Maastricht Excavation, Smithsonian Vote, and Trump Arch Plan Put Culture in the Political Crosshairs
A church-floor dig in Maastricht has become a legal and historical dispute, while Washington is once again weighing questions of memory, representation, and monumentality. Dutch archaeologist Wim Dijkman was arrested and later released after retaining skeletal remains from an excavation that may be connected to D’Artagnan, the 17th-century musketeer who inspired Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.
The remains were discovered beneath the floor of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul parish in Maastricht’s Wolder neighborhood, where the find quickly fueled speculation that the burial could belong to Charles de Batz de Castelmore, the man known as D’Artagnan. Dijkman said the excavation had been planned for months and argued that local officials mishandled the process. He also said he retrieved the bones from Germany, placed them in a friend’s safe, and later handed them over. He is now the subject of a police investigation.
The episode underscores how quickly archaeological discoveries can become entangled in questions of ownership, authority, and public narrative, especially when a figure as mythologized as D’Artagnan is involved. The real-life musketeer died near Maastricht in 1673 during the Battle of Maastricht, giving the site unusual historical weight.
In Washington, the US House of Representatives rejected a bill to create a Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum after Republicans amended the measure to recognize only “biological” females. The vote was 216 to 204. Supporters had hoped to secure a long-awaited museum site on the National Mall, but the revised language and added presidential discretion over location helped sink the bill.
Separately, the US Commission of Fine Arts approved Trump’s plan for a 250-foot triumphal arch in Washington, D.C. The design now advances through the city’s planning process, adding another contested monument proposal to the capital’s landscape. Together, the three developments point to a broader truth: in both museums and monuments, the fight is rarely only about form. It is about who gets to define history in public.
