Art News

At solemn ceremony at Quai Branly museum, France returns 20 Maori heads to New Zealand

PARIS (AP).- Preparing the biggest homecoming yet of its kind, authorities in New Zealand on Monday received 20 ancestral heads of Maori ethnic people once held in several French museums as a cultural curiosity. French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand and New Zealand’s ambassador presided over a solemn ceremony at Quai Branly museum in Paris, where the heads were encased in a box — the largest single handover of Maori heads to be repatriated, New Zealand’s embassy said. Since 2003, the South Pacific country has embarked on an ambitious program of collecting back Maori heads and skeletal remains from museums around the world. Yet the program has run into significant obstacles. France long resisted handing over such cultural artifacts,