16. Report of the Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum (Department of Ethnology) for the year ending 31 July 1950
Staff
Curator: T.K. Penniman, M.A., Trinity College.
University Demonstrators and Lecturers in Ethnology: B.M. Blackwood, B.Sc., M.A., Somerville College; J.S.P. Bradford, M.A., Christ Church
The first season of the British Archaeological Expedition to Apulia, based on the Museum, and sponsored and supported by the Apulia Committee of the Society of Antiquaries, lasted from July to November 1949, and was most successful. . In July of this year Mr. Bradford started the second season, which will last until October, going again as Field-Director, assisted by Mrs. Bradford and Lord William Taylor of Trinity College, Cambridge.
The 1949 work on the Foggia Plain confirmed the existence of one of the densest concentrations of ancient sites to be identified in Europe in an area of comparable size. These discoveries, studied during the last five years in the Pitt Rivers Museum, and recorded in preliminary publications in Antiquity and other journals, were first made in 1945 from British air photographs which revealed the plans of settlements, farms, roads, and field-systems below the ground, but clearly visible to the air camera. Mr. Bradford and Major P.D. Williams-Hunt recorded these in the summer of 1945; but the essential sequel of excavation and field-work on the ground awaited execution until last year.
The sites were distributed across 3,000 years of Italian history from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages, and illustrate from the archaeological record three principal stages in the rise of a European peasantry. This is a theme that affords ideal ground for the conjunction of archaeology and ethnology, and it is appropriate that the Expedition and its planning should be based on the Pitt Rivers Museum which was founded to exemplify this very continuity.
Neolithic, Roman, and Mediaeval sites were examined and measured in an area of 60 by 30 miles. Test excavations were conducted on the site of a typical example of the 200 of Neolithic type identified from the air. This one, enclosed by several ditches, is practically the largest known Neolithic site in Europe, and yielded copious finds of pottery, including painted ware, as well as almost every item characteristic of Italian Neolithic equipment. Work on this site midway between Foggia and Manfredonia will continue this year. Other trial excavations were devoted to newly found Roman farms, roads, vineyards, and plantations of the Republican period. Such an investigation of a Roman rural landscape broke new ground, and supplements the scanty written record for the Romanization of this region. Very often Neolithic and Roman enclosures stood out as bold lines of colour in wild flowering plants. Much new evidence was also collected towards the archaeological reconstruction of the Mediaeval landscape. The sites of a number of deserted Mediaeval villages and their defensive ramparts were found, and several early ‘hunting-castles’ of the Emperor Frederick 11 were planned for the first time. Buried Mediaeval field-systems were also identified from the crop-marks on the ground above them. A preliminary reconnaissance was made on the site of the abandoned Roman colonia and Mediaeval port of Salpi (Salapia) on the lagoons south of Manfredonia. The earth ramparts still survive to a height of 30 feet, but the air photographs provide the first plan ever to be made of the site. Both Roman and Mediaeval discoveries are being correlated with evidence from the documents and ancient texts, and work is being continued on the sites during this season. Interim reports written by Mr. Bradford are published in Antiquity for June 1950, pp. 84-95, the Illustrated London News 29 April 1950, pp 674-5, Atti del Congresso, Florence, 1950, and Fasti Archaeologici, Rome, 1950.
The Expedition has been guided and supported by the Apulia Committee of the Society of Antiquaries on which are representatives of the University and various learned societies, and much of its success is derived from advice and help given by Professors. C.F.C. Hawkes and R.E.M. Wheeler, Mr. I.D. Margary, His Excellency the Italian Ambassador, Professor Drago, Signor Fernando Pavoni, and the British School at Rome. Grants were most generously made by the British Academy, the Society of Antiquaries, the Trustees of the Leverhulme Fund, the Craven Committee fo the University of Oxford, the Ashmolean Museum the Prehistoric Society, Trinity and St. John’s Colleges, Cambridge, and All Souls, Christ Church and New College, Oxford. Special gratitude is due to Mr. I.D. Margary for immediate and invaluable help when the Expedition in the field was jeopardized by the effects of sudden devaluation.
The Museum again made a grant, and the Expedition is also indebted to members of the Museum technical staff, notably to Mr. K.H.H. Walters for a great deal of photographic work, and to Mr. I.M. Allen for drawings maps and plans.
