It has been an unusually revealing week for cultural heritage law.
In Iran, conservators are racing to stabilize historic buildings damaged during the war. In Denmark, a homeowner digging a new terrace discovered the largest known Viking Age silver hoard in the country. In Florida, federal investigators are beginning the daunting work of identifying more than 22,000 antiquities seized in an ongoing smuggling investigation. And in Washington, the physical fabric of national cultural institutions continues to be remade, from the demolished East Wing of the White House to the removal this week of Joel Shapiro’s Blue from the Kennedy Center.
These stories arise from very different legal settings. Together they offer a useful reminder of what cultural heritage protection actually requires: good rules, capable institutions, expertise, and enough time to act before something important disappears.
The most sobering story comes from Iran. Sarvy Geranpayeh reports in The Art Newspaper that Iranian heritage officials have recorded damage to 149 historic monuments across 18 provinces and 29 cities following the US-Israeli strikes that began in February. Among the damaged sites are the Golestan Palace in Tehran, the seventeenth-century Chehel Sotoun Palace in Isfahan, and part of the Trans-Iranian Railway, all associated with UNESCO World Heritage inscriptions.
The details of the conservation work are especially striking. At Golestan Palace, specialists are collecting, sorting, and coding shattered wooden and decorative fragments. Damaged roofs are being repaired before autumn rain causes another round of harm. At Chehel Sotoun, crews have stabilized damaged sections and removed hazards. Specialists repaired the Trans-Iranian Railway quickly enough to restore operations. Iranian officials estimate damage to the heritage sector at about 7.5 trillion tomans, roughly $40 million at current exchange rates. This is the less glamorous side of cultural heritage protection.
Iranian officials have been communicating with UNESCO, the secretariat of the Hague Convention, and other international bodies. They are also compiling technical documentation for possible compensation claims and international legal proceedings. Farhad Azizi Zelani, Iran’s director general of national and world heritage sites, draws a broader lesson from the experience: international instruments need effective implementation and a rapid response when cultural property is threatened.
That is an important point for the broader law of armed-conflict heritage protection. A treaty supplies a framework. The resilience of cultural property also depends on institutions capable of using it.
A very different story from Denmark: A homeowner in Rebild set out to build a terrace and instead found enough Viking silver to make archaeologists everywhere reconsider the attractions of yard work. The newly discovered hoard contains about 700 tenth-century objects and fragments weighing nearly 18.5 kilograms, including silver bars, bracelets, 47 whole coins and coin fragments, a small Thor’s hammer, and pieces of cut silver. The Art Newspaper reports on the discovery here, while Nordjyske Museer provides an excellent account of the find and its archaeological significance.
The objects reveal an economy tied to a very large world. The hoard contains both Arabic and Anglo-Saxon coins. Much of the silver was apparently valued by weight rather than by the identity of the object itself. The bars, broken jewelry, coins, and silver fragments offer evidence of trade networks linking Scandinavia with England and the Islamic world during a period when the Danish kingdom and Christianity in Scandinavia were taking shape.
The legal response is almost as interesting as the discovery. Under section 30 of the Danish Museum Act, objects from the past that possess valuable material or special cultural-historical significance can constitute danefæ, or treasure trove. Qualifying finds belong to the state and must be turned over to the National Museum. The finder receives compensation based on the material value and rarity of the objects and, importantly, “the level of care” used in securing the find. The National Museum of Denmark explains the reward system here.
That last factor matters. Denmark has built an incentive into the law for a finder to protect archaeological information rather than simply extract valuable objects from the ground. The Rebild finder realized he had encountered something significant, proceeded carefully, and the find entered an archaeological and museum system. The result preserves the objects and much of the knowledge they carry.Compare that sequence with what happens after antiquities have entered illicit commercial channels.
Hyperallergic reported this week on the extraordinary seizure of more than 22,000 artifacts by Homeland Security Investigations in Florida. HSI announced the seizure on August 28 and described it as among the largest in the agency’s history. Preliminary assessments suggest some of the objects are between 1,000 and 5,000 years old and originated in Europe, Africa, the Levant, and the eastern Mediterranean. Researchers from the University of South Florida and the University of Pennsylvania are assisting with identification, authentication, and conservation.
At this stage, there is still a great deal we do not know. Authorities have said little publicly about the suspected trafficking network, the provenance of individual objects, possible source countries, or eventual repatriations. With 22,000 objects, sorting those questions will take considerable time.
This is the recurring difficulty with antiquities enforcement. Recovery gets the object back into responsible custody. Archaeological context may already have vanished. Investigators and scholars then have to reconstruct histories of excavation, ownership, export, and import from whatever evidence remains.
The institutional juxtaposition identified by Hyperallergic is also difficult to miss. HSI has developed considerable expertise in cultural-property investigations and repatriations. Elsewhere within the Department of Homeland Security, border construction has recently damaged the Las Playas Intaglio archaeological site in Arizona, while preservation and environmental requirements have been waived for other border projects that may affect archaeological resources. Somehow, one federal department can simultaneously contain sophisticated cultural-property enforcement and activities that put cultural resources at risk.
Which brings us to Washington D.C. The East Wing of the White House was demolished between October and December 2025 as part of the project to construct a new East Wing containing a ballroom and underground military facilities. Adam Gopnik’s essay on the demolition in The New Yorker remains one of the better pieces of writing about why the loss generated such a strong response. His central insight is that architecture carries political meaning. The White House accumulated meaning because presidents inherited it temporarily. Alterations to a building like this therefore implicate process, stewardship, and institutional continuity as well as architectural taste.
