Nashville Museum Returns Hundreds of Pre-Columbian Artifacts to Mexico

For many years, Nashville’s Parthenon museum housed hundreds of pre-Columbian artifacts in its collections. Many of the items were accompanied by incomplete information about what they were and where they came from.

Bonnie Seymour noticed these objects about two years ago, when she started working as the Parthenon’s assistant curator, per NPR’s Scott Detrow. During her first day on the job, as she toured the collections, she was unsettled by their presence.

“My first thought was, well, [they’re] going to get repatriated,” she tells Travis Loller of the Associated Press (AP). “[They’ve] got to go home.”

This month, the valuable artifacts are doing exactly that: The Nashville museum is returning 248 ceramics, musical instruments, tools and clay sculptures of animals (including grinning Colima dogs) to Mexico City, where they will be housed at the National Institute of Anthropology and History.

“The repatriation of these artifacts is a cultural obligation as well as a moral responsibility,” says Monique Horton Odom, the Metro Parks and Recreation director, in a statement. “These artifacts have value and meaning to the people of Mexico and should be housed where they will have a dynamic impact on understanding the people and culture of the past.”

Ahead of the journey, the artifacts went on display at the Parthenon one last time at an exhibition titled “Repatriation and Its Impact.” The show explored the history of repatriation and placed the pre-Columbian pieces alongside work by José Véra González, a Mexican artist based in Nashville.

Recently, Seymour got a call from Rich Montgomery, who had heard about the exhibition on NPR. He explained that he and his brother had collected many of the artifacts on the instructions of his father, John Montgomery, a doctor based in Oregon. According to the AP, John had been looking for a way to lower his income taxes and decided to use museum donations to get tax deductions.

“He gave me the whole rundown,” Seymour tells Nashville Scene’s Laura Hutson Hunter. “It’s similar but different—very different—than what we thought originally.”

Rich Montgomery and his brother went to western Mexico and purchased the artifacts from local farmers, who were happy to part with them for a few pesos. “At no point did we ever think or feel that we’re doing anything illegal,” he tells the AP. His father and a friend, Edgar York, donated their acquisitions to the Parthenon throughout the ’60s and ’70s.

“Unfortunately, because pre-Columbian artifacts have been particularly popular for people to take, a lot of Mexican history is missing information,” Seymour tells the Tennessean’s Cassandra Stephenson. “There are a lot of gaps. ... I can’t fix the problem, but I can hopefully help.”

Repatriation efforts have increased in recent years as people have become more aware of the ethical concerns surrounding museums’ acquisition methods, as Javier Diaz de Leon, the Mexican consul general in Atlanta, tells the AP.

“People come to us, are coming to us, all over the world, voluntarily saying, ‘I got this. It came to our hands. But we don’t think we should have it. We think [it] belongs to the Mexican people,’” says Diaz de Leon, who worked with Seymour on the recent return. “And that is the sort of transition that we are very happy about.”

Ella Feldman | READ MORE

Ella Malena Feldman is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C. She examines art, culture and gender in her work, which has appeared in Washington City Paper, DCist and the Austin American-Statesman.