16. Report of the Pitt Rivers Museum (Department of Ethnology and Prehistory) for the year ending   31 July 1959    

Staff
Curator: T.K. Penniman, M.A., Trinity College
University Demonstrators and Lecturers in Ethnology: B.M. Blackwood, B.Sc., M.A., Somerville College; A.J. Butt, B.Litt., M.A., D.Phil., Lady Margaret Hall.
University Demonstrator and Lecturer in Prehistory: J.S.P. Bradford, M.A., Christ Church.
Secretary to the Museum and Librarian: R.C. Gurden.

Miss Blackwood's friends all over the world will be happy to know that her approaching retirement after an extended term of office will not mean the end of her connexion with the Museum. Some twenty years ago she was invited to San Francisco to read a paper and take part in the discussions of the Sixth Pacific Congress, and took the occasion to visit several places for the Museum. The outbreak of the Second World War cut short her visit, and she returned in the midst of gloomy rumours about the end of civilization and the suspension of University lectures. While she was still at sea, the room lent to her by the Delegates of the University Museum was taken over for the Home Guard. After reflection on our then more severely restricted accommodation, Mr. H.F. Walters suggested a partial clearance of what was known variously as the lamp room, the duplicate room, the store room, and the small godsend. By the time she arrived, we had just managed to get in a table, a couple of chairs, and a bowl of late roses. She took to the room at once, and when later, after we had rebuilt the former Geology Department for a library, studio, and private rooms for some members of the staff, the curator offered her a much larger room, she strongly preferred to remain where she was, although the room, now better furnished, was fitted to display and store about 3,000 lamps and lighting appliances of our research collection, and the hum of the workshop machines comes steadily through the open window. Thus she will remain in the midst of Son et Lumiére to our great satisfaction and to that of many students and research workers.

For some time past we have been considering how her background lectures on Lands and Peoples could be continued, as few people remain with so much first-hand knowledge of the peoples of the world. We were fortunate in 1955 to bring Dr. Audrey Butt here as demonstrator from Spain where she was then working, as she had considerable knowledge of peoples in America and Africa, and we are again fortunate in bringing Mr. K.O.L. Burridge here from Baghdad as demonstrator for October 1959, as he has considerable knowledge of peoples in Oceania and in Southern Asia. Both are our former students who have done a good deal of field-work and published their results, and both have experience of teaching. Accordingly, we have been able to divide the background course on Lands and Peoples between them, Mr. Burridge giving the Wednesday, and Dr. Butt the Saturday lectures in this course, and taking the Practical Classes between them. This leaves each of them with one term free for more intensive lectures illustrating their personal field-work and research.

The murder of the Royal Family of Iraq and the consequent revolution made it necessary for Mr. Burridge to leave Iraq. He arrived here at a loose end during this year, and it was much to our advantage to provide him with a room and some work, including tutorials for the Preliminary in the Honour School of Geography, during the interim period, as Mr. Bradford was on sabbatical leave. For this the General Board provided a small extra grant during a year of financial stringency.

For a time, Br. Burridge shared the curator’s room, while Mr. H.F. and Mr. K.H.H. Walters were building a new room for the curator adjoining Mr. Allen’s second laboratory in the room used for the reception of specimens, taking as their standard the curator’s mahogany desk with its gold-tooled vermilion leather top. The room has double walls, with cream panels and ivory and lime-green decoration, with grey-blue curtains for windows which give a very pleasant view of the new flower and shrub border. The curator provided an off-white carpet, and a glass-fronted bookcase and other furniture of the Early Victorian period, and Miss Blackwood gave the pictures and an ebony inkstand with brass inlay. Opportunity was taken to sand and polish the wood-block floor of what remained of the reception room, and Mr. Walters and his son designed and built a wall-cupboard in parchment-yellow and black with sliding doors, and beneath it a large table in the same colours, which folds down against the wall when not in use. Thus once again we have managed to fit in a sizeable extra, and to make the remaining space more commodious for use than the whole area was before we started to work on it.

