Peru Vs Yale Case Study

Yale University once housed crates of items from Machu Picchu that date back to the 15th century. Yale purchased the items from Peru, the University displayed many of the items including ceramics, jewelry, and human remains at the Peabody museum for over 100 years. However, the government of Peru sued to have the artifacts returned and in 2010 Peru won and Yale returned the artifacts. Peru won the court case on the basis that the artifacts were the cultural heritage of the people of Peru (Buying, Selling, Owning the past, 1).The case of Peru vs. Yale brings up the question of should people be able to buy and sell antiquities? The general consensus is that all artifacts should be excavated by professional archaeologists who will be able to determine the exact purpose and significance of the object. However looting does still happen and museums often blame private collectors who buy artifacts off of looters for causing the looting problem. Some governments who believe that artifacts from their country are part of their heritage and they view anyone who removes those artifacts, including museums, as looters (Buying, Selling, Owning the past, 3). Looting in terms of archeology is when a site is illegally excavated for the purpose of selling the …show more content…
Archaeologist in the early 1900’s would take the mosaics and carvings off of the walls of ancient buildings and send them back to their home countries. Archaeologist were often poorly funded so they would hire local villagers as cheap labor to help them excavate sites. The only problem with hiring uneducated villagers is that they would often break or miss artifacts. Without the help of GPS or modern surveying technology archaeologist would ask locals where to find ancient ruins. Villagers would often send archeologist to sites that they had already looted and they would sell their finds to archaeologist (Brown,