University Of Oxford
THE PITT RIVERS MUSEUM ANNUAL REPORT 1999 – 2000
Committee for the Pitt Rivers Museum as of 1 October 1999
The Vice-Chancellor (Dr C.R. Lucas)
The Senior Proctor (Mr R. Jenkyns)
The Junior Proctor (Dr P. Smith)
The Assessor (Professor R. Mayou)
Dr J.M. Landers (Chairman)
Dr J.A. Bennett
Dr C.P.H. Brown
Professor B. Cunliffe
Dr C. Gosden
Professor A.S. Goudie
Dr M. O’Hanlon
Professor D.J. Parkin
Professor P. Rivière
Dr S.J. Simpson
Dr P. Slack
Professor K.S. Thomson
The Pitt Rivers Museum
The Committee for the Pitt Rivers Museum, having received from the Director the following report for the period 1 August 1999 to 31 July 2000, presented it as its annual report to Congregation.
Introduction
The year has been one of almost unprecedented activity. The start of the period covered by this report found the main museum scaffolded both internally and externally for re-roofing. As the months proceeded, the roof was renewed and lined with sophisticated insulation in an effort to reduce the environmental swings that have previously characterized its interior. Internally, the museum was re-decorated and re-lit as far as the very limited budget allowed.
In the meantime, an accelerated programme of exhibitions and events continued at the Museum’s renamed Balfour Galleries (formerly ‘the Balfour Building’), in partial compensation for the closure of the main site. At the same time, the Museum heard that the first stage of its £300,000 bid to the Designation Challenge Fund had been successful. Four new full-time staff were recruited to accelerate the computerization of the collections. Working under Alison Petch’s energetic leadership, and drawing upon the already well worked-out database protocols, very considerable inroads into the backlog have already been made. A bid was also made in conjunction with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Access Fund for staff to research the Museum’s existing audience profile, and to pilot projects to attract new audiences. This also was successful, and the museums were awarded £180,000 for the joint project. This will begin in the next reporting year.
Simultaneously, the Museum underwent the time-consuming but ultimately rewarding process of a long-delayed General Board Review, in which five distinguished museum directors and anthropologists external to the University were invited to scrutinize the functioning and funding of the Museum, under the chairmanship of Laurence Whitehead and with the guidance of Chris Gosden of the Museum’s own staff. The General Board also made available to the Museum the generous and expert assistance of Nicholas Dummett who helped Museum staff think through the transition to being a larger and more complex organization than it has been in the past. The results of the reviewing process will be available in the next reporting period. However, one of the members of the Review, Professor John Mack, has already agreed to become a member of the Committee for the Pitt Rivers Museum, where he joins a second external member, Janet Vitmayer, the director of the Horniman Museum, who joined the Committee in Hilary 2000. Both will bring valuable extra-university expertise to the Museum.
The refurbishment of the main museum was completed in February and it was reopened to the public on 25 March 2000, along with an attractive, appropriate, and immediately successful exhibition entitled Transformations: The Art of Recycling. For the first time, the main museum is also open on Sundays, making it a seven-day week operation, with an immediate increase in visitor figures. A musical version of Transformations, entitled Transpositions: The Music of Recycling, was also installed in the Balfour Galleries, which was also host to a new exhibition, Collectomania, put on by the Museum’s students. The year has also been marked by the making of a Millennium Award to John Simmons, to enable him to broaden his museum experience through secondment to the British Museum where he will assist in the preparation of exhibitions to launch the Great Court in December 2000. On a sad note, the Museum was sorry to lose the services of Andy Munsch who had to take early retirement on ill-health grounds after almost twenty-three years service as one of the Museum’s technical team.
Finally, the Museum offers its thanks to John Flemming, who retires as Chairman of the Committee for the Pitt Rivers Museum, and welcomes in his place Dr John Landers.
