Pitt Rivers Museum Research Articles

Time-of-flight neutron diffraction: a new analytical technique for conservation?

Historical metallurgy is an important aspect of archaeometry, and the study of the process of steel making is of great interest in this field. In order to achieve a high level of material characterization by traditional analytical methods, a destructive approach is usually necessary. This article reports the first systematic use of a neutron-based, non-destructive method that enables resolution of the complex microstructure of a metallic object while retaining full authenticity and artefact integrity. Historical Japanese swords represent some of the best examples of historical metalwork and are, therefore, one of the most rewarding classes of artefacts to study in order to elucidate the evolution of metallurgy. With the aim of characterizing the materials and forging methods used, we analysed two Japanese long swords from the Pitt Rivers Museum, using time-of-flight neutron diffraction (ToF-ND). The results showed that ToF-ND is a very promising method of analysis and investigation for ancient metals.

A Journey of 13,033 Stones

The Westlake Collection in the Pitt Rivers Museum includes 13,033 Tasmanian Aboriginal stone artefacts; it is the largest collection of its kind. Formed by amateur English scientist Ernest Westlake from 1908–1910, this paper tells the story of Westlake's life; why, and how, he chose to travel to Tasmania to collect stone artefacts; and what happened to that collection after his death in 1922. It also explores Westlake's collection as an enactment of nineteenth and early twentieth-century scientific ideas about Tasmanian Aboriginal people, and examines his accompanying paper archive, in particular his interviews with Aboriginal people. Possibly the richest source of Tasmanian Aboriginal language and culture dating from early twentieth century, these long-overlooked notes demonstrate the enduring traditions of a people once presumed extinct. An epilogue explains how these papers are being published in an innovative online archive guide and history.

The scholar–practitioner expanded: an indigenous and museum research network

An ongoing initiative based at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, England, is expanding the idea of the museum scholar–practitioner. In partnership with the Haida First Nation from British Columbia, Canada, the project Haida Material Culture in UK Museums: Generating New Forms of Knowledge is an international research network that uses museum collections to build and maintain long–term relationships between scholar–practitioners from both museum and aboriginal communities. The material heritage of the Haida acts as a nexus for dialogues regarding provenance, conservation techniques, cataloguing practices, cultural expression and artistic innovation, linguistic research and the emotive and affective power of objects. Such dialogues also promote forms of repatriation, and build links between material culture and the generation and transmission of cultural identity. The result is a multi-sited community of practice, comprised of seasoned and burgeoning scholar–practitioners using material culture and collective knowledge to explore Haida history, contemporary cultural expression, museum practices and the relationships between them.

Muddying the Waters

<p>This paper examines the history of one man's engagement with one of the most dominant intellectual ideas of the second half of the nineteenth century—evolution—and the way this was given physical form in the display of his collections up to 1884. It will also discuss the subsequent changes wrought to his work by his museum descendants at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.</p><p>The collection does not contain any considerable number of unique specimens, and has been collected during upwards of twenty years, not for the purpose of surprising any one, either by the beauty or value of the objects exhibited, but solely with a view to instruction. For this purpose ordinary and typical specimens, rather than rare objects, have been selected and arranged in sequence, so as to trace, as far as practicable, the succession of ideas by which the minds of men in a primitive condition of culture have progressed from the simple to the complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.</p>

Folklore, Survivals, and the Neo-Archaic

This article explores three terms of reference connected to late-nineteenthcentury ethnographies of British vernacular life—folklore, survivals in culture, and the neo-archaic. These descriptive vocabularies came to characterize homeland material culture and each expression became entrenched in museumbased discourse. The Folklore Society (FLS) made an abortive attempt to found an independent Museum of Folklore, in anticipation of which they deposited objects in the Museum of General and Local Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge. Similar artifacts were acquired by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford where, under the auspices of Edward Burnett Tylor, they were characterized as survivals from an earlier age. Similarly, Arthur Mitchell donated neo-archaic finds to the collections of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, arguing that such items exemplified the material resonance of the past in the present. This paper examines the emergence, impact, and agency of these interlinking terminologies, addressing their formative role in museological practice.

From Greater Britain to Little England

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading are seemingly very different institutions. In setting out to link the origins of these two museums, this article situates itself amid the tangled web of connections that existed between folklore, anthropology, and museums in Britain between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. By following a range of human and institutional connections this paper suggests that the different orientation of these two museums and their collections can be related to the ideological shifts that accompanied Britain's movement from an expansionist imperial power in 1860 to an actively decolonizing nation in 1960. In particular, the article relates the two museums to the decline of a discourse of civilization and the rise of folk museums and a salvage paradigm, which accompanied the development of an English national consciousness during the mid-twentieth century.

