Committee for the Pitt Rivers Museum as of 1 October 1993
The Vice-Chancellor (Dr Peter North)
The Senior Proctor (Dr P. Allen)
The Junior Proctor (Dr E. Filaize)
The Assessor (Dr J. Rowett)
Professor John Davis (Chairman)
Dr Brian Atkins
Dr R.H. Barnes
Dr Malcolm Coe
Professor Barry Cunliffe
Mr John Flemming
Professor Geoffrey Harrison
Ms Joanna Innes
Dr Schuyler Jones
Mr Francis Maddison
Dr Dennis Shaw
Dr Steve Simpson
Dr Donald Tayler
Professor Christopher White
The Pitt Rivers Museum
The Committee for the Pitt Rivers Museum, having received the following annual report from the Director, presented it as its report to Congregation.
Introduction
This has been a successful year for the Museum, although the increase in activity shows only too clearly how painfully stretched resources are in some areas. The gap between the expectations of Museum users, at all levels, and the ability to meet them, due to limitations of staffing and funding, continues to grow. It is a worrying trend.
However, there have been real gains this year. The most obvious is progress in the refurbishment of 64 Banbury Road. More of the house has been put into order than had been initially planned, as the upper floor is providing a temporary home for the Oxford Centre for the Environment, Ethics and Society, based at Mansfield College. The lecture theatre has been equipped with the help of a grant from the University’s Research and Equipment Committee and is already in use. The Research Centre should be fully functional by the beginning of Michaelmas Term 1994.
On 27 February 1994 Michael Palin gave two benefit performances at the Oxford Playhouse, the Museum’s share of the income from which was £9000. This was put towards the cost of a new lighting system in the Upper Gallery. It is a considerable boost to the Museum’s morale, and indeed its image, when someone so busy not only asks what he can do to help but also translates that into tangible results. We are very grateful to Mr Palin for his generosity.
The Main Museum
A prominent feature of work at the Museum during this reporting period has been the University Surveyor’s programme of replacing all the electrical wiring in the galleries, library, workshop, and staff offices. This is being done in phases, which is to say that the work will be spread out over two or three reporting periods. In tandem with this, new lighting systems are being installed throughout, both in wall cases and in gallery circulation spaces. These new systems will not only reduce energy costs, but will also give much greater control over light levels. At the same time, work continues on the setting up of new displays in the Upper Gallery, with the aim of re-opening that area to the public as soon as possible.
Special Exhibitions in the Main Museum
The exhibition Wilfred Thesiger’s Photographs: A Most Cherished Possession ran until February 1994. It proved immensely popular and was universally well-received. From April the exhibition then went on a tour of six venues in East Africa and the Middle East under the auspices of the British Council. Again it proved to be very popular; in Addis Ababa, for example, it was seen by more than 3000 people in four days. The Middle East tour is to continue into 1995, after which the exhibition will go to North America where it will be shown at a number of venues under the auspices of the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Heights of the Heavens: Buddhism in Mongolia and Tibet opened on 28 May 1994. A large-scale model of the Mongolian temple Megjid Janraiseg formed the centrepiece of the exhibition. It was made by the Monumental Arts Corporation of the Union of Mongolian Artists in Ulan Bator as an inspiration for the Mongolian revival of Buddhism following years of communist oppression, and as part of a plan to have the original temple repaired and restored. The model was purchased by the Museum in 1993 with the aid of the MGC/ V&A Purchase Grant Fund, the National Art Collections Fund, and the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum. The exhibition also included a selection from the recently donated photographs of Tibet taken in the 1930s by Frederick Spencer Chapman, which were shown alongside photographs taken in Tibet some fifteen years earlier by Sir Charles Bell. The exhibition proved to be very popular, no doubt due in part to the fact that both Tibet and Buddhism are popular subjects at present. Sandra Dudley and Paul Harris assisted in the presentation of the exhibition. We are very grateful to them for their help.
Heights of the Heavens was followed by Baka: Forest People, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and music by husband-and-wife team Su Hart and Martin Cradick. Sponsored by the James A. Swan Fund, which is administered by the Museum, Hart and Cradick lived for some time among the Baka people near the Cameroon–Congo border, taking with them few trappings of Western civilization: a guitar, a mandolin and a tent, as well as photographic, sound-recording, and drawing equipment. The exhibition documented their stay with the Baka.
Special Exhibitions at the Balfour Building
At the beginning of the year Nick Gray designed an audio-visual exhibition of music and slides for the Music Makers gallery. This exhibition, entitled Geringsing Wayang: The Flaming Heaven of the Ancestors, introduced the Balinese shadow-puppet play and related topics such as textiles and musical instruments, using material collected during his fieldwork in Bali. This was followed by an exhibition of traditional crafts of Slovenia collected by Hélène La Rue and Linda Mowat earlier in the year. This was organized to coincide with the erection of a newly acquired Slovenian kozolec or hayrack in the Baines Music Garden and was thus entitled The Slovenian Kozolec. It was accompanied by a display of photographs by Rafael Podobnik.
Other Museum Events
On 20 February 1994 the Museum held a family day jointly with the University Museum. ‘Discovery Sunday’, as it was called, was a resounding success with some 1500 people visiting the two museums, many for the first time. The money raised on the day is to be used to improve disability access and facilities in the University Museum, which of course indirectly helps access to the Pitt Rivers Museum as well. Master-minded by Kate White, both staff and graduate students contributed to a varied programme of events, which included talks (on such subjects as the history of the Museum, Australian Aboriginal art, shrunken heads, Thesiger’s photographs, and Captain Cook), an identification desk to which the public were invited to bring objects to be examined, and conservation demonstrations, as well as face painting, which proved the most popular activity of all.
Among numerous other events during the year were talks on the Museum’s textile and toy collections given by Julia Nicholson to visiting groups. The Museum also hosted study visits by a number of groups from the Oxford summer school led by Dick Speed. The weekly series of family events known as ‘Pitt Stops’ continued throughout the University terms. The Museum also took part in National Music Day with a weekend event involving six groups of musicians.
Visitor Numbers
Again there was a significant increase in the number of visitors during public opening hours. The total for the year exceeded 104,000. Of these, some 15,500 came in educational groups, two thirds of them taking advantage of the Museum’s special morning openings for such parties. It is good to be able to report that 5000 people visited the Balfour Building.
