Archaeology, Anthropology, and Museums, 1851–2014: Rethinking Pitt-Rivers and His Legacy – An Introduction

Abstract

This special issue is an outcome of ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector’, a three-year research project funded by a grant from The Leverhulme Trust. The editors, Coote and Petch, were the project’s principal investigator and researcher, three of the contributors (Green, Morton, and Riviere) were ‘associate researchers’ on the project, and all but one of the contributors participated in ‘The Many Faces of General Pitt-Rivers’, a project workshop held on 25 March 2011 that was the stimulus for the present set of articles (Figure 1). The ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ project was inspired by three concerns: that so little was known about Pitt-Rivers’s collecting activities in general and about his ‘second’ collection in particular; that scholarly and popular understandings of Pitt-Rivers and his collections had been distorted by the existence of a museum in Oxford that bore his name but was never ‘his’ and was filled with other people’s collections; and, finally, that scholarly and popular understandings of the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum had been skewed by its nominal connection with a man of supposedly fixed ideas. The main aim of the project was to gain an overall understanding of the totality of Pitt-Rivers’s collections, and of his related collecting activities, broadly conceived — as a lecturer, author, correspondent, cataloguer, exhibiter, museum creator, thinker, and theorist. The records for Pitt-Rivers’s ‘first’ collection — that is, the one he gave to the University of Oxford — had already been the subject of a previous project, also funded by a grant from The Leverhulme Trust in the mid-1990s. The records for the second had only recently been placed in the public domain, through the deposit by his great-grandson in the Cambridge University Library of the nine-volume manuscript catalogue of Pitt-Rivers’s ‘second’ collection, which had been housed in the main at the private Pitt-Rivers Museum in Farnham (see Saunders, this issue). As part of the work of the ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ project we were able to commission Cambridge University Library to digitize the manuscript catalogue (Figures 2 and 3), which was then made available online as part of the project website. A database covering the records for both collections was created, and also made available online. Thanks to the generous collaboration of The Salisbury museum history journal, Vol. 7 No. 2, July, 2014, 126–134