“The first step toward decolonization then is to ques-tion the legitimacy of colonization.”3 The silence around the history of co-lonialism throughout the Americas at the nmai fails to challenge the pub-lic’s steadfast refusal to face this nation’s genocidal policies that had, andcontinue to have, a devastating impact on Indigenous people. Nor doesthis silence assist Native communities in recognizing how colonialism hasaffected all areas of their lives, including how to embark on the necessarychanges to move toward decolonization and community healing.

The first, and arguably the mostimportant theme, is historical and aesthetic: the value of these artifacts asunique objects that help illuminate critical moments in history and shedlight on an important region of the ancient world. The second reflects theartifacts’ place in a historical continuum that extends from prehistory tothe classical era and into the present day, and in some cases, a nation’sself-positioning as an inheritor of parts of that historical legacy. Third isSchliemann’s own presence in the narrative, either as an agent of destruc-tion or discovery, a thief or a hero. A fourth theme that varies from nationto nation but which is nonetheless a shared approach is a patriotic, nation-alistic approach that emphasises the museum and nation’s place in the storyof the works’ discovery and preservation. The final, entirely predictable,theme is both legal and curatorial: each museum’s self-positioning as a pro-tector of the artifacts from Troy and their legal rights of possession to theworks.

This essay willtake no moral stance on the question of object repatriation, but will seek tocontextualise and explore the self-justifying half-truths, convenient fictionsand outright falsehoods put forward by the four institutions that hold theseartifacts, while also explaining the sources and functions of the interpre-tive approaches taken by these institutions, to argue for the importanceof greater transparency, honesty and self-awareness in the presentation ofimportant works of art and cultural history

Historians of museums often see the new art-historical hang as the triumphof an advanced, Enlightenment thinking that sought to replace earlier systemsof classification with a more rational one. To be sure, the new construct wasmore in keeping with Enlightenment rationality.

Rather than a rare attainment, it was comingto be seen as a necessary component of every society, an organic expression ofone or another particular national spirit.*

As anew kind of public ceremonial space, the Louvre not only redefinedthe political identity of its visitors, it also assigned new meanings to theobjects it displayed, and qualified, obscured, or distorted old ones. Nowpresented as public property, they became the means through which a newrelationship between the individual as citizen and the state as benefactorcould be symbolically enacted.

e awed by the sheermagnitude of the treasure.

he new museum proved to be a producer of potent symbolic meanings,The transformation of the palace into a public space accessible to everyonemade the museum an especially pointed demonstration of the state’scommitment to the principle of equality.

The consequence is that museums almost everywhere have, in essence,shifted from a "selling" mode to a "marketing" one. In the sellingmode, their efforts have been concentrated on convincing the public to"buy" their traditional offerings. In the marketing mode, their startingpoint instead is the public's own needs and interests.

The accessibility themes also extend to reaching underserved audiences.Natural history museums will need to adapt and evolve to serve our diversepublic. We must become places that are welcoming, familiar, comfortable,and safe for all visitors, especially those traditionally underserved or un-derrepresented in the museum, both as staff and visitors. Natural historymuseums have to be aware of the social histories that created them in orderto look forward and create relevant exhibitions attentive and sensitive toall who come through the doors. From an exhibit development perspec-tive, multiple languages, diverse people represented in exhibit graphics andfilms, locally focused examples, and co-curation/co-development with tar-get audiences can help make the museum more broadly accessible.

While Q?rius doesn't realize the same audi-ence numbers as major exhibitions

Exhibition content must also reflect the stories our visitors hear in the news,and we must be prepared to deconstruct complicated science, show relevance,explain phenomena, dispel myths, and uproot unfounded fears

Imagining the future ofnatural history museumexhibitions

This interdisciplinary emphasis

the first-person descrip-tion as a critical part of the storytelling process.

The authoritative museum voice is shifting-we accept that we don't haveall the answers, th at we can't present definitive viewpoints. And nowhere isthat more apparent than in anthropology exhibitions

Co-curation has become a critical element of this renewal process, shar-ing first-person perspectives directly from people of cultures and socialgroups represented in exhibits

For the NMNH exhibition Genome:Unlocking Life's Code, the volunteer corps had the opportunity to havetheir own genomes sequenced and to express personal thoughts regard-ing the complex ethical and social questions that direct-to-consumer se-quencing raises for them and their families. In other settings, teens havebeen specifically recruited to talk with other teens about relevant exhibitiss ues, and bilingual volunteers have been brought in to talk with visitorsin their own language-prompting conversations and questions that mightnot otherwise emerge.

This kind of "behind-the-scenes" expe-rience surprises visitors and encourages them to consider museum careers.

