• BolexForSoup@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    The joke is that the British have an incredibly problematic history literally centuries-old of taking things from other cultures and going “well, it’s ours the world’s now.“ Many of these communities have been asking them literally for decades to return them, but they simply won’t even to this day.

    There was a time where they could maybe make the claim “this is the best way to preserve them,“ but for the vast majority of cases that time has long since passed and it was flimsy to begin with.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      11 months ago

      We didn’t just steal artifacts. We stole whole countries. At one point the empire covered a quarter of the planet. And it wasn’t that long ago either.

      The artifacts were just the souvenirs.

    • Kbin_space_program@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      It’s mostly due to early “archeologists” being almost entirely trust fund babies born into the aristocracy and to whom it was a contest to make the craziest claims possible.

      See the OG trench at Troy that went completely past the end of the Bronze Age and dumped all of the important artifacts into a refuse pile that is apparently still being sifted through today.

      Also see early “paleontologists” who seemed to use Dino bones in an attempt to make monsters scary enough to make kids cry.