Two archives, queried live.
Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 13 shown for “Animal-headed Rattle” — 35 records examined, 10 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-06 10:53 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Animal-headed Rattle
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1981–1550 B.C.

Talking Drum
Artist not stated in the record

Cow rattle
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1550–1300 BCE

Rattle
Artist not stated in the record · 19th century

Crocodile whistle and rattle
Maya artist(s) · 700–800 CE

Smiling figure (Sonriente)
South central Veracruz artist(s) · 600–1000 CE

Trumpet
Artist not stated in the record · 200 BCE–600 CE
Whistling Jar
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1000–1476

Ocarina
Artist not stated in the record · 1300–1500

Whistling Jar
Artist not stated in the record · 1000–1476

Ocarina
Artist not stated in the record · 1300–1500

Coiled serpent
Mexica artist(s) · 1325–1521 CE

Double animal-head bell
Chiriquí artist(s) · 1000 - 1600 CE
Where these records came from.
Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.
- The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field:
isPublicDomain. 35 matched · 24 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.12 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 11 matched · 11 examined · 10 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.1 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-06 10:53 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.
Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.
An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.