Documentation
Linda Mowat left the Museum in February 1994 to pursue her research interests and to spend more time in her second home in Colombia. She has, however, remained in close contact with the Museum. The post of Assistant Curator (Documentation) was filled by Julia Nicholson and Jeremy Coote as a jobshare; they are also husband and wife. Generally speaking, Coote is responsible for dealing with the collections from Africa and Oceania, while Nicholson is responsible for dealing with those from Asia and the Americas. Computerization of the object records continued throughout the year, as time allowed. There are now nearly 14,000 records on the database.
The majority of documentation time, however, continues to be spent accessioning new collections, though an increasing amount of time is also taken up with enquiries, including non-scholarly but income-generating requests from film companies and publishers. The contribution of Marina de Alarcón (Museum Assistant) to the work of the department has been invaluable in enabling it to cope with the ever-increasing number of requests for access to the collections. We are also grateful to Bridget Heal who made a valuable contribution to the work of the department during a temporary appointment as a volunteer in the summer.
New Acquisitions
Purchases were as follows: a violin and a collection of textiles from Guatemala (1993.66; from Ed Carter); a Guatemalan harp (1994.37; from Ed Carter); a trough zither from Uganda (1994.6; from ‘The Garden of Life’); textiles from India and Central Asia (1993.64; from John Gillow); a cotton scarf from Nepal (1993.67; from Aama Impex); a pair of man’s boots from Greenland (1994.2; from Hannah Jones); a painting by Judy Napangardi Watson (1994.43; from Warlukurlangu Artists of Yuendumu, Australia, via Tamara Lucas); a rhino-hide whip, a coiled basket, and two ash-trays made from rhino bone from Tanzania (1993.49; from Michael Maguire); a Tibetan woman’s costume (1994.33; from Harriet Marcus); three bark paintings from the Northern Territory, Australia (1994.1; from Fiona Magowan); a collection of contemporary basketry, animal trappings, and other items from Colombia (1993.50; from Linda Mowat); tapes of field recordings from India (1993.56; from David Mowat); a model of the Buddhist temple Megjid Janraiseg from Mongolia (1993.61; from the October Gallery with the aid of the MGC/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, the National Art Collections Fund, and the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum); a collection of blouse fabrics worn by women of the Dutch Reformed Church in Staphorst, Netherlands (1993.59; from Dr Hélène La Rue); a collection from a field trip to Slovenia (1994.20; from Dr Hélène La Rue and Linda Mowat).
Donors were as follows: Anonymous (two figures and a fortune-telling cone from Kenya; 1994.30); Canon John Beckwith (a large and varied collection from West Africa; 1994.14); June Bedford (a plaited basket, possibly from North America; 1994.9); Beatrice Blackwood (a collection of children’s drawings from her 1926–27 trip to North America found unentered in the Museum; 1994.15); Brian Bone (a British naval game and a pipe; 1994.31); Dr S. Brock (an animal charm from Iraq; 1994.19); Sue Brooks (forgeries of a pound coin and fifty pence piece found in the takings of the Museum shop; 1994.39); Mr Alexander Chablo (a Christmas card and calendar for 1994 from Ukraine; 1994.5); Dr Audrey Colson (collections made by Father Rooney and Cenydd Jones in Guyana, mostly of Akawaio material acquired in the early 1950s; 1994.10); Mary Dearden (a finely decorated gourd from Peru; 1994.42); Andrew Dipper (a violin and violin-making material; 1994.41); Elizabeth Feltham (a coiled basket purchased in Melbourne, Australia in the 1960s; 1993.55); Linda Gelens (three pots and a pair of shoes from Guatemala; 1994.8); Mrs Grundy (a large mixed collection from Sierra Leone and Nigeria; 1993.68); Hampshire County Museums Service (a large mixed ethnographic collection; 1994.4); Pauline Holden (an African musical instrument; 1994.21); Sarah Hosking (a piece of painted barkcloth; 1994.16); Rebecca Hossack (a Mursi lip-plate from Southern Ethiopia; 1994.22); Hannah Jones (a pair of Breton wooden clogs; 1994.36); Dr Schuyler Jones (a collection from Tanzania; 1993.52 / imitation Tibetan dzi beads made in India; 1994.32 / an imitation Kafir woman’s ‘horned’ headdress from Pakistan; 1994.34); Jonathan Kingdon (an incised coconut from East Africa and a bead-covered bottle from West Africa; 1994.23); Judy Knight (a collection of pottery and pottery-making tools from Uganda; 1993.70); Meng Gan Lu (five paintings of devotional subjects; 1993.69); Dr Howard Morphy (a bar of chocolate shaped like a Chilkat blanket from the Northwest Coast of America; 1993.48); Linda Mowat (a Japanese textile and an embroidered panel from a Palestinian dress; 1994.7); the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford (two bookmarks; 1994.25 / two engraved and painted buffalo horns recording scenes from the Boer War; 1994.28); Mr A. Parry (a spear-head probably from East Africa; 1994.40); Dr John Penney (a Dinka or Mandari spear-head from Sudan; 1994.27); Mrs M. Phillips (a musical cigarette box; 1994.24); Mrs Alethea Pitt (brass models and mirrors from Pakistan and a brass amulet from Tibet; 1994.17); Patrick B. Power (a fishing spear from Lake Rudolph, Ethiopia; 1994.12); Sir Richard Southwood (a desk name-plaque from Korea; 1993.51); Mrs F. Spencer Chapman (a figure of the goddess Tara from Tibet, collected by her husband F. Spencer Chapman in 1935; 1994.11); Mrs Ione Tayler (a wooden figure carving from Sudan; 1993.71); Mrs C. Turner and sisters (two Naga spears and a helmet; 1994.35); Jana Valencic (various items from Slovenia including a hay-rack; 1993.58 / a fragment of a Pre-Columbian textile and two spindles from Peru; 1993.62 / a pair of shoes from Croatia; 1994.38); Lorraine Da’Luz Vieira (acupuncture equipment from the UK and China; 1994.18); Nigel F. Walker (two spearheads and three knives with sheaths; 1994.29); Donald J. Waters (a Cornish fishing line for catching blennies; 1994.26); Mr J. Warren (a Romanian pottery whistle; 1993.72); Julie A. Watson (a stone head of Maya style from Guatemala; 1993.63).