There is an especially revealing legal wrinkle now. On August 31, the Supreme Court divided 5–4 in National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation and stayed a lower-court injunction that had restricted above-ground construction. The Court’s per curiam opinion emphasized standing. It concluded that the government was likely to succeed in showing that the National Trust lacked a sufficiently concrete and particularized injury to challenge the project and that the remaining stay factors favored the government. The Court expressly said that it was not deciding the legality of the East Wing project itself. The Court’s opinion is available here.
Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, dissented. His opening conclusion was unusually direct: “That construction is likely unlawful.” Roberts pointed to 40 U.S.C. § 8106, which prohibits construction of a building or structure on federal public grounds in the District of Columbia without express congressional authority. In his view, Congress had supplied no such authority for the ballroom project.
The standing dispute may prove important for preservation law well beyond this particular building. Historic-preservation organizations often rely on members whose use and enjoyment of historic places supply the injury necessary to get into federal court. A rule that treats an architectural or historic injury largely as disagreement with government aesthetics could make some preservation challenges considerably harder to bring. There is also a simpler lesson here. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, the East Wing was already gone. Preservation law has always struggled with remedies because demolition can happen quickly.
Another removal in Washington this week raises a related set of questions. On Wednesday, September 2, National Park Service crews dismantled Joel Shapiro’s Blue, the 24-foot painted-aluminum sculpture installed at the Kennedy Center’s REACH campus in 2019. Shapiro had described the animated, angular figure as a “celebration of possibility.” He gifted the sculpture to the Kennedy Center as a permanent installation. The Washington Post’s reporting on the removal is particularly useful, as is Hyperallergic’s account of the deinstallation.
The Kennedy Center offered no advance public explanation for the decision. It said that the Joel Shapiro and Ellen Phelan Foundation would decide where the sculpture is installed next. Former Kennedy Center curator Josef Palermo gave the Post a more pointed account. He said he had previously been instructed to “get rid” of outdoor artwork because President Trump wanted an entirely new collection when the Center reopened after renovations. Palermo did not recall Blue being singled out individually.
The photographs of the sculpture being taken apart invite a moral-rights question, and I may return to that issue in a separate post.
There is an important wrinkle at the outset. Shapiro died on June 14, 2025. For a work of visual art created after the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) took effect, 17 U.S.C. § 106A provides that the federal rights of attribution and integrity last for the life of the author, with the statutory term running through the end of the calendar year in which it otherwise expires. Shapiro’s VARA rights therefore expired at the end of 2025, months before Blue was removed.
That makes Blue a potentially useful case study in the limits of American moral rights. Had Shapiro still been alive, the facts would invite questions about destruction or modification, removal from a site for which a work was given as a “permanent installation,” and the uneasy treatment of site-specific art under VARA. The First Circuit’s decision in Phillips v. Pembroke Real Estate—which of course does not bind courts in Washington—famously concluded that VARA does not protect site-specific art as such. Those questions deserve more space than I can give them here.
For now, the larger pattern is enough. Cultural heritage law is sometimes treated as a field concerned with old things: temples, archaeological sites, ancient coins, museum collections, historic buildings. Yet heritage becomes vulnerable in the present. The differences among these stories matter. So does the common question beneath them: who gets to decide what survives, and through what process?
Good heritage law creates time for expertise before an irreversible decision. It records what has been found and what has been lost. It creates incentives for responsible behavior. It gives institutions the authority and resources to conserve. And, at its best, it recognizes that stewardship carries obligations to people who will encounter these places and objects long after the present decision-makers are gone. Once the bulldozers arrive, or an archaeological context has been scattered, the law has considerably less to work with.
Sources and Further Reading
- Sarvy Geranpayeh, “Iran’s Heritage Experts Race to Repair Damaged Sites as Negotiations Stall,” The Art Newspaper (Sept. 4, 2026).
- Hadani Ditmars, “Man Discovers Denmark’s Largest Viking Age Silver Hoard While Digging a Terrace in His Garden,” The Art Newspaper (Sept. 3, 2026).
- Nordjyske Museer, “Havearbejde afslører Danmarks største vikingesølvskat”.
- National Museum of Denmark, “Payment of the Treasure Trove Reward”.
- Denmark, Museumsloven § 30, current consolidated text.
- Rhea Nayyar, “ICE Seizes 22,000 Antiquities in Florida,” Hyperallergic (Sept. 3, 2026).
- U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “ICE HSI Seizes Over 22,000 Ancient Artifacts in Florida” (Aug. 28, 2026).
- Adam Gopnik, “Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing,” The New Yorker (Oct. 25, 2025).
- National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, No. 26A203, 609 U.S. ___ (Aug. 31, 2026).
- Victoria Craw & Jonathan Edwards, “Kennedy Center Removes Landmark ‘Blue’ Sculpture from Campus,” The Washington Post (Sept. 2, 2026).
- Emma Cieslik, “Critics Slam ‘Petty’ Removal of Joel Shapiro Sculpture From Kennedy Center,” Hyperallergic (Sept. 2, 2026).
- Jesse Bedayn, “Kennedy Center Disassembles Blue Sculpture from Its Grounds,” Associated Press (Sept. 2, 2026).
- Torey Akers, “Post-Minimalist Sculptor Joel Shapiro Has Died, Aged 83,” The Art Newspaper (June 17, 2025).
- 17 U.S.C. § 106A, Rights of Certain Authors to Attribution and Integrity.
- Phillips v. Pembroke Real Estate, Inc., 459 F.3d 128 (1st Cir. 2006).
