[1][2] Hicks studied archaeology and anthropology at St John's College, Oxford, gaining a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree.

[citation needed] Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford and Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

[17] It was also criticised with Nigel Biggar saying "Brutish Museums is an object lesson in how political zeal can abuse data in the cause of manufacturing an expedient narrative"[18] and Richard Morrison of The Times saying "Hicks’s vision of great museums returning hundreds of thousands of items...to the possible descendants (or not) of the peoples who created them, in some cases thousands of years ago, strikes me as being so impractical on so many levels that it could only have come from someone who makes his living in an ivory tower that’s actually stocked with ivory".

[19] Staffan Lundén criticized the book, saying it let "emotion, oversimplified messages, and personal opinion take precedence over evidence.

He was criticised for "cloudy vagueness" and historical inaccuracy in asserting that Jeremy Bentham was opposed to the abolition of slavery and involved in the invention of race science.

[28] He responded to this accusation by claiming that the provision of bodies for anatomical investigation was a key part of the development of 19th century race science.