Visitors
The number of general visitors to the main museum from the reopening to the end of the reporting year was 40,984; a further 6630 visited in educational groups and a further 3319 visited the Balfour Galleries, making a total visitor figure of 50,933. This represents a 26% rise on the last available figures for the same equivalent period (in 1998). Even allowing for the enthusiastic rush stimulated by the publicity associated with the reopening and the new special exhibition, it is reasonable to estimate that the Museum’s annual visitor figures will now total between 118,000 and 120,000. The new Sunday opening is only partly responsible for this rise in visitor numbers. The number of visitors on Sundays, unsurprisingly, is significantly lower than Saturdays, and it will presumably take some time for this new service to be firmly established in the minds of the public—and to erase the common myth that the Museum is more often shut than open!
The Museum hosted visits by a number of specialist groups, providing them with tours, talks, and ‘behind the scenes’ introductions. Among these were groups from the Royal Asiatic Society (Hong Kong branch), the Friends of the Whitworth Gallery, and the Friends of the Wellcome Institute. There were also important research visits from First Nations Peoples, including a visit by a group of Ojibwe in March, a group of Blood Elders in June, and a visit by delegates to ‘Art of the Northwest Coast’, a conference held at the British Museum.
During the year, 133 visiting scholars and students from all over the world used the photograph and manuscript collections and/or visited to discuss issues of curatorship, documentation, and representation. This represents a 30% increase on the previous year. Given that the staff who service the collections only work part-time, the increase in visitor numbers imposes a major strain on the section, for the same staff have to perform all the other curatorial and research duties relating to the collections. The fact that the other research facilities in the Museum were severely curtailed because of the re-roofing seems to have had little or no impact on the number of research visitors to the photograph and manuscript collections, demonstrating the research demand for these collections in their own right. In addition there were, of course, hundreds of postal, telephone, and e-mail enquiries.
Despite the main museum, and thus much of the collections, being inaccessible for three-quarters of the year, the documentation section dealt with 87 research visitors. Documentation staff also dealt with the usual innumerable enquiries about the collections, the Museum, the cultures represented in the Museum’s collections, and related museological issues. Enquiries and visits to the music collections were as frequent and numerous as usual throughout the year. More than 150 such enquiries and 70 visitors were dealt with.
Exhibitions and Events
A major focus of the year for many staff has been the new special exhibition Transformations: The Art of Recycling, which opened—as the main museum itself did—on 25 March 2000. The exhibition combines material from the Museum’s ethnographic collections with works lent by contemporary British artists. Apparently it is the first exhibition to explore recycling across a range of cultures and periods of time, and its topical theme has made it very popular, particularly among school groups and young people. The ‘Transformations’ project, as it has come to be known, includes a number of elements: the exhibition in the main museum; a commissioned installation by photographic artist Joachim Schmid, who works with recycled images, integrated into the main displays; and a display of recycled musical instruments at the Balfour Galleries entitled Transpositions: The Sound of Recycling.
Through active fundraising the Museum has been able to put together a more ambitious display and range of supporting material than usual. Artist Robert Race was commissioned to devise designs for the exhibition, which included cladding the somewhat dated ‘Swedish sauna-style’ panelling in the special exhibition area with a montage of telephone-directory pages, and fabricating showcases from cosmetics storage drums. A series of quality supporting publications have been produced, including a full-colour catalogue, a teacher’s pack (prepared by Anne Stevenson), and cartoon-style trail (by Tim Hunkin). The Museum held a successful ‘teachers preview’ session in May, organized by Anne Stevenson. The Museum is very grateful to the artists, writers and lenders who have contributed to the success of the ‘Transformations’ project and the following for their generous financial support: the Hulme University Fund, the Crafts Council, Southern Arts, Southern Museums, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, the Goethe Institut, Southern Electric, Reckitt Benckiser plc, Tetra Pak, and Museum and Gallery Lighting Ltd.