During the year the workshop was kept busy almost continuously with this new work and the provision of new storage cupboards. By now, Mr. Walters and his son have reached a total of 31, each 8 feet high by 4 feet 4 inches wide by 2 feet 6 inches deep, and 7 of the same width and depth but 4 feet 6 inches tall, each internally designed to suit the material they hold. We greatly miss the help of Mr. R.P. Rivers, now on National Service with H.M. Forces, who would have enabled us to add more to the number, both by assistance in the workshop, and by taking some of the work in the lecture rooms and with research students. Extra storage is urgently necessary to enable us to make use of a bequest by the late Miss. G.A. Hansell of £1,700 to the University which was allotted to the Museum by decree in January for the provision of new show-cases. As the curator wrote to the Registrar in April, none of the standard cases provided by the principal firms is of real use for our big specimens, and we shall need to follow the usual practice of ethnological museums and build them, buying the material with the Hansell money. There are plenty, indeed too many, of the smaller cases in the Museum, and what we need is to replace about 100 feet of trumpery wall-cases, suitably inscribed, where they are badly needed, e.g. for a first-rate exhibition of archery of many periods and areas in one long run. This will take some time, in view of the absence of Mr. Rivers, a heavy teaching programme, and the fact that in the past, bows, arrows, and quivers were all exhibited and stored separately, and we must first provide more storage and space for sorting and getting them together again. But doing the work in this way will make the money go four times as far, and give us something that we can use rather than something we would have to store until we have a new building. A large new thicknesser and planer, added to our machines towards the end of the year, will help greatly to improve and increase our output of cabinet work.

Among other urgently needed cupboards Mr. H.F. and Mr. K.H. Walters have built one 11 feet high by 6 feet wide facing another in the Staff and Workshop entrance to hold about another 1,300 volumes of our Museum Publications. This is in good time for Number 9 of our Occasional Papers on Technology on ‘Bagpipes’ by Anthony Baines, of which we are printing an edition of 1,250. The galley proofs, which will make about 150 quarto pages, with 78 text-figures by Anthony Wootton, and 16 pages of half-tone plates, mainly by Mr. K.H.H. Walters, arrived just before the national press strike began, at the same time as 13 photographs with extensive notes from Professor S.P. Tolstov of the University of Moscow, who had been about a year collecting data from the Russian museums. We are greatly indebted to him because our collection of bagpipes, made by the late Professor Balfour, with some additions by the curator, covered the world very thoroughly except for Russian bagpipes, of which we had only one Cheremiss example. During the strike at the University Press Mr. Baines has been incorporating the Russian material in the galleys, and Mr. Wootton had been preparing extra text-figures. The consequent delay in the date of publication will mean that the book will be much more valuable as a definitive work of reference.

This year saw the completion of Ancient Metallurgical Furnaces in Great Britain to the End of the Roman Occupation, a long illustrated paper by the curator, Mr. I.M. Allen, and Mr. Anthony Wootton, which is the British contribution to an International Corpus of Ancient Metallurgical Furnaces sponsored by the Centro di Studi Preistorici e Archeologici of Varese. The curator undertook the general supervision of this section of the Corpus, and the other two authors collected and prepared the material for publication, Mr. Allen being responsible for the technical material, and Mr. Wootton for the form of presentation and illustrations. The work is now in press with Sibrium, the journal published by the Centro di Studi. The curator and Mr. Allen also completed ‘A Metallurgical Study of Four Irish Early Bronze Age Ribbed-halberds in the Pitt Rivers Museum’, now in press with Man, Mr. Allen being again responsible for the metallurgical and metallographic reports, Mr. Wootton for drawing the artefacts and micrographs, and Mr. K.H.H. Walters for mounting each artefact with the attendant micrographs and photographing them together to form one plate. Mr. Allen has now completed 72 metallurgical and metallographic reports on our British Bronze Age material and collected 152 chemical analyses from other sources for comparison towards the publication of ‘A Metallurgical and Metallographic Study of the British Bronze Age Implements in the Pitt Rivers Museum’ by himself and the curator in our Occasional Papers on Technology, and Mr. Wootton has already drawn many of the artefacts and micrographs for the book.

