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Pitt Rivers Museum is a museum displaying the archaeological and anthropological collections of the University of Oxford in England.[2] The museum is located to the east of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and can only be accessed through that building.

Pitt Rivers Museum

Pitt Rivers Museum interior, 2015
Pitt Rivers Museum
Established	1884
Location	Parks Road, Oxford, England
Coordinates	51.7586°N 1.2550°W / 51.7586; -1.2550
Type	University museum of archaeology and anthropology
Visitors	468,013 (2019)[1]
Website	http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk

The museum was founded in 1884 by Augustus Pitt Rivers, who donated his private collection to the University of Oxford with the condition that a permanent lecturer in anthropology must be appointed. Edward Burnett Tylor thereby became the first lecturer in anthropology in the UK following his appointment to the post of Reader in Anthropology in 1885.[3] Museum staff are still involved in teaching archaeology and anthropology at the university. The first curator of the museum was Henry Balfour. A second stipulation in the Deed of Gift was that a building should be provided to house the collection and used for no other purpose. The university therefore engaged Thomas Manly Deane, son of Thomas Newenham Deane who, together with Benjamin Woodward, had designed and built the original Oxford University Museum of Natural History building three decades earlier, to create an adjoining building at the rear of the main building to house the collection. Construction started in 1885 and was completed in 1886.

The original donation consisted of approximately 22,000 items;[4] this has now grown to more than 500,000 items, many of which have been donated by travellers, scholars and missionaries.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the museum was shut from 17 March 2020[5] to 22 September 2020.[6] The decision was made to remove from display the shrunken heads (tsantsa), as well as other human remains during this closure.[7] The heads had been on display since the 1940s.[8]

Organization

The museum's collection is arranged typologically, according to how the objects were used, rather than according to their age or origin. This layout owes a lot to the theories of Pitt-Rivers himself, who intended for his collection to show progression in design and evolution in human culture from the simple to the complex. Whilst this evolutionary approach to material culture is no longer fashionable in archaeology and anthropology, the museum has broadly retained the original typological organisation of the displays, partly due to a stipulation in the Deed of Gift that any changes to the displays 'shall not affect the general principle originated by the said Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers'.[9] The display of many examples of a particular type of tool or artefact, showing historical and regional variations, is an unusual and distinct feature of this museum.[10] The museum has a high density of objects on display, and the displays are changed periodically.[11]

At 11.36m high, the Haida house post or totem pole is the largest object on display in the museum. From a Haida community, it originally stood outside Star House in the village of Old Massett (Haida name Uttewas), on Graham Island, in British Columbia, Canada. The house was built around 1882 and belonged to chief Anetlas (c.1816–1893). The pole was purchased via Edward Burnett Tylor and transported to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1901.[12][13]

• 
  The Pitt Rivers Museum
• 
  Figures from around the world
• 
  Fishing boat models from around the world
• 
  Japanese Noh masks

Expansion

In 2004, the museum received £3,700,000 from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to build an annex adjoining the museum. Building work was completed in 2007, bringing the academic staff of the museum back to the site, and providing a laboratory for conservation of the specimens.

A second phase of development began on 7 July 2008 necessitating the closure of the museum and galleries. The museum reopened on 1 May 2009.[14] In this work, the 1960s exhibition gallery was dismantled, restoring the original view through to the museum's totem pole. Original display cases were returned to their original place at the front of the museum. The space upstairs vacated by these cases provides additional space for a Clore Duffield Education Centre. A new entrance platform was built to allow visitors to enter on the same level as the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and improves access for wheelchair users and parents with pushchairs. The entrance platform provides re-located shop and reception areas. An environmental control system was also installed.[15]

Awards

The Pitt Rivers Museum, along with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, won The Guardian newspaper's award for Family Friendly Museum of 2005.[16]

In 2019, the Pitt Rivers Museum was finalist of the Art Fund Museum of the Year Award.[17]

Colonial legacy

In recent years, the Pitt Rivers Museum has been called sector-leading[18] in its work on decoloniality. Further details can be found on the website.[19]

In September 2020, the museum announced it had made a number of critical changes to its displays,[20] including the removal from display of human remains and the installation of a new Introductory Case as an intervention in its permanent galleries that engages with the colonial legacy of the museum. The museum has also said that it would make changes to the labels to include stories "through the voices of artists and indigenous leaders".[7]

As part of this process the Pitt Rivers Museum is meeting with originating communities to address errors and gaps in the information it stores, and to discuss repatriation.[21] One of these is the Living Cultures initiative, a collaboration between the museum, a Maasai community based campaign group called Oltoilo Le Maa, and community development organisation InsightShare.[22][23]

Notable people

• Henry Balfour (curator)
• Beatrice Blackwood (curator, anthropologist)
• Elizabeth Edwards (curator, historian of photography)
• Bernard Fagg (curator, archaeologist), curator
• Barbara Freire-Marreco (anthropologist)
• Chris Gosden (archaeologist)
• Clare Harris (curator for Asian Collections)
• Schuyler Jones (American anthropologist)
• Margaret Staples-Browne (Makereti) (Maori anthropologist)
• Howard Morphy (anthropologist)
• Edward Burnett Tylor (anthropologist)

See also

• Museums of the University of Oxford
• Ashmolean Museum
• Museum of Oxford
• Museum of the History of Science, Oxford
• Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge

References

Further reading

• Baumgarten, Lothar. Unsettled Objects. Edition of Guggenheim Magazine published in conjunction with the exhibition AMERICA Invention. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1993. (Contains photographic documention of the Pitt Rivers' collection and essays on ethnographic collecting)
• Chapman, William Ryan. "Arranging Ethnology: A. H. L. F. Pitt Rivers and the Typological Tradition." In Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture. Edited by George W. Stocking, Jr. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
• Cranstone, B.A.L. and Steven Seidenberg. The General's Gift: A Celebration of the Pitt Rivers Museum Centenary, 1884–1984. Oxford: JASO, 1984.
• Hicks, Dan and Alive Stevenson (eds) 2013. World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: a characterization. Oxford: Archaeopress. World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum

External links

• Media related to Pitt Rivers Museum at Wikimedia Commons
• Official website
• Rethinking Pitt Rivers

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