University of Oxford
THE PITT RIVERS MUSEUM ANNUAL REPORT 1997 - 1998
…Committee for the Pitt Rivers Museum as of 1 October 1997
The Vice-Chancellor (Dr P. North)
The Senior Proctor (Dr M.E. Ceadel)
The Junior Proctor (Dr A.M. Volfing)
The Assessor (Dr R.J. Goodman)
Mr John Flemming (Chairman)
Dr J.A. Bennett
Professor B. Cunliffe
Dr C. Gosden (Acting Director)
Dr T.S. Kemp
Dr R.M. Landers
Dr P.R.S. Moorey
Professor D.J. Parkin
Dr J. Rawson
Professor P. Rivière
Dr S. Simpson
Dr D. Tayler
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.
N.B. It having been decided that future reports should cover the period 1 August to 31 July (rather than, as previously, 1 October to 30 September) this report is for the shortened period 1 October 1997 to 31 July 1998.
Introduction
In April, Dr Chris Gosden relinquished the Acting Directorship (which he had assumed in October on Dr Schuyler Jones’s retirement) and Dr Michael O’Hanlon took up post. Congratulations are due to Dr Jones on being awarded the CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
The Museum had been due to close for six months for re-roofing and other works in June 1998. When the timescale slipped unacceptably, so that the re-roofing was to take place over the winter, with the additional risks of inclement weather, a deferment of works until Spring 1999 was negotiated with the University Surveyor’s Office.
This deferral had some impact on the Museum’s public services, and the changeover of directors limited the scope for new initiatives. Conservation and improved access were nevertheless two clear themes. Preparations for the University’s new American Studies Centre began before the conservation section could move out. However, despite the unsettlement, conservation staff were very active in contributing to the Oxford Conservation Week and designing and installing an innovative exhibition Braving the Elements, which was aimed at promoting a greater understanding of conservation work amongst the general public. This special exhibition has been nominated for a Jerwood Conservation Award.
The new requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) present the Museum with unusual problems, as the interior of the Museum with its crowded cases and handwritten labels has become a cultural artefact in its own right. However, with the aid of grants from the University’s Committee for Disabled People, a schedule of improvements to the physical access at the main site, the Balfour Building, and 64 Banbury Road (which houses both the Museum’s teaching activities and the photograph and manuscript collections), was put in hand. In addition, support was also provided for a training programme in disability awareness. The scope of this included intellectual access as well as improvements to the physical conditions in the buildings. The development of the Museum’s Website, the successful conclusion of two major Leverhulme-funded collections-based projects, and experimental work in connection with a project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and co-ordinated by the University of Kent at Canterbury, have all contributed to this.
A significant new initiative this year was the setting up of the Museum’s own seminar series ‘Work in Progress: Research Seminars in Museum Ethnography’. This was designed as a forum in which Museum staff, students, and visitors could discuss current issues. Speakers included members of the Museum staff, students about to go to or recently returned from ‘the field’, as well as visiting scholars, museum curators, and artists (see annex J).
The Museum was pleased to be able to donate exhibition prints of some sixty photographs taken by Diamond Jenness in the D’Entrecasteaux Islands, Papua New Guinea, in 1911–1912 to the National Art Gallery Museum of Papua New Guinea. The prints, made from original negatives held in the Museum’s photograph collection, had earlier been shown at the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1992 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1993. The Museum is most grateful to the British Council (Visual Arts Department) and the British High Commission in Port Moresby for their help in facilitating this.
A summary of the Museum’s functions, scale, and estate is given in Annex A.
Visitor Numbers
To better enable future comparison of annual visitor numbers, the figures for visitors to the main galleries and to the Balfour Building are given for the twelve-month period August 1997 to July 1998, rather than for the shortened period of this report. The overall figure of 115,708 is very close to the equivalent period in the previous year. An increase in both school and public visits in the Spring compensated for lower figures later in the year resulting from advance publicity about the planned closure.
The total figure for educational bookings was 17,009 students, a slight increase on last year. Group bookings comprised: 2805 from primary schools, 5201 from secondary schools, 4181 from Universities and Art Schools, 1784 from language schools, and 1492 pupils on guided trails, the remainder being made up of adult groups.
The documentation section dealt with 130 research visitors, a significantly increased number given the shortened period covered by this report. Such visits involved retrieval of material from the reserve collections and from the textile store. Some 80 visiting scholars and students used the photograph and manuscript collections. A number of visitors contacted the Museum’s conservators during the year for conservation advice. For details of research visitors to the Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre see Annex I.
There was an increased volume of enquiries by post, telephone, and e-mail, in part at least reflecting the wider use of Web facilities internationally. The number of research enquiries (including surveys and requests for interviews) from students following courses in heritage management and museum studies increased significantly. They covered a range of topics including visitor surveys, marketing policies, museum education, ethical trading, access for the disabled and use of the Website. The number of enquiries and visitors relating to issues of curatorship and representation also continued to rise.
Exhibitions and Events
Glimpses of Kyoto Life closed on 1 November. It was replaced by the major special exhibition of the year, Braving the Elements: Conserving Plant-Fibre Clothing from Around the World, which opened on 28 November 1997 by the well-known gardener and writer Rosemary Verey. Designed and installed by the Museum’s conservators, this exhibition dovetailed with events for this year’s Museums Week, one of the central themes of which was conservation. Maree Lee Haynes returned to assist with the mounting of the exhibition, helping to ensure that the support stands, which she had previously designed, were suitable. Among others, Dr Lulu Rico and Dr Hew Prendergast from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Ms Serena Marner and Dr Ian Gourlay from the University’s Department of Plant Sciences provided invaluable assistance in the identification of plant material, while Elizabeth Newberry kindly gave advice on the preparation of texts for the information panels.
The Museum’s postgraduate students curated two exhibitions of photographs in the Balfour Building. The first, Women’s Lives: An Ethnographic Journal (which ran from March to June), drew on a series of photographs taken by Beatrice Blackwood in Buka and Bougainville, Papua New Guinea in 1936. The second, Going Home: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Mongolia (which ran from June to November), featured contemporary colour photographs by Barbara Hind and was a collaborative exhibition between the Museum and the Department of Lens-Based Media at De Montfort University in Leicester.
Also in the Balfour Building, A Rainy Season Among the Arawe: Collecting in Melanesia remained on display throughout the year (see previous Annual Report for details).
Saturday afternoon Pitt Stops (the series of family events on various topics) were held once a month during term-time through the year and continued to be very popular. Several were organized around themes raised by the new special exhibitions. Among the other topics covered were ‘General Pitt Rivers and his Founding Collection’, ‘Paper’, ‘Masks’, and ‘Exploration’.
The Museum participated in Oxford City’s ‘familiarization day’ aimed at language schools and other organizers of group visits. Participants were given guided tours of the Museum and other key sites in the city.
In April the Museum hosted two receptions—one at the Balfour Building and another at the main museum—for the participants of ‘Claiming the Stones, Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity in the American and British Experience’. This major international conference on repatriation and related issues, sponsored by the Drue Heinz Centre for American Literature, Oxford University and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California, was held at St John’s College and attracted leading figures in the field from all over the world. Many of the Museum’s staff and students attended the conference.
The Museum participated in National Museums Week in May by organizing a number of events relating to Braving the Elements. Birgitte Speake of the conservation section gave a talk on the exhibition and participated with her colleagues in a ‘conservation clinic’ in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History giving members of the public advice on caring for ethnographic objects. The Museum also participated in the City of Oxford’s ‘Sound City’ programme. Three music workshops were held in the Balfour Building, followed by a performance to which all the participants’ family and friends were invited free of charge.
