Cultural Restitution

June 12, 2023
NEW ZEALAND
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NEW ZEALAND

Updated April 2025

Below is a schedule of successful restitutions made to New Zealand, together with other restitution news.

Entries are updated regularly



April 2025

A precious taonga, made between 1900 & 1908 and collected by an American Mormon missionary in the early 1900s, has been returned from a private collection in Los Angeles to New Zealand

Tepapa.govt.nz


September 2024

Fourteen ancient bronze and stone sculptures are being returned by a private collection in New Zealand to the Republic of Yemen after study and cataloguing by New York's Metropolitan Museum

The Art Newspaper


June 2023

A delegation from New Zealand arrived in Germany last month tasked with repatriating around 100 Maori and Moriori remains across six cities

abc.net.au


July 2022

London's Natural History Museum participates in the largest ever repatriation of human remains by returning the skeletal remains of more than 100 ancestors of the Rekohu tribe to New Zealand

The Guardian


 



More News

Imperial Gold Hairpin to return to Ethiopia

December 5, 2025
A rare and important 19th century gold hairpin once owned by Empress Tiruwork, wife of the Abyssinian Emperor Tewodros II, will be returning to Ethiopia following negotiations by the Royal Ethiopian Trust with the Rome auction house Bertolami Fine Art

Protests in favour of a Benin Royal Museum frustrate ambitions of Nigeria’s Museum of West African Art

November 25, 2025
In 2022 several western collections made a decision to transfer ownership of their Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. Reassured by progress on the construction of a major new facility in Benin City, they understood their Benin artefacts would be exhibited in a new museum to be called the Edo Museum of West African Art

Why the Rosetta Stone will not be returning to Egypt ... just yet

November 11, 2025
After years of delay and political distraction, the official opening of the new Grand Egyptian Museum finally took place in the shadow of the pyramids on the evening of November 1st attended by monarchs, world leaders, heads of state and government