The objective of this resource is to document, and offer tools to search and analyze, metadata relating to disputes initiated by national governments over ownership of tangible artifacts (antiquities — broadly defined — particularly) owned by individuals or institutions in different nations. The About tab leads to more detailed information about the project’s scope.

The Case Index tab leads to the searchable case archive. The Analysis segment provides dynamically generated visualizations of trends, statistics, projections, etc., based on analyses of the expanding corpus of case metadata.

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In September 2022 the BLAIS Foundation funded a two-year development initiative for this project at the Claremont Colleges. We anticipate this award will enable us to more than double the number of project case metadata records allowing the project case metadata to become sufficiently robust to be increasingly useful to a diverse cohort of scholars, lawyers, et al. involved in cultural heritage disputes.

This project originated under the sponsorship of Yale University’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, which provided resources for development of the project’s database structure and for collecting and editing its initial traunch of case records.