Our new National Fossil Hall willinclude a working fossil preparation lab for staff and volunteers to prep col-lections for study, as well as a hands-on learning lab companion that willallow visitors to try their own hand at exploring fossils up close.

cit i-zen science

Of course, this gives rise to the eternalbattle between preservation of artifacts and specimens-as conservationstandards become more stringent-and the desire to enhance learnin gthrough touch and close access.

As we look to the future, augmented reality and immersive virtual realitywill give the time-honored diorama a run for its money, with lifelike scenesthat immerse visitors in reconstructed worlds without seams, railings, andma nnequins. Even traditional habitat dioramas could be put into motionor augmented with views of the same scene through time, and old-schoolco llections displays can be brought to life and put into context, encour-agi ng visitors to look more closely at the objects to understand how theymig ht have moved or been made .

fter an assessmentof the scenes using a defined set of criteria, the team decided that noneof the twelve dioramas were of a quality worth preserving

though they're no longer on exhibit.

In the end, the team decided to relocate their dioramas to createa stylized, "vintage" entrance to the museum, a nod to nostalgia whilerecog nizing the dioramas' limitations for interpretation.

Recentl y, due to scientific inaccu-racies, social offenses, and challenging expectations concerning the le vel ofdetail, museums have begun to move away from traditional dioramas andare trying to find creative ways to display the complexities that make up ournatural and cultural world.

To explore where we've been and where we're headed, we'll look at thepast and future of three techniques key to natural history museums: dior a-mas past and future, the display of specimens, and conversation prompt sin exhibitions

we are a nineteenth-centurysolution reinventing itself to address twent y-first -century problems.

as our audiences' expectations become ever more per-sonal and digitally connected, we must continually reinvent our techniquesto meet visitors where they are

The dynamic tension between celebrating iconic objects and giving themrelevance is at the heart of imagining the future of natural history museumexhibitions.

s collection professionals, we tend to assume that the col-lections exist for the purpose for which they were created: as researchand education resources underpinning the missions of our institutions.

Concerned about the prospect of illegal col-lecting, many in the museum community believe that locality data onlineshould automatically be redacted, either to an arbitrary level such as thecounty where a specimen was found or by deliberate "fuzzing" of coordi-nate data.

One of the oft -cited benefits of digitization is the increased accessibilityof collections. By making specimens and data available online, we arebroadening the public's access to the collections that we hold in trust forthem. But in doing so we negate our traditional role as gatekeepers for thecollections, deciding who accesses them and how. Previously, these deci-sions could be justified based on the limited resources available to supportphysical access, but with digital assets, there is no good resource-basedreason why, having made the assets available online, you would need torestrict their accessibility.

Unfortunately, specimens do not have to be moved off-site to becomeinaccessible

passivecontrols. These topics comprise the subject of ongoing research and dis-cussion within the International Council of Museums collections commu-nity (ICOM-CC, 2014), but what is clear is that if museums are to takea leading role in tackling the environmental challenges facing the planet,they may need to start close to home

but they become urgent as we look to en-courage and support the building and maintenance of collections in theemerging economies that are the home of much of the world's undescribedbiodiversity

Even when the direct costs are met, the improve-ments in preservation have rarely led to an expansion of staffing; asa result, preservation now competes with curation for staff resources

rang et al., forthcoming).Because of these changes, many natural history collections are in bet-ter shape now than in previous decades and more likely to survive intothe future, which is not to say, however, that the problem of preserva-tion has been solved.

The dramatic expansion of the World Wide Web over the last twentyyears has fundamentally changed how the public accesses information andother material. To their credit, museums have been quick to recognize andrespond to this change. Within the natural history collections community,this has resulted in the formulation of national and international strategiesto digitize specimens and data from collections and to create tools and in-frastructure to make these available to users (NIBA, 2010). The potential,in terms of both increased access and availability of novel forms of use, isenormous (Beaman and Cellinese, 2012).

There are, of course, strongcounterarguments in favor of physical vouchers . Any species whose long-term viability can be significantly affected by the removal of one or two indi-viduals is already effectively extinct: without aggressive human intervention(through, for example, capture and captive breeding), natural mortality willfar exceed this.