Miss Blackwood’s Technology of a Modern Stone-Age People in New Guinea has been published as the third of our Occasional Papers on Technology, with 60 pages of text, 16 pages and frontispiece of half-tone plates by the author, and 19 text-figures drawn under her direction by Mr. I.M. Allen. It gives an account of the methods used by a modern Stone-Age people in making their stone and other tools, weapons, and articles of domestic use, as observed and photographed by the writer during nine months’ residence in their villages in 1936-7 while on an expedition to collect specimens and observe and record their uses and the methods of making them for the Museum. It continues our method of presenting technological processes in such a way that the reader, given suitable materials, could repeat the work, and obtain the results described.
The Curator has finished editing Mr. H.H. Coghlan’s Prehistoric Metallurgy of Copper and Bronze in the Old World and sent it to press as Number 4 of our Papers. It will contain about 128 pages of text, 15 half-tone plates, and 21 line drawings, the preparation of the illustrations being largely the responsibility of Mr. K.H.H. Walters and Mr. I.M. Allen. A valuable feature of the book is two chapters contributed by Dr. E. Voce, Metallurgist of the Copper Development Association, on the examination of specimens in the Pitt Rivers Museum, and on bronze castings made in ancient moulds in our collections. The Curator has contributed a section on Cire Perdue Castings illustrated by the splendid series collected for the Museum in 1888 by Captain, later Sir, Richard Temple, and a section on furnace bellows illustrated from the Museum collections and by drawings kindly contributed by Mrs. N. De Garis Davies and by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As Secretary to the Committee on Ancient Metallurgy of the Royal Anthropological Institute, of which the Curator is also a member, Mr. Coghlan has developed and extended his practical experience and experiments of many previous years, and has promoted such work in others, and his method of presentation is fully in accordance with that for which our series of papers was founded.
The Curator took the opportunity afforded by work on this book to clear out the accumulations of years and completely to rearrange the case illustrating the Metallurgy of the peoples of Asia and Africa. Mr. H.F. Walters and Mr. F.C,. Whiting rebuilt and painted the interior in a pleasant cream colour, and we now have a good and complete series showing the stages of bronze and brass casting in Burma and West Africa, and a good series displaying the stages of iron working by native Africans. Space was also miraculously devised for storing material from three cases in the Court, and the Curator was then able to bring out of storage a part of the large Balfour collection representing the history of illumination. One case shows the history of rush-lights and candles, a second that of oil lamps, and a third that of lanterns. Space was also found in the case displaying fire-making to show developments in Europe from about 1800. Some of the Balfour specimens are exceedingly rare, and the whole collection illustrating fire-making and lighting appliances is for both quality among the first two or three in the world. Choice for exhibition was made much easier by the previous work done on classification by Mr. F.W. Robins, which made it possible to see that no type in our possession was wholly unrepresented.
The next major rearrangement will be that of about 5,000 musical instruments so as to incorporate some part of the Balfour collection, now housed in the iron shed. This will be difficult, as everything that goes out of sight must be even better arranged than material on exhibition, both to make it quickly accessible for teaching and for research students, and also to ensure safety by regular inspection. As in other rearrangements, I must not ask to see the distant scene, but when opportunity occurs to deal with a small area, set to work and trust that things will shape,
‘One step enough for me.’
The one thing to remember until we get a new building is the whole shape of the mosaic when no major part can be done at a time, and the whole has to be made up in small parts, often widely separated.
A purchase from Miss. E.A. Turner of some broken Central American pottery mended by Mr. H.F. Walters gave Miss Blackwood the opportunity to set up a good small exhibition of Chiriqui pottery, which shows the four main types suggested by Cornelius Osgood in the American Anthropologist, vol.xxxvii. 1935, based on earlier work by W.H. Holmes and G.G. MacCurdy. These are Armadillo-Terracotta Ware, Fish-Tripod-Handled Ware, Lost Colour Ware (decorated by a resist technique using a covering of wax), and Alligator Ware. There were also two specimens of the rarer Chocolate-Incised Ware, which is typical of Costa Rica and was probably traded to Chiriqui in Panama. According to S. Lothrop, ‘Handbook of South American Indians’, B.A.E., Bull, 143, vol. 4, 1948, p. 167, the culture of Chiriqui flourished for two centuries or more before the Spanish Conquest. This pottery can therefore be dated roughly as of the 15th or early 16th centuries.
