Provenance Research and Natural History Specimens: Bringing Together What Belongs Together

The past thirty years have seen a turn to restitution, intensified provenance research, and debates about ownership, stewardship, conservation, and justice. Their usual focus: sacred artifacts, ancestral remains, cultural goods. Natural history museums, on the contrary, are largely unaffected by this trend; their collections attract nowhere near the attention that Nazi-looted art or colonial loot enjoy. That disconnect is unjustified. Natural history collections have been entwined with contexts of injustice, and fossils and meteorites fetch millions at auctions today. This talk opens an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history and natural history and introduces natural history specimens as an area of interest for provenance research. It contributes to closing a gap between natural and cultural objects that might be affected by the same contexts of injustice but housed in different institutions, and advocates for comprehensiveness in provenance research.