In a significant step towards cultural restitution, the University of Oxford has returned the remains of 39 individuals from the Naga community, who were taken during British colonial rule in India. A delegation of around 30 people from Nagaland, a mountainous state in northeastern India, attended a ceremony at Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum to receive these ancestral remains on Monday. The remains, primarily skulls, will be returned to their homeland and given a respectful burial under a joint memorial in a park in Nagaland. This move marks a historical moment, with museum director Laura Van Broekhoven describing it as "a significant milestone that will be part of stories told to future generations." The remains had been on display at the Oxford museum for decades before being removed from public view in 2020 as part of a decolonization process. The Pitt Rivers Museum, founded in the 19th century, houses over 6,000 objects associated with Naga culture, believed to be the largest such collection worldwide. Most of these were acquired during British colonial rule in India and Myanmar (the former Burma). The museum's website lists 219 items as human remains, collected between 1910 and 1940 by two colonial administrators who were also anthropologists. The objects were frequently confiscated during punitive military expeditions rather than freely given. During their visit to Oxford, the Naga delegation met descendants of one of the anthropologists involved in collecting the remains. This handover concerns only the 39 ancestral remains and follows a visit by a Naga delegation to Oxford in 2025, when they formally requested their return. The museum had announced in September that the remains would be returned to India.