Good news from Syria, Hasakah's archeological museum is opening. A sign of the progress on the long road of healing and recovery for Syria and its rich heritage. www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/02/12/s...

Weekend timeline cleanse! A #Greek rhyton in the shape of a #dog's head. 🐕🐶 Vessels such as this were used in drinking parties. Since they didn't have a base, their contents had to be consumed before the vessel could be put down Dating ca. 475 BC. 📷 Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia 🏺

In recent months, at least two Europe-based Chinese students were detained after they returned to China for the holidays on charges of “secession” and “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” respectively, allegedly for speaking up against the regime.

Tibetan Buddhist leader with provincial-level senior positions Lobsang Lungrig reported held and disappeared – Tibetan Review: ‘the head-lama of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Yushu prefecture of Qinghai province’ ‘for having allegedly helped a fugitive monk’

Another major museum theft in the Netherlands, almost a year after the Drents Museum heist. Unfortunately there has been a significant uptick in museum thefts across the globe in the last year. www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/01/22/t...

oh man, the Walker Art Center is going to be closed on Friday (If you're not from the Twin Cities, this is like MoMA closing in support of a general strike—a very big deal)

Iranian official says verified deaths in Iran protests reaches at least 5,000 reut.rs/3ZiPI21

Good news: Sudan's government said it has recovered what it described as large collections of antiquities looted from museums in Khartoum during the war, and it plans to announce details at a Tuesday ceremony in Port Sudan. www.turkiyetoday.com/culture/suda...

A case of complete credulity to nationalist claims. The Mexican gov't has claimed for decades that various codices were looted without proof, and even ratified codex theft from rightful owners, becoming looters themselves. Yet their claims get uncritically amplified by journalists and activists.

The Indian gov't seemingly admits to abusing int'l AML reporting by filing a false notice through the Egmont network to pressure Sotheby's to call off the Piprahwa relics auction. Much like Interpol Red Notice abuse, this too is a form of transnational repression. indianexpress.com/article/long...

Article (in French) highlighting some of the damage and destruction to Sudan's cultural heritage during the cities occupation by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

ICCROM is in the list of organizations the Trump admin is withdrawing from. If the earlier withdrawal from UNESCO wasn't enough of a sign, leaving ICCROM makes clear the admin's hostility to int'l cultural heritage frameworks. apnews.com/article/trum...

So does Trump think this is like Crusader Kings where if you capture the enemy leader you get to press all your war goals or something?

"The Nomadic Leviathan: A Critique of the Sinocentric Paradigm" by Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene is now open access! "This book places pastoralism at the origin of the state and civilization, and the Eurasian steppe at the center of human history." #tengri #bluesky brill.com/display/titl...

“I carried him on my back. It took seven days.” A camp in eastern Chad is now home to more than 100,000 refugees of Sudan’s civil war, and is a key destination for those fleeing El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State. Resources are strained as the number of newly displaced people increases.

This article attempts to conflate moral claims with legal ones. Despite stating that the British Museum lacks legal title to its objects, and starting the article with such a conceit, the author provides no evidence, as she has none, only decolonial rhetoric. 1/5 hyperallergic.com/british-muse...

A fine article, but could have more words on issues of ownership at the heart of this story. Vesting ownership in an individual rather than the Nigerian state was always fraught. Thought in Feb. joint ownership was established, the mob at MOWAA suggests the Oba is fine blowing such arrangements up.

What a time to decide to learn less about the world. dailytarheel.com/article/univ...

Rob Reiner was a good guy. He made a lot of movies about good guys, in worlds where not everyone was good and you didn’t have to be good. He made movies about people trying. He was angry, as many hopeful people are. He knew the world could be better and he wanted it to be. His death is devastating.

In late 2020 a Chinese man called Guan Heng travelled to Xinjiang with our BuzzFeed map of detention facilities to provide ground truth for our work - he provided the first corroborating evidence for many sites. He escaped to the US - then ICE detained him. www.wsj.com/world/china/...

Disgusting. This person took huge risks and now is again at risk. Man who filmed Uyghur concentration camps now fights for his own freedom in the US hrichina.substack.com/p/man-who-fi...

A timely article that examines some of the narratives around the 'Prakhon Chai' bronzes and begins to untangle the trade in Southeast Asian antiquities from Douglas Latchford, a trade that began decades before him and in which he was only one of many actors. www.academia.edu/145262131/A_...

Even with the year almost over, another museum burglary to add to the disturbingly long list of thefts this year. Are all these thefts pure coincidence, or did the success of the Drents Museum theft in January encourage copycats across Europe? www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

“In recent days, Ms Amsi's team was able to use heavy equipment to uncover more badly damaged manuscripts. She says it is now clear that the library's archive - seen as an invaluable record of Palestinian history, with many Ottoman records - was totally burned.” www.bbc.com/news/article...

The All-Russian Cossack Society turns school clubs into pipelines for state-sponsored militarisation and recruitment for war in Ukraine. Bellingcat shows how they shape an alternative mobilisation force: www.bellingcat.com/news/2025/12...