The Museum was used as a location for filming for three television programmes: an Open University programme on Australian Aboriginal art; a documentary entitled Now and Then, featuring Desmond Morris, made by the Korean television company MBC; and a British Satellite News item on the Museum’s future under a new Director.
The Museum was awarded the ‘Young NADFAS’ prize of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts in a competition for the best museum in the eyes of its members. Andrew MacDowell, aged 14, described it as: ‘a shrine to every culture and item that exists in its thriving galleries, full of the objects that demonstrate the world’s great diversity’.
Collections
Acquisitions
There were many significant new acquisitions during the year. Among the more noteworthy were a collection of artefacts from Micronesia donated by Dr H.G.A. Hughes and a further mixed ethnographic collection donated by Sir Wilfred Thesiger. Two collections were commissioned, with the planned future exhibition on Recycling in mind. A collection of contemporary recycled Indian domestic tools and utensils was commissioned from Tony Hayward, and a collection of material culture from a Sudanese refugee camp in northern Uganda was commissioned from Tania Kaiser.
Among the important donations to the photographic collections was that received from Mrs R.J. Townsend Coles comprising a large number of photographs taken by her father in Sudan and Arabia in the 1920s and 1930s. Given the increasing anthropological interest in relevant colonial records of this kind the donation was most welcome. (A number of photographs and manuscripts were also added to the collections through internal archiving.) Full details of purchases and donations are given in Annex B.
Loans
The Museum continues to receive more requests for loans than it can meet without prejudice to its other activities. In March a veranda post carved by the Yoruba master-sculptor Olowe of Ise was lent to the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC for the exhibition Olowe of Ise: A Yoruba Sculptor to Kings. In June a number of objects relating to Indian Ocean trade were lent to the Museu Nacional de Arte Antigua, Lisbon for the exhibition Cultures of the Indian Ocean. Also in June, the portraits of Ngairo Rakai Hikuroa and Ana Rupene by Gottfried Lindauer were lent to the British Museum for the exhibition Maori. All these items are due to be returned next year.
Cataloguing
A number of substantial cataloguing projects were completed or significantly advanced during the year. The records for the Museum’s holdings of Cypriot archaeological material were updated and extended in collaboration with Professor Vassos Karageorghis of the Leventis Foundation in Cyprus. A previously unentered collection of Oceanic material formerly belonging to George Pitt Rivers was accessioned and catalogued. The records for the Museum’s holdings of firearms and related material were computerized and updated; in addition, all the material was numbered, labelled, bagged, and its storage improved.
There were a number of other areas for which records were computerized, including the Mary Kingsley collections, the Sarawak ikat textiles, the Kongo and Luba material from Central Africa, the Roscoe collections from the Bunyoro of Uganda, and an extensive collection of Arawe material, including that collected by Beatrice Blackwood. A keyword list of archaeological terms for use in the databases was developed and a glossary for use in cataloguing archaeological artefacts was produced.
A three-and-a-half year research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust on the founding collection of the Museum reached its final stages. The outcome of this research, which has been carried out on behalf of the Museum by Alison Petch, was a full computerized catalogue of the collection, cross-referenced to all of General Pitt Rivers’s own publications. The research carried out for this project was also used as the basis for the Museum’s contribution to a major project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council of England in conjunction with the University of Kent, to show how multi-media can be used in the teaching of anthropology. This work was carried out by Alison Petch and Sandra Dudley.
The Museum’s sound database was extended to include all the wax-cylinder material in the collection. The previously separate, but related, music database has now been rendered entirely compatible with the main collections database and it is planned to integrate the two databases in due course. The files in the Sharp collection were interleaved with their contents listed and loaded on to the database.
In addition to work on new accessions, inroads were made into the cataloguing backlog in the photograph collections. Catalogues of the Nash collection and, thanks to volunteer assistance, of early Japanese and Chinese photographs were completed. Throughout the year work continued on ironing out imperfections in the archive collections’ databases.
Conservation
In addition to those objects prepared for Braving the Elements, 128 objects received interventive treatment. In addition, the conservation section treated a number of books for New College and for the Bodleian Library as well as some artefacts for the Ashmolean Museum and for the Taylorian Institute (including a scrap of a dressing gown that supposedly once belonged to Voltaire).
As part of the Museum’s ongoing plans to improve the storage of the collections, many objects were repacked in purpose-made boxes. Some of the storage and location systems were also revised to make objects more accessible at the same time as upgrading their storage.
The systematic rolling programme of examining objects on permanent display for damage caused by pests or other agents of decay continued, and the insides of the display cases were cleaned both at the main museum and at the Balfour Building. Pest-survey sheets were introduced, designed by conservation staff for easy recording and retrieval of information on pest activity. Combined with information for previous years, data from these will enable a better overview of the situation in all areas within the main museum and the Balfour Building. In time the programme will be extended to include the reserve collections at the Powerhouse. A survey of metal work in the archaeological collections continued.
Accurate data from environmental monitoring in the main museum made clear for the first time that there were unacceptable fluctuations in humidity and temperature following the outside weather pattern. Preparations for the installation of a natural air ventilation system were started. This involved relocating many of the objects stored above the wall cases in the Court. A programme of removing years of accumulated dust from these artefacts was undertaken. This has now been halted, but the project will continue next spring. The floodlights in the court also remain of concern with far higher than normal levels of lux and ultra-violet light being recorded.
Conservation staff continued to undertake research on objects in the collection. Robert Pearce researched the deterioration of cellulose nitrate objects and Lorraine Rostant investigated alternative methods of pest control. Conservation staff also continued to liaise with staff at the University’s Research Laboratory for Art and Archaeology, who were able, through X-ray fluorescence, to help identify pigments on some Sarawak wooden carvings in the collection.
Balfour Library
Modifications to the records of library loans allowed overdue orders to be chased more effectively. As part of the ongoing stocktaking process, accessions files were updated and copy numbers on the books themselves clarified. The process of automation continued, with increased use of the Oxford University Libraries’ Online Catalogue (OLIS) acquisitions module. Use of e-mail and Internet booksellers has improved location of rare and out-of-print titles and should lead to reduced postage costs. E-mail is now frequently also used for circulating messages to readers. To allow for increased usage of OLIS and remote databases the library acquired a second reader work-station, with multimedia capacity. A number of donations were received (see Annex B).
Public Education
Education Services
A survey by Oxfordshire County Council revealed that the Museum attracted a far greater number of secondary- and higher-education groups than any other museum in the region, an indication of the appeal of the Museum and its history across many different fields.
Anne Stevenson, one of the Museum’s volunteer guides, worked closely with conservation staff to produce an education programme to accompany the special exhibition Braving the Elements. The programme was developed in liaison with the University’s Botanic Garden so that children could see both the living plants and their transformation into clothing in the Museum. The accompanying teachers’ pack, put together by the Museum’s voluntary education service and aimed at Science Key Stage 2 pupils following the National Curriculum, was particularly impressive, raising the profile of the exhibition and assisting in the aim of communicating conservation to the public.
Progress was also made on drawing up a policy covering the Museum’s education services, including the guiding service.
Guided Tours
As it was originally expected that the Museum would be closed from the end of May, bookings for guided trails were not taken for June and July 1998. One extra guide was recruited but the Museum’s band of stalwart volunteer guides, to which it remains indebted, continues to be a very small group.