Taphonomy and Behaviour at the Acheulean Site of Kariandusi, Kenya

In this article, Louis Leakey’s previously unpublished field reports are used to describe the 1929–1931 excavation campaign at the Acheulean site of Kariandusi. Using the sample of artefacts from this campaign housed in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University, I attempt to understand the natural and behavioural factors contributing to site formation at Kariandusi. The matrix adhering to the artefacts and the degree of rounding on the artefacts are used to assess the depositional environments at the site. The artefact types represented at the site are used to reconstruct hominin discard behaviour. Descriptions and measurements of the bifaces are used to determine how these tools were made and whether they were resharpened. In conclusion, I provide a model of the life history of a Kariandusi biface.

Bonn voyage—sending our iconic objects on loan

Abstract From 2009 to 2011 the Pitt Rivers Museum sent a collection of 62 of its most iconic objects on loan to three venues in Europe (Bonn, Vienna and Bern) for the touring exhibition James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific. The exhibition included over 500 objects collected by or associated with the three voyages undertaken by James Cook in the eighteenth century, many of which were being displayed together for the first time since the collections were dispersed. Amongst them were some of the museum's most iconic—and most fragile—objects, including head-dresses, aprons, Maori cloaks and a large, fragile and rare basketry and feather head-dress (fau) from Tahiti. The loans process enabled a re-evaluation of the artefacts, including research into their histories, and resulted in interesting discoveries regarding previous conservation treatments. This article outlines the history of the Cook collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the conservation issues associated with preparing the objects for l...

Peter Gathercole (1929–2010): A Life Well-Lived

Peter Gathercole, museum anthropologist, teacher, archaeologist, biographer of V.G. Childe and long-time supporter of the aims of WAC, died on 11 October in Kernow/Cornwall, UK. The funeral was held on 5 November in Cambridge, where his partner Bobbie Wells lives. A lifelong Marxist, it was Peter’s undergraduate involvement with the Communist Party that brought him into early contact in 1949 with past WAC President, Jack Golson, at Cambridge University. They remained firm friends until Peter’s death, both leaving the Communist Party in the 1950s as the contradictions of Stalinism became ever-clearer. It was Jack who encouraged Peter to switch to Archaeology from History for his first degree (awarded 1952). Peter had come to University after his military service in Egypt in the Royal Army Education Corps, while Jack had resumed his studies after conscription as a ‘Bevin Boy’ in the Nottinghamshire coalfields. Peter took out a Postgraduate Diploma at the Institute of Archaeology in 1954, studying under Vere Gordon Childe. It was Jack Golson again who encouraged Peter a few years later in 1958 to make the move to New Zealand to take up the second academic appointment created in archaeology in that country. Jack, in Auckland on the North Island in 1954, was of course the first such appointment. Peter quickly established the University of Otago in Dunedin on the South Island as the second great centre of archaeological teaching and research. The friendly rivalry between these two key New Zealand departments of anthropology continues to this day. Peter had started his post-degree professional career working at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery from 1954 to 1956, and before heading overseas had been the Curator of the Scunthorpe Museum and Art Gallery from 1956 to 1958. After his New Zealand interlude ended in 1968 he again took up his museums career at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, moving to Cambridge in 1970 as Curator of the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. During the rest of his career he produced numerous publications in the field of museum anthropology, often returning to consideration of Pacific and of course particularly New Zealand Maori artefacts and their meanings. O B IT U A R Y

Collecting Objects

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed an enhanced role for museums in Great Britain. There was also a parallel growth in private collections and an eagerness to collect souvenirs from distant lands. Material culture emerged as an important means to understand the evolutionary history of humankind. The development of archaeology and anthropology may be situated in this backdrop. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford was founded in 1884 with a founding collection of archaeological and ethnographic objects from around the world. The donor was Augustus Henry Lane Fox, better known as Col. Pitt Rivers. The Indian collection of archaeological objects, amassed over the succeeding years, forms the subject of this article. I attempt to show how the colony and the metropolis were tied in a broad network of connections. I also argue that this enterprise of ‘collecting’—participated in by colonial servants, missionaries and others—lent an important dimension to the beginning of prehistoric research in the subcontinent.

People Apart: Cape Town Survey 1952: Photographs by Bryan Heseltine, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, 19 July 2011 - 8 January 2012

People Apart: Cape Town Survey 1952: Photographs by Bryan Heseltine, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, 19 July 2011 - 8 January 2012

A case re-opened: the science and folklore of a ‘Witch’s Ladder’

This article retraces the process by which a feathered rope, discovered in the roof of a house in Somerset, came to be displayed as a ‘Witch’s Ladder’ in a glass case showing ‘Magic and Witchcraft’ at the Pitt Rivers Museum. This ‘retracing’ has revealed a set of alternative associations that the feathered rope has had: with other museum objects and written documents, as well as with a range of people. Although presented in the museum as a ‘matter of fact’, its original function is revealed to have been a ‘matter of concern’, enabling this ‘object’ to emerge from its glass case as a ‘thing’ (Latour). Retracing its network and the historical process by which it became a museum object has meant engaging with the scientific ambitions of E.B.Tylor and his notions of independent corroborating evidence, as well as with the more ‘folkloric’ practices of literary folklore.