With the help of Mr. H. F. Walters, Mr. Bradford rearranged the three desk cases devoted to armlets and anklets in regional groups, and saw to it that the storage drawers below containing many hundreds of specimens were similarly resorted. In addition to rearrangement carried out with the academic staff, Mr. H. F. Walters has collected together all of the textiles from different buildings, sorted, sprayed, and reboxed them in the Museum laboratory, where they can be better supervised and consulted, and has repainted and rearranged high wall-cases, those showing techniques of basketry, and several others. With the help of Mr. I. M. Allen he has repainted the passage from the Court to the workshop, and made the steps wide and safe for carrying trays loaded with specimens. He also directed the staff in fitting up a new screen for the epidiascope in the lecture theatre.
Mr. Walters and Mr. Whiting have finished making the bookcases on the upper floor of the library, and Mr. Gurden has completed the cataloguing and arrangement of the periodicals. The Curator has seen to the classification of pamphlets and manuscripts by subjects and areas, and moved the photographs to the library, arranging them for easier consultation. Every bay of the library, both upstairs and down, has been occupied daily by our own Diploma and research students, and by students from the Honour School of Geography whom we teach for their Preliminary Examination, as well as by many other scholars who find the close connection between the library and the museum of great value. It has saved the staff many hours in the work of documentation, and the position improves as we become able year by year to bring some of the older runs of periodicals up to date.
As inscriptions in living languages date themselves as the years go on, the Curator asked the Publica Orator, Mr. T. F. Higham of Trinity College, to give his commemoration of the founders of our library the immortality of a dead language.
The inscription reads:
CONDENDAE CONDITAEVE BIBLIOTHECAE LIBRORVM COPIAS ANIMO LIBERALI CONTVLERVNT: EDVARDVS BVRNETT TYLOR, EQVES AVRATVS. IONNES EVANS, HONORATISSIMI ORDINIS DE BALNEO EQVES COMMENDATOR. IOANNES LINTON MYRES, EQVES AVRATVS. LEONARDVS HALFORD DVDLEY BVXTPM. HARRICVS GALFRIDVS BEASLEY. ROBERTVS POWLEY WILD. ROBERTI RANVLPHI MARETT VIDVA CONIVNX, FILIVS FILIAEQVE. LAVDETVR AVTEM IN PRIMIS
CVIVS AD MEMORIAM NOMINATVR BIBLIOTHECA
HENRICVS BALFOVR
ETHNOLOGIAE GENERIS ARTIVM OPEROSARVM SCIENTIA CONSTANTIS PROFESSOR. QVI VIR, IPSI MVSAEI CONDITORI AVGVSTO HENRICO LANE FOX PITT RIVERS NON DISPAR MVNIFICENTA, LIBROS COMMENTARIOSQVE PER ANNOS PLVS QVINQVAGINTA, IDEO COLLECTOS VT RERVM SPECTACVLA DOCTRINAE LVMINE ILLVSTRARET PRETIOSISSIMVM DEDIT OXONIENSIBVS LEGATVM. NEC SINE CAVSA CENSVIT ID VNVM OMNIBVS SEMPER ESSE EXPETENDVM, VT CRESCENTE MVSAEO CRESCERET PRO SVA PORTIONE BIBLIOTHECA
‘ALTERIVS SIC ALTERA POSCIT OPEM RES ET CONIVRAT AMICE.
The Regional Index now runs to over 200 boxes with between 200,000 and 250,000 cards, some of them still with mass entries, but the Curator has nearly finished collations between various old Accessions Books so that we are now fairly certain of how many objects of a kind we have. The Donors’ Index is completed regularly by the Curator. The Subject Index has grown to 50 boxes. Miss Blackwood typed and distributed about 12,000 cards for the Subject Index, brought both Regional and Subject Index up to date for the current year, and distributed about 4,000 cards of collations made by the Curator, and about 2,000 cards typed by Mr. G. E. S. Turner. In connexion with this work on the Subject Index, Mr. Turner has begun a systematic revision of our unassigned American Indian material. Over 50 specimens have so far been allotted to their culture areas or to definite tribes. They include two rare ceremonial sashes, originally feathered, from the Pomo of California, a woman’s fringed apron from the Hupa, and some Hopewell implements. Of historical interest is a cloth ‘fire-bag’ of apparently Cree workmanship, embroidered with the name S. Black and now shown beyond reasonable doubt to have belonged to Samuel Black, a notable Nor’-Wester and later Hudson’s Bay Company trader, who was killed in 1841 by the nephew of an Indian whose death he was supposed to have caused by witchcraft. This specimen is one of several collected in 1841-2 by Mr. E. M. Hopkins, while acting as secretary to Sir George Simpson, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Territories. The Company kindly allowed Mr. Turner to examine, in their London archives, a transcript of Simpson’s original journal which has thrown valuable light on our Hopkins material. Additional information has been supplied by Mr. Clifford P. Wilson of the Company’s Canadian headquarters in Winnipeg, whom we have also to thank for the gift of a set of aluminium tokens, ranging in value from one cent to one white fox, in current use at Eskimo trading posts in the Eastern Arctic.
