High Desert Heritage and Research

High Desert Heritage and Research (HDHR) helps tribal communities safeguard their cultural heritage by repatriating artifacts from private collections and promoting collaboration, archaeological research, and public engagement.

Millions of archaeological and cultural items from the American West are held in private collections. Generational turnover and the shifting ethics of collection pose a looming yet silent crisis: many collectors and inheritors would like to return some or all of their collections but find it impossible. No policies or structures exist at any level for ordinary people to facilitate artifact repatriation, museums cannot accept most collections, universities have no need to expand teaching collections, and tribes do not have the human or financial resources to grapple with this problem. Finding no support and no solutions, some collectors and inheritors are dumping their collections. When unique and remarkable artifacts are destroyed, we all suffer the loss of connection to the past.

HDHR addresses this gap by providing a non-adversarial, donor-supported repatriation process that benefits collectors, tribal communities, and the public at-large.

Who We Serve

Private collectors and those inheriting collections benefit from having a trustworthy, knowledgeable partner to execute ethical and legal repatriation procedures. We find that most private individuals with cultural items have acquired them as a way to honor and preserve a “lost” culture, and would like to part with them now out of a concern for the legality of possession and/or shifting notions of the ethics of maintaining their collections.

Tribal communities often would like items of cultural patrimony returned to their care, but lack the needed resources to engage with private collectors ad hoc. HDHR offers a collaborative approach wherein the tribe determines which items are of interest to them and how they would like to be contacted about important items, and HDHR processes collections according to these orders.

Items in collections represent an untapped reservoir of information about the past that will be of particular interest to the general public. Items held by collectors are often in good condition and have an evocative presence to them that communicates their importance to onlookers. Pairing this with tribal knowledge and archaeological interpretation creates a powerful engine for generating new discoveries that will be of interest to a broad range of people.

Community Benefit

HDHR establishes a scalable solution to a nationwide gap in cultural resource management. By creating infrastructure for voluntary repatriation, our organization reduces the loss of archaeological information, supports Tribal sovereignty and cultural ownership , and generates new opportunities for research and public education from materials that would otherwise remain inaccessible or be destroyed.