BERLIN — The foundation overseeing state museums in Berlin returned nine artifacts to indigenous communities in Alaska this week after it determined that they had been taken from a burial site in the 1880s.

“The objects were taken from graves without permission of the native people, and thus unlawfully,” said Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin's publicly funded museums.

“Therefore, they don’t belong in our museums,” he added.

The items, which included several masks, a wooden idol and a baby basket, had been in the collection of Berlin’s Ethnographic Museum, though they were never exhibited publicly. From 1882 to 1884, they were taken by Johan Adrian Jacobsen, a Norwegian adventurer and amateur ethnographer acting on behalf of the museum.