Owned by an antiquarian and collector called W.J. Bernhard Smith FSA, in May 1884 it was sold at Sotheby’s and bought by Augustus Pitt-Rivers FSA for five guineas. Kept in the dining room of Pitt-Rivers’ country estate at Rushmore, and exhibited to the public, it was eventually inherited by Pitt-Rivers grandson, the Blackshirt eugenicist George Pitt-Rivers FSA. After his wartime imprisonment under Defence Regulation 18B, the grandson donated the item to his Oxford college, instigating its use at desert in the Senior Common Room – a tradition eventually brought to an end in 2015. Outlining the story of the skull-cup told in Dan’s book Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting (Hutchinson Heinemann 2025), the talk considers what can and can’t be known about the woman whose skull this was, and what this episode tells us about institutional inheritance, tradition, and dehumanization. It also considers the wider implications for cultures of memory, memorialization and restitution, and the ethical treatment of human remains in museums and universities in the 2020s.
February 19 @ 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
This event will be both in person at Burlington House and online.
Open to all, free of charge but please register here.
