Overview of PRM Pitt-Rivers papers
An overview of the Pitt-Rivers related papers held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, can be found at http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/manuscripts/pittriversmuseumpapers.html
Particular highlights are:
Box 1 contains information about the foundation and early history of the Pitt Rivers Museum and includes many letters to and from Pitt-Rivers. A full listing for all letters included in the volume is attached as a pdf download on the above link. Most of these letters are fully transcribed on this site, see the section Primary Documents: Founding collection.
Box 2: 20 contains a copy of the deed of gift between Pitt-Rivers and the University of Oxford (the original is held by the University of Oxford archives at the Bodleian Library)
Box 5: 1 contains a copy of the catalogue of Colonel Lane Fox’s Anthropological Collection’, South Kensington Museum, 1879. Published catalogue of Pitt-Rivers’ collection as arranged at the Bethnall Green Museum in 1874. dd. W. L. Nash, 1911.
Box 5: 2 contains a copy of ‘The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Farnham. General Handbook edited by L. H. Dudley Buxton, Farnham Museum 1929’. dd Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1985.
Box 5: 4 contains ‘Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. A Short Directory of the Series. Court Copy’. Bound typescript showing locations of types of objects within the Museum. Includes numerous annotations, mostly in Balfour’s hand. Indexed and bound by Penniman in 1941.
Box 5: 5 contains a copy of ‘The General’s Gift: a Celebration of the Pitt Rivers Museum Centenary 1884-1984’ edited by B. A. L. Cranstone and Steven Seidenberg. Published by the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO) as Occasional Paper no. 3. Oxford 1984, 68pp.
My thanks to my Pitt Rivers Museum colleagues, Jeremy Coote, Alice Stevenson, PRM Photographic and Manuscripts Collections, Chris Morton and Philip Grover, for their help during the transcription period and for their listing of the manuscripts on the PRM website.
AP, 23 July 2010.
