lead to epistemic repairs in the field.

Contemporary Ndee (Apache) cultural protection and preservation activities not only continue to stress the need to respectfully and responsibly engage our past but are continually recognizing the limitations  of Western research methods and practice as defined outside of Tribal heritage preservation programs.  Our Tribal cultural heritage best management practices discuss how to protect and preserve Ndee cultural heritage resources. However, how do we actively apply such Tribal practices to in off trust land contexts do we move beyond over-reliance on non Ndee filed-based research while exerting Ndee sovereignty. This paper explores various ways the White Mountain Ndee are protecting their own culture, heritage and identity through our own cultural heritage best management practices.

“Curating Spirituality, Observing Sanctity: Reimagining Archeological Display in Living Islamic Sites”

The Fatimid Shrine of Yahya al-Shabih in Cairo (1154–60 CE), built over the bodies of Prophet Muhammad’s descendants, has undergone a recent conservation by Megawra | Built Environment Collective, a heritage management office based in Egypt. This two-year project has led to the uncovering of archeological remains of religious significance, including cenotaphs of revered Muslim walis (saints) dating to the tenth century. 

This paper presents the theoretical considerations and practical decisions made by the team during the curation of a permanent archeological exhibition within the shrine. It addresses the complexities of studying artifacts in a living heritage site that continues to receive visitors every day and is under the care of community members. Within such sites, uncovered objects resist colonial interpretations of material culture that assume an inherent neutrality and stagnant signification of historic objects. The paper also discusses our team’s negotiations with the shrine’s caretakers to ensure that our display respects the site’s sanctity. Visitors’ interactions with the display, which include the recitation of supplication prayers (du‘aa’) towards the uncovered objects, highlight the ability of archeological research to inspire deeper connections between indigenous communities and their material culture. Moreover, the presentation of the artifacts within their original context has reinspired local oral traditions and folktales, centering community stakeholders and reimagining the artifacts’ mediating role between the past and present.

Our research attempts to rethink dominant epistemologies in the study of material culture by offering new possibilities for artifactual “post-discovery” lives that are much richer and less alienating than traditional museum settings. It engages with broader debates on modern archeological ethics extending to other fields of indigenous archeology beyond the Islamic.

The Limits of Postcolonial Statehood in Central Asia and the Silk Road as Method

This paper argues that the modern state in Central Asia is not an indigenous outgrowth of regional political traditions but a carefully engineered Westphalian graft, one that imposes rigid territorial sovereignty onto a historically fluid and relational cultural landscape. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of archaeology, where material remains are routinely nationalised, catalogued, and interpreted through the lens of the modern nation-state. This process legitimises contemporary political borders and identities by projecting them backwards onto a premodern world that operated under very different epistemological and ontological assumptions.
The paper contends that true decolonisation in Central Asia must move beyond questions of restitution or representation and instead interrogate the deeper structures through which heritage is claimed, displayed, and understood. Drawing on decolonial thinkers, it introduces the concept of a Silk Road mentality, not as a romanticised or Eurocentric fantasy, but as a critical heuristic. This mentality evokes an alternative worldview: one marked by interconnectivity, mobility, cosmopolitanism, and non-territorial modes of belonging.
By contrasting dominant Western philosophical constructs with Islamic and Persianate intellectual traditions, the paper calls for a decolonisation of both historical consciousness and political subjectivity. In doing so, it reimagines archaeology that must be unbound from nationalist frameworks if it is to contribute meaningfully to a post-Westphalian understanding of cultural memory and regional identity.

Living Mounds, Speaking Ancestors: Reimagining Maidams Beyond Materiality in Assam, India

This paper critically challenges dominant frameworks that treat material culture—especially funerary sites and associated artefacts—as static “treasures,” often detached from their historical, cultural, and spiritual contexts. Focusing on the maidams of Assam, India—the burial mounds of the Ahom dynasty—the study contrasts popular historical narratives derived from textual sources with the ambiguities revealed through archaeological investigation.
For the Tai-Ahom community, maidams are not relics but sacred, living spaces that embody ancestral presence and cultural continuity. The tradition of erecting tumuli for the dead, still practiced in parts of the community, reflects the deep-rooted cultural and spiritual significance of these mounds. However, in processes of institutional heritage-making, maidams are increasingly reinterpreted as static monuments, culminating in their recent nomination as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2024. This transformation reflects a shift from living heritage to mnemonic monumentality—where material remnants are severed from present-day practices and meanings (Tilley & Rowlands 2006). Drawing on the longue durée perspective (Braudel 1960), and the concept of ‘archaeological traces’ (Joyce 2006), my work documents the lived histories of the structure. Based on archaeological as well as ethnographic fieldwork this paper re-imagines maidams not as inert archaeological data, but as dynamic, relational landscapes shaped by memory, ritual, and territorial identity. Building on my PhD research and long-term engagement with the site, this work aims to contribute to de-colonial archaeological epistemologies by destabilizing extractive narratives and affirming the maidams as living mounds where ancestors continue to speak.