Exchanges were as follows: two flint arrowheads from Nottinghamshire (1923.73.8 and .9) were given to the Department of Archaeology, University of Nottingham in exchange for four stone implements from Vaal River, South Africa (1993.57.1 - .4).
Loans to other Museums
A Bamenda figure, a Yoruba carving of a district officer, and six Cameroon pipes lent to the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam in October 1992 for the exhibition Five Hundred Years of Tobacco Culture were safely returned to the Museum in January 1994. Two Arawak stone carvings and an Aztec head lent to the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge in April 1992 for the exhibition The Americas 1492 were safely returned to the Museum in September 1994.
In November 1993 a model of a cradle from Siberia, a baby-carrying chair from Assam, a cradle from Burma, a baby bag from the Swampy Cree, Canada, and a portrait of Anna Rupene by Gottfried Lindauer were lent to the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam for the exhibition Beloved Burden; they were safely returned in September. In March 1994 a Sami reindeer-skin suit and some drawings by Arthur Evans were lent to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford for the exhibition Arthur Evans: Life and Times; they were safely returned in August. In June seven kachina dolls from the southwestern United States were lent to the Musée d’Arts Africains, Océaniens, Amerindiens in Marseilles for the exhibition Kachina: Poupées Rituelles des Indiens Hopi and Zuni; they were safely returned in September. In July three fish mascots from Great Yarmouth were lent to the National Fishing Heritage Centre, Grimsby for the exhibition Poseidon Experiment; they are due to be returned in January 1996.
Research Visits and Enquiries
The documentation section dealt with 284 written enquiries, a 50% increase on the previous year. There were 127 research visits to study the reserve collections. Informal enquiries were also logged, and it is estimated that the department dealt with about 160 telephone enquiries requiring further action. New information sheets have been produced to assist researchers in planning visits to the Museum.
The music department dealt with some 200 enquiries, including both general enquiries about the Education Service and scholarly research enquiries about instruments in the music collection. An even larger number of telephone enquiries were also dealt with. During May 1994 the music department was able to host a visit from Dr Istvan Almasi, a visiting fellow from Romania. Mr Nicholas Gray’s work proved invaluable in supporting this level of activity.
The archaeology section dealt with a number of museum enquiries including several involving access to the collections for research purposes. The Director of the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, Dr Ilhan Temizsoy, together with his senior technician, spent an afternoon with Mr Inskeep, studying the Hunter-Gatherer Past and Present gallery in the Balfour Building.
Requests for access to the archive collections remained at a high level. Some 75 visiting scholars, many of them from overseas, carried out research on the collections, some staying for several weeks. In addition, innumerable postal and telephone enquiries were received. Having one member of staff responsible for visitor services continues to work well, both staff time and visitors’ time being used more efficiently—and with a better standard of supervision. In keeping with the trend of recent years there have been as many enquiries on conceptual questions relating to photography and history as there have been about ‘photographs as documents’. This is reflected to some extent in the demands on the manuscript collection, where interest in the history of collecting has been an increasingly common theme.
Fifteen students from the PREMA (Prevention in Museums in Africa) course organized by ICCROM (International Centre for the Study, Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property in Rome) spent a day with the conservation department. In addition, the conservation department provided access to the reserve textiles collections to a number of researchers and students. Advice was given on conservation training to a number of enquirers.
A number of specialist groups visited the Museum during the year, including parties from the Oxford University Forestry Society, the International Committee of Musical Museum Curators, the Museum and Galleries Commission, and the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.
Archives
Elizabeth Edwards reports that work in the archives has focused on the very substantial backlog that built up as efforts were diverted to the Thesiger exhibition. A chronic lack of space not only hinders work, but matters are now approaching the point where the collections themselves are at risk and there is no suitable place for research visitors to work. The allocation to the archives department of part of the first floor of the 64 Banbury Road building is a most welcome development, though it leaves the daunting task of raising the funds to convert and furnish the space for archival use. The total costs involved are estimated at £80,000.
The archives continue to attract important accessions. Two outstanding collections have been received during this year. The first comprises Freddie Spencer Chapman’s photographs taken in Tibet in 1936, including what are probably the earliest colour images (both still and motion picture) ever taken there. The visual quality and historical importance of these photographs is of the highest quality, and we are very grateful to Mrs Faith Spencer Chapman and her family for donating them. Secondly, many thanks are due to Mr Hubert Hottot who has donated an extremely important series of photographs from the expedition of his father, Robert Hottot, to the Congo in 1907–8. As well as being ethnographically rich, the photographs constitute a detailed narrative of an expedition. They are well documented and are very beautiful as objects in their own right, being small Vérascope positive stereos. The donation also includes photographs of travels in China and Japan, photographic equipment and related documents. Wilfred Thesiger also added to his collection at the Museum, donating a large number of file prints. These will be used to provide first access to his collection and have already been invaluable in the continuing work on its collation. We are also grateful to Michael Maguire for photographs from Tanzania, and to Michael O’Brien for a substantial collection documenting Mambila material culture.
An important part of the year’s work has been devoted to making accessible the Spencer Chapman and Thesiger collections, and progress has been made. We are grateful for a grant from the Faculty Board of Anthropology and Geography, which enabled us to employ Zara Fleming to give specialist advice on the Spencer Chapman collection. We are very grateful to her for the work she carried out. This same grant enabled us to employ temporarily Ingrid Skeels, Jennifer Punnett, and Nick Blinco, all of whom worked tirelessly on the Thesiger collection. We are also pleased to acknowledge David Zeitlyn’s technical assistance with the department’s catalogue database.
In archive conservation two major improvements were achieved. The first was the correct boxing of the Thesiger albums, which was made possible by a grant from the Area Museum Service that covered half the costs. The second was the work undertaken at the Bodleian Library on the Museum’s ‘foundation volume’. While such projects are important, the major concern remains the lack of photographic support. Making copy negatives of the nineteenth-century print collection and file print and copy negatives of glass plates, as well as the replacement copying of nitrate stock, should be part of a rolling preservation programme in any photographic collection. Understaffing has meant that in recent years it has not been possible to maintain a coherently planned preservation policy. The progress that has been made has tended to be piecemeal and ad hoc. It is to be hoped that it will be possible to address some of these issues more systematically once the collections have been moved to 64 Banbury Road.