Accessions have been numerous, but of so varied a character in each collection that it is difficult to describe them without writing down long lists. A few of the principal ones may be mentioned.
From Africa Mr. M. A. Jaspan, a pupil, brought us a collection of articles of domestic use collected by himself from the Bidla tribe, who live in the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains, Nguni, S.W. Natal. Mr. H. F. Matthews gave us further specimens of Nigerian ornaments, weapons, and wood carving collected by himself, the Powell-Cotton Museum sent a small collection of weapons and ornaments collected by Mr. F. G. Merfield in the French Cameroons, and the Wellcome Trustees through the Ashmolean Museum presented us with a large collection ranging from Prehistoric to Mediaeval from the Jebel Moya excavations of the late Sir Henry Wellcome in 1910-14.
Among the American accessions are some well-made baskets of the Chilcotin Indians in British Columbia given by Professor R. W. Lee, further examples of Mrs. Robert Aitken’s (Miss Freire-Marreco) generosity from the Pueblo and Pomo Indians, the remainder of the late Sir Frederick Ogilvie’s Mochica and Chimu collection from Lady Ogilvie, and a collection of deerskin clothing of the Northern Plains Indians made in the second half of the 19th century from Mr. E. B. Perry. Mrs. Elsie McDougall continued her generous gifts. In addition to the facsimile of the Mendoza Codex, mentioned last year, she has sent a colour facsimile of the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, published by the Duc de Loubat in Paris, 1901, a pre-Conquest Aztec manuscript with religious and calendrical signs, the original of which is in the Free Public Museum at Liverpool. With it came ‘The Book of the Life of the Ancient Mexicans’, a facsimile in colour of the post-Conquest manuscript known as the Codex Magliabecchiano, with an introduction by Zelia Nuttall, published by the University of California in 1903. The original is in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. The Códice Sierra is a post-Conquest manuscript, 1550-64, with a Nahuatl text. Our facsimilar in colour was published by the National Museum of Mexico in 1906, and Mrs McDougall has sent with it a Spanish translation in typescript. Another important book was the de luxe edition, published in San Francisco in 1929, of Buckingham Smith’s translation of Cabeça de Vaca’s Relación, an account of his journey across Texas into Mexico in 1528-36, as a member of the first party of white men to cross the continent of North America.
Of Asiatic acessions we may mention Mr. Fitz-Adam Ormiston’s fine collection of Tibetan, Nepalese, and Indian ritual vessels of copper and silver collected by her husband and herself prior to 1925 and as early as 1904 at Darjeeling, &c., after the expedition to Lhasa. Among these are two iron fantailed pigeons and a cockerel, inlaid with brass and silver wire in floral patterns showing Persian influence which we cannot exactly place. Mrs. Fitz-Adam Ormiston is an old friend of the Museum, Major P.D. Williams-Hunt sent a spring trap from Perak, whose documentation is so good that all Curators might well study it, and show it to their staffs as a model. Miss Margaret Eyre sent a series of pottery figures illustrating and amusing Burmese folk tale, and other material collected by her family at the time of the annexation of Burma. We are indebted to the Ashmolean Museum for a collection of sherds representing the principal periods of early civilization in Mesopotamia, some of them from sites on which the Curator once worked. An historic collection came from Major E.J. Lugard, at various stages of their careers of public service in the Empire. Burmese material collected before 1860, Assamese about 1894-5. Afghan collected during the war of 1879-80, Indian, Chinese gifts to Sir. F.D. Lugard (later Lord Lugard) while Governor of Hong Kong in 1907-12, and specimens from Bechuanaland and elsewhere in Africa collected in 1898, all testify a long and honourable family life devoted to duty well done, and we are proud to show them to our students.
