At one of the world’s most elite universities, professors once toasted to empire using a human skull.
For decades, Oxford academics at Worcester College drank wine and served chocolates from a silver-rimmed chalice made from the sawn-off cranium of a woman believed to have been enslaved. The grotesque ritual continued until 2015.
It gets even worse. The skull was donated to Oxford by George Pitt-Rivers, a noted eugenicist and former Nazi sympathizer.
A shameful history
In the candlelit dining halls of Oxford’s Worcester College, there are plenty of rituals. Latin graces are sometimes recited before meals. Diners rise when the head of the table enters. Port is passed left; always left. But until just a decade ago, one ritual stood out—not for its reverence, but for its sheer brutality. Wine was poured into a cup fashioned from a human skull.
The chalice’s story is unearthed in Every Monument Will Fall, the new book by Professor Dan Hicks, curator of world archaeology at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. His investigation began in 2019, when Worcester College asked him to trace the object’s origin and significance. What he found, Hicks told The Guardian, was not merely an artifact, but “some sick variety of tableware.”
Carbon dating suggests the skull is around 225 years old. The skull seems to have belonged to a Caribbean woman, and circumstantial evidence suggests she was once enslaved. The skull has silver hallmarks that date to 1838—the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation and the formal abolition of slavery in British colonies.
The skull was auctioned in 1884. At the Sotheby’s auction, it caught the eye of Augustus Pitt Rivers—a soldier, collector, and architect of British ethnographic display. He paid five pounds and five shillings for it. The seller was Bernhard Smith, a lawyer and Oxford alumnus whose father served with the Royal Navy in the Caribbean. The chalice joined Pitt Rivers’s private collection and was eventually inherited by his grandson, George Pitt-Rivers.
George Pitt-Rivers was an anthropologist and one of the wealthiest men in the UK in the interwar period between WWI and WWII. But that’s not what he is known for. George Pitt-Rivers embraced anti-Semitism and fascism; he promoted several conspiracy theories and openly supported fascism in the UK. In 1940, he was arrested as a potential traitor. He was ultimately released and made a series of donations to support his reintegration efforts.
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Among these donations was the skull. But the skull didn’t go to a museum or an anthropology collection. It became part of a macabre ritual.
Routinely used
The skull-cup was used for decades in the senior common room at Worcester College, Oxford, primarily by fellows—academics and college members. It was mostly employed during formal dinners and social gatherings. Polished and mounted with a silver rim and stand, the chalice was initially used to serve wine. After it began to leak, it was repurposed to hold chocolates.
According to Hicks, it was used routinely at formal dinners in the senior common room at Worcester College. Not as a prank or novelty, but as part of the tableware. Its use was ceremonial, folded into the college’s traditions, and persisted for decades with little public scrutiny until concerns raised by guests and fellows led to its removal in 2015.
The skull was only retired after growing discomfort among fellows and guests.
Oxford has responded to the book with cautious acknowledgement. A spokesperson for Worcester College said that the vessel was sometimes displayed with the silver collection and used as tableware, but this was “severely limited after 2011.” It was removed entirely by 2015. The college, after seeking legal and scientific advice, resolved to store the skull “in a respectful manner, where access to it is permanently denied.”
A stain on Oxford’s legacy
The skull’s journey from the Caribbean colony to an English auction house to an Oxford dining table tells a larger story. The victims of colonialism were not only exploited in life—they were silenced in death, their remains handled, bought, and displayed like trophies.
Although the identity and enslavement of the woman can’t be proven conclusively, this is clearly a colonization story, says Hicks. “The dehumanization and destruction of identities was part of the violence [of colonization],” he writes in his book.
Oxford academics should have known better; or cared more. Normalizing the use of human remains in university traditions (and as tableware of all things) is an embodying a legacy of colonial violence and dehumanization. It’s a failure to defend basic human values.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, chair of the UK parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, responded with horror. “It is sickening to think of Oxford dons, sitting in this bastion of privilege, itself enriched by the proceeds of centuries of colonial violence and extraction, swilling drink out of a human skull that may have belonged to an enslaved person and has been so little valued that it has been turned into an object.”
This is not the only such case Hicks documents. His book also reveals how skulls of African commanders were collected from battlefields and displayed in British drawing rooms, including that of Field Marshal Lord Grenfell, who exhumed the skull of a Zulu leader after the Battle of Ulundi in 1879.
“These are not anomalies,” Hicks argues. “This is a system.”