As part of Museums and Galleries Month 2000, the Museum embarked on a collaborative project with two Oxford schools: Frideswide Middle School and the Cherwell School. This ‘Transformation Triangle’ project aimed to encourage creative links between schools, artists, and the Museum, and used the art works on display in the Transformations exhibition as a springboard for art, design, and technology coursework. As well as visiting the Museum, each group benefitted from a one-day creative workshop led by a professional artist at the school. In total six workshop-days were held and 130 pupils directly participated. Two of the workshops were led by textile artist Sharon Porteous (who works with woven and bonded plastics, especially supermarket carrier bags); artist and toy-maker Robert Race led a one-day workshop; and artist Amanda Ralph spent three days at Cherwell School working on a ‘chambered tomb’ installation. A display of the pupils’ work is planned to take place in the next reporting year. The project would not have been possible without the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Millennium Festival Fund as part of Museums and Galleries Month 2000.
At the Balfour Galleries, West African Journeys: Photographs by Michael Pennie (on which, see previous report) closed on 18 September. It was followed by Ladakh: Himalayan Photographs by Karl-Einar Lofqvist which ran from October 1999 to April 2000. Organized by Clare Harris, this was an exhibition about a region of the north-western Himalayas in which she has conducted fieldwork since 1987. This was followed by Collectomania, which opened on 1 May 2000. This exhibition is curated by the Museum’s graduate students and explores personal motivations for collecting. Collectors from different walks of life were invited to contribute materials for display along with thoughts on the collection’s history, instigation, and meanings. The students created a vibrant exhibit related to their readings and research on material culture, museums, and collecting.
During Museums and Galleries Month in May several members of staff gave free public talks in the main museum on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Among the topics covered were ‘Caring for the Collections during Major Building Work’, ‘Coping with Poisons in the Museum’, ‘The General’s Gift’, ‘Tibet in the Pitt Rivers Museum’, ‘Native American Clothing’, ‘Looking at Historical Photographs’, and an introduction to the Transformations exhibition. The series of ‘Pitt Stops’ (monthly, staff-led, introductions to the Museum and its collections, aimed at children) continued throughout the year, being held in the Balfour Galleries while the main museum was closed. The last ‘Pitt Stop’ of the year took place in South Parks as the Museum’s contribution to OOMF (Oxfordshire’s Own Millennium Festival) on 1 July 2000. In an event linked to the Transformations exhibition, members of staff joined up with ORINOCO (the Oxfordshire Scrapstore for Recycled Materials) to run a mask-making session. Through the afternoon, a stream of parents and children settled down on the grass and enjoyed making masks of all shapes and sizes from the extraordinary variety of materials provided. Many of the masks could still be seen amongst the crowds during the evening’s musical festivities. The Museum is grateful to all those who helped with the ‘Pitt Stops’, including Joanna Archibald, Ina Barnes, Feng Cheng, Assimina Kaniari, and Alaine Whinnet.
The Museum participated in two other public events, one a University-wide project and another an Oxfordshire-wide initiative. The ‘University of Oxford Millennium Buildings’ project marked the University’s contribution to the built environment through current new developments and restoration work. The Museum was selected to feature as one of 12 building projects to be completed during the Millennium year, one for each month. The launch event was held at the Bodleian Library on 22 February, while the March panel featured work on the Museum’s new roof and internal paintwork, and its imminent reopening. Oxfordshire Museums Council received a Millennium Festival ‘Awards for All’ grant for the Trails 2000 Passport scheme, distributed through local libraries and museums to encourage local families to visit all the Oxfordshire museums during the summer holidays. This was launched in the Pitt Rivers on 29 March by Loyd Grossman, who handed out ‘passports’ to children from Frideswide School and cut the large celebration cake. The scheme proved very successful, with hundreds of children coming in to get their passports stamped.
This broad range of initiatives and collaborations with local schools and other groups illustrates the already inclusive base on which the HLF Access project (see ‘Introduction’ above) will be able to build.
Collections
Acquisitions
Among the more significant new acquisitions during the year were: a collection of more than 2000 Asante gold weights and related material from the collection of the late Bernard Schottlander; the remaining part of the Thesiger photographic collection, comprising more than two hundred films shot by Sir Wilfred in Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Southern Iraq, and Kurdistan; and a set of slides donated by Joachim Schmid relating to national identity in the former DDR. Special thanks are due to Mrs Florence Dagg for her gift of a rare copy of the official diary of the British Political Mission to Tibet in 1936. This will greatly enhance the documentation of the important Spencer-Chapman photograph collection. A list of the new acquisitions during the year are given in Annex B.