The subjects covered continued to be dominated by the needs of the National Curriculum and thought is already being put into how to meet the increased focus on reading and number work. Most of the children on guided tours were aged between 8 and 11 years, but the Museum continued to receive visits from groups of GCSE and A-level art and design students. A number of the visiting schools brought very large groups of children, which posed organizational problems, especially when they arrived late. The visiting schools came mainly from Oxfordshire and adjoining counties, but this year there were also visits from schools in Worcestershire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Hampshire, and Surrey.
Among adult groups visiting were groups from Cherwell University of the Third Age and a group from the Department of Adult Education at the University of Leicester. The Museum’s volunteer guides organized the first half of an in-service day for a group of teachers from Northampton and also held a ‘twilight session’ for teachers on the special exhibition Braving the Elements.
Voluntary Assistance
As in previous years the Museum’s activities were greatly enhanced by the assistance of a number of volunteers to whom it is deeply indebted. Individual acknowledgements are given in Annex C.
Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum
The Museum’s enthusiastic and growing band of Friends remained an enormous asset to the Museum and was augmented this year by the creation of the Young Friends. A report by the Chairman of the Friends is included as Annex D.
Teaching and Examining
The main University teaching and examining duties undertaken by the curatorial staff were for the undergraduate degrees in Archaeology & Anthropology, Human Sciences, and Geography, for the M.St. and M.Phil. degrees in Ethnology and Museum Ethnography, and variously for M.St., M.Phil. and D.Phil candidates in Social Anthropology, History of Art and Visual Culture, Archaeology, and Music. Details are given in Annex E.
Staff
In addition to the change of Director (see Introduction), a number of other staff changes took place. Emma Hook left the conservation section at the end of December to take up post as National Adviser for Preventive Conservation for the Scottish Museum Council. She was replaced in February by Robert Pearce, who had been working for English Heritage and has specialized in archaeological conservation with much experience of improving storage facilities as well as active conservation treatments. Sandra Dudley resigned from the post of IT Officer in March and was replaced by Haas Ezzet in July. Jeremy Coote was seconded full-time to the teaching arm of the Museum for the year and, to help ease the load on the depleted documentation section, Claire Warrior was appointed as a curatorial assistant for the period. Three attendants, Brian Bone, Jeff Jagger, and Mary Lalé, resigned during the year and, in anticipation of the proposed closure of the Museum, were replaced by casual help. It is with great regret that the death in service of Ted Tidbury is recorded.
The staff of the Museum over the period of this report are listed in Annex F. An account of staff activities is given in Annex G. Publications by the Museum’s staff continue to be extensive in both number and range: these are listed in Annex H.
Museum Publications
There were new publications in both the Museum’s main series: M.C. Fagg’s Rock Music, surveying the natural rock gongs of the world, appeared as number 14 in the Occasional Papers on Technology series, while Donald Tayler’s A Village in Asturias, based on his long term fieldwork in a Spanish village, appeared as number 8 in the Monograph series. A booklet entitled Collectors 2, edited by Alison Petch, was published in May; following the format of Collectors: Collecting for the Pitt Rivers Museum (published last year), it features eight essays on people whose collections are held by the Museum. Linda Mowat’s booklet Symbol of Kings: Benin Art at the Pitt Rivers Museum (first published in 1991) was reprinted.
The Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre
A report on the work of the Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre, from Professor Roe, its Honorary Director, is given in Annex I.
Estate
Improved access was a strong theme of the year with a grant to improve physical access to all sites and training to increase staff awareness of disability issues. During the summer, work started at 64 Banbury Road to create a downstairs lecture theatre, and to provide ramps to the front door and a specially adapted lavatory on the ground floor. This will improve access to both the teaching facilities and the photograph and manuscript collections.
Preparations for the University’s new American Studies Centre began in the Spring, and demolition work at times made conditions in the conservation laboratory difficult in the extreme. Discussions with the University Surveyor on where to rehouse the laboratory and associated facilities were concluded at the end of 1997 with the offer of tenure of the old rifle range in St Cross Road for a period of five years. The new laboratory, with adjacent storage for the textile and shoe collections and a study room, will create improved storage of the constantly growing textile collections as well as the footwear collections. No date for the removal has been set.
The Museum welcomed an initiative from the University’s Committee for Museums and Scientific Collections to develop a joint strategy for shared conservation and storage facilities that would meet the standards of collection care laid down by the government’s Museums and Galleries Commission, as well as rationalizing resources. This strategy was accepted by the University as part of its long-term planning. Such facilities will ease the acute pressure on the storage space presently available for the Museum’s collections, many of which are potentially at risk from being over-crowded, as well as expediting access to the collections for researchers.
Plans for the re-roofing and insulation of the main museum were developed, together with a scheme to improve the control of the environmental conditions (see Introduction).
Miscellaneous Financial Matters
The James A. Swan Fund
Payments from the James A. Swan Fund for the period 1 August 1997 to 31 July 1998 amounted to £10,572 leaving a balance of £8,428. Ten grants were made ranging from £400 to £2,000. The Fund, from a bequest by the late J. A. Swan, is for research either at, or sponsored by, the Museum into the Batwa, Bushmen, and Pygmy peoples of Africa.
Grants, Bequests, and Donations
The following are gratefully acknowledged: £500 in sponsorship was received from Novatron Limited and Hanwell Instruments Ltd for Braving the Elements, while sponsorship-in-kind was received from Bishop’s Move, Laxton Tools, and D & F Wine Shippers Ltd.; grants of £5000 from Southern Arts and £10,000 from the Crafts Council were made for the exhibition on recycling, while a £1000 development grant was received from Southern Arts to commission Joachim Schmidt to do site-specific work for the exhibition; £100,000 was received from Company Services Associates Ltd for a four-year research fellowship; £22,000 was received from ARC for a fellowship and for excavation work at Stanton Harcourt; £10,000 was received in a bequest from Mrs K. A. Turvey for educational purposes related to Native Americans; and £4000 was received from the W. H. Delafield Charitable Trust for the care, maintenance, and display of the collections; a grant of £5000 was received from the Museums and Galleries Commission for work on the National Register and Database of Musical Instruments (NRDMI); and an award was received from the American Musical Instrument Society (AMIS) to enable Brenda Neece (a graduate student) to travel to the Getty Institute in California to present a paper on the findings of the NRDMI at AMIS’s annual meeting.
Collecting Box
The Museum’s new collecting box, designed by Tim Hunkin, raised £3895 in its first year, far more than had been forecast. It also stimulated various research enquiries from students and from other museums. Tim Hunkin’s design for the box was featured in Crafts Magazine and also in a travelling exhibition on automata mounted by Croydon Museum.
Museum Shops
The Museum shops had a difficult year due to the changes in the building programme which affected both the schools bookings and sales in general due to a planned reduction in levels of stock. According to many tourists the strong pound also played its part. Nevertheless, the turnover of £64,745 still produced a net profit of well over £9,000. Books represented 36% of the sales and postcards 14% of sale, though the fact that the latter represented 21% of the overall profit justified the space allocated to their display.
Photographic Services
Orders worth nearly £4500 were received for the sale of prints and reproduction rights.
Annex A
The Pitt Rivers Museum
The Pitt Rivers Museum is an ethnographic and archaeological museum of international importance that attracts more than 100,000 visitors a year. The Museum is also a noted centre of research with a strong role in the University’s teaching of anthropology and archaeology. It has more than forty staff.
