Academics at Oxford 'drank from a human skull chalice'

Oxford University academics used a chalice made from a human skull potentially belonging to an enslaved Caribbean woman at formal dinners until as recently as 2015, a new book has alleged.

- ANDY GREGORY

The chalice, created from a sawn-off skull adorned with a silver rim and stand, was used for decades as a drinking cup in the senior common room at Worcester College, according to Professor Dan Hicks, curator of world archaeology at the university’s Pitt Rivers Museum.

It was eventually repurposed to serve chocolates instead of wine after it began to leak, said Prof Hicks.

The item’s “shameful history” is detailed in his forthcoming book Every Monument Will Fall, which explores the colonial origins of contemporary conflicts and the theft of ancestral human remains.

The ritual at Worcester College was phased out in response to mounting dismay among fellows and guests, and in 2019 the college invited Prof Hicks to investigate the chalice’s origins, he told The Guardian.

Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who chairs a cross-party parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, told the outlet: “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.”

Noting that the identities of colonial victims were often erased from history as a result of racist ideas about British and white supremacy, with this forming “part of the dehumanisation and violence”, Prof Hicks said he had been unable to find any record of who the skull belonged to.