In the cold winter months of 1872, an armed group of headhunters raided a series of tribal villages along the isolated eastern foothills of the Himalayas, a region that would come to be known as the Lushai Hills District. Moving through dense jungles and looting the slain, the raiders left a trail of human carnage in their wake. Two skulls were acquired: one intact, one partly smashed. Following their traditional cultural customs, they cleaned the ‘soft parts of the head whilst fresh’ before removing the brains and soaking the rest.1 The trophies would soon join the largest set of human heads in the world – 1,474 skulls – on the order of one of the headhunters’ preeminent medicine men: Joseph Barnard Davis of Staffordshire.2