The Pitt Rivers Museum of the University of Oxford has agreed to return the remains of 39 Naga ancestors to Nagaland, India, according to a press release issued by the museum. This repatriation has come about as a result of dialogues between the museum and the Forum for Naga Reconciliation, an umbrella organisation representing the rights of the Naga people in Nagaland and neighbouring Indian states, as well as northern Myanmar.
The Pitt Rivers Museum holds the world's largest collection of Naga material, much of it collected by John Henry Hutton and James Philip Mills, two British colonial officials, ethnographers, and anthropologists who worked in the area during the first half of the twentieth century. Both men amassed large collections of ethnographic materials during their time in India, much of it seized during punitive military exhibitions.
During these expeditions preserved skulls kept by the peoples of Nagaland were particularly sought after. Naga communities typically had a house, cave or rockshelter in which many such skulls were stored. The British colonial authorities interpreted these as trophies associated with headhunting, something which demonstrated the superiority of British culture, and therefore the importance of the British imperial project in bringing civilisation to the world.
While there may have been some headhunting in Nagaland, the origin of the majority of these skulls derives from the traditional burial practices of the Naga people. These varied from community to community, although the most common form appears to have been a form of platform burial, in which the body was wrapped in cloth and placed on a raised Bamboo platform called a machang at the edge of the village, where it was typically consumed by Animals. The skull of the deceased was removed and cleaned before placing it in a sacred cave, called a Khulo Apshang (or if this was not available, a specially built house called a Lochem), along with those of other ancestors. Notably, not everyone could have their skull placed in a sacred place; persons who died as a result of violence, accidents, or diseases perceived as unclean (such as leprosy) were denied such funerary rights and had separate burial customs.
It is also possible that some skulls were taken directly by British soldiers or adventurers; 'native' skulls were highly sought after by both museums and private collectors in Europe, seen as natural history specimens which could be used to demonstrate theories about evolution and European superiority fashionable at the time (this would have required a degree of creativity, as modern archaeologists cannot reliably differentiate European from non-European skulls based upon morphological examination).
Today the Pitt Rivers Museum holds approximately 6500 items identified as being of Naga origin. Of these 219 are listed as being Human remains; 39 identifiable body parts, predominantly skulls but also including a finger and a piece of skin with hair, and 178 artefacts which may contain Human hair. It is the 39 body elements which the museum is currently planning to return to Nagaland.
Until 2020, many skulls from the Nagaland collection were on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum, but in that year the decision was taken to remove them from public viewing. The publicity raised by this event attracted the attention of Dolly Kikon, a member of the Lotha-Naga community, and professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the Forum for Naga Reconciliation. Kikon then contacted Laura Van Broekhoven, the director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, beginning the dialogue which has led to the planned return of the items.
During the Covid 19 pandemic, the Forum for Naga Reconciliation formed a Recover, Restore, and Decolonise team, under the leadership of Dolly Kikon and Arkotong Longkumer, who comes from Kohima in Nagaland and is a professor of anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. This group arranged for a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum by a Naga delegation including leaders and elders of several Naga tribe Hohos (councils), together with members of the Forum for Naga Reconciliation and Forum for Naga Reconciliation, in June 2025.
As a result of this visit, the Pitt Rivers Museum proposed the return of the 39 identifiable body parts in its Naga collection, one of which was rejected due to uncertainty about its provenance (i.e. it was uncertain whether it actually came from Nagaland), and the Naga delegation produced the Naga-Oxford Declaration on Repatriation, which reads:
- We are grateful to our ancestors for being a testament and silently proclaiming the stories of our people.
- We are sorry that it has taken us several decades but we are here now to reclaim and return you to the homelands from where you were taken.
- We are committed to the process of your return from museums.
- We acknowledge that this Repatriation process is towards the healing and wholeness of the Naga people.
- As Nagas, we do so in a united voice, with mutual respect and consensus and to offer you a dignified rest, establishing a Naga monument of healing and peace for all generations, symbolising the oneness of the Nagas.
- We extend our solidarity to fellow Indigenous Peoples across the world who seek to undertake a similar journey of repatriation in the hope of bringing decolonisation, justice and peace, not just for ourselves but for humanity.
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