Studio Cameroon The Everyday Photography of Jacques Touselle. November 9, 2007–June 29, 2008, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, England

<b>Studio Cameroon</b> The Everyday Photography of Jacques Touselle. November 9, 2007–June 29, 2008, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, England

Knowing things: exploring the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884-1945 - By Chris Gosden &amp; Frances Larson

Knowing things: exploring the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884-1945 - By Chris Gosden &amp; Frances Larson

Raman spectroscopy applied to understanding Prehistoric Obsidian Trade in the Pacific Region

Obsidian is a natural volcanic glass which is amorphous and isotropic. These characteristics allow it to be easily shaped as little force is required to produce conchoidal fractures of predictable forms and sizes. A class of obsidian artefacts known as ‘stemmed tools’ have been found in locations situated across lowland Papua New Guinea and have been approximately dated to the early and middle Holocene periods (c. 10 000–3400 BP). The fragile nature of these tools, and their rarity, mean that non-destructive techniques are highly desirable for chemical analysis. In this study Raman spectroscopy was used, in conjunction with multivariate analysis, to discriminate between the major geological sources of obsidian within the Pacific Region. Application of principle component analysis (PCA) to data collected from forty-three samples from three major geological sources revealed the presence of three distinct clusters. In addition, Raman spectra were collected from an obsidian stemmed tool housed at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. The locality of the stemmed tool was tentatively assigned to the New Britain obsidian source group. The results are helpful for tracking social interaction during an early period of Pacific Prehistory.

Collecting and Projecting Identity Barotseland's Arts in International Arenas

On September 21, 1906, Lozi king Lewanika of Barotseland (western Zambia) signed a contract with New Jersey trader Richard Douglas. With this document, he bequeathed the rights to cattle, wild game, ivory, and more than 2,000 objects that would come to reside in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The works in question ranged from a few lumps of tobacco to a feather-crested wooden mask. On their own, each object serves as an ambassador of Barotseland and the Lozi culture from which it came. As a group, these art works and cultural artifacts illustrate one African king's ability to discern the power of collections and collecting. King Lewanika understood that by sending the material evidence of his kingdom abroad, Barotseland would be represented and known to audiences far from Africa's shores. By examining the extraordinary journeys through which Lozi objects arrived in such prominent collections as that of the American Museum of Natural History and Oxford University's Pitt-Rivers Museum, this paper chronicles the visionary leadership of King Lewanika and the power of collections in shaping cultural identity.

Social Networks and the Creation of the Pitt Rivers Museum

We consider how far different `networks of connection' have structured the relationships between curators, collectors and objects at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University. Museum collections are generated through complicated, fluctuating circulations of people and things that are literally endless and, when there is a high standard of computerized documentation, network analysis can be a stimulating and revealing methodological tool. Network analysis can reveal patterns in sets of social relationships that are too large to process or analyse mentally, and it can be a spur to more in-depth, nuanced research. An introduction to network theory and a consideration of `network' as a metaphor for social and material interactions more broadly is followed by a discussion of our research into the history of the Pitt Rivers Museum and an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of network analysis as a research tool in the museum context.

Notes and Queries and the Pitt Rivers Museum

This article examines the contribution that a major ethnographic museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, has made to the development of anthropology in the United Kingdom, through the prism of a seminal publication, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, which was published in several editions between 1874 and 1951. While Notes and Queries has been of considerable interest to historians of anthropology, its connections to museum anthropology and to material culture studies have, to a large degree, gone unexamined hitherto.

Book Reviews

Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums by Ken Arnold. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 297 pp.Alison Petch is a project researcher and registrar at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Until March 2006, she was employed on the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)— funded "Relational Museum" project, and since April 2006, she has been working on "The Other Within: An Anthropology of Englishness at the Pitt Rivers Museum," also funded by the ESRC.

Anthropology As Comparative Anatomy?

Recent work by Alfred Gell echoes research methodologies used by anthropologists a century ago, when the new university discipline of anthropology was construed as a scientific subject. The early history of anthropology at Oxford University is explored with particular reference to Henry Balfour's work as curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the turn of the 20th century. Balfour and Gell both paid close attention to the formal qualities of things in an attempt to chart the linking threads of design and form which structure ‘distributed objects’. Balfour was concerned with human origins, while Gell tracked shifting ‘networks of transformational relationships’ with no origin, but their methodologies show similarities because they both prioritized the physicality of things. Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of an earlier, scientific approach to people and things helps us to understand and reassess our own intellectual (and material) ancestry.