The most interesting European accessions were Dr. E. Voce’s casts of bronze implements made in ancient bronze and stone moulds in the Museum, and photo-micrographs and analyses of some of our bronze and copper objects, made by himself at our request. These will be published during the year in Mr. Coghlan’s book on ancient metallurgy, already described as Number 4 of our Occasional Papers on Technology. Mrs. Joseph Wright gave us a wedding dress used in her family in 1822, and Miss Pastorella Shelley a collection of ancestral 18th and early 19th century costumes. These, with the large collection of 18th and early 19th century costumes given earlier by Miss Margaret Irvine and catalogued for us by Miss L.E. Start, are among our most delightful and pleasant possessions. Mrs. Marcon gave a handsome glass peasant’s lamp from Mentone, Mrs. T. Lloyd a good corn-dolly of oats, wheat, and barley from Kent, and Miss E. Canziani lent us Balearic baskets and whistles, and some amusing snail-shell lamps used at Grimaldi village, Ventimiglia, in Italy, where for eight days after Corpus Donimi they illuminated every parapet, wall and railing.
Accessions from Oceania were small but important. Through Mr. C.R. Stonor we received 22 specimens from the Mr. Hagen, Kumaon, and Bena areas in Central New Guinea. Mr. Bradford arranged this with him, and also arranged an exchange of a typical European series in return for a well-documented series of stone implements from the Australian Museum at Sydney. A few more came from Mr. S.R. Mitchell through Sir Francis Knowles, and Mr. G.K. Roth came on one of his rare and ever welcome visits from Fiji and added to his former gifts.
We purchased an ophicleide formerly in Lord Ducie’s collection from the Rev. C. Overy, and one of the earliest of the modern type of harmonium, made by Alexandre et Fils in Paris in the 1850’s on the model invented in the 1840s from Mrs. R. Smith; Mr. K.H.H. Walters, and Mr. I.M. Allen made themselves responsible for restoring it to good order, so that it plays as well as ever. Mr. Walters also photographed about 200 objects in the Museum, many for publication, made about 260 prints and over 200 slides, and bound up a further 100 made by Miss Blackwood. Under her direction, he and Mr. Allen prepared reproductions of some very intricate patterns from the Bosmun of the Ramu area in New Guinea, first by photography, then by tracing the detail over with Indian ink, and finally bleaching out the parts of the photograph not required.
Among visitors who helped us and were helped by us during the year, we may mention Dr. Junius Bird of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who spent two days working over our ancient Peruvian textiles, and left valuable notes on many of them, Professor H.V. Vallois, Director of the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in Paris, who went over some of our archaeological series, especially the cases showing natural fractures arranged by the late Professor A.S. Barnes, Mrs. Nilima Barua, a weaver from India, interested in some of the more important of our groups of textiles, Dr. Carl Gibson-Hill, of the Raffles Museum in Singapore, who made several valuable corrections of old labels on Malayan material, Mr. H.G.A. Hughes, Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Oriental Studies, University of London, with Bauro Ratieta, a Gilbert Islander with whom he is preparing a grammar and dictionary, who spent some time on our Micronesian specimens, Professor G.H.R. von Koenigswald of the University of Utrecht, working on connexions between Indonesia and Polynesia, Mlle Balfet sent by the Musée de L’Homme in Paris to study pottery, Professor W.F. Harper from the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica, to see our series on cranial deformation, and Dr. E. Voce, Metallurgist of the Copper Development Association, who has helped us greatly by the analysis of some of our ancient copper and bronze, and by making casts in some of our ancient stone and bronze moulds for our forthcoming publication of Occasional Paper, No.4.
In addition to activities already mentioned, the Curator lectured once weekly in all three terms on Origins of Civilization, and continued to serve as Secretary to Heads of Science Departments. Much more can be accomplished in developing the work of the Museum now that Mr. Gurden deals with routine administration, accounts and wages, correspondence, duplication of lecture material, and the management of the library.
Miss Blackwood lectured twice weekly in Michalemas Term on Hunters and Herders, and twice weekly on Cultivators in Hilary Term, these lectures being attended by students taking Ethnology in the Preliminary Examination for the Honour School of Geography as well as by our own Diploma and some research students. In Trinity Term she lectured once weekly on Aztec, Maya, and Inca, and their Predecessors, and once weekly on the Material Culture of S.E. Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya, the Special Area prescribed for Diploma students. In Michaelmas Term and Hilary she supervised practical work with Mr. Bradford for Diploma students, and as usual gave special demonstrations to our own students or visiting research students. Other activities not previously mentioned were collection from donors, labelling and entering, and redocumenting many older specimens and breaking up mass entries in the Accessions Books. One of the more interesting examples of this sort of work was her labour in collecting together all of our ancient Peruvian textiles, and taking advantage of Dr. Junius Bird’s visit to this country to get many of them documented in the light of recent knowledge. Another valuable task was the preparation of a working list of negatives taken in Ashanti by the late Captain R. S. Rattray. Among other work she examined on two occasions for the for the B.Litt degree, and for the Diploma in Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, served on the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Folk-Lore Society, and the British Ethnography Committee, and represented the Museum on the Council for British Archaeology.
In Hilary Term Mr. Bradford gave weekly lectures on Nomad Empires of Asia, and in Trinity Term on City, Village, and Field in Eastern Asia, as well as two lectures for the Professor of European Archaeology on The Settled Peasantries in Italy, Greece, and the Balkans, and one lecture to the University Anthropological society on Fieldwork and Excavation in S.E. Italy, 1949: The Neolithic Results. During Hilary and Trinity Terms he gave practical instruction, together with Miss Blackwood and Sir Francis Knowles, on archaeological and ethnological draughtsmanship, identification of material, interpretation of air photographs, social data from maps, and recognition of physical types, gave weekly tutorials to 24 students from the School of Geography during Hilary Term, 8 being assigned to Mr. Roberts of the Department of Human Anatomy, and as Moderator, examined the whole group for the Preliminary Examination in the Honour School of Geography. He also continued supervision of two candidates for the D.Phil. Apart from the Australian exchange and arrangement for material from Central New Guinea, already mentioned, he agreed with Mr. Julian Pitt-Rivers, our pupil working in Andalusia, and great grandson of our Founder, that we should have a representative assemblage of objects and photographs to illustrate the peasant cultures of Southern Spain, an area from which the Museum has very little.
We are very happy to tell our readers that on 1 October 1951, Mr. W. C. Brice will join our staff as University Demonstrator and Lecturer. He was educated at Guisborough Grammar School and Jesus College, and gained a First Class in Honour School of Geography with Ethnology as his special subject. He served as a Lieutenant in India and Burma during the war, and spent leaves in ethnological and archaeological reconnaissance, visiting Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. After the war he became a Lecturer in Manchester University and worked with Sir Leonard Woolley at Atchana-Alalakh and with Professor Garstang at Mersin, and, on his own, traversed Turkey on an archaeological reconnaissance, publishing some of his results in Iraq. He has just returned from another expedition to Harran with Mr. Seton Lloyd. One of the pleasantest features of the appointment is that he has spent a long time for several years in the Museum and has had teaching from Sir Francies Knowles, the late Professor Barnes, and Sir John Myres. Thus he has a combination of the Humanistic outlook together with the technical skill of Stone-Age peoples, a combination not so easy to find as it once was. With him and Mr. Bradford, the succession of work and ideas of our great forerunners is secured.
In addition to contributions to our forthcoming work on Prehistoric Metallurgy, the Curator wrote a short review for Man of T. Burton Brown’s Studies in Third Millenium History, and is engaged on a revision of the Hundred Years of Anthropology which was entirely destroyed by enemy action. The fact that Professor Evans-Pritchard, Miss Blackwood, and Dr. J. S. Weiner are helping to write the final chapter on Anthropology since 1935, the date of the first edition, both lightens the labour and improves the book.
Besides our publication on a Modern Stone Age People in New Guinea, mentioned earlier, Miss Blackwood has written ‘Reserve Dyeing in New Guinea’, in Man, 1950, 68, and ‘Some Arts and Industries of the Bosmun, Ramu River, New Guinea’ for the Memorial Volume to the late Professor Felix Speiser of Basel. She also edited and prepared for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute a paper on ‘Ritual and Secular Uses of Vibrating Membranes as Voice-Disguisers’, left almost completed by the late Professor Henry Balfour, and with some additional material by a former pupil of ours, Captain R. M. Downes.
Mr. Bradford’s publications on the Apulia Expedition have been mentioned. Further articles were requested by and sent to Discovery on ‘Air Photography and the Study of Man’. Reviews of Dr. G. E. Daniel’s Hundred Years of Archaeology have been sent to Man and to the Oxford Magazine, and of Professor René Grousset’s L’Empire des Steppes to Oriential Art.
Mr. Turner contributed notes on American Indian personal names for an article in the Oxford Junior Encyclopedia, and published a review of The Excavation of Ste Marie I, a Jesuit Missionary site of 1639-49, by Kenneth E. Kidd, in Man, 1950, 185. It is hoped that some further information about material submitted to us from this site may be printed in our next report, when Mr. Turner and Sir Francis Knowles have finished their investigations. Sir Francis has continued his important work for us on stone-flaking techniques.
Some 10,000 people, apart from research workers, including about 700 children from about 40 schools, who came as part of their school work, visited the Museum.
T.K. PENNIMAN
