US museum prepares to return four Cambodian antiquities

THE Denver Art Museum is preparing to return four antiquities to Cambodia following a news media collaboration that reported the pieces are linked to a man charged with trafficking looted artefacts.

The four antiquities to be returned came to the museum through Douglas Latchford, who in 2019 was indicted by US prosecutors after decades of alleged trafficking in looted artefacts from the Khmer Empire, which flourished in Southeast Asia a thousand years ago.

The Washington Post, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other media organisations in the Pandora Papers collaboration began contacting museum officials about pieces in their collection linked to Latchford in June and followed up with a letter in September.

The museum removed the four artefacts from its collection after receiving the letter from the news organisations seeking comment about the items. “The museum is now working with the government to return the pieces to Cambodia,” museum spokesperson Kristy Bassuener said.

The collaboration reported that 10 museums around the world held at least 43 relics that passed through the hands of Latchford or those of his associates identified by prosecutors.

The four relics from Denver are of “extraordinary cultural significance”, said Bradley Gordon, one of the lawyers representing the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts.

Gordon is part of a team the ministry assembled to track down pieces looted from Cambodia during the decades of tumult around a civil war and the genocidal regime of Pol Pot.

One of the four relics to be returned – a prehistoric bell – likely belongs to a set of 12 that had been looted from a province north of Phnom Penh, experts say. According to the Cambodian team’s research, Latchford likely owned at least half of the stolen set, Gordon said. “When you put them together, they made different sounds, and it is believed that they were used to call warriors to battle,” he said.

“Now they are spread around the world, which means it’s impossible for musicologists to study them.”