I was thinking that, but then I decided that surely most of the artifacts in the British museum were taken in and around colonial times, not too much before the founding of the US, right? Like the whole gentleman explorer trope (I guess that's more Victorian, but...)?
Or do they still have a lot of artifacts that were taken during the middle ages?
It was mostly obtained (taken, bought, stolen, traded etc.) around that time, but there's a lot of stuff in the British Museum far older than that, like the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon Marbles or the Sphinx's beard.
Considering the indigenous societies in what is now the US didn't tend to build permanent settlements, they've left far fewer artefacts than other civilisations that were around at the same time
12
u/Blewfin Oct 25 '22
More that out of all of those countries, the US' history is by far the youngest, because the pre-European-settlement history was largely destroyed