Other Museum Matters
Mr R. J. Macrae and Dr J. McNabb sorted and systematized the large collection of British Palaeoliths collected by Mr Macrae from the Middle Thames Highlands Pit. These materials will eventually be incorporated into the Museum’s collections, as it is Mr Macrae’s intention to donate them to the Museum. The Museum gratefully acknowledges the work done on this collection by Mr Macrae and Dr McNabb.
With the agreement of their collector, Dr Collcutt, the large collection of soil samples that had occupied space in the basement of 60 Banbury Road for many years was disposed of. The resulting space was filled with new shelving and is now used to accommodate stone tool collections formerly housed in the garage, which was demolished to provide builders with access to the back of 56 Banbury Road.
A display of specimens and photographs illustrating Dr Kate Scott’s work at the Stanton Harcourt Pleistocene site was arranged by her and installed in public galleries at the Balfour Building. The costs of the display were met by the gravel extraction company A.R.C.
Balfour Library
Richard Hanson resigned as Balfour Librarian at the end of January to return to Australia. His successor Veronica Lawrence reports that readers now have access to OLIS, the Oxford Libraries Information Service. A second computer has been purchased to allow the entry of Balfour Library book stock on to the OLIS database. The reclassification of the library into the Bliss classification scheme is progressing, and the binding of periodicals has been resumed after a lapse of five years. Some additional shelf space has been made available to the Library, which has allowed for better accommodation of many books.
The Library gratefully received donations of some 700 books and pamphlets from the following individuals and institutions: Afrika Museum (Berg en Dal), Nicolas Argenti, the Ashmolean Library, Professor Alberto Bass, Dr Ruth Barnes, Mr Bauer, the Bead Society of Central Florida, Mrs June Bedford (including 34 books on African art), Professor Dionisio Blanco, Dr Roger Boulay, Mrs Sally Chilver, Mr Jeremy Coote, Ms Julia Cousins, William Delafield (18 books from the library of Lieutenant-General Pitt Rivers), Dr Nélia Dias, Mrs Catherine Fagg, Dr Josephine Flood, the Geography Faculty Library, Carla Ghezzi, Mr Lennox Honychurch, the Indian Institute Library, Mr Ray Inskeep, the Instituto Panamerico de Geografia e Historia, William Jehan, Dr Schuyler Jones, Dr Hélène La Rue, the estate of Dr Godfrey Lienhardt, Ms Tamara Lucas, the Maison Française, Marcel Marée, Licda Casilda Tamara Matos, Dr Peter Mitchell, Ms Linda Mowat, Musée d’Arts Africains, Océaniens, Amerindiens (Marseilles), Ms Julia Nicholson, the Oriental Institute Library, Dr Sandra Ott, Maria l’Assumpció Saurí i Pujol, Humberto Soto-Ricart, Mr and Mrs R. Rickey, the Sala Catalunya de la Fundació ‘la Caixa’ (Barcelona), Ing. Luz Severino, Dr A. Sherratt, Shire Publications, Edwin M. Shook, St. John Simpson, Takayama Institute of Historical Studies, Dr John Taylor, T. Mason Trainer, David Tucker, Mrs K. Turvey, Jana Valencic, Revd. P. A. G. Westlake, Dilys Winegrad, Harry Woodhouse, Ms Harriet Young, and Dr David Zeitlyn.
Ms H. Thompson resigned her position as Library Assistant and was replaced in Hilary Term by Ms T. Lucas and in Trinity Term by Ms R. Page. In addition to her library duties, Mrs I. Tayler has embarked on the Library Assistantship course run by the Oxford College of Further Education, which she plans to take over two years. Volunteers from NADFAS (National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies) continued their excellent work in keeping the book stock in good repair.
Conservation
Ms Heather Berns left at the end of her two-year contract and Mrs Birgitte Speake took over in June as Head of Conservation. Matthew Simkins helped with the conservation of many objects during his six-week contract at the end of 1993. Michelle Maunders from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London spent July and August with the department as an intern. Trudy Knight, a specialist in organic conservation, also worked in the department during August and September. We are grateful to all of them for their help. In August, Lorraine Rostant returned to the department to take up the newly created trainee post. She has since been accepted for the two year part-time course in conservation at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.
Thanks to a successful bid to the University’s Research and Equipment Committee, the conservation laboratory now has a computer linked to 10 portable electronic monitors in the Museum. These gather accurate data on temperature and relative humidity (RH), while another four monitors record visible and ultra-violet light levels in the galleries. All the data are radioed to the lab where they can be accessed and recorded on the computer. There are four other temperature and RH recorders, not radio linked, in the reserve collections. These are also available for monitoring conditions of loan material, both in transit and on display. The information gathered to date has tended to confirm staff concerns regarding unsatisfactory environmental conditions in the main galleries. These are caused in part by the roof structure, which allows excessive heat loss during cold spells in winter and a build-up of heat during hot summer weather. The resulting temperature and RH fluctuations are far from ideal.
One of the conservation department’s many tasks during this reporting period was the completion of work on objects selected for redisplay in the Upper Gallery. Shields, bolas, slings, and some of the fishing materials were treated, as well as arm-guards, thumb-rings, and bows and arrows. A number of musical instruments were conserved for a special display in the Music Makers Gallery in the Balfour Building. Conservation staff also consulted with the Museum’s display technicians on a number of exhibition problems.
Procedures to eliminate carpet and museum beetles from the collections are being rigorously maintained. All new collections are frozen before entering the museum. All objects from the Head Hunting display were frozen, apart from the shrunken heads, which were fumigated. All the display cases in the Music Makers Gallery at the Balfour Building were cleaned and checked for infestation. All objects taken to the lab for conservation are frozen before being returned to the galleries or the reserve collections.
All the material loaned to other institutions was conserved. Condition reports were compiled for each object, and advice was given on packing. Returned loans were examined, compared with condition reports, and frozen before being returned to the collections. Much time was spent working on a collection of African horse furniture for a loan which, in the event, did not go ahead.
Educational Services
A special gift enabled Mr Nick Gray to be appointed as Dr La Rue’s assistant during her sabbatical leave. He has been involved in a number of activities that comprise an important part of the Museum’s interface with its public. The most complex of these projects was the development of a teacher’s pack about puppets, based on the collections in the Museum and focusing especially on the Balinese shadow-puppet play. This work had to be carefully researched in order to complement the demands of the national curriculum.