The Museum takes its name from General Pitt Rivers, who in 1884 donated an ethnographic and archaeological collection of some 20,000 objects to the University. The collection has since been extensively added to and today numbers some 400,000 artefacts (275,000 objects, 125,000 historical photographs), making it second in size only to the Department of Ethnography at the British Museum. The Museum is noted for the density of its displays, which are arranged by artefact category and activity rather than by cultural area, as most ethnographic museums are. The Museum also holds some 60 collections of manuscripts. Its Balfour Library specializes in cultural anthropology and museology.
The Museum’s operations are distributed over five sites. Two of these are visitor attractions. The main museum, a Victorian building entered through the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in Parks Road, is acknowledged to be a cultural artefact in its own right, a museum of museums. This is complemented by the Balfour Building beside 60 Banbury Road, which opened in 1986 and currently houses displays devoted to musical instruments and to hunter–gatherers past and present. The main museum and the Balfour Building are open to members of the public free of charge from 1.00 p.m. to 4.30 p.m. from Monday to Saturday; both sites also cater for pre-booked educational parties from 10.00 a.m. to 12.00 noon from Tuesdays to Fridays.
Two further sites are major repositories: one at the old Power House at Osney and the other at the recently converted old Rifle Range site off St Cross Road. The latter will house the conservation laboratory and the reserve collections of textiles and associated material together with research facilities for studying them. Reserve collections of musical instruments and archaeology collections are housed in 60 Banbury Road, which is also home to the Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre. Though the latter is formally attached to the Museum, and meagrely financed from its budget, it is in effect a largely independent institute with its own honorary director.
The fifth and final site is the Pitt Rivers Museum Research Centre at 64 Banbury Road. This accommodates the photograph and manuscript collections and attached research facilities, as well as the offices of the teaching staff and associated facilities.
Annex B
Acquisitions
Purchases
Lt.-Col. T. S. Anderson (a beaded Kayan pouch from Borneo; 1997.36); Tony Hayward (recycled artefacts from India; 1998.25); and Tania Kaiser (a collection of objects obtained during her fieldwork in the Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement, Masindi District, Uganda; 1998.9).
Donations
The following donations are gratefully acknowledged:
To the Museum:
Dr Ahmed Al-Shahi (a Sudanese bridal doll; 1997.38); M. Arsène Henon (a Mende mask and carvings from Sierra Leone; 1997.33); Ashmolean Museum (a collection of plates made in Scotland for export to China; 1998.11); Mrs P.L. Carter (a basket from Nuristan; 1998.24); Dr V.E. Chancellor (a Moroccan powder horn; 1998.14); Dr H. G. A. Hughes (a collection of Micronesian artefacts; 1998.10); Mary Lalé (a Martini Henry gun; 1997.45); Howard and Frances Morphy (a spent bullet case and a china insulator from Australia; 1997.37); National Museums Consortium Firearms Amnesty (miscellaneous rifles and bayonets; 1997.44); Irene Pluim (Javanese puppets and a complete anklung (a set of tuned bamboo rattles); 1997.35); Lorraine Rostant (a plastic fish for fortune telling; 1998.16); Royal Armouries (walking-stick guns and air-canes; 1998.18); Gertrude Seidmann (jewellery from Asia and Europe; 1998.28); Shepherd & Woodward (a straw boater hat, as worn in England; 1997.41); Miss Grace Smyly (a collection of photographs and manuscripts relating to her father’s time as Chief Justice in Ghana); Dr Veronica Strang (firesticks from the Cape York Peninsula, Australia; 1997.34); Sir Wilfred Thesiger (a mixed ethnographic collection; 1998.26); Mrs R.J. Townsend Coles (a mixed collection, including a complete Ethiopian costume; 1997.42 / and a substantial collection of photographs taken by her father in Sudan and Arabia in the 1920s and 30s); Mrs Helena Wayne (photographs taken by or given to her mother Elsie Masson (Malinowska) in Northern Territories, Australia 1912–1914); Oxford University Museum of Natural History (Victorian British Army helmet decoration; 1998.13); and Dr P.M. Waring (a Turkana wrist knife from Kenya; 1998.15).
To the Library:
Gifts of books and pamphlets were received from the following individuals and institutions: Dr and Mrs Ahmed Al-Shahi, Mrs June Bedford, Dr Theodore Celenko, Mrs Sally Chilver, Ms Jacqueline Coote, Mr Jeremy Coote, Mr F.D. Fox, Indian Institute Library, Mrs Petty Benitez Johannot, Dr Schuyler Jones, Dr Howard Morphy, Ms Julia Nicholson, Oriental Studies Library, Mr Roger Smith, Mrs K. Turvey (bequest), Tylor Library, Ms Judy Watson, Revd Peter Westlake, and the Department of Zoology.
Annex C
Volunteers
Mrs Audrey Smith and Mrs Ruth Wickett continued their dedicated work in the Museum’s manuscript collections, cataloguing manuscripts and undertaking basic repairs. This year they listed and numbered E.B. Tylor’s working notes and prepared a catalogue of the small collection of papers from Kenneth Oakley. The Museum is also extremely grateful to Inka Heeren, an art-history student from the University of Oldenburg in Germany, who worked as an intern in the archives section for three months. She produced a detailed database of the Museum’s nineteenth-century Japanese and Chinese photographs. Ms Heeren also carried out background research for a planned new teachers’ pack on masks.
Grateful thanks are also extended to Felicity Wood, who helped conservation staff repack the Museum’s collection of footwear, and to Mika Takami (from the Textile Conservation Centre at Hampton Court), who helped pack part of the textile collection in preparation for the move to the new laboratory.
Pitt Stops were run throughout the year on a voluntary basis by Hélène La Rue and Chantal Knowles, ably assisted by graduate students Jessica Sack, Clare Parry, Meghan O’Brien, Heather Pesanti, and Zena Overton, and volunteer Zoe Teale.
Tristan Arbousse Bastide expertly drew, and scanned on to the computer, drawings of six Museum objects for use in publications arising from the research project ‘Historical Change and Material Culture in Papua New Guinea’.
Dr John Crammer, Mrs Joy Crammer, and Mrs Jane Christie-Miller of the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum continued to give generous and much valued assistance in the library of the Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre throughout the year.
Annex D
Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum
(Report by Professor Geoffrey Harrison, Chairman)
This year the Friends lectures started at the later time of 6.00 p.m. and a greatly increased attendance resulted. The lectures for 1997/98 were: ‘Letters from Central Australia: The story of a Friendship’, given by Alison Petch, Leverhulme researcher at the Museum; ‘Reverend Charles Harrison, Shaman Ku-te, and General Pitt Rivers’s Museum: A Nineteenth-Century Missionary’s Collection of Haida Art’, given by June Bedford, collector and writer on tribal art; ‘The Price of Survival: Filming in Southern Sudan’, given by John Ryle, Guardian columnist, anthropologist, and aid worker; ‘The Bai Women and Children of Heqing: Village Culture and Festivities’, given by Zuleika Kingdon, film-maker; and ‘Covert Culture: The Morris Dance Tradition in the English South Midlands until 1900’, given by Keith Chandler, historian of English dance. There were also two Saturday morning events: ‘Braving the Elements and Surviving an Exhibition’, a gallery talk on the Museum’s exhibition and aspects of conservation, by Birgitte Speake and Lorraine Rostant; and ‘Doing Exciting Things with Photos: A New Take on the Ethnographic Photograph Collection’, by Elizabeth Edwards.
