Last month, Germany’s Minister of State for Media and Culture Monika Grüetters announced that a 15th-century navigation landmark known as the Stone Cross, erected on the Namibian coast by Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão in 1498 and currently on display at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, will return to Namibia this August as “a clear signal that committed to reappraising the colonial past.”Īt the start of the movie, Indiana Jones is little more than an educated grave robber, trying to earn a buck by trading the cremated remains of Nurhaci (a real-life Jurchen chieftain, whose unification efforts throughout China and Korea would lay the groundwork for the Manchu Dynasty) to Shanghai gangsters in exchange for a diamond. This past February, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would return a first-century gilded coffin to Egypt after evidence emerged suggesting the object had been looted during 2011’s Arab Spring. “At what point then is Turkey going to return the Alexander Sarcophagus to Sidon in Lebanon? In the 19th century it was brought from Sidon when Lebanon was part of the Ottoman empire … On what grounds should you return and not return?”Īs the debate rages, many museums have been fulfilling requests by foreign governments to return stolen items, often on a case-by-case basis. “Where do you stop?” he asked in a 2007 interview with TIME. “As we seek to remake the bonds between nations based on mutual respect rather than plunder,” he wrote in 2016, “what could be more symbolic than a gradual but highly public return of many of the myriad items removed by travellers, conquistadors and dutiful civil servants?” Others, such as former Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Philippe de Montebello, believe that due-to ever-changing geopolitical landscapes, such claims for restitution are rhetorical at best. Those in favor of artistic repatriation, such as The Guardian’s Jonathan Glennie, argue for the return of such works to the places where they actually come from because it’s the ethical thing to do. While it has mainly been the mantra of Harrison Ford’s swashbuckling archaeologist that sacred objects belong in museums for Western scholars to study and display, this viewpoint has been largely contested within the art world. Twenty-six years later, we learn that Jones is still chasing the cross when he finally secures the object, he ultimately donates it to the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. Some time later, it was boxed and buried in Utah until being dug up by treasure hunters and stolen by an adolescent Indiana Jones, who is then forced to surrender the artifact back to the hunters. In the movie, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés gave the cross to Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in 1520. It dates back to the last emperor of the Byzantine Empire, Justinian II, and bears a nearly identical inscription to that of the real-life Crux Vaticana, currently kept at St. According to the film’s version of history, this fictional “Cross of Coronado” is a jewel-encrusted cross that combines a gold alloy crucifix from the 7th or 8th century with a piece of the True Cross upon which Jesus Christ was crucified.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) begins with the pursuit of a looted artifact: a gang of treasure hunters chase 13-year-old Indiana Jones on horseback and train to recover a stolen cross.
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