As well as giving general talks and organizing public events based on this theme, during the course of the year Mr Gray worked with one particular school, trying out the pack and getting many helpful hints from the teachers. Beginning by learning about Bali, its geography and traditions, the children went on to make puppets and a screen, and then went on to put on shadow plays. As a result of requests from those who took part, the pack includes some Balinese recipes.
Sixteen schools had assistance with their visits to the musical instrument collection. Schools can either book to have their own unguided visit, or they can ask for a guide. The Education Service provides guided visits in the Main Museum, but there is no guide to help visitors to the music collections. Without Mr Gray’s efforts this year, these children would have had a much less rich and informative experience.
Photography
Malcolm Osman reports that photography of the objects selected for display in the Upper Gallery continued throughout the year. Because of the sheer number of items involved delays became inevitable in undertaking routine internal photographic work, including archive and new accession photography. Some exhibition printing (from the Spencer Chapman negatives) was undertaken for the Heights of the Heavens exhibition. The demand, both internal and external, for large-format colour photography continues to increase. For example, many new postcard subjects were selected and photographed during the year.
The Museum Shop
The shop turnover rose to £51,483 net, compared with £43,500 net the previous year. It is unlikely that this rate of increase can continue as the shop at the Main Museum is now stocked to capacity with a wide range of imported goods, books, and postcards, as well as with the traditional souvenirs. Just over £20,000 worth of books were sold through the two shops, a remarkably high figure considering the lack of shelf space and room to browse. This is in part due to the popularity of the new souvenir guide, as well as to the rise in visitor figures. It also reflects the number of teachers turning to the shop for source materials on national curriculum subjects. Schools purchases include not just books but also materials for classroom use, such as papyrus, musical instruments, and such small items as bells, stamps, beads and mirrors for use in textile design. Computerized records provided the first accurate figures for overheads, including complimentary stock, breakages and theft, staff discounts, training, and publicity expenditure.
Publications
The Pitt Rivers Museum: A Souvenir Guide to the Collections has proved a success and sold well throughout the year. Some of the small books were reprinted, including Symbols of Kings, The Origin and Development of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and A Whole Room for Music, which have all proved very popular. A further title was added to the series: Hunting the Right Weapon, produced to accompany the new displays in the Upper Gallery.
Teaching and Examining
Jeremy Coote gave tutorials in African art and aesthetics to students taking the ‘Art in Society (Africa)’ option in the M.St. in Ethnology and Museum Ethnography.
Elizabeth Edwards gave lectures, seminars, tutorials, and supervisions in critical history and the theory of still photography to students in visual anthropology and contributed to the teaching for the ‘Museum Studies’ option on the M.St. course.
Chris Gosden contributed to lecture courses on ‘World Archaeology’ and ‘People, Environment, and Culture’. Together with Howard Morphy, he developed and co-taught a new advanced course on the material culture of regional systems.
Ray Inskeep gave sixteen lectures to undergraduate and graduate students on hunter-gatherers and first farmers in Africa.
Schuyler Jones gave lectures in the ‘People, Environment, and Culture’ series. He gave classes for students taking the ‘Museum Studies’ option, held tutorials for undergraduates and supervised a number of M.St., M.Phil., and D.Phil. students.
Howard Morphy continued to lecture in the introductory courses and convened and co-chaired the seminars in ‘Museum Studies’ and the M.St. research seminars. He also taught ‘Art in Society’ options. Together with Chris Gosden he developed and co-taught a new advanced course on the material culture of regional systems. By Hilary Term he was supervising twenty-one postgraduate students. In the B.A. in Archaeology and Anthropology he served as course coordinator for the ‘Material Evidence’ core course and was Director of Studies for St Peter’s College. With Marcus Banks he organized the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology’s weekly departmental seminar series on ‘Visualizing Anthropology’.
Julia Nicholson gave a seminar on the Museum’s documentation systems to the students taking the Museum’s M.St.
Birgitte Speake gave a seminar on preventative conservation to the students taking the Museum’s M.St.
Donald Tayler served once again as Chairman of Examiners for the M.St. and M.Phil. in Ethnology and Museum Ethnography, as Assessor for Geography Mods, and as coordinator for both Archaeology and Anthropology Mods and Human Sciences Prelims. As Director of Studies and lecturer at St Hugh’s, he undertook undergraduate admissions and the assessment of candidates for postgraduate research scholarships and fellowships.
Students
Jeremy Avis and Philip Tebbs carried out fieldwork (in the Cameroon and St Louis, USA respectively), during the year. Marilyn Herman, Fiona Magowan, Veronica Strang, J. Ensenyat-Alcover, and P. J. Barlow Horlick successfully completed their doctoral theses. Former student Dr Henry Johnson was appointed to a lectureship in ethnomusicology at the University of Otago, New Zealand.
The Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre
Mr Inskeep retired at the end of the year, after twenty-two years’ service to the Museum, and to the teaching of prehistoric archaeology, particularly African archaeology, in the University. He will be much missed. We are enormously grateful to him for all his help in running the Centre over the years. He, as much as anyone, has personified its successful working relationship as a unit within the Museum.
After a year’s suspension of the post, Dr Gosden arrived in January, as successor to Dennis Britton. He is, however, likely to move to 64 Banbury Road when that building is ready for occupation in due course. Dr Roe was on sabbatical leave for the year, but continued to carry out his research and writing at the Centre.
The building at 60 Banbury Road has remained under siege by successive teams of workmen for almost the whole year, most notably those who installed proper fire alarms. We should doubtless be grateful for these, which are effective enough to produce two fire-engines each time the electric kettle fails to switch itself off. So far, we have failed to persuade the firemen to stay for tea as a reward for their trouble.
The regular field projects with which the Centre is associated have continued throughout the year, and important new discoveries have been made both by Dr Waldren in Mallorca and Menorca, and by Dr Scott at Dix Pit, Stanton Harcourt. The latter site has again received some press and television coverage, and it is pleasing to report that some of this was engendered by the decision of the Hanson Trust, through their subsidiary A.R.C. (Midlands Division), to provide a generous grant of £27,000 to support the work on what has become known as ‘The Oxford Mammoths Project’. This is in association with Earthwatch (Europe) and St Cross College (where Dr Scott has now become an A.R.C. Research Fellow). Mrs J. Scott-Jackson, a research student based at the Centre, also successfully continued her fieldwork at the Lower Palaeolithic site of Wood Hill, East Kent.
