Nashville’s renowned Parthenon Museum is bidding farewell to one of its prized collections: This month over 250 Mexican artifacts — including ancient tools, instruments and clay sculptures dating back more than 500 years — are being returned to Mexico City, where they will eventually be put on display.
The prized artifacts have been at the Parthenon since the late 1960s, when an Oregon doctor donated them for tax deduction purposes. Farmers in western Mexico had sold them for cheap, thinking they were junk found on their farms.
“It’s just the responsibility of all museums to return that," said Bonnie Seymour, the assistant curator who led the museum’s repatriation effort. "We can’t fix the holes that are lost, because a lot of context is lost. But we can give it back to where it belongs.”













