News

Journalists should contact press@prm.ox.ac.uk for further details and images concerning the Museum, its collections, research projects, events and activities. Download our press releases.

An Award Filled Day! 15 May 2025

On 15 May 2025 the Maasai Living Cultures Project scooped two major awards, reflecting the significance of this innovative partnership. In the University of Oxford Vice-Chancellor's Awards, it was announced as winner in the 'Making a Difference Globally' category, against stiff competition from other inspiring, groundbreaking and life changing projects taking place in the University. In a glittering ceremony in London later in the day, it was then announced as winner of the Museums + Heritage Partnership of the Year Award. The judges described the project as: "Brave, sensitive, and internationally significant, this partnership sets a new standard for genuine collaboration. Through exceptional dialogue and deep mutual respect, it has delivered outcomes with impact far beyond the project itself — offering vital lessons for the sector at a pivotal moment in museum practice."

Find out more about the project at https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/maasai-living-cultures.

Professor Dan Hicks publishes new book Every Monument Will Fall 1 May 2025

St Cross Fellow Professor Dan Hicks, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum and Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, publishes his latest book, Every Monument Will Fall, on 1 May 2025. 

Part history, part biography, and part excavation, Every Monument Will Fall traces the deeper histories behind today's debates around art, colonialism, and memory. Professor Hicks explores the origins of disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, the creation of monuments, and the acquisition of contested cultural objects — weaving together stories that stretch from country houses in Yorkshire to Caribbean plantations and British colonial outposts. His book offers a powerful call for rethinking how we remember, and whose histories we choose to honour. 

The publication has already received wide acclaim. Professor Paul Gilroy has called it "an extraordinary intervention", Professor Alice Roberts describes it as "brave and clear-sighted", and the artist Isaac Julien praises it as "an astonishing tour de force". 

Hair of Tasmanian Aboriginal People Returned Home 24 March 2025

The Pitt Rivers Museum is returning five ancestral remains to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. The five remains are all samples of human hair taken during the period of Imperial expansion and the colonisation of Tasmania without the consent of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. The hair was transferred into the care of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre during a small ceremony on Monday 24 March 2025. Two Tasmanian Aboriginal delegates travelled to Oxford to receive the hair samples and take them home.

Three of the hair samples had entered the museum collections as transfers from other departments of the University in 1886; one was donated in 1914 and the other was acquired at an unknown date. None of the remains have been on display in the Museum. The identities of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people from whom the hair was taken are not known.

Statement from Prof. Laura Van Broekhoven, Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, in response to Museum hides mask "not for women's eyes" article in the Telegraph, 18 June 2024:

"This is a non-story. The Igbo mask has not been removed from display, as it was never on display and no one has ever been denied access to it.

 The Museum’s online collections now carry a cultural context message, which allows users, especially those from different cultures around the world, to actively choose which items they wish to see, and which to remain blurred from view. Only around 3,000 of our object records carry such a warning, so less than 1% of the overall collection.  No digital assets are withheld from view from women."

 Background information:

  • Contrary to an article which appeared in this morning’s Daily Telegraph, the Pitt Rivers Museum is not withholding an Igbo mask from display because it should not be shown to women. The mask in question is in storage in the museum, and there is no record of it ever having been put on public display. The museum displays around 50,000 items from its overall collection of around 350,000 objects.

  • Some collections and imagery of them are not appropriate for general public access online, and in this case, direct contact with the museum staff is encouraged to discuss the research need to consult them. Overwhelmingly this is for human remains, graphic or personal content, but also for copyright or other legal reasons. Only about 2,200 digital assets out of over 250,000 objects (less than 1%) are withheld from public view in this way. 

  • The primary purpose of the sensitivity warnings is to protect people who may find these images culturally distressing, rather than from stopping visitors or researchers seeing them or doing research on them. We have a global collection and as such, have a responsibility to more than one community. Users of the online collections database can choose whether to proceed with or without these warnings.

  • The Museum is not working with groups to ensure that that objects are ‘selectively displayed’. We are working with groups to allow them to decide how their own cultures are represented.

  • A 15th century Indian statue has been claimed for return from the Ashmolean Museum collection, not the Pitt Rivers. Further information on this is available here.

Benin Bronzes: Statement from Oxford University's Gardens, Libraries and Museums 29 March 2021

Oxford University's Gardens, Libraries and Museums hold approximately 105 objects taken during the 1897 looting of Benin City; they are currently under the stewardship of the Pitt Rivers Museum.

The Pitt Rivers Museum has been working with Nigerian stakeholders, including representatives of the Royal Court and the Legacy Restoration Trust, to identify best ways forward regarding the care and return of these objects from the Court currently in the museums' care. Delegates from the Royal Court have visited Pitt Rivers (in 2017 and again in 2018), and representatives from the Pitt Rivers visited Nigeria in 2019 as part of the Benin Dialogue Group. This work is part of the Museum's continuous programme to research the composition and provenance of the collections and identify collections that were taken as part of military violence or looting, or otherwise contentious circumstances and engage in conversations with external partners about the future care of these objects.

Since 2017 the Museum has been part of the Benin Dialogue Group and subsequently the Digital Benin Project, a multi-lateral collaborative working group, bringing together museum directors and delegates from Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom, with representatives of the Edo State Government, the Royal Court of Benin and the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria. Member museums are seeking to address the issues of return and restitution within their own governance structures. There are different laws that apply in different countries to the field of culture and the return of cultural objects. Conversation are developing at a differing pace in the various countries for initiating permanent returns.

We acknowledge the profound loss the 1897 looting of Benin City caused and, alongside our partners of the Benin Dialogue Group, we aim to work with stakeholders in Nigeria to be part of a process of redress.

Any request for the return of these artefacts would fall within article 2.2 of Oxford University's Procedures for claims for the return of Cultural Objects.

More information at https://prm.web.ox.ac.uk/committed-to-change.