The Pitt Rivers Museum normally uses a broad continental breakdown for all its objects and this will be used for these statistics. It includes Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia and Oceania, and Europe.

Here is the breakdown for the founding collection of all objects between continents [1]:

Africa = 1783

Americas = 1746

Asia = 2952

Australia & Oceania = 1711

Europe = 11426

It can be seen that objects from Europe dominate the founding collection.

Here are the percentages:

Africa = 9 per cent

Americas = 8.8 per cent

Asia = 15 per cent

Australia & Oceania = 8.7 per cent

Europe = 58.2 per cent

In other words at least one in every two objects in the founding collection comes from Europe.

To see a country breakdown for each continent go here.

AP, 24.5.2010

Notes:

[1] Note that there is a small over-count of objects, because 12 objects do not have a specific provenance and are listed under two continents