One example of this was the first-evercollection of a male specimen of the moustached kingfisher (Actenoidesbougainvillea), an endemic species from the Solomon Islands, by a teamfrom the American Museum of Natural History. The discovery, inOctober 2015, was announced on the expedition blog by the ornithologistwho captured the kingfisher (Filardi, 2015a). When it emerged that theanimal had been euthanized there was a storm of protest, communicatedvia comments on the Audubon Society article that reported the discovery(Silber, 2015), a subsequent article by the collector explaining the basis ofthe decision co collect the bird (Filardi, 20156), and negative coverage inmainstream media (for a typical example, see Klausner, 2015)

There is a considerable (and perhaps understandable) resentmentin many parts of the world toward the mining of biodiversity by "firstworld" institutions, and any large-scale program of species descriptionneeds co address this imbalance

ut all specimens, regardless of discipline, are to some extent items ofmaterial culture. People may place different values on them than we do;in the case of collecting, as has already been discussed, they may questionour long-established collecting practices, based on their view of the naturalworld . They may wish to use our data as evidence of past malpractice onthe part of a museum, such as illegal collecting. They may want to down-load specimen images and data to support theories that we regard as sci-entifically untenable, such as creationism or intelligent design. If our aimis genuine and is to increase accessibility, how comfortable are we withaccommodating usage with which we are unfamiliar, or with which wedisagree?Perhaps the ultimate expression of this is the question of whether weshould be holding some of this material at all. If, as discussed earlier,we accept that our collections were obtained under circumstances an

We can no longer rely on distance, be it physical orintellectual, to protect us from criticism.

and build-ing collection capacity in the host country.

Those benefits can bemonetary or non-monetary, which means that arguing that the results ofmuseum-based research are rarely commercialized makes no difference-in principle, any benefits obtained from the possession or study of thegenetic material in the specimens, be they commercial, scientific, edu-cational, or promotional-should be shared with the country of origin( eumann et al., 2014).

he great natural history collections of the world were bornin the heyday of Western colonialism when the right of their scientists tocollect specimens from around the world was unquestioned .

They reflected prevailing attitudes of the time, whichcould also be seen in the conduct of the expedition.

But the expeditions were also a product of their time, as was Andrews .Frequently forgotten amid the triumphalism of their finds was the under-pinning purpose of the trip: to find evidence of early human s that wouldsupport the theory of American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)President Henry Fairfield Osborn that Central Asia was the cradle of hu-man evolution. In Osborn 's worldview, people of color occupied the far-flung edges of the planet, having been displaced by the more "advancedNordics" situated in Eurasia.

Natural history collections face four main challenges: acquiring material,preserving that material, making it available for use, and making the case thatthe first three activities are worthy of support.

When your child states with cer-tainty that Tyrannosaurus rex lived in the Cretaceous period they are,knowingly or unknowingly, drawing on the results of research done usingmuseum collections.

We conceive these spaces astrue ''culture factories'' that are -based on an unfinished project that shouldbe enriched with the participation of citizens, integrating them into theterritorial dynamics.

museums like scenarios of ''imagined communities''

Borrowing the metaphors,'museums of identity and mentality would be the ''mirrors and windows''that permit to reflect us and pass throt1gh our identity and otherness

The mentality museums should have a close relationship with everydaylife.

The difference between theframework of identity museums and mentality museums is a matter ofemphasis. In the museums of identity the greater emphasis has been onproduction environments, closely related to local traditions and lifestyles,including also their implications for cultural performances (rituals, beliefsand customs, for example) (Heimlich & Falk, 2009)

The museum trac~ minds, and sometimes recovers forgot...ten stories that are explanatory qf the .actual history of territories and thepeoples of these territories. Projects of identity and mentality have led toreflection on the transmutation of the concept of museum.

The mentality museums

But the younger citizens also remember, having received the storyfrom their parents and relatives. ..I•

The objects of the library were not very valuable, but they hada very particular political connotation, apart from their emotional compo-nent.

Identity museums should collect the identity signs of a town or city,the differentiating feelings of the residents of a region, seeking and givingpriority to those they feel most proud of and they consider are the mostidentity for them, so that will provide recovery and the assumption of itsown historical development and favoring the involvement in their individu-al and collective responsibilities in the construction of their culture.

On one hand, wetook into consideration the proposals of a religious interpretation. On theother hand, we also considered the agnostic interpretation of this ritual,which consists of a rite of passage, incorporating some religious syncretism,stemming probably from a Ce~.tic period much earlier than its supposedChristian origins.

Identity•museums have two main objectives in terms of their cultural offer. One isrelated to the region, reflecting the explicit relationship between the localdevelopment. The other is to maintain quality control and rigor for themuseum contents.

For example, the mayor of a town wouldask the regional government the help build a local museum about somecultural ~vent or demonstration of the village

Most of these museums were basedon either a general and universal treatment of messages, away from anyexplanation of the territory, based on their own idiosyncratic perspective,or a localism overly personal, instead focusing on characters and the collec-tions, which did not reflect the historical, cultural and social developmentof the region Gennings, 2007)