During my seven years working at the American Association of Museums I was very closely engaged with the "antiquities wars." They make an interesting thought experiment--the same theoretical issues railroad preservation faces were being debated on a far larger stage, with stakes that included national pride and tactics that included criminal indictments.

Antiquities source countries argue that artifacts found in their soil are part of their cultural patrimony, and are best interpreted in the local context. There is logic to this argument. But after watching the antiquities debate for years, I came to feel that this theoretical argument for repatriation is ultimately very problematic.

Try running a simple thought experiment: waving away any practical difficulties, let's wave our magic wand and return everything to its source region. Now we have to go to Italy to see Renaissance art, to France to see impressionism, to China to see Ming Porcelin, and others have to come here to see Warhol.

I think everyone can agree that this is not what we really want. So there is clearly some pragmatic boundary to the "everything back to its home" argument. But devising a logical limit to the "everything belongs in context" argument is very hard, if not impossible. It seems to be all or nothing--either context trumps all other considerations, or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, than the THEORETICAL argument for repatriation starts to fall apart.

On another line of argument entirely, there is an interesting conversation in the art and antiquities world about risk mitigation. Some art comes from regions of the world in which the art itself will be under immediate threat of destruction through theft, neglect, or deliberate vandalism if it returns home. The perfect real-world example is representational art such as the Bamiyan Buddhas in Pashtun-Taliban controlled parts of Afghanistan. To return this art to its context, is, in the near term, a death sentence for it.

On the same lines, Hurricane Katrina prompted some serious though among art museums about natural disaster risk mitigation. The Ohr Okeefe Museum was an art museum in Biloxi dedicated to showing the pottery of artist Frank Ohr, the "mad potter of Biloxi." Art shown in context--just what we want, right? Well it seemed like a good idea until Katrina threatened to destroy the majority of the Ohr pieces in the entire world--because they were all concentrated at home in Bioxi.

So where does this leave us? There are good theoretical arguments for repatriation, chiefly having to do with the power of interpreting objects in context. But there are equally compelling practical boundaries to this theory-- one being making objects inaccessible to a broader audience beyond the home region, the other being risks of loss of patrimony through over-concentration in physical space, ie "all the eggs in one basket." So we end up back to where we started, with very little clarified. There reasons to repatriate. There are reasons not to. There is no magical theoretical solution that will tell us where every object "belongs".

So its back to the messy real-world issues of title, property rights, museum mission statements, and so on, where these issues are really sorted out on a case by case basis.

To my mind there is no one "right" answer. But there are right questions to ask. Is the artifact being well conserved and well interpreted? If not, let's work to get it to a better place--meaning, to a better state of preservation and conservation and interpretation. And that can mean moving the object, or not. It can mean a new custodian, or new resources and focus for the existing custodian. It can happen in its home region or outside of it. My concern ends up being with the artifact itself, and I have little interest any longer in where it physically is vs. where its "supposed to be"