In July 2026, the University of Oxford approved the return of thirty-nine skulls. They had spent nearly a century at the Pitt Rivers Museum, one of the world's great ethnographic museums, catalogued in the manner of a museum: human remains, provenance, inventory number. The announcement was made in September. At the time of writing, they had not yet left Oxford; the journey is being prepared, and a delegation will travel to collect them.
The thirty-nine are skulls of Naga people, a people of north-east India and northern Myanmar. They reached Oxford between 1910 and 1940, brought by British administrators and anthropologists, chiefly two of them, Hutton and Mills, who worked for the colonial administration. The museum itself now says that the word 'collecting' does not describe a neutral, scholarly activity, that it was bound up with colonial violence, and that many of those remains were confiscated during punitive military expeditions rather than freely given. Of one of those men, Mills, it is recorded that on a 1936 expedition he hoped to obtain 'some good specimens'.
The phrase 'good specimens', said of human heads, is the whole problem. What decides what a Naga skull is in an Oxford display case is not the object but the word placed in front of it. Specimen. Piece. Remains. Museum holdings. Each of them turns a dead person into a classifiable thing, and the spoils of war into a scientific acquisition. The ethnographic museum was built on that operation: looking at the dead of other peoples and calling them a collection.
That word is now falling away, pushed aside by its rightful owners, and not out of generosity. The Naga have been in dialogue since 2020; they formed their own organisations to press the claim, travelled to Oxford, spent six years building a common position across different communities, languages and territories, and filed the formal claim. The museum accompanied the process and the university held the legal power to authorise the departure, but the impetus, the work and the voice come from them. And in that voice, the word that replaces 'specimen' is not 'remains' but 'ancestor'.
The difference between the two words is the difference between two worlds. Remains are preserved, studied, exhibited. An ancestor comes home. In their declaration, read in Oxford in 2025, the Naga representatives did not address objects, they addressed people: we are here now to reclaim and return you to the homelands from where you were taken. They said that the process seeks the healing and wholeness of the Naga people, and that they want to offer their ancestors a dignified rest. One of the communities, the Phom, put it plainly: the spirit of our ancestors will find no peace or eternal rest until they receive a burial with honour and dignity, according to our customs. This is not museum language. It is the language of mourning, the language of those who recover their dead, not of those who receive the return of property.
The museum was built on the operation of turning the dead into a collection. But the museum of today is not that of Hutton and Mills, and the people who now handle this return are not those who confiscated those skulls on punitive expeditions. The present institution administers the consequences of a plunder, carried out by others, under structures it now repudiates. For almost a century those skulls were there, catalogued and at times on display. That is the responsibility of the institution that kept them as what they were not. But one has to distinguish the one who steals from the one who, generations later, gives back, even if both bear the same name above the door. Reparation exists because they are different.
This case reveals that the status of a thing was never in the thing. A skull is not a specimen or an ancestor by nature; it is one or the other depending on who holds the power to name it, and that power has sat, for a century, on the wrong side of the display case. The ethnographic museum was the place where an empire exercised that power: it decided that the dead of the peoples it ruled were study material and placed them behind glass as proof of its own way of looking at the world. What is being returned, along with the thirty-nine skulls, is that power to name. Whoever decides now whether they are remains or ancestors is not Oxford. It is the Naga. And they have decided that these are their dead, and that they are going to bury them.
Almost everything is still to be done: the journey, the resting place, the rituals, the form the apology will take, if there is one. They call it a step on a longer road towards healing, not the end of the road. But the step that has been taken is the one that matters, because it is the one that changes who holds the word. For a century a museum looked at thirty-nine heads and saw specimens. Now a people looks at the same thirty-nine and sees its grandparents. The thing did not change. What changed is who can say what it is.
On the open conversation
This text starts from a decision by the Pitt Rivers Museum of the University of Oxford, approved in July 2026 and announced in September: to return thirty-nine ancestral human remains of the Naga people, a process driven and led by the Naga communities themselves over more than six years, and one that at the time of writing has not yet been completed. It is not an end, as the Naga partners themselves stress, but a step. What interests me is what the case reveals about the status of things: that a skull is a 'specimen' or an 'ancestor' depending on who holds the power to name it, and that what is restored, along with the remains, is that power. I have tried to distinguish the colonial agents who took the remains from the present staff who are handling their return, and to mark the reading of the museum as the administrator of a colonial mourning as my own interpretation, not as a fact from the file. If anyone wants to weigh in from museology, postcolonial studies or heritage law, this notebook stays open.
Sources
Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 'A Path Home: The Return of Naga Ancestral Remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum to the Naga Homeland', 5 September 2026. The University Council approved the return of 39 ancestral Naga human remains (primarily skulls) on 13 July 2026; the return is in preparation but has not been completed. The museum acknowledges the colonial origin of the collection: 'Their “collecting” was not the neutral, scholarly activity the word implies… it was bound up with colonial violence; remains and objects were frequently confiscated during punitive military expeditions, rather than freely given'. The 39 remains should not be confused with the 178 objects that contain or may contain human hair, which are not part of this consignment; the total for the category is 219 records. The figure changed from 41 (2025) to 39 (2026) as provenance research progressed.
The process has been led by the community ('a Naga-led process'): Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR) and Recover, Restore and Decolonise (RRaD, established in 2021), together with the Naga Tribe Hoho, elders, churches and civil society.
Naga voice: 'Naga Oxford Declaration on Repatriation', 13 June 2025: 'we are here now to reclaim and return you to the homelands from where you were taken'; the process seeks 'the healing and wholeness of the Naga people' and to offer the ancestors 'a dignified rest'. Statements from tribal organisations (Konyak Union: remains 'taken away without our consent'; Phom People’s Council, regarding dignified burial according to their customs).
The agents of the colonial acquisitions (the administrators and anthropologists J. H. Hutton and J. P. Mills, circa 1910-1940) should not be confused with the current museum staff facilitating the return. The characterisation of the museum as an administrator of colonial mourning is the author's interpretation.