A newly revealed chapter in Britain’s colonial past has shocked scholars and activists alike: until 2015, fellows at Worcester College, Oxford, regularly drank wine, and later chocolates, from a chalice fashioned from a Black woman’s skull.
The “skull-cup,” comprising a polished braincase mounted with a silver rim and stand, was used at formal dinners in the college’s senior common room. Its origins remained unexamined until Professor Dan Hicks, curator of world archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, was invited in 2019 to trace the vessel’s provenance.
His recently-released book, Every Monument Will Fall, exposes the “shameful history of the skull” and its role in colonial violence.
Carbon dating suggests the skull is approximately 225 years old, and its dimensions point to a likely Caribbean origin, possibly the remains of an enslaved Black woman.
Yet, no record of her identity survives.
By contrast, the skull-cup’s British custodians are well documented: the chalice was acquired at an 1884 Sotheby’s auction by Victorian archaeologist Augustus Pitt Rivers and later donated in 1946 by his eugenicist grandson, George Pitt-Rivers, whose name is engraved on its silver rim.
The revelation has prompted renewed calls for reckoning with colonial legacies. Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, condemned the practice as “sickening,” highlighting the college’s enrichment “by centuries of colonial violence.”
In response, Worcester College says the skull-cup was phased out of use after mounting discomfort and placed in permanent archive storage in 2015, with access now strictly prohibited.
A spokesperson asserted that the governing body “dealt with the issue ethically and thoughtfully,” following scientific and legal advice.
Professor Hicks’s research underscores how colonialism not only lauded its perpetrators with statues and institutions but also erased and dehumanized its victims, often literally treating their remains as curiosities.
His book further documents similar abuses, including Victorian elites displaying Zulu battle-victim skulls in private collections, reminding us that dismantling these monuments remains an urgent task.