Other Staff Activities
Jeremy Coote continued the work he has been doing since 1991 as Area Editor for Africa and Oceania on Macmillan’s 34-volume The Dictionary of Art (to be published in 1996). He also continued working as Editor of JASO: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford. He advised the Royal Pavilion Art Gallery and Museums, Brighton, on their exhibition Kinyozi: The Art of African Hairstyles, as well as contributing to the accompanying catalogue. He seconded the motion ‘Aesthetics is a Cross-Cultural Category’ at the debate organized by the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory at the University of Manchester in October. With Marina de Alarcón he attended a Museums Documentation Association (MDA) half-day workshop on ‘Labelling and Marking Methods’ and an Oxfordshire Museums Council training session on ‘Packing Up’.
Elizabeth Edwards continued working with contemporary photographers in the visual arts, as well as on the dissemination of early photographic material in anthropology. Her continuing work on aspects of nineteenth-century photography in the Pacific has this year been focused in particular on Samoa. She is a contributor to the exhibition Bilder aus dem Paradies, which will open at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum für Völkerkunde in Cologne before coming to Oxford in May 1995. She attended the AVICOM conference ‘Photography and the Museum’ in Bonn in September and gave a paper on new interpretative strategies for photography in ethnographic museums. She also attended the Museum Ethnographers Group annual conference in Glasgow. In March she worked on early Pacific photography in the collections of the Linden Museum, Stuttgart and the Agfa-Historama, Cologne, and later paid a fruitful visit to the National Museum of Photography in Bradford. She continued to serve on the editorial board of History of Photography, was appointed to the Photographic Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and elected Chair of the Museum Ethnographers Group. In the course of the year she also acted as photographic consultant to a number of institutions and gave lectures in London and Birmingham
Chris Gosden continued his fieldwork at the Neolithic site of Jeitun in Turkmenistan and carried out a survey of potential pre-Neolithic sites in the Kopet Dag mountains. He continued to write up results from fieldwork in both the New Britain and New Ireland provinces of Papua New Guinea, as well as more general works on the Pacific and problems of time in archaeology. He organized a session on recent work in Papua New Guinea at the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He also organized a theme entitled ‘Changes in Agrarian Systems’ at the World Archaeology Congress in New Delhi. He gave seminars in Lampeter, London, Oxford, and Southampton. He continued to serve as a member of the editorial boards of World Archaeology and Archaeology in Oceania and of Cambridge University Press’s ‘World Archaeology’ series.
Ray Inskeep examined a Cambridge Ph.D. thesis and re-examined an Oxford D.Phil. thesis. With the support of Merton College and the Faculty Board, he attended a six-day conference in Cambridge in July on ‘The Growth of Farming Communities in Africa from the Equator Southwards’. In March he retired from the editorial board of World Archaeology after eighteen years.
Schuyler Jones once again spent part of the summer in Sisimiut kommune, Western Greenland, excavating Dorset and Saqqaq sites as part of a team working under the direction of Finn Kramer, Director of the Sisimiut Museum. He purchased a number of artefacts for the Museum, acquiring both an East Greenland and a West Greenland dog sledge, and journeyed up the west coast to Disko Bay, and on to Upernavik at 73 degrees N., some 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle. In Uummannaq he obtained for the Museum a special blind which Greenlanders use for hunting seals on the ice. Back in Copenhagen he continued research on the Tibetan collections in the National Museum. He continued to serve as a Trustee of the Horniman Museum and as a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Collections.
Hélène La Rue was on sabbatical leave during this reporting period. She devoted the time to completing the transfer of the records for 5489 musical instruments from the card catalogue system to an electronic database. She also made progress towards completing entries on those instruments which, though already entered in the Museum’s catalogue, had not previously formed part of the musical instrument index. These tasks have involved correcting and adding information, not just copying and entering existing records. In addition, she has been examining each instrument in the store in order to add up-to-date descriptions, measurements, and condition reports. Parallel with this she also replaced much of the old packing materials and redesigned completely some of the storage systems, this being her first opportunity to take on such tasks since she first worked on the reserve collections in 1974–5. In addition to this work, she was elected Chairman of the Steering Committee of the Musical Collections Forum, a newly founded national specialist group. She also worked as one of the team writing the new Standards of Care of Musical Instruments, to be published by the Museums and Galleries Commission in 1995. In Berlin in November she attended the first international congress for children’s museums and led one of the working groups.
Howard Morphy had a particularly busy year as, in addition to his usual duties, he also served as Chairman of the Faculty of Anthropology and Geography. He was awarded a grant of £74,000 from the Leverhulme Trust, to be paid over a three-year period, to employ Alison Petch to carry out research on the Original Pitt Rivers Collection (the Museum’s founding collection). He was also awarded a British Academy minor award for travel expenses for Alison Petch to continue, under his direction, research in Australia on the Gillen letters. He proposed the motion ‘Aesthetics is a Cross-Cultural Category’ at the debate organized by the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory at the University of Manchester in October. He was made a Senior Research Associate of Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford. He continued to serve on the editorial boards of Art History and Oceania. He gave seminar papers at Sussex and Lampeter and gave a paper on ‘Australian Adaptation’ at a workshop on ‘Human Adaptability’ at the Pauling Human Sciences Centre, Oxford. During the long vacation he visited Australia, giving public lectures at the Australian National University, Canberra and the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales. He gave a paper on Spencer and Gillen at a conference commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Horn Expedition and was interviewed about his work on the Gillen letters for a feature on ABC television’s science show. He researched the Stockdale manuscripts at the Mitchell Library. He also continued his research on contemporary Aboriginal art in Sydney, Canberra, and Alice Springs. He examined D.Phil. theses for the University of Oxford and for the Australian National University. He served as external examiner for the M.A. in Visual Anthropology at Manchester, as well as for the B.A. and B.Sc in Anthropology and the M.A. in the Anthropology of Art at University College London. He lectured in the art of Oceania for the SOAS/Sotheby’s Course and gave a lecture in the landscape course at University College London.