Loans
Three Zande harps that had been lent to the Musée de la Musique in Paris for the exhibition ‘La Parole du Fleuve’: Harpes d’Afrique were returned in October. In March, two Australian Aboriginal clubs were lent to the South Australian Museum, Adelaide for exhibition in the ‘Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery’; they are due to be returned in March 2002. In June, seventeen original prints and an album from the Thesiger collection were loaned to the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris for their summer exhibition Le Désert; they are due to be returned in November 2000.
Cataloguing and Collections Research
Work was completed or continued on a number of ongoing projects. Alison Petch’s work on a nine-month project, funded by a grant from the Pilgrim Trust, to computerize the records for the objects transferred from the Ashmolean Museum to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1886 was completed in September 1999. Jeremy Coote’s work on a one-year project, funded by a Jerwood/Museums and Galleries Commission Cataloguing Grant, to prepare a catalogue of the Forster collection (the Museum’s collection of artefacts from Captain Cook’s second voyage) was completed in December 1999; work on a publicly accessible on-line version continued throughout the year. Work on projects to publish catalogues of the Japanese and Cypriot archaeology collections also continued, as time allowed, through the year. Work on the Museum’s collection of copies of southern African rock art also continued and the opportunity was taken of visits by Aron Mazel of the South African Cultural History Museum and Val Ward of the Natal Museum to discuss the collections. Clare Harris and Marina de Alarcón continued their work on the computerization and documentation of the Tibetan and Himalayan collections. Important work was done on the documentation of the Japanese music collections by Dr Henry Johnson, a senior academic visiting scholar from Otago University, New Zealand.
Among important house-keeping projects was the processing of reserve collections held in the old lighting store and the ‘green shed’ (the old lecture room). Conservation and documentation staff processed more than 600 lamps and related material, all of which was documented, numbered and tagged, conserved, and removed to improved storage conditions in the main museum or Osney as appropriate. Documentation staff also made significant advances in recording locations for many of the objects stored in the museum. The important wax-cylinder recordings made by Northcote Thomas were taken to the British Library for digitalization.
However, the major advance of the year was undoubtedly the work carried out by the team of cataloguers that the Museum has been able to employ with the grant provided by the Designation Challenge Fund (DCF). It seems likely that the aim of completing the computerization of the records for all the Museum’s acquisitions (excepting those in the special collections) will be accomplished by the end of the two-and-a-half year project. This is an extremely exciting and important project and represents a major advance. It is difficult to know whether to be moved more by pleasure at its accomplishment or by regret at how profound a difference quite modest amounts of additional funding can make to the Museum’s functioning.
For the photograph collections, too, the DCF project has had a major impact. Good progress has been made in transferring the manual handlists to the computer database. In preparation for this work the existing database was thoroughly ‘cleaned’ and standardized and a new instruction manual prepared. Together these developments have significantly enhanced the access and research potential of the collection. Work on other small collections has also been completed and work has begun on preparing a collections-level listing for first reference, which it is hoped will be available on-line in the near future. A very generous donation from Sir Wilfred Thesiger has enabled a major programme to digitalize his collection. Two major sections, Arabia and East Africa, are already complete and work continues on the rest of the collection. It is anticipated that it will be completed early in the next reporting year. This will enhance access and protect the originals of a very popular and important collection. In the manuscript collections, the listing of the Blackwood Papers has been completed and a collections-level listing prepared for on-line use. The database for the Museum’s music collections was made publicly available at a terminal at the University’s Bate Collection.
