This article explores the decolonization of heritage politics in 1970s Hong Kong. It firstly revisits recent scholars’ work on Hong Kong heritage politics and the transformation of Hong Kong’s cultural identity. It shows how people’s perceptions of their colonial heritage and history in Hong Kong have changed since the 1970s. Secondly, it outlines the city’s cultural heritage policy framework after the 1967 Riots, inspired by the Cultural Revolution. It analyses how the colonial government intentionally rebranded the city’s colonial heritage as an anachronism to justify its new narrative of Hong Kong and its cultural identity in the 1970s. It also employs the demolition of the former Kowloon Railway Station building in the 1970s as a case study to discuss how the colonial government decolonized local colonial structures through its new cultural heritage policy approach after the Riots. Finally, by employing the case study of the demolished Central Star Ferry Pier in the 2000s, this article argues there was a change in people’s perceptions of the city’s colonial history in the early postcolonial period of Hong Kong. A more active notion of Hong Kong’s cultural identity is also being articulated in the uncertain future due to the city’s recent rapid political and social changes influenced by the mainland authority.

The impetus for this study was a review of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) 86th Annual Meeting program in 2021. Finding that no single poster or presentation referenced looting or antiquities trafficking despite these issues being ethical considerations that all SAA members are expected to recognize, we sought to investigate whether this was an irregularity – perhaps due to the virtual format of the meeting – or whether it was more common than not. For a broader understanding of if, how, and where these topics are discussed by archaeologists outside of the SAA, we expanded the investigation and studied the archives of 14 other archaeological and anthropological conferences. The results of the study show that despite there being an overall increase in mentioning looting and antiquities trafficking at conferences, it remains a niche and infrequently discussed topic.1

This paper discusses some of the major ethical issues that arise in connection with the widespread holding of cultural heritage by private collectors. If, as many people believe, and UNESCO has affirmed, cultural heritage is, in some morally significant sense, everyone’s heritage, then the private acquisition of cultural heritage, although widely permitted in law, raises some significant ethical questions. I discuss the nature of the tension between public heritage and private ownership of heritage items and the possibility that more might be done by law to regulate the activities of private collectors before arguing the merits of a shift in the mindset of collectors from thinking of themselves as the unfettered owners of the heritage they acquire towards conceiving themselves primarily as stewards who protect and preserve that heritage on behalf of the wider community. There follows a detailed examination of practical ways in which collectors can discharge their stewardship role to the best effect, emphasizing, in particular, the fresh opportunities for doing so afforded to collectors by the new digital environment.

In this paper we present T. rex fossils as disruptive objects that can drastically influence the actions and reactions of humans that encounter them. We present a vision of the T. rex as being a key node within a web of human and object associations that ultimately produces, first, extreme desire in humans, and then a breakdown in human relationships resulting in disagreements, disputes, lawsuits, and the committing of crime. From there we bring these T. rex fossils into the concept of desirescape which sees a network of object/object and object/human reactions provoking irresistible desire in humans. We argue that this desire can push humans to violate law or social norms or, in several T. rex cases, sue each other. How then should we humans approach T. rex and other disruptive objects? Cautiously, and with the knowledge that these objects may be more powerful than we are.

This article focuses on the ancestral human remains of Indigenous peoples that were taken by European invaders during the colonial era. It begins by considering the notion of human remains. It then describes the two types of heritage that result from the removal of human remains: the tangible heritage made of the remains exhibited or stored in the museums or universities of former colonial States, and the intangible heritage made of the collective memories of the surviving communities and their descendants about the removal (and the absence) of the stolen remains. The article next examines the role of national and international laws with respect to the restitution of human remains by exploring the concept of transitional justice. This article argues that transitional justice can facilitate the meaningful repatriation of ancestral human remains and hence the healing of past injustice.

Sophie Vigneron, incoming editor of the International Journal of Cultural Property, interviewed Alex Bauer, who was the journal’s editor from 2003 to 2023. Alex is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Associate Director of the Sinop Region Archaeological Project, an interdisciplinary archaeological and heritage project on the landscapes and seascapes of the Black Sea coastal community of Sinop (Turkey).

While I believe that the authors, Emiline Smith and Erin Thompson, have legitimate concerns regarding the theft of cultural objects, I consider that, in the article “A Case Study of Academic Facilitation of the Global Illicit Trade in Cultural Objects: Mary Slusser in Nepal”, International Journal of Cultural Property (2023), 1–20, the authors present a number of serious misrepresentations.