SHRUNKEN HEADS, SHRINKING HORIZONS

ANYONE WHO HAS READ Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy will recall a key scene in which the heroine, Lyra Belacqua, visits Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, described as possessing “a thousand and one jumbled trophies and relics and objects of magic and tools and weapons, and not only from the Arctic … but from every part of this world”.

Lyra, of course, inhabited a fictional parallel universe, but the Pitt Rivers Museum, founded in 1884 by Augustus Pitt Rivers, was accurately sketched. Recently shortlisted for the Art Fund Museum of the year award, it remains one of the most fascinating collections of anthropological artefacts in the world. Its treasures include the object of Lyra’s quest, trepanned, or shrunken heads, which have both shocked and delighted successive generations of visitors.