Derek Roe was on sabbatical leave for this academic year. He used the opportunity to catch up on reading and writing, for which there is little time in the course of an ordinary year. He continued to supervise his research students, but otherwise did not teach. In August 1993, he led the British team in a joint Anglo-Spanish project to study Early and Middle Palaeolithic sites in south-east Spain. He also lectured to a number of groups in the course of the visit. Work on the results of the visit continued for much of the year. In March 1994 he gave the first Tom Hassall Lecture to the Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society. During the summer he gave a number of special lectures on aspects of Palaeolithic stone artefacts to various Earthwatch teams working at the Stanton Harcourt excavations, and to a visiting party of students from Liverpool University. With Mrs Anne McBurney he completed work on the papers of the late Professor Charles McBurney (of whose literary estate he is executor), a task that has lasted several years. In June he took part as an invited speaker in the meeting at Oxford to celebrate twenty years of the British Archaeological Reports. He made field visits to excavations at Whipsnade and Pontnewydd Cave, and continued regularly to assist English Heritage’s Southern Rivers Project in its final year. In January 1994, he took delivery of new word-processing equipment, since when he has been learning how to use it. He examined one Ph.D. thesis during the year, for London University.
Birgitte Speake attended a meeting on Ethnographic Conservation at the Horniman Museum. She attended a course on Pest Management and Control for Museums organized by the Getty Conservation Institute and a course on Caring for Musical Instruments organized by the Museums and Galleries Conservation Unit. She assisted in setting up an ethnographic conservation section within the United Kingdom Institute of Conservation. She gave an illustrated talk to the Oxford Conservators Group on ‘Pest Management and Control for Museums’.
Donald Tayler attended the Decennial Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He also participated in a consultative meeting at St John’s College on a proposed Oxford Film Archive. He lectured at the Day Conference of School Masters held at St Hugh’s and contributed to a series of talks on the BBC Foreign Service. He served as an intermittent publications consultant to Survival International and reviewed books for Folklore. He also examined an Oxford D.Phil thesis. He served as a member of the Committee for the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Kathryn White successfully completed her MA in Museum Studies at Leicester University.
Staff Publications
Jeremy Coote, ‘Introduction’ to Kinyozi: The Art of African Hairstyles (Green Centre Catalogues and Occasional Papers Series, No. 1), by Louise Tythacott, Brighton: The Green Centre for Non-Western Art and Culture at the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums (1994), pp. 6–7.
Jeremy Coote (with Howard Morphy and others), Aesthetics is a Cross-Cultural Category: A Debate Held in the Muriel Stott Centre, John Rylands University Library of Manchester, on 30th October 1993, edited by James A. Weiner, Manchester: Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester (1994).
Elizabeth Edwards, Review of Axel Poignant’s Photographs, Northern Australia 1948–1952 (an exhibition held at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London, 14 September to 9 October 1993), Pacific Arts, nos 9/10 (1994), pp. 120–23.
Chris Gosden, ‘Relics of the First New Ireland Settlers’, in The First Humans: Human Origins and History to 10,000 BC (American Museum of Natural History: The Illustrated History of Mankind), edited by Göran Burenhult, Weldon Owen, and Bra Brocker, San Francisco: Harper (1983), p. 183.
Chris Gosden, ‘Comment’ (on ‘Bronze Age World System and Cycles’ by Andre Gunder Frank), in Current Anthropology, Vol. XXXIV, no. 4 (August–October 1993), pp. 410–11.
Chris Gosden, ‘Understanding the Settlement of Pacific Islands in the Pleistocene’, in Sahul in Review (Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, Occasional Paper 24), edited by M. A. Smith, M. Spriggs, and B. Fankhauser, Canberra: Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University (1993), pp. 131–6.
Chris Gosden, Social Being and Time: An Archaeological Perspective (Social Archaeology), Oxford: Blackwell (1994).
Chris Gosden (with John Webb), ‘The Creation of a Papua New Guinean Landscape: Archaeological and Geomorphological Evidence’, Journal of Field Archaeology, Vol. XXI, no. 1 (1994), pp. 29–51.
Chris Gosden (with John Webb and others), ‘Lolmo Cave: A Mid- to Late Holocene Site, the Arawe Islands, West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea’, Asian Perspectives, Vol. XXXIII, no. 1 (1994), pp. 97–119.
Chris Gosden (with D. R. Harris and others), ‘Investigating Early Agriculture in Central Asia: New Research at Jeitun’, Antiquity, Vol. LXVII (1994), pp. 324–38.
Chris Gosden (with G. R. Summerhayes and others), ‘West New Britain Obsidian: Production and Consumption’, in Archaeometry Studies in Australia, edited by B. Fankhauser and R. Bird, Canberra: Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University (1991), pp. 57–68.
R. R. Inskeep (ed.), Reading Art (special issue of World Archaeology, Vol. XXV, no. 3 (1994)).
Hélène La Rue, ‘Kinder nehmen ihre Eltern mit Pitt Rivers Museum’, in Kinder - und Jugenmuseum Kulturort mit Zukunft, edited by Nel Worm, Unna: LKD (1994), pp. 127–9.
Hélène La Rue, ‘Music, Literature and Etiquette: Musical Instruments and Social Identity from Castiglione to Austen’, in Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Berg Ethnic Identity Series), edited by Martin Stokes, Oxford: Berg (1994), pp. 189–207.
Hélène La Rue, Review of La collezione degli strumenti musicali: Museo Nazionale delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari, Roma (Rome, 1991), by Paola Elisabetta Simeoni and Roberta Tucci, in Galpin Society Journal, Vol. XLVII (March 1994), p. 502.
Hélène La Rue, Review of On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments, by Margaret J. Kartomi (Chicago, 1990), in JASO: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, Vol. XXV, no. 1 (1994), pp. 127–8.
Hélène La Rue, Review of Wrapping Culture: Politeness, Presentation and Power in Japan and other Societies (Oxford, 1993), by Joy Hendry, in LMH Brown Book (April 1994), pp. 90–91.
Veronica Lawrence, ‘Richard Whitford and Translation’, in Medieval Translator, Volume 4, edited by R. Ellis and R. Evans, Exeter: University of Exeter Press (1994), pp. 136–52.
Howard Morphy (with Jeremy Coote and others), Aesthetics is a Cross-Cultural Category: A Debate Held in the Muriel Stott Centre, John Rylands University Library of Manchester, on 30th October 1993, edited by James A. Weiner, Manchester: Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester (1994).
Howard Morphy, ‘Australia’, in Fjern og naer: sosialantropologiske perspektiver på verdens samfunn og kulturer, edited by Signe Howell and Marit Melhuus, Oslo: Ad Notam Glydendal (1994), pp. 77–97.
