WORcester College building at Oxford University, Photo: Peter Schickert / Imago Stock and People / Profimedia Images
Academics from the prestigious Oxford University in the United Kingdom have drank for decades from a pocal made of a human skull, reveals a book that explores the violent history of human remains during the colonial period, The Guardian reports on Tuesday.
Professor Dan Hicks, a world archeology curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum of the British Higher Education Institution, says that the improvised pole from a cut and polished cranial cap, adorned with a silver handle and support, was regularly used in the formal dinner of the Worcester College.
Hicks, whose future book Every monument Will Fall (“Each monument will fall”), follows the “shameful history of the skull,” he said that the pole was also used to serve chocolate, after, due to wear, the wine began to flow from it.
The archaeologist said that the increasing dissatisfaction among teachers and guests finally ended the macabre ritual in the Common Hall of teachers. The Worcester College in 2019 In 2019 on Hicks to investigate the origin of the skull and the way it became what he calls “a variety of table dishes.”
Hicks states that the debates on the consequences of colonialism usually focus on how the prominent British who took advantage of it – such as Cecil Rhodes or Edward Colston – were commemorated by statues, objects or institutions that bear their name.
But he wanted to show in the book how the identities of the victims of the colonial domination were often deleted from history, because, due to racist ideas on British and white cultural supremacy, they were not considered to be mentioned. “The dehumanization and destruction of identities were part of the violence,” the archaeologist stresses
Hicks found no record regarding the person whose remnants was made, although carbon dating showed that he is about 225 years old. Its size and other circumstantial evidence suggest that it came from the Caribbean and possibly belonged to a enslaved woman.
Instead, British Pocal owners are well documented. The cup was donated to the Worcester College in 1946 by a former student, George Pitt-Rivers, whose name is engraved on the silver handle. Convinced eugenist, he was incarcerated by the British government during World War II, because of his support for British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.