Frank Gehry, masterful architect who transformed L.A.’s urban landscape, dies at 96 www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

As the Sudan war rages on, curator Shadia Abdrabo is on a yearlong research grant in France with one mission: to build an online database of the African nation’s archaeological sites, museum collections and historical archives. abcnews.go.com/Internationa...

I’ve written for the FT on art and AI. Can we use it to find lost Rembrandts? www.ft.com/content/8f07...

We’re delighted to announce that the newly remodeled Getty Provenance Index has won Digital Innovation of the Year in this year’s Apollo Awards. [🧵10/10] Learn more: www.getty.edu/tracingart/

The secret mission to save Gaza's historical artefacts

Are the operation's photos meant to be a joke? Perhaps they actually seized $116 million dollars in antiquities, but what is pictured here is a medley of low value pawn shop items. Law enforcement often inflates the value of seized antiquities for media coverage, but the disconnect here is absurd.

NEW Stratigraphy from two of the 51 Aketala sites in the Tarim Basin of north-western China. The westernmost Bronze Age settlements discovered in China to date, they indicate cultural connections across Central Asia c. 4000 years ago. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

The Uzbek gov't has spent decades destroying Uzbek heritage without any consequences, and continues to do so. UNESCO may complain but they will do nothing, just as they did nothing when Karimov gutted Shahrisabz's UNESCO-designated old city—a useless organization. thediplomat.com/2025/11/dest...

Great news for open source art crime researcher: The International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR)'s publications are now digitized & free at the Internet Archive. Congrats to our MOLA colleague Lisa Zeballos and team on this important preservation effort!

The Directorate-General for Antiquities and Museums (DGAM); has published photos of the six stolen artefacts taken during a weekend burglary at the National Museum of Damascus. All of the six small marble statuettess, are representatives of the goddess Venus, the Classical deity of beauty. 1 of 2

Screened this film about the repression of Uyghurs last night at Cornell. A powerful and tragic account of how the colonial project in northwest China continues to destroy lives www.allstaticandnoise.com

More terrible news in a terrible year for museums. Especially disheartening given how hard Syrian museum authorities worked to protect the collections throughout the entire Syrian Civil War. I hope the thieves are quickly caught and the statues returned.

The problem of the decolonial lens the scholars in this article use is not only is it based on no evidence, it minimizes the agency of those it champions. The gem trade in Eurasia was thriving for millennia before the 19th century and did not need Europeans to develop it. apnews.com/article/jewe...

Nakadai's unmatched acting talent drove so much of Japan's great post-war cinema. "The Human Condition" trilogy, "Harakiri," "The Sword of Doom," "The Face of Another," "Kagemusha," "Ran"; the list goes on and on. A true legend of cinema has passed.

Renowned actor Tatsuya Nakadai, best known for his role in Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran,” has died at the age of 92.

The problem of the decolonial lens the scholars in this article use is not only is it based on no evidence, it minimizes the agency of those it champions. The gem trade in Eurasia was thriving for millennia before the 19th century and did not need Europeans to develop it. apnews.com/article/jewe...

Even a museum in Benin City not under the Oba's control is too much for his supporters. This is a result of the Nigerian State's foolish decision to give the Benin Bronzes to the descendant of slaver autocrats rather than holding them in trust for all Nigerians. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

The average SNAP benefit per month is $177 a person. The average ACA benefit per month is up to $550 a person. People want us to hold the line for a reason. This is not a matter of appealing to a base. It’s about people’s lives. And working people want leaders whose word means something to them.

It is sad, but unsurprising, that the new head of UNESCO is one who presided over intentional cultural heritage destruction in Egypt. UNESCO from Azerbaijan to China ignores heritage destruction and States should view it as having little legitimacy. www.reuters.com/world/africa...

Egypt has a gov't engaged in the destruction of disfavored heritage, in this case Islamic heritage. Perhaps el-Sisi's regime might stop destroying the heritage entrusted to it before baselessly claiming that which legally and ethically belongs to others. www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menaso...

The organizer of the inaugural IndieChina Film Festival in New York said he was forced to cancel after facing a "relentless" pressure campaign, and that he may be unable to travel back to China. "I did think it might be better here....It turns out I was wrong."

A unique fire worshipping scene for #BonfireNight 🔥 Reconstructing a wall painting from the Sogdian palace of Sanjar-Shah, Tajikistan reveals a procession of priests approaching a large fire altar, offering a rare insight into ancient fire worship. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

A powerful 6.3 magnitude earthquake shook northern Afghanistan before dawn Monday, killing at least 20 people and injuring more than 640 others, as well as damaging the historic Blue Mosque, officials said. https://to.pbs.org/47HUdXL

This sort of complicity with the Chinese state is in culture heritage orgs too. @combatlooting.bsky.social founder and chair Deborah Lehr was advising companies on how to do business in Xinjiang as late as 2021 and still publicly endorses Chinese heritage policies in the midst of cultural genocide.

Sheffield Hallam University complied with Beijing demand to halt research about human rights abuses in China, leading to a major project on supply chains and forced labour being dropped. It was reinstated after threat of legal action but chilling effect remains www.theguardian.com/education/20...