Conservation
A mixture of priorities dominated the year. The urgent requirement to clear out a number of neglected storerooms, led staff to feel at times as much like removal men as conservators. Much time was expended on preparing objects for return to permanent display before the re-opening of the main museum. Many larger object were worked on during the refurbishment including the ‘totem pole’, the Hawaiian feather cloaks, and the ‘Life of Many Shots’ cape. While the re-roofing of the Museum was being carried out, special scaffolding was erected around the ‘totem pole’ so that conservation staff could have access to it. This enabled the removal of layers of dust from areas that had been inaccessible for years. A detailed condition report was prepared and paint samples taken for analysis. The wood was identified by Dr Gourlay of the Department of Plant Sciences as a conifer, Thuya plicata, common name western red cedar. The Hawaiian feather cloaks were removed to the conservation laboratory, checked, and remounted. Many support-rings were made for the pots before they were returned to display in the Lower Gallery. Each display case in the museum was checked before the Museum re-opened and the protective tissue paper and other temporary supports removed.
Many of the 1211 objects treated in the laboratory during the year were for the Transformations exhibition. The majority, however, were lamps from the old lighting store. A number of objects found to need treatment during the annual pest survey were also checked.
Conservation staff gave talks on object handling to new members of staff throughout the year and a talk on ‘housekeeping’ to the security staff in March.
Problems with environmental control in the photographic and manuscript collections were particularly intractable this year, due to the ageing of the system. However, the matter is in hand and under control. More positively, considerable progress was made with the restorage of delicate negatives. We are grateful to the Delafield Fund for a grant for storage materials.
This year also saw a very important University-wide survey of the condition of its museums’ collection. Despite much of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s collection being inaccessible, Museum staff co-operated with the survey as much as possible. The survey was commissioned by the University’s Committee for Museums and Scientific Collections, with the support of the South Eastern Museums Service and a grant from the University, and carried out by conservation consultants Hallahan Associates, who produced a final report entitled ‘The Conservation Audit of Materials in Institutions within the University of Oxford’.
Balfour Library
This has been an eventful year for the library, against the background of continued retrospective conversion. Elizabeth Carr left us to return to teaching, with Miyuki Mizunoya now working full-time as library assistant during term time. We were fortunate to have the help of an intern, Kathryn Mercer, previously of the Whanganui Regional Museum, New Zealand, for three months. She began work on a bibliography of works by Museum staff past and present. Some analysis of potential sites for a combined anthropology library was carried out this year, though the situation remains in a state of flux. We continue to be grateful to Joy Crammer and Jane Christie-Miller for their work at 60 Banbury Road and to Ros Kendall and her NADFAS conservation team.
Public Education
Education Services
There was a healthy demand for education services this year with 6579 students booked in on educational visits over the four months that the main museum was open. Of these, 408 took advantage of the trails provided by the Guiding Service and occasional talks by members of staff. The total comprised: 2935 secondary school students; 1593 art-school, university, and other mature students; the comparatively small number of 1148 primary-school children; and 903 language-school students. As usual these figures run counter to the usual student profile for museum education services, indicating the demand for the Museum as an important educational and cultural resource for older students. This demand is now greater than the Museum can easily satisfy, given that numbers are limited by pressure on public facilities in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
Guided Tours
As the Museum only re-opened in March, the numbers for guided tours during the year were very small. We also feel that it will take a while for the numbers to build up again. We are still surprised that many fairly local schools that visit the Museum seem unaware of what the Museum has to offer as a useful resource for many subjects in the national curriculum. However, as the guides at present are a very small group, we feel we are not in a position to publicize the Education Service, as we would be unable to cover an increase in guided visits.
The schools and groups that came to the Museum were mostly from Oxfordshire and adjoining counties and were normally repeat visits, but we did have a group of older students from a school in Hamburg and two small groups from local schools were brought in by Arabella Warner of Rag Doll productions, who is doing research for a new television series. The Oxford Brookes playscheme brought in a group of 5–12 year-olds for a general tour. There were 377 visits between the re-opening in March and the end of the summer term. These were mostly in the 7–11 age group and usually covered subjects in the national curriculum. We have also seen the return of GCSE and A-Level students.
The Transformations exhibition is particularly interesting and useful to schools, especially as it has been possible to produce a resource pack to accompany it. In addition, local secondary schools were involved in the ‘Transformation Triangle’ part of Museums Month, