Righting Historic Wrongs                     

Brynn Mawr College

Mireille Lee was a master’s student studying Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology in 1993 when her professor, James Wright, tipped authorities off about a collection of Mycenaean gold and jewelry that he believed to have been looted from Aidonia, Greece.

In 2022, Lee established the Foundation for Ethical Stewardship of Cultural Heritage (FESCH). The foundation's inaugural project is to create a protocol for cataloging items in museum and academic collections and make that data available in an open-source database where items and their origins can be easily researched.

In January, FESCH received a $349,315 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to officially launch the Mediterranean Antiquities Provenance Research Alliance, or MAPRA, a pilot program with four universities to establish standard nomenclature and protocols for provenance research and begin creating a database.

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