Archaeologists quote them as being priceless, as the spears are among the few remaining artefacts that can be traced back to Cook's first voyage. Although the Gweagal Spears remain in the ownership of Trinity College, they are now on display at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge in England. The so-called Gweagal Shield is often claimed to be a bark shield dropped by the warrior Cooman, who was shot in the leg on 29 April 1770, and which has been in the possession of the British Museum for many years. Sixth-generation descendant of Cooman, Rodney Kelly, has been campaigning since 2016 for the return of the shield and the spears, saying that "the shield is the most significant and potent symbol of imperial aggression – and subsequent Indigenous self-protection and resistance – in existence",  The shield was lent to the National Museum of Australia for an exhibition called "Encounters: Revealing stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects from the British Museum", from November 2015 to March 2016, which was where Kelly first saw it. In April 2016, the British Museum offered to display the shield in Australia on a loan, but its permanent return is the only acceptable outcome for the Gweagal people. The NSW Parliament passed a motion acknowledging the clan as the shield's rightful owners in August 2016 and two months later, the federal Senate did the same. Kelly has made several crowdfunded trips to the UK, in late 2016 Kelly travelled to the UK and Germany On this trip, Kelly discovered that the Ethnological Museum of Berlin holds another shield also said to be connected to Cook's 1770 visit to Botany Bay. In November 2016, the British Museum began investigating the provenance of the shield and held a workshop involving various experts, including Aboriginal participants, which challenged their previous published claims about its origins. The resultant study, published in 2018, disputes the origin of the shield and undermines Kelly's claim. The scholarly research shows that the shield in the British Museum is not the so-called Gweagal Shield taken from Botany Bay in April 1770.