Colombia demands return of 34 San Agustín stone sculptures from Berlin museum

Colombia is demanding the return of 34 ancient sculptures from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The dispute centers on questions of illegal property, inviolable cultural assets, and indigenous rights.

The San Agustín Archaeological Park in the Andes is a city of the dead, home to hundreds of stone sculptures and one of the largest ancient necropolises in the world. For many years, the indigenous Yanakuna people, who live in this region of southern Colombia, have been ritually preparing the site for the return of more than 20 such grave figures.

These ancient grave guardians—carved from volcanic rock, half human and half animal—were created between the 1st and 10th centuries by a shamanic society that had already vanished by the time the Spaniards arrived in South America in 1492. Today, they sit 9,450 kilometers away from San Agustín, housed in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.

The absence of these sculptures could lead to an imbalance, fears Jair Quinayas of the Yanakuna during a conversation with taz. "The spirits in the stones could be a mother, a grandmother, or a child," adds Yanakuna elder Segundo Burbano.

In recent years, a dispute has developed between the Colombian government and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK), to which the Ethnological Museum Berlin belongs. The controversy stems from suspicions that ethnologist Konrad Theodor Preuß (1869–1938) brought the stone grave guardians into the possession of Berlin museums illegally around 1920.

"Pueblo Escultor" Demands the Sculptures Back

For decades, civil society initiatives in Colombia have demanded the return of the grave figures, including the "Pueblo Escultor"—named after the pre-Columbian people who created the sculptures of San Agustín. Some Yanakuna also organize within this initiative. For them, the issue goes beyond questions of ownership. It concerns a national cultural asset with which they feel spiritually connected, and which was unjustly separated from them approximately 100 years ago.

In 2021, the Colombian government submitted a repatriation request to the SPK, and the case has been under negotiation since then. taz obtained correspondence between Hermann Parzinger, President of the SPK from 2008 to May 2025, and Alhena Caicedo, Director of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH).

Request Rejected in 2025

On January 2, 2025, Parzinger stated that a return of the objects under German law would only be justified if they came from a "colonial context" and had been "appropriated in a way that is no longer legally and/or ethically acceptable." However, he noted that at the beginning of the 20th century, Colombia was already an independent republic with which Germany maintained diplomatic relations.

Parzinger cited another criterion: if "these are archaeological objects from pre-Christian times that do not originate from a community whose descendants still live today," then present-day Colombia could not claim them either. The request was initially rejected.

Colombian Arguments Rejected

On the Colombian side, these arguments are not accepted—especially not by the "Pueblo Escultor." One of their activists, researcher David Dellenback, gained access to the depots of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin as early as 1992.

There, as he told taz, he found not only 21 stone figures from San Agustín but also discovered 14 other artworks from Nariño, on the border with Ecuador, that were not officially recorded. At the beginning of the 20th century, Konrad Theodor Preuß—then curator of the Royal Museum of Ethnology, the predecessor institution of the Ethnological Museum—had them brought to Berlin. Today, 440 objects from the so-called Preuß Collection are still held there.

The grave figures from the necropolis of San Agustín have been stored in the Berlin museum depot for a long time. Photo: Colombian Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia

By José David Escobar Franco