Howard Morphy, ‘Colonialism, History and the Construction of Place: The Politics of Landscape in Northern Australia’, in Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Explorations in Anthropology), edited by Barbara Bender, Oxford: Berg (1993), pp. 205–43.
Howard Morphy, ‘The Anthropology of Art’, in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life, edited by Tim Ingold, London: Routledge (1994), pp. 648–85.
Howard Morphy, ‘The Interpretation of Ritual: Reflections from Film on Anthropological Practice’, in Man, n.s., Vol. XXIX, no. 1 (1994), pp. 117–46.
Alison Petch, Hunting the Right Weapon: A Guide to the Upper Gallery of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum (1994).
Derek Roe, ‘Landmark Sites of the British Palaeolithic’, in Review of Archaeology, Vol. XIV, no. 2 (1993), pp. 1–9.
Derek Roe, ‘Invited Comment’ (on ‘Technology and Society during the Middle Pleistocene’ by S. Mithen), in Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Vol. IV, no. 1 (1994), pp. 18–19.
Derek Roe, ‘A Visit to Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Sites in Southeast Spain, August 1993’. (Archive Report prepared for the British Council, Madrid, and for limited circulation, 1994. 12pp.)
Donald Tayler, ‘From the Heart of the World’ (review of the film and book of the same title by Alan Ereira (London, 1990)), Visual Anthropology, Vol. VI, no. 2 (1993), pp. 219–22.
Grants
The following grants were received during the year. From A.R.C. Midlands Division (the Hanson Trust): £27,000 via Earthwatch Europe, for the work of Dr K. Scott and her team on the Pleistocene deposits at Dix Pit, Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire. From the British Council (Madrid), Acciones Integradas Fund: £2800 to Dr D. A. Roe to support the British contingent of a joint Anglo-Spanish project concerning Palaeolithic sites in south-east Spain. From the W. H. Delafield Charitable Trust: £3000 for the care, maintenance and display of the collections. From the Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund: £40,000 for installing a fibre optic system and new display cases in the Lower Gallery. From an anonymous benefactor: £20,000 for the employment of an assistant to Dr La Rue during her sabbatical.
James A. Swan Fund
This research fund, established out of a bequest by the late J. A. Swan, is for research work, either at the Museum or sponsored by the Museum, on the archaeological, historical, physical, and cultural nature of the Batwa, Bushmen, and Pygmy peoples and their prehistoric antecedents in Africa. Grants are awarded primarily for fieldwork and the publication of such work. The fund is administered by the Director of the Museum in consultation with the Professor of Biological Anthropology and the Professor of Social Anthropology. Total funds at 1 August 1993 were £35,549. During the period from 1 August 1993 to 31 July 1994 income of £18,995 was received and grants totalling £20,148 made, leaving a balance of £34,396.
Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum
Felicity Wood reports that the Friends’ lecture programme for 1993–94 started with the Beatrice Blackwood Lecture. This was given in the Zoology Department Lecture Theatre in October by Carlo Ginzburg and was entitled ‘Alien Voices: The Dialogic Dimensions of the Early Modern European Historiographs’. Professor Ginzburg’s travel costs from Italy were kindly paid for by the University’s Department of Modern History. A copy of the text of the talk has been deposited in the Balfour Library. The series continued with ‘Alchemy of Culture: Intoxicants in Society’, given by Richard Rudgeley, a postgraduate student at the Museum; ‘Creative Play: Recent Experiments with Genre and Narrative in Ethnographic Film’, given by Peter Loizos of the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics; ‘Slaves in Turkish Government and Society’, given by Dick Repp, Lecturer in Turkish History, Oxford University, Master of St Cross and also Chairman of the Friends; ‘Kalasha Poetics: Researching Song Performance in the Hindu Kush’, given by Peter Parkes of the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmith’s College, London; ‘Maasai Ecology’, given by Katherine Homewood of the Department of Anthropology, University College London; ‘Artists in Museums’, given by Chris Dorsett (artist, and organizer of a series of exhibitions in the Museum); and ‘Venice: Modernity and Modernism’, by Lidia Sciama, a Research Associate of Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford. Peter Loizos’s lecture was followed by Christmas drinks in the Museum.
In addition to these lectures, the Friends were involved in a number of other events during the year. There was a Friends table at ‘Discovery Sunday’, and Friends also helped with activities ranging from face-painting to mini-talks. In February Linda Gelens led a Peruvian weaving workshop. A large number of Friends attended the Michael Palin benefit performance at the Oxford Playhouse and a bookmark was designed for free distribution from the Museum’s table in the foyer.
The Friends celebrated their tenth anniversary on 16 March 1994 and the occasion was marked by a concert of music from the Balkans given by the group Dunav in the Holywell Music Room. This was followed by a buffet supper in the Warden’s Lodgings at Wadham College. The Friends are most grateful to Jean and John Flemming for allowing this invasion and were delighted that Julian Pitt Rivers, one of the patrons of the Friends, was able to attend. A Special Newsletter was printed for the occasion, which included some particularly interesting recollections about Beatrice Blackwood.
The Newsletter is now produced quarterly and is especially enjoyed by those who are unable to get to meetings. It continues to include the occasional ‘Behind the Scenes’ report and items entitled ‘One of My Favourite Things’, while the back page now provides a summary of forthcoming events. The Friends are grateful to the editor, Janet Sharpe, who puts the Newsletter together so expertly. A distinctive Friends poster has also been produced, which represents a great improvement in our image. Designed by Isabella Whitworth, it features a terracotta frame and logo into which may then be photocopied details of lectures and other events.
At the AGM in June the overall membership of the Friends’ Council remained the same, although there were some changes in officers. Elena Kingdon stepped down after two very successful years as Programme Secretary, the post being taken over by Christine Wrigley. Clare Austyn has now taken up the post of Secretary and is responsible for the minutes, while Felicity Wood remains Membership Secretary. The Council agreed to a proposal that the Beatrice Blackwood Lecture should be organized by a separate team coordinated by Kenneth Kirkwood. It was announced that membership stood at 165 and that a contribution of £625 had been made towards the purchase of the model of the Mongolian Temple acquired by the Museum during the year. The meeting was followed by refreshments and a showing of the film N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen.
The Friends are most grateful to the Museum staff for all their help and cooperation. We only wish we had more members, which would in turn enable us to make more significant contributions towards Museum purchases ... but we are getting there, slowly.
