Abstract
The Pitt Rivers Museum was established at Oxford University in 1883 as a result of the gift of the ethnographical and archaeological collection belonging to Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers. He had begun his collection some thirty years earlier in order to illustrate what he referred to as the ‘principle of continuity’; and he was concerned to find a place for it within an academic setting in order to promote the study of anthropology, a subject in which he had become involved as a serious amateur since the early 1860s. His collection, which numbered approximately 14,000 items at the time of its presentation to Oxford, ranged from boomerangs to bows and arrows, housing types (based on models), and clothing and ornamentation. Many of the items were obtained from returning travellers and explorers, among them Richard Burton, the Africanist, and Edward Belcher, the Arctic explorer. The system had a specifically ethnological purpose, one that Pitt-Rivers hoped would be realized at Oxford.
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