The United States Federal Bureau of Investigations’ Art Crime Team is seeking help in tracing the origin of thousands of items recovered from the home of an amateur archaeologist and anthropologist in 2014, and believed to have been looted from sites around the world. The objects were found following a tip-off in 2013, that led the Bureau to the home of Don Miller, a 91-year-old former Manhattan Project physicist who had amassed a collection of around 42 000 items over seven decades from all around the globe. While the majority of these items are believed to have been obtained legally, with Miller regularly opening up his collection to schools and other visitors, some items were not on public display and around 7000 have been identified as having come from illegal sources or been looted by Miller himself, including around 500 sets of Human remains, the majority of which are thought to have come from Native American burial grounds in the USA.
Artefacts on display at Don Miller's farm in 2014. For more than seven decades, Miller unearthed cultural artefacts from North America, South America, Asia, the Caribbean, and in Indo-Pacific regions such as Papua New Guinea. FBI.
The FBI team, which was headed by Special Agent Tim Carpenter, established a facility to process the recovered material, much of which was ancient and delicate, leasing a property near Indianapolis where the artefacts could be stored securely, and where controlled temperatures and humidity could be maintained. They also sought help in handline the material from Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, who set up a team of anthropologists and archaeologists under the leadership of Holly Cusack-McVeigh, to make sure everything was handled with appropriate care.
Museum studies graduate students from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis help care for the recovered artefacts in a facility near Indianapolis where all the recovered artefacts are housed securely and temperature, humidity, and light levels are controlled. Students and highly trained Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis staff also help prepare the artefacts for shipping when repatriation occurs. FBI.
Despite these steps, five years after the original operation only about 15% of the material has been returned to its rightful owners, and the FBI have decided to publicize the case, and has issued a press release asking official representatives of Native American tribes and foreign governments that would like to determine whether they have a claim to any of the recovered artefacts to contact the Bureau’s art theft program.
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Recognising that much of the material, and particularly the Human remains, had been looted from Native American sites in the US, the FBI involved Native American groups in the operation very early on, contacting representatives of the almost 600 recognized Native American tribes in order to have them help to review the items and return them to their owners or burial sites. They also contacted other nations via the United Nations, asking them to nominate experts to review the material so that where possible it could be repatriated to the countries from which it was taken.
Dozens of Colombian artefacts recovered by the FBI were repatriated during a ceremony in October 2018 at the Colombian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Seen in the background are FBI Special Agent Max Marker and Colombian Ambassador His Excellency Francisco Santos. FBI.
Despite these steps, five years after the original operation only about 15% of the material has been returned to its rightful owners, and the FBI have decided to publicize the case, and has issued a press release asking official representatives of Native American tribes and foreign governments that would like to determine whether they have a claim to any of the recovered artefacts to contact the Bureau’s art theft program.
See also...
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