DAR

In 1963, the Volkenkunde Museum in Leiden in the Netherlands, acquired an indigenous human skull decorated with mosaics from an art dealer who illegally trafficked in archaeological pieces from indigenous peoples. The museum director acquired the piece because he believed that it was an authentic pre-colonial work, representative of the Ñuu Savi (People of the Rain) or Mixtec ancestral culture. However, the gallerist Robert L. Stolper provided little information about its provenance and this raised questions about its authenticity. For nearly fifty years this mosaic-decorated skull was considered a pre-Columbian masterpiece, similar to the magnificent treasures in Tomb 7 at Monte Albán. A pride of the Dutch nation!

Until 2012, when Dr. Martin Berger —professor at the University of Leiden— verified after a detailed study that more than a fake or original work, it was something else. “A modern composition with ancient materials”, is how the professor neatly defined it. The analyses, carried out using brand-new technology, revealed that both the skull and the mosaic stones were indeed pre-colonial —dating before 1521 AD. — and both with a very high probability of being from the Mixtec region. The gallerist said the artifact came from a cave or tomb near Teotitlán de Flores Magón, on the border between Oaxaca and Puebla. As for the glue, the study showed that it was a Shellac gum, an adhesive that arrived in Mexico after the Conquest. It is suspected that the mosaics were —in whole or in part— glued to the bone with Shellac by people who commodified these pieces.

This finding radically changed the perception and value of this work inside and outside the Volkenkunde Museum, since it also impacted the judgment of the international community of Mesoamerican archeology scholars. In the Netherlands and in other countries they still don't know what to do with this skull or with forged works with similar stories. And as usual among museums of anthropology, archeology and ethnology, the perspective of the heirs and cultural descendants of native peoples on this type of complex situations is not taken into account.

For this reason, I thought it was necessary to organize workshops in Communitarian Museums to share this story and facilitate the conversation about what to do with this type of heritage and thus know what are the meanings and values that such a modern composition with ancient materials could have for the Mixtec communities of the present. The workshops has the aim to elaborate the following rematriation scenarios: If we know that it is unfair and inhumane that a museum in Europe —that just as owns a painting, a chair, a stuffed animal or anything else— possesses and exhibits an indigenous ancestor from Abya Yala as part of its collections, why is it still in the Netherlands and has not returned home? And if one day they come back, wil Ñuu Kuiñi Communitarian Museum or Yucu Saa Communitarian Museum, or some other Communitarian Museum from the People of the Rain, be an ideal home for the dignified protection of such a grandmother or grandfather who could once inhabited the Mixtec lands? Or would it not be better for them to find eternal rest in a cave or in a tomb of the Ñuu Savi? Or where will it be a good place? Or what about OaxaCalifornia in the USA, with the Indigenous migrants who had reclaim their belong to that terrotory? Or perhaps, an un expected destination, another rainy land like Jogja, Indonesia for the skull to know how to gain independence from the Netherlands?