Work on cataloguing, exhibiting, and storing the collections continued throughout the year. Having finished her own share of arrears after 20 years of work, Miss Blackwood distributed 1,100 cards of arrears typed by the curator, and about 1,000 cards of current accessions which were done each month by Mr. Wootton from entries in the books by the curator, Miss Blackwood, Dr. Butt, Mr. Allen, and himself. Mr. Gurden has completed the detailed card catalogue of the Gunther collection of about 1,000 netsuke, and has begun on the preparation of the hand-list of headings and sub-headings in the Subject Index, checking each card to make certain that it is in its right place, and sometimes revising the subdivisions in the light of experience gained since the index was started. She is still reducing the number of cards in the drawer for specimens entered without provenance. Since Dr. Butt began her series of detailed cards with full information about lantern-slides, she has increased the number by 62 for a collection of Pokot slides given by Captain Downes illustrating the Tiv people of West Africa. Miss Blackwood has labelled and numbered the valuable collection of 150 lantern slides given by Mrs. Aitken (who was Miss Barbara Freire-Marreco, the first pupil entered for the Diploma Examination in Anthropology when it was started in 1908) and typed the information collected by her on our standard large cards. Here we have a record of the ethnography of the Pueblo Indians of the south-western United States made by an unrivalled field-worker in the early years of this century, and a most useful complement to the large and fully documented collection of specimens which she made at the same time. Miss Blackwood also found time to go through a part of our collection of cinematograph films, with Mr. K.H.H. Walters as projectionist, and to make notes on their contents. This was undertaken primarily in order to fill up a questionnaire sent by the Ethnographic Film Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute, but the work has been useful to the Museum in improving the catalogue. The work is proceeding as time allows. Mr. Gurden brought the catalogue of negatives made by Mr. K.H.H. Walters up to date with 106 detailed entries, duplicated for both the Subject and Regional Indexes.

Apart from the entering and distribution of new accessions, Miss Blackwood has gone through the large collection of Australian shields, adding details of provenance and other data received from Mr. C.P. Mountford during his visit to the Museum, rearranged a considerable number of our textiles in storage boxes according to areas, labelling them so that they can easily be identified, and storing them in the large cupboards made by Mr. H.F. Walters, and has checked with the catalogue a large number of specimens in the series illustrating Artificial Cranial Deformation and Treatment of the Dead, entering at the same time a number of specimens which had come to the Museum in its early days and had not been catalogued. Dr. Butt has practically finished the rearrangement of our long series of several thousand amulets so that they can be found at once without looking through a lot of large drawerfuls, and has arranged the gourd vessels and other containers geographically to facilitate quick reference. As a preliminary to our projected rearrangement of archery, Mr. Allen and Mr. Wootton got together all of our Polynesian and Korean material, and while doing this sorted the material remaining in the loft, labelling and entering where necessary, and distributing where possible, while Mr. Gurden prepared a card catalogue of objects remaining in this somewhat inaccessible place. As usual with such turn-outs, objects involved work on others of the same class, so that a considerable amount of material was got into better order. We owe Mr. Gurden a good deal for his advice and careful planning in rearrangement which made it possible in many places to make far better use of space and so to make it possible to include new developments with a better ordering of the old material. We could work with confidence that we should find our very varied specimens in good condition, since throughout the year as usual Mr. H.F. Walters was superintending the regular inspection and treatment of the collections to save them from the innumerable pests that prey on the various materials of which they are made. For delicate objects which need special care Mr. Allen’s knowledge and skill have made it possible for us to deal confidently with them. He acts as our Museum Analyst, and we hope in time to get this title recognized as a necessary and regular post in this Museum.

Among new exhibitions, Mr. Allen set up two screens and rearranged a desk case illustrating ancient Far Eastern metallurgy. For this he contributed analyses of about 20 of our own specimens, for which Mr. Wootton drew the micrographs, and interpreted the micrographs of 75 analyses by Mr. Dono in a Japanese publication. Space has been left for the inclusion of some of our ancient Siberian and Burmese material when we have finished work on it. Mr. Wootton has completed a new exhibition of free reed musical instruments after sorting and checking all of our material in various places, and has prepared labels and explanatory diagrams, at the same time getting all instruments not on show together in one large cupboard. He has also completed a new exhibition of sansas and of jew-harps, and another of trumpets, again after going through the entire storage, checking and labelling where necessary, and getting every object of a given class which we possess together, so that we need look in two places only, i.e. the exhibition and the store. Such a method of setting up new exhibitions is of course slow, but is the only honest and useful way, and ultimately saves us from endless unnecessary work for a long time to come. This year also saw the completion of a small case illustrating the history of Chinese porcelain abroad, which is shown by examples from Borneo, Siam, Indo-China, Indonesia generally, Iraq, and East and South Africa, which the curator has been getting together over a period of years. (The European work is of course another story.) Besides Mr. Wootton’s work in labelling and arranging, Mr. K.H.H. Walters made ingenious wire stands for the sherds and for many of the musical instruments, since in some of the hotter parts of the museum court the plastic stands are inclined to bend and buckle. A good many of the labels were handwritten by Mr. Wootton, but for a very large number we have to thank Mr. H.N.F. Varney, printer to the University Museum, for the speed and accuracy of his work, and for the great interest he has shown in helping with the improvement of the Museum.
    
We have to thank Mr. J. Lankester, Surveyor to the University, for seeing to the extensive repairs of the main roof of the Museum, and for the pleasant new green and white paint on our three storage buildings and on the south and east fronts. Here the new shrub and flower borders have begun to show the work that was put into them. During three seasons of the year there has been continual bloom over the whole area, and during the remainder of the year there was no day without some plant or shrub in flower. We have now begun to put in some of the more unusual and interesting plants, shrubs and trees.

Some of the more notable accessions of the year may be briefly mentioned. The most outstanding gift from Africa is that of 65 12-inch double-sided long-playing recordings of African music, made by Mr. Hugh Tracey, and presented to the Museum through his generosity and that of Mr. Harry Oppenheimer. Any European who has tried to get an idea of music outside his own forms of expression from half a dozen recordings will have realized how futile it would be for an African, Indian, or Chinese to try to understand European music from a similar number of recordings. With this wealth of material and other recordings which Mr. Tracey is making, it is possible to begin real study, and we are happy to say that Mr. Tracey’s son Andrew, who is working with the curator for a B.Litt. on the nature and social significance of the music of some of the tribes in southern Africa, has already spent many hours with the museum gramophone and head-phones transcribing music from these recordings. Here perhaps we might stress the necessity for a couple of sound-proof recording studios in our new building, a necessity not only for students, but for our own work in re-recording our soft-wax cylinders and in dealing with the tape recordings made by our staff and students abroad. Considering the fact that the understanding of a people depends so greatly on its forms of musical expression, we intend to ask the University in the next quinquennium to consider the appointment of an ethnomusicologist. This country is decidedly backward in this subject, and while there are men in this country and in the Commonwealth who are entirely comparable to the great figures on the Continent, and the curator is little more than an interested amateur, here is an opportunity for the University to take the lead, and call a halt to the wastage of much talent.

A rare and unusual collection made by Mr. Colin Turnbull representative of the pygmies of the Ituri Forest in the Belgian Congo has been a most fortunate accession. With their musical instruments he presented a double-sided long-playing 12-inch record made by himself. Mention was made last year of Mr. Ralph Tanner’s presentation of over 500 clay figures from Tanganyika representing moral precepts all of which he had recorded in manuscript, which he kindly lent to Mr. Wootton who copied it and had it bound and labelled as a supplement to one of our accessions volumes. The Chinese sherds from Tanganyika form a part of our exhibition of Chinese porcelain abroad, and we have also to record a sizeable further collection of material from tribes in the Pangani District among whom he has been working. Our old friend Dr. W.D. Hamby, also a former pupil, sent over 1,200 feet of 35 mm. film taken by himself among the Ovimbundu of Angola many years ago. This Mr. K.H.H. Walters wound on reels made by himself from Formica offcuts. We also value highly a good collection made by Miss Lois Mitchison for us in the French Cameroons from which we have little well-documented material. We understand that she made extensive notes on the collection, and await her arrival at the Museum before entering the collection in the accessions volumes and putting it into the card indexes.

Of American accessions, the most noteworthy is a collection made by Mr. D. Maybury-Lewis among the Akwe Shavante of the Rio das Mortes region of the Matto Grosso in Central Brazil, again a region from which we had little material. Among Asiatic and Indonesian material, we may mention two large Japanese masks from Mr. J.A. Daniell, identified by Mr. Gurden as a demon and as Shoki the demon queller, both beautifully repaired by Mr. Allen, and a nose flute which came to us from the Eastern Penan of Borneo, brought by Dr. Rodney Needham, who arrived playing it most beautifully and skilfully, collecting members of the staff round him like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

The most noteworthy of the European accessions was given by our old friend Dr. A.D. Lacaille, who had noticed from an earlier annual report and from former observation of our exhibitions that our presentation of the Mesolithic in northern Europe showed specimens for all periods except the earliest, the Pre-Boreal, where we had been obliged to resort to pictures. Accordingly he presented us with 32 flint implements of the Ahrensburg culture collected by Dr. Alfred Rust of Hamburg in 1934, and showing clearly the origin of this phase in the earlier Magdalenian culture. The Oxford University Snaefellsnes Expedition to Iceland gave us a wooden hay saddle and horsehair rope used with it, as well as a series of photographs of objects in Icelandic museums, collected by Mr. J.A. Hellen, the leader, and Mr. T. Ireland.

There were from all areas a considerable number of single and small but welcome gifts which filled gaps in our various series, and we are very glad to have them, but to list them all would double the length of the report, and we have therefore confined our mention mainly to collections.

Some of Mr. Gurden’s work has already been noted. Apart from a considerable amount of work on the Museum Catalogue and helping the curator in rearrangement of collections to reduce the ratio of wood to specimens, he has been responsible for the general administration of the department, including the scrutiny of expenditure and advising the curator thereon, ordering equipment, supplies, and books, keeping and presenting accounts to the auditors and paying wages, supervision of the Library with about 150 regular readers and research workers, and generally attending to the many people who use the Museum, both personally and by correspondence, much of which requires identification of material and advice about it. In the coming year he will have general charge of all the catalogues, including those of specimens, with between a half- and three-quarter-million cards, as well as of the library, and of negatives. In some of this he will be assisted by Mr. Wootton, whose work on the exhibitions and storage, as well as entering specimens and doing duplicate cards for current accessions, has made him familiar with the working of the catalogue. Mr. Gurden has also found time to revise entirely the files of several of the curator’s committees, enabling him to refer quickly to any matter when called on to do so, and to add to the shelving in the Library space for about 500 books, and still keep the place looking pleasant and uncrowded. In this last, he was assisted by Mr. H.F. and Mr. K.H.H. Walters.

Besides work on publications, on the catalogue, and on exhibitions so far mentioned, Mr. Wootton regularly assisted Mr. Gurden in correspondence, taking over his duties when away, and dealt with all orders for our Occasional Papers on Technology, as well as with the duplicated maps, notes, and bibliographies used in Miss Blackwood’s and Dr. Butt’s lectures. Besides the drawings for our own publications, he drew eight objects from the Azande tribe for a forthcoming paper by Professor Evans-Pritchard, and a number for Dr. Butt’s papers in J.R.A.I. and Timehri, and wrote the sub-titles and prepared a map for her film on ‘The Akawaio of British Guiana’. During the year he published ‘A Further Note on the Roman Blanching Technique’ in Seaby’s Coin and Medal Bulletin, in continuation of a previous article. For both these articles Mr. Allen gave useful advice, and he and Mr. Wootton carried out experiments in one of the Museum laboratories for the paper. Another long paper is in press for the same journal called ‘A Numismatic Curiosity in the Pitt Rivers Museum’. This is a detailed description of the dowry head-dress collected by General Sir Charles Warren in Bethlehem about 1870, and given to the Pitt Rivers Museum by his daughter Mrs. Watkin Williams in May 1952. It contains coins of classical Greek and Roman times, Byzantine, Muslim, and Mediaeval European periods, and covers over 2,000 years of history. The paper is illustrated by a photograph of the head-dress taken by Mr. K.H.H. Walters.

Various of the activities of Mr. K.H.H. Walters have already been mentioned in this report. During the year he also found time to photograph 106 objects in the Museum and to make 200 prints, as well as a number of lantern slides, seeing with Mr. Gruden to the full documentation and classification of the negatives. With Dr. Butt, he has now united all the bits and pieces of her film on ‘The Akawaio of British Guiana’ into a continuous film, adding so far about 200 feet photographed in the studio, and including Mr. Wootton’s titles and map. Several of our soft-wax cylinders have been satisfactorily recorded on tapes with the aid of the small transistor amplifier described in our last report, and he has now built a large box baffle loudspeaker, and purchased a new and more versatile control unit, which promises to be a great help towards getting decent results with the more difficult cylinders. There is now a chance to go ahead with these 850 West African and Melanesian cylinders. For a long period this year temperatures of over 90 degrees in the studio have slowed down the work, and have emphasized the great need of a new air-conditioned studio, but he has used the hotter weather for the building programme already mentioned, including the modification of the large cupboard for the phonograph cylinders to hold also the Tracey and other gramophone discs. When Mr. Rivers returns he can take from him a part of the studio work and a good deal of the constant attendance on lectures with lantern slides and other forms of projection.

Much of Mr. Allen’s work in addition to his help at lectures and in the ordering of the Museum, identification and entering of specimens, analysis, and restoration, has been recorded. In addition to work on publications, he gave a lecture on ‘Prehistoric Metallurgy in Britain from about 1800 B.C. to A.D.. 450’ as part of the programme on Industrial Archaeology of the University of Birmingham Department of Extra-mural Studies and the Workers’ Educational Association Joint Committee at Preston Montford near Shrewsbury. For this he drew a number of valuable diagrams and illustrations which Mr. Wootton and Mr. K.H.H. Walters prepared as slides, which will form a permanent addition to our teaching collection.

During the year we gave lectures and instruction to 13 candidates for the Diploma in Anthropology, 14 Colonial Probationers, and 69 candidates for the Preliminary Examination in the Honour School of Geography, besides giving help to many research students form the University and all parts of the world.

The curator lectured in all three terms on Origins of Civilization, examined for the Diploma in Anthropology, and supervised students for the B.Litt. degree. He continued, with Miss Blackwood, to edit our series of Occasional papers on Technology, and served as usual on the Board of the Faculty of Anthropology and Geography, the Committee of Management of the Griffiths Institute, the Committee for Archaeology, the Committee for the Fine Arts, and the Joint Advisory Science Committee of Council. He also continued to act as Diploma Secretary for Anthropology, Interviewer of Research Students, and Secretary to Heads of Science Departments. As a member of the Ancient Mining and Metallurgy Committee and of the Ethnomusicology Committee of the R.A.I., he continued work on relevant problems.

Miss Blackwood lectured twice each week in all three terms, and gave a long practical class once weekly for students of the Diploma in Anthropology, and two shorter practical classes each week to students for the Preliminary Examination in the Honour School of Geography, being assisted by Dr. Butt in the first term, and by Dr. Butt and Mr. Burridge in the remaining two terms of practicals. The general title for Michaelmas and Hilary Terms was Lands and Peoples, the first term being on Hunters and Herders, and the second on Cultivators, the lectures being given both to Diploma and Geography students. For Diploma and Research students she gave a once-weekly course in Trinity Term on The Higher Civilizations of Pre-Conquest America, a course of lectures followed by demonstrations on Some African Arts and Industries for Overseas Cadets going to Africa, and a course of lectures and demonstrations on Ethnology of the Western Pacific for a Cadet going to the Fiji Islands. As usual, she found time from the large amount of work done on the catalogue and collections to give help and advice personally and by letter to our students and to research workers from all over the world, and these return frequently from the field for further consultation.

Besides work on editing our next Museum publication for the press, she served on the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute, to which she has been elected a Vice-President for a second year, and as a member of the Institute’s Committee for British Ethnography and of its Middle and South American Research Committee. She also served on the Council of the Folk-Lore Society, and complied the section ‘Museum News’ in Folklore, vol.69, September 1958, and in vol. 70, March 1959.

Mr. Bradford was on sabbatical leave during Michaelmas and Trinity Terms to work on the Report on his work in Apulia. He gave a once-weekly lecture on Nomad Empires of Asia in Hilary Term, and assisted in Tutorial work for the Preliminary Examination in the Honour School of Geography. He also continued his work on the catalogue of the air photographs which he has collected. His interpretation of many of these photographs has continued to be of use to scholars, notably to the Italian archaeological authorities working with the Fondazione Lerici on the location and excavation of a large number of Etruscan tombs. He contributed an article on this subject to the Manual of Photo Interpretation, and a lecture on ‘Aerial discoveries: methods, results and related problems’ to the Seventh International Congress of Classical Archaeology held in Rome in September 1958. This year saw the establishment by decree of the Myres Memorial Lecture to be given biennially on a subject within the fields of ancient history, European and Near Eastern archaeology, ancient geography, and ethnology, with special reference to Mediterranean lands. Mr. Bradford played a large part in the foundation of this memorial, and it is satisfactory to know that he has been elected to the Board of Management. He continued to serve as a member of the Board of the Faculty of Anthropology and Geography and of the Committee for Archaeology.

Dr. Butt gave a lecture course with practical work on the prescribed area, East Africa, once weekly to Diploma students in Michaelmas Term, and in Hilary and Trinity Terms gave a once a week lecture course on Amerindian Tribes of the Guianas (South America). She also assisted Miss Blackwood in the Diploma and Geography practical courses each week, and supplemented her course by giving some extra lectures on South America, as well as giving tutorials to 14 students for the Preliminary Examination in the Honour School of Geography, and examining for the Preliminary, for which there were 67 entrants in Ethnology, in March 1959. Outside lectures included a talk illustrated by slides and recordings to the University Exploration Club on British Guiana, to provide background for a proposed expedition to the Potaro River area. A talk illustrated by colour slides was also given to the Harrow Camera Club and to the Oxford Business and Professional Women’s Club. A talk on Symbolism was given at a meeting of the University Anthropological Society and to the Thame Branch of the Workers’ Educational Association. A party of W.E.A. members was subsequently escorted round the Museum.

As Hon. Secretary for the Middle and South American Research Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute, she was engaged in a considerable amount of correspondence with scholars interested in research in the Americas and in the countries concerned. This terminated in the work of drawing up a project for research to be presented to foundations interested in financing field research in the South American area. She also undertook work as Joint Secretary to the University Anthropological Society. She is well forward in working up her research material and expedition notes for a book on the Carib tribes of the Guinas, and has completed, with the help of Mr. K.H.H. Walters, the editing of her colour film, and much of her tape recordings. By-products of her work have been ‘The Birth of a Religion’, an account of the origins of the semi-Christian Hallelujah religion of the Carib-speaking tribes in British Guiana, Venezuela, and Brazil, for the J.R.A.I., and ‘Secondary Urn Burial among the Akawaio’, which appeared in Timehri, No.37. September 1958.

It remains as usual to thank our oldest member, Mr. F.J. Nipress, for his quick and cheerful help as messenger, attendant, day-to-day shopper for the Museum, and help in all the various odd matters which would hinder us greatly if it were not for his quiet efficiency in dealing with them.

Apart from research students, there were 10,266 visitors to the Museum, including parties from 67 schools.
                                        
T.K. PENNIMAN