A successful Christmas party featured the entertainment ‘An Evening with Beatrice Blackwood’, a performance by Hélène La Rue and Julia Cousins, featuring extracts from the anthropologist’s letters and other writings. Friends generously donated a variety of tasty and exotic morsels to complement the mulled wine and a net profit of £284 was made.
The Beatrice Blackwood Lecture, the Friends’ annual public lecture, entitled ‘Beatrice Blackwood, Curator, Fieldworker, Teacher, and Friend’, was given by Schuyler Jones, former Director of the Museum. Geoffrey Harrison introduced the speaker and Michael O’Hanlon gave the vote of thanks. The lecture, which attracted a good number of visitors, was also recorded for the archives. The Friends are most grateful to the Administrator of the Inorganic Chemistry Department for once again allowing the use of the lecture theatre free of charge, to José Allen for arranging the recording of the lecture, and to Dymphna Hermans and the Warden of All Souls for hosting the supper for the speaker.
A major addition to the Friends activities this year was the introduction of the Young Friends, for members aged between 16 and 25 years. Initiated by Claire Warrior and Sophia Handaka, and supported by members of the Council, a recruitment drive at both Oxford University and Oxford Brookes Freshers Fairs yielded several founder members. Excellent and informative lectures were given by Sandra Dudley on Thailand and Burma, Alison Brown on First Peoples in Canada and the United States, and Chantal Knowles on Beatrice Blackwood and her fieldwork in Melanesia. The first year’s programme concluded with a garden party in the Baines Music garden at the Balfour Building. The Young Friends have already made close links with both the Young Friends of the Ashmolean and Oxford Brookes Anthropological Society and look forward to increasing their numbers in the coming years.
The AGM, held at the Quaternary Research Centre in June, attracted a record number of Friends as, for many, it afforded the first opportunity to meet Michael O’Hanlon, the new Director. It was reported that membership has continued to increase steadily and now stands at 277 (85 joint, 129 ordinary, 17 Young Friends, and 46 concessions). It was also reported that donations to the work of the Museum totalling £710 were made during the year: for hardwood benches for the Baines Music Garden; to help Lorraine Rostant attend a conservation course in Prague; and towards the cost of mounting what turned out to be a most successful evening of talks devoted to conservation during Museums Week.
It was with great sadness that the Chairman reported the death of Kenneth Kirkwood earlier in the year. As a founder member and past chairman, Kenneth Kirkwood’s contribution to the Friends had been invaluable.
The newsletter continues to be edited by Janet Sharp and co-ordinated by Felicity Wood. The back page, compiled by Liz Yardley, is also sent out as a separate information sheet to various interested organizations and individuals.
Annex E
Teaching and Examining
Jeremy Coote supervised and gave tutorials to students reading for the BA in Archaeology & Anthropology, the M.St. and M.Phil. in Ethnology and Museum Ethnography, and the M.St. in History of Art and Visual Culture. He lectured in two series organized by the Museum: ‘People, Environment, and Culture’ and ‘Art, Material Culture, and Aesthetics’ and initiated, chaired, and contributed to the Museum’s new series of lunchtime seminars ‘Work in Progress: Research Seminars in Museum Ethnography’. With Michael O’Hanlon he also chaired a series of workshops entitled ‘Debates in the Anthropology of Aesthetics’. He was an examiner for the M.St. and M.Phil. in Ethnology and Museum Ethnography, the M.St. and M.Phil. in Social Anthropology, and the M.St. in History of Art and Visual Culture.
Elizabeth Edwards continued giving lectures, seminars, tutorials and supervisions in critical history and theory of still photography within visual anthropology and museology to graduate students in anthropology and to a small but increasing number from other faculties, reflecting the growing interest in vernacular photographies within the University. She also co-ordinated and supervised two student exhibitions.
Chris Gosden taught ‘The Nature of Archaeological Enquiry’ for the degree in Archaeology & Anthropology. He lectured in two series organized by the Museum: ‘People, Environment, and Culture’ and ‘Art, Material Culture, and Aesthetics’. He gave tutorials to students reading for the Archaeology & Anthropology and Ethnology and Museum Ethnography degrees. He examined two Oxford D.Phil.s., as well as Ph.D.s. at Southampton University and the Open University. He was an external examiner at University College London.
Hélène La Rue taught courses in ethnomusicology (for anthropology students) and on musical instruments in culture (for music students). One of her music D.Phil. students, Ken Shifrin, completed his thesis during the year.
Peter Mitchell lectured for the undergraduate degree in Archaeology & Anthropology and co-ordinated the Honour Moderations courses ‘Introduction to World Archaeology’ and ‘Evolution, Environment, and Culture’, as well as serving as Chairman of Examiners for the M.St. in Anthropological Archaeology, as examiner for the M.St. in World Archaeology, and as organizer of the third Archaeology & Anthropology Open Day.
Michael O’Hanlon examined an Oxford D.Phil. thesis. With Jeremy Coote he chaired a series of postgraduate workshops entitled ‘Debates in the Anthropology of Aesthetics’.
Derek Roe gave courses on Palaeolithic Archaeology and associated topics for taught-course graduates in archaeology, and for undergraduates in Archaeology & Anthropology and in Geography. He gave special lectures and practical classes for undergraduates in Archaeology & Anthropology. As last year, he shared his undergraduate course on ‘Aspects of Palaeolithic Archaeology’ with Dr Paul Pettitt. He provided lecture/demonstrations on the subject of Palaeolithic artefacts for parties of visiting students. He supervised two doctoral research students; one of whom, John Mitchell, completed his thesis during the year. He served as an examiner for Honour Moderations, and as assessor for the Final Honours School in Archaeology & Anthropology and for the M.St. and M.Phil in European Archaeology.
Donald Tayler was on sabbatical leave during Michaelmas Term. He supervised seven doctoral students and set and assessed the Ethnology option paper in Geography Moderations. He examined one doctoral thesis and assessed a second, and acted as external examiner for the BA and BSc degrees in Anthropology at University College London.
Annex F
Staff List
Director Michael O’Hanlon (from April 1998)
Chris Gosden (Acting Director to April 1998)
Administration Julia Cousins (Administrator)
Sue Brooks (Administrative Assistant)
Christina Fox (Museum Secretary)
Marketing Kate White (Marketing and Visitor Services Officer)
Shirley Careford (Shop Manager)
Lecturer–Curators Chris Gosden
Hélène La Rue (also Curator of the Bate Collection)
Peter Mitchell
Donald Tayler
Lecturer Derek Roe
Departmental Lecturer Jeremy Coote (seconded)
Assistant Curators Elizabeth Edwards (Photographs and Manuscripts)
Julia Nicholson (Objects)
Museum Assistants Marina de Alarcón (Objects)
Chris Morton (Photographs and Manuscripts)
Claire Warrior (Objects)
Conservation Birgitte Speake (Head of Conservation)
Emma Hook (to December 1997)
Lorraine Rostant
Robert Pearce (from February 1998)
Technical Services Bob Rivers (Head of Technical Services & Head Technician)
Andy Munsch
John Simmonds
John Todd
Photography Malcolm Osman
Information Sandra Dudley (to March 1998)
Communication Haas Ezzet (from July 1998)
Technology
Library Mark Dickerson (Balfour Librarian)
Ruth Emsley
Ione Tayler
Security/Attendants Brian Bone (to December 1997)
Sandy Fowlie
Jeff Jagger (to October 1997)
Mary Lalé (to October 1997)
Neil Owen
Security/Attendants Sue Phillips
(continued) Peter Stimpson
Ted Tidbury (to July 1998)†
David Turvey
Norman Weller
Brian Winkfield
Researchers Chantal Knowles (Leverhulme Trust)
(fixed-term) Gwyneira Isaac (Economic and Social Research Council)
Alison Petch (Leverhulme Trust)
Katherine Scott (ARC Limited)
Julie Scott-Jackson (Company Services Associates)
Other Staff Maree Lee Haynes (South Eastern Museums Service)
(fixed-term) Sacha Moore (Sharp Trustees)
Jamie Savan (Sharp Trustees)
Annex G
Staff Activities
Jeremy Coote spoke at the Museums Association seminar ‘Point of No Return? Museums and Repatriation’ held at the Museum of London in November. He presented a case-study of the University of Oxford’s refusal to accede to a request from the Zuni Tribal Council for the return of an ahayu’da or ‘war god’. With Birgitte Speake he gave a joint paper ‘Conversation Pieces: The Conservation and Curation of a Collection of Nineteenth-Century South African Leather Figures’ at a meeting of the Conservators of Ethnographic Artefacts hosted by the Museum in June. He acted as a consultant on non-Western art for ‘Gallery Earth’, a world art book for children forthcoming from Frances Lincoln. He continued to serve as Associate Editor of JASO: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford and co-edited with Ahmed Al-Shahi a special issue of the Journal in memory of Oxford anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt.
Marina de Alarcón organized (with Julia Nicholson) a Museum Ethnographers Group study day on Japan at the Museum in October to coincide with the exhibition Glimpses of Kyoto Life. In November she attended the Museums Association seminar ‘Point of No Return? Museums and Repatriation’ held at the Museum of London. She also attended a course on firearms legislation run by the South Eastern Museums Service (SEMS) at Poole Museum, a SEMS course on exhibit design held at the Oxfordshire County Council museums’ store at Standlake, and participated in the Oxford Asian Textiles Group study visit to the Textile Conservation Centre and the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court.
Elizabeth Edwards gave an invited paper on ‘Photographs as Objects of Memory’ at ‘Material Memories: Design and Evocation’, an international conference jointly organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art. She was also invited to ‘Visual Imagination in 19th Century Victorian Medicine and Science’, a major conference jointly organized by the Huntington Library and California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, where she gave a paper on ‘Professor Huxley’s Well-Considered Plan: Photography, Ambiguity and Anthropological Intention’ (the product of new research funded in part by a grant from the University of Oxford’s Hulme Fund). With funding from the Astor Fund, University of Oxford she visited Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico where she worked with Gwyneira Isaac (D.Phil. student and project research assistant) at the A:shiwe A:wan Tribal Museum and Cultural Centre and the Zuni Tribal Archives (the focus of an ESRC Research Grant held by Edwards and former Lecturer–Curator Howard Morphy). She gave a paper on the Torres Strait Expedition at the Workshop for History of Science in the Pacific at the University of London. She gave seminars at the University of Cambridge and the London Institute and continued to teach at the Royal College of Art as a visiting lecturer where she was invited to write the introductory essay for the catalogue of the Department of Photography’s degree show. She served as a consultant for the exhibition ‘Native Nations: American Photography from the Edge’ at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. She joined the editorial board of Visual Anthropology Review and continued to serve on the editorial board of History of Photography and on the Photographic Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Chris Gosden submitted two books for publication—Archaeology and Anthropology and an edited volume on The Prehistory of Food—both being the fruits of the sabbatical he spent at the Australian National University in Canberra during 1996–97. Together with Chantal Knowles he continued to work on the project funded by the Leverhulme Trust using early museum collections to look at the changes brought about by colonialism in West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. He visited the Museum für Völkerkunde und Schweizerisches Museum für Volskunde in Basle to look at a collection made in the same area of Papua New Guinea in 1930 by Felix Speiser. During July he undertook excavations with Gary Lock of the Institute of Archaeology at Alfred’s Castle in south Oxfordshire. This is part of the ‘Hillforts of the Ridgeway’ project which Gosden and Lock have been running for the last three years to investigate the evolution of the landscape from the late Bronze Age period (circa 1000 bc) to the Roman period (ad 410). Substantial Roman buildings were discovered in the interior, either a villa or part of a temple. These were built over the remains of a late Bronze Age or early Iron Age fortified settlement of a type that is very rare and could provide vital information on an otherwise almost unknown period. During the excavation training was provided for students in Archaeology & Anthropology and to students on a summer school organized by the Department for Continuing Education. He was a member of the Council of the Prehistoric Society and served on the editorial boards of World Archaeology, Archaeology in Oceania, and Die Ethographische–Archeologische Zeitschrift, as well as for Cambridge University Press’s ‘World Archaeology’ series.
Emma Hook continued to chair the Oxford Conservators Group until the end of October 1997.
Chantal Knowles completed the second year of her research assistantship on a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust to study ‘Historical Change and Material Culture in Papua New Guinea’. She carried out research at the Field Museum, Chicago in October and November and at the Museum für Völkerkunde und Schweizerisches Museum für Volskunde in Basle in January and February.
Hélène La Rue presented a paper at the conference of the International Musicological Society. She gave a paper ‘Unsound Sounds: Ethnomusicology and Cultural Property’ at ‘Claiming the Stones, Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity in the American and British Experience’ a major international conference on repatriation and related issues, sponsored by the Drue Heinz Centre for American Literature, Oxford University and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. With Dr Joanna Archibald, her assistant at the Bate Collection, she organized a number of study weekends and public events throughout the year. These included two summer schools—a gamelan school taught by Andrew Channing and Peter Smith, with guest teachers Sumarsam and Bo Maeny from Wesleyan University, and a bow-rehairing school taught by Andrew Bellis—a ‘Viol Day’, and ‘Ophiophiles in Oxford’, a weekend for the Serpent Society. Other music events included a ‘Horny Morning: A Celebration of the Horn and its History’ and the first Bate lunchtime concert. She also completed the pilot project for the National Register and Database of Musical Instruments.
Peter Mitchell continued to write up the results of previous seasons’ excavations and field surveys in Lesotho, and in July and August carried out a further season of archaeological fieldwork at the Later Stone Age site of Likoaieng in the Lesotho Highlands. This year’s excavation (carried out in collaboration with Dr Ruth Charles of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) focused on expanding the area excavated in 1995 and on investigating the older levels at the site. Ten Oxford students were able to take part in the project, which was funded by the British Academy, the University of Oxford, the Swan Fund, the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Prehistoric Society, and St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He served as Chairman of the Sub-Faculty of Archaeology, Secretary of the Management Committee of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and (in Trinity Term) as Tutor for Admissions at St Hugh’s College. In April 1998 he lectured in Brussels for the International Certificate in African Archaeology, a course sponsored by the Socrates Project and attended by four Oxford students. In July he spoke to a meeting of the South African Archaeological Society in Johannesburg and in August at the Department of Archaeology of the University of the Witwatersrand. He also presented a conference paper to the meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists in Syracuse, New York.
Julia Nicholson organized (with Marina de Alarcón) a Museum Ethnographers Group study day on Japan at the Museum in October to coincide with the exhibition Glimpses of Kyoto Life.
Michael O’Hanlon continued to serve as Honorary Secretary of the Royal Anthropological Institute and to sit on the editorial boards of the Journal of Material Culture and Ethnos. In May he spoke at a museology conference in Stockholm.
Derek Roe continued his research on the Earlier Palaeolithic of Southern Spain and the British Palaeolithic. He studied and reported on various recently discovered Palaeolithic artefacts, including those from the important Middle Pleistocene site at Stanton Harcourt. He was one of the speakers at a one-day symposium on the British Palaeolithic, organized by the University’s Department of Continuing Education, and gave a public lecture on ‘Early Humans in Oxfordshire’ at the County Museum, Woodstock.
Lorraine Rostant advised Campion Hall on the care of a large collection of ecclesiastical vestments. She gave an introductory talk about the Museum in general and about Braving the Elements in particular to the Basketmakers Group. She continued as treasurer and membership secretary of the Conservators of Ethnographic Artefacts (CEA). In this role, she helped organize the group’s first workshop and AGM held in Exeter in December and a seminar on ‘Conservator–Curator Collaboration’ held at the Museum in June.
Katherine Scott continued her excavations for the ‘ARC Oxford Mammoths Project’ at Stanton Harcourt. A number of further artefacts came to light this year, as well as many more large vertebrate remains and much environmental information. The excavation is now in its final stage of rescuing what can be saved, before the domestic rubbish landfill finally engulfs the site.
Julie Scott-Jackson began a four-year research fellowship at the Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre, in which she will be continuing her work on the high-level Lower Palaeolithic sites of the Clay-with-Flints areas of the English Chalk Downlands.
Birgitte Speake advised Campion Hall on the care of a large collection of ecclesiastical vestments. In December she attended a forum on adhesives organized by the textile section of the United Kingdom Institute of Conservation (UKIC) and held at the Museum of London. She spoke on ‘Braving the Elements’ at a special teachers’ preview and gave a joint paper with Jeremy Coote on ‘Conversation Pieces: The Conservation and Curation of a Collection of Nineteenth-Century South African Leather Figures’ at a meeting of the Conservators of Ethnographic Artefacts hosted by the Museum in June.
Claire Warrior attended the Museums Association seminar ‘Point of No Return? Museums and Repatriation’ held at the Museum of London and a SEMS course on exhibit design held at the Oxfordshire County Council museums’ store at Standlake.
Kate White attended a seminar on ‘Current Legal Issues in Publishing’ organized by Manches & Co. Solicitors of Oxford. In November she attended a seminar on ‘Electronic and Multimedia Publishing in Museums and Art Galleries: Multimedia and the Millennium’ at the Brunei Gallery in London.
Annex H
Staff Publications
Jeremy Coote, ‘Art and Anthropology’, in Discovering Anthropology: A Resource Guide for Teachers and Students (5th edn.), edited by Simon Coleman and Robert Simpson, London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (for the National Network for Teaching and Learning Anthropology and in association with the University of Durham), 1998, pp. 11–12.
Jeremy Coote, ‘Art: Eastern Africa’, in Volume 1 of The Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara, edited by John Middleton, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons (1997), pp. 120–32.
Jeremy Coote, ‘Preface’, in JASO: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, Vol. XXVIII, no. 1 (Hilary 1997; Special Issue in Memory of Godfrey Lienhardt), pp. 1–3.
Jeremy Coote, ‘Statler, Waldorf, and I’, in JASO: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, Vol. XXVIII, no. 1 (Hilary 1997; Special Issue in Memory of Godfrey Lienhardt), pp. 109–111.
Jeremy Coote (co-editor with Ahmed Al-Shahi), Special Issue of JASO: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford in Memory of Godfrey Lienhardt (Vol. XXVIII, no. 1, Hilary 1997).
Jeremy Coote (with Elizabeth Edwards), ‘Images of Benin at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, in African Arts, Vol. XXX, no. 4 (Autumn 1997), pp. 26–35, 93.
Sandra Dudley, ‘Lucy Margaret Eyre’, in Collectors 2: Collecting for the Pitt Rivers Museum, edited by Alison Petch, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum (1998), pp. 18–20.
Elizabeth Edwards, Mohina Chandra: Visions in a New World, Liverpool: Bluecoat Gallery (1997).
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Captain Acland R.N.’, in Collectors 2: Collecting for the Pitt Rivers Museum, edited by Alison Petch, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum (1998), pp. 2–5.
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photo-objects’, in Martor: The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review, Vol. II (1997), pp. 85–92.
Elizabeth Edwards, Review of Impossible Science of Being: Dialogues between Anthropology and Photography (an exhibition held at the Photographers Gallery, London, 20 October 1995 to 13 January 1996), in Visual Anthropology, Vol. XIII, no. 2 (1998), pp. 79–84.
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Encounter at Nagalarramba [review of Encounter at Nagalarramba, by Roslyn Poignant and Axel Poignant (Canberra, 1996)]’, in Visual Anthropology, Vol. XI, no. 3 (1998), pp. 273–5.
Elizabeth Edwards (with Jeremy Coote), ‘Images of Benin at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, in African Arts, Vol. XXX, no. 4 (Autumn 1997), pp. 26–35, 93.
Chris Gosden, Review of Archaeology of a Coastal Exchange System: Sites and Ceramics of the Papuan Gulf, edited by David Frankel and James W. Rhodes (Canberra, 1994), Asian Perspectives, Vol. XXXVI, no. 2 (Fall 1997), pp. 268–70.
Chris Gosden (editor), Culture Contact and Colonialism (Special Issue of World Archaeology, Vol. XXIX, no. 2, February 1997).
Chris Gosden (with G. R. Summerhayes, J. R. Bird, R. Fullagar, J. Specht, and R. Torrence), ‘Applications of PIXE–PIGME to Archaeological Analysis of Changing Patterns of Obsidian Use in West New Britain, Papua New Guinea’, in Archaeological Obsidian Studies: Method and Theory (Advances in Archaeological and Museum Science, Vol. 3), edited by M. Steven Shackley, London and New York: Plenum Press (1998), pp. 129–58.
Chris Gosden (with Jim Specht), ‘Dating Lapita Pottery in the Bismarck Archipelago, Papua New Guinea’, in Asian Perspectives, Vol. XXXVI, no. 2 (Fall 1997), pp. 175–99.
Chris Gosden (with Gary Lock), ‘Prehistoric Histories’, in World Archaeology, Vol. XXX, no. 1 (June 1998), pp. 2–12.
Chantal Knowles, ‘Beatrice Mary Blackwood (1889–1975)’, in Collectors 2: Collecting for the Pitt Rivers Museum, edited by Alison Petch, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum (1998), pp. 6–13.
Chantal Knowles, ‘Discovering the Museum at Eye Level’, in Newsletter of the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, No. 23 (January 1998), p. 7.
Chantal Knowles, Review of Living Tradition: A Changing Life in the Solomon Islands (London, 1997), by Ben Burt and Michael Kwa’ioloa, in Journal of Museum Ethnography, No. 10 (1988), p. 142.
Peter Mitchell, ‘The Holocene Later Stone Age in Africa South of the Limpopo’, in Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. XI (1997), pp. 359–424.
Peter Mitchell, ‘The South African Stone Age in the Collections of the British Museum: Content, History and Significance’, in South African Archaeological Bulletin, Vol. LIII, no. 167 (June 1998), pp. 26–36.
Peter Mitchell, Review of The Middle Paleolithic Site of Combe-Capelle Bas (France), edited by Harold L. Dibble and Michel Lenoir (Philadelphia, 1995), in Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. XXIV, no. 11 (November 1997), pp. 1061–62.
