Bonnie Seymour is the registrar and assistant curator at The Parthenon and spoke with Consider This host Scott Detrow about how this journey started.
On her first day on the job, she took a tour of the museum’s collection and saw hundreds of pre-Columbian artifacts: obsidian arrowheads, hand tools, a grinding stone and more.
“And my first thought just looking at it was just, ‘Well, this can’t stay here,'” she said. “This has to go back home.”
The museum has a special exhibit about the items and the process of returning them called “Repatriation and Its Impact.”
Seymour says the items will be returned to Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. One artifact she’ll miss is the “Xolo dog”, which she described as “this kind of basketball-sized fat dog with a grin on his face, and he’s still got dirt in his mouth from when he was excavated.”