Adivasi studies in North East India: New approaches to field-based research

The field of Adivasi or Tribal studies in Northeast India has evolved with a focus on inclusive, participatory, and reflexive approaches. Scholars are moving away from traditional and colonial perspectives to embrace more diverse and locally grounded research methods. This shift reflects theoretical advancements and a response to the region’s complex socio-political landscape. Northeast India is home to diverse Adivasi communities with unique languages, cultures, and histories. Historically, research in the region was influenced by colonial anthropology, often portraying tribal identities in a stereotypical manner. Contemporary Adivasi studies aim to challenge these narratives and offer perspectives grounded in local experiences and agency. Key aspects of the shifting methodologies in field-based research include participatory and collaborative research, community-led inquiry, oral testimonies, life histories, co-authorship with tribal intellectuals and activists, and decolonising ethnography. Emphasis is placed on indigenous knowledge, questioning outsider authority, restoring historical agency to Adivasi voices, and recognizing migration, displacement, transborder identities, ethnic assertion, resistance movements, autonomy demands, state policies, militarization, insurgency, indigenous ecological knowledge, conflicts over land rights, gender roles, Adivasi women’s agency, religious dynamics, and indigenous spiritual practices.
Rituals are viewed as cultural and political expressions, with notable works by scholars like Sanjoy Hazarika and Tanka B. Subba, grassroots documentation by tribal NGOs and community researchers, and a focus on informed consent, long-term engagement, ethical representation, and scholars reflecting on their positionality and power dynamics. New approaches in Adivasi studies in Northeast India prioritise respect, dignity, and justice in knowledge production, marking a moral and political shift in engaging with tribal societies.

Soft Power, Hard Control: Decolonizing Heritage Bans

Are heritage import bans preserving the past or entrenching colonial control? For decades, the U.S. and EU have implemented Cultural Property Agreements (CPAs) and import restrictions, framing them as shields against looting. Yet, what if these “protections” are sanctions in disguise, using soft power to put forward terms to source countries and marginalize descendant communities?

This paper reframes heritage bans as a “heritage sanctions” regime, a kind of diplomatic chess game mimicking arms-control logic. Analyzing the 2024 U.S.–India CPA and 2025 Jordan and Ecuador agreements, it exposes how these treaties tie cultural protection to aid packages, tourism deals or diplomatic leverage, neglecting communities like India’s Indigenous Adivasi or Jordan’s Bedouin, whose heritage is at stake. Using IR theories of soft power and norm contestation, I mix treaty text analysis with interviews from cultural-property negotiators to reveal how closed-door deals prioritize state agendas over decolonial ones. These negotiations risk turning restitution into permission, giving power to Global North gatekeeping.

Who controls access to the past, and who defines protection? This study challenges the myth that legal restitution is inherently decolonial, showing how sanctions-like policies preserve unequal power dynamics. It proposes treaty models that prioritize community-led negotiations and co-custodianship like Adivasi-led repatriation protocols to recover cultural sovereignty. Here, by putting together archaeology and global governance, this framework presents insights for making heritage diplomacy as a tool for justice and not control with implications for decolonial policy worldwide.

The Dutch National Museum of Antiquities, founded in 1818, holds one of the largest collection of Egyptian and Nubian archaeological material outside of Egypt. While the majority of the collection was acquired through the antiquities market, some objects were given to the collection by the Egyptian state. Indeed, database entries and text labels for such objects mention that Egypt had donated them, but the history of the transference of such objects is often more complex. They need contextualisation, sometimes found in undocumented accounts that are orally transmitted within the museum space, and from the museum’s correspondence kept in the archives of the museum and the Dutch National Archive.

In this paper I discuss the case of the so-called temple of Taffeh. The well-known narrative around this building highlights the donation of the temple by the Egyptian state to the people of the Netherlands as a token of gratitude for the Dutch contributions to the UNESCO campaign to salvage the archaeology of Nubia in the 1960ies. However, oral accounts and archived correspondence paint a picture of a complicated political situation and the competing interests of European states, which negotiated with the Egyptian government for the acquisition of archaeological finds. Through the efforts of the Dutch Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work, the Dutch Embassy in Egypt and the diplomatic connections of archaeologist Bryan Emery, the temple eventually went to Leiden.

The case study illustrates the entanglement of archaeology and cultural diplomacy between the Netherlands and Egypt. In addition, they challenge the way in which the narrative of the Egyptian state donation is reiterated.

From illegally obtained treasures to ethical objects of study: Recontextualising Looted Antiquities

This paper examines how looted archaeological objects are transformed from criminal commodities into celebrated cultural treasures, revealing the deep entanglement of artefactual value with colonial and extractive frameworks. In my research, I trace the journey of Apulian vases to Switzerland where they were discovered in a warehouse in Geneva, back to Italy, and then to Denmark where they are currently displayed. Based on my research, these objects can be recontextualised within the Daunian site of Arpi in the Foggia area of northern Puglia.

My research recontextualises these vases by analysing the multiple contexts they have inhabited: their findspot, which was part of the illegal art market, the production and use of the objects in antiquity, the looted landscape of Puglia, and the wider archaeological setting. Methodologically, the project combines interviews with Italian archaeologists with long-standing experience in the region, as well as the analysis of geographical data to trace looting patterns and site degradation. I also apply archaeological approaches such as attribution studies and landscape archaeology to situate the objects in relation to their material and historical environments.

In previous scholarship, the context and meaning of antiquities depend on and reinforce epistemologies that treat the object as inherently valuable, aesthetic, and disconnected from its social and material origins. By foregrounding these entanglements, I argue for a critical rethinking of how we classify, exhibit, and engage with looted object to move toward more relational, processual, and ethically grounded frameworks that enable the recontextualisation of looted artefacts without perpetuating the dynamics of the illegal art market.