Peter Mitchell, Review of Late Pleistocene and Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Matopos: An Archaeological Study of Change and Continuity in Zimbabwe, by N. J. Walker (Uppsala, 1995), African Archaeological Review, Vol. XIV, no. 4 (December 1997), pp. 257–62.
Peter Mitchell, Review of The Tsodilo Jewellery: Metal Work from Northern Botswana, by Duncan Miller (Rondebosch, 1996), The African Book Publishing Record, Vol. XXIII, no. 4 (1997), p. 302.
Peter Mitchell (with John Parkington and Lyn Wadley), ‘A Tale from Three Regions: The Archaeology of the Pleistocene/Holocene Transition in the Western Cape, the Caledon Valley and the Lesotho Highlands, Southern Africa’, Quaternary International, Vol. XLIX/L (‘As the World Warmed: Human Adaptations across the Pleistocene/Holocene Boundary’, edited by B. V. Eriksen and L. G. Strauss), (1998), pp 105–15.
Peter Mitchell (with Ina Plug), ‘Ritual Mutilation in Southern Africa: Gender and Ethnic Identities and the Possibilities of Archaeological Recognition’, in Our Gendered Past: Archaeological Studies of Gender in Southern Africa, edited by Lyn Wadley, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press (1997), pp. 135–166.
Alison Petch, ‘“Man as He Was and Man as He Is”: General Pitt Rivers’s Collections’, in Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. X, no. 1 (1998), pp. 75–85.
Alison Petch, Review of Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, by Tom Griffiths (Cambridge, 1996), in JASO: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, Vol. XXVII, no. 3 (Michaelmas 1996), pp. 269–70.
Alison Petch, ‘Preface’ to Collectors 2: Collecting for the Pitt Rivers Museum, edited by Alison Petch, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum (1998), p. 1.
Alison Petch (editor), Collectors 2: Collecting for the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum (1998).
Derek Roe, ‘As Represented by the Thames Valley’, in Stone Age Archaeology: Essays in Honour of John Wymer (Oxbow Monograph, No. 102 / Lithic Studies Society Occasional Paper, No. 6), edited by Nick Ashton, Frances Healy, and Paul Pettitt, Oxford: Oxbow Books (1998), pp 38–42.
Donald Tayler, A Village in Asturias (Pitt Rivers Museum Monograph 8), Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
Claire Warrior, ‘A Monumental Storyteller: The Totem Pole of the Pitt Rivers Museum’, in Newsletter of the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, No. 25 (July 1998), pp. 7–8.
Annex I
The Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre
(Report by Professor Derek Roe, Honorary Director)
Though there were fewer research students in residence this year, the Centre has remained extremely busy, coping as best it can with the changed circumstances following the loss of the caretaker post last year. The gallery staff in the Balfour Building have done their best for us, taking over the cleaning duties and answering the door when available, but the situation has steadily deteriorated through the year, with their own numbers declining. It would be idle and inaccurate to pretend that we are operating on the scale that we once did, but only an increase in University funding can solve the problems, since neither our expertise nor our willingness to perform our role has declined.
Not all is doom and gloom, fortunately. Generous gifts to the University by CSA (Company Services Associates Ltd) have enabled a former research student Dr Julie Scott Jackson to begin in Michaelmas 1997 a four-year research fellowship at the Centre, in which she will continue her work on the high-level Lower Palaeolithic sites of the Clay-with-Flints areas of the English Chalk Downlands, while next year a graduate studentship fully funded by the CSA will enable Miss Vicky Winton to begin doctoral research on a topic within the same broad field. We are extremely grateful to CSA for their generous support.
Visitors who came to the Centre for substantial periods of time this year included Mr Mikolaj Urbanowski, from Warsaw University, holder of a Stephan Batory Trust/Foreign & Commonwealth Office Scholarship at Plater College, to study the Early Palaeolithic of Britain and Western Europe; Dr Jordi Hernandez Gasch, from Barcelona University, working on Mallorcan Prehistoric Archaeology; and Professor Ofer Bar-Yosef, of Harvard University, working on a number of Palaeolithic projects. Other overseas visitors included Professors Lars Larsson (Sweden), Gi-Kil Lee (South Korea), David Lordkipanidze (Georgia), Naama Goren Inbar (Israel), Michael Walker (Spain), and Marcel Otte (Belgium).
The two long-running major research projects associated with the Centre both continued throughout the year: the Stanton Harcourt ‘ARC Oxford Mammoths Project’, directed by Dr K. Scott and Mrs C. Buckingham; and work on the Prehistoric Archaeology of the Balearic Islands, directed by Dr W. H. Waldren (which featured in a Channel 4 Television ‘Time Team’ programme).
Annex J
Museum Seminars
‘Work in Progress: Research Seminars in Museum Ethnography’
Elizabeth Edwards (PRM staff) and Janice Hart (London Institute), ‘Mixed Box: An Ethnography of an Archive Object’.
Jeremy Coote (PRM staff), ‘Repatriation 1: Case Study—The Zuni “War God”’.
Tim McKeown (NAGPRA Team Leader, National Parks Service, Washington), ‘Introduction to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act’.
Meghan O’Brien, David Odo, Zena Overton, Clare Parry, and Heather Pesanti (all PRM/ISCA students), ‘Repatriation 2: Report on the Museums Association Seminar’.
Lennox Honychurch (PRM/ISCA student), ‘An Ethnographic Museum in an Ethnographic Setting’.
Mary Bani (National Museum of Australia, Canberra), ‘Researching Torres Strait Collections in the UK’.
Birgitte Speake, Maree Lee Haynes, and Lorraine Rostant (all PRM staff), ‘Preparing an Exhibition: Braving the Elements’.
Sandra Dudley (PRM staff and PRM/ISCA student), ‘Collecting for the Museum in Thailand and Burma’.
Alison Petch (PRM staff), ‘Computerizing Collections 1: The Pitt Rivers Founding Collection’.
Julie Gough (Goldsmiths College, University of London), ‘Representing Culture though Art’.
Ken Orchard (University of Wollongong and National Gallery of Australia), ‘J. W. Lindt’s Photographs of Australian Aborigines (1870s)’.
Anita Herle (Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology), ‘From Expedition to Exhibition: The Hundredth Anniversary of the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait’.
Merata Kawharu and Paul Tapsell (both PRM/ISCA students), ‘Metropolitan Museums, Land, and Customary Authority in the Antipodes’.
Cressida Fforde and Lyndon Ormond-Parker (both University College London), ‘Returning Australian Aboriginal Remains: The Yagan Case’.
Chantal Knowles and Chris Gosden (both PRM staff), ‘Computerizing Collections 2: The Arawe Project’.
Tania Kaiser (PRM/ISCA student), ‘Collecting for the Museum in a Sudanese Refugee Camp’.
Chris Ballard (Australian National University), ‘Encountering Photography: Witnesses to the Past in South Irian Jaya’.
Elizabeth Peri-Willis (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), ‘Body Designs for a Dance: Uli Paintings in Nigeria and Oxford’.
Jane Samson (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London), ‘Curios, Culture, and Christianity: Pacific Missionaries as Collectors’.
Jeremy Coote and Chris Morton (both PRM staff), ‘Excavating African Art in the Pitt Rivers Museum’.
Ali Brown (PRM/ISCA student), ‘Collecting in Canada: Salvage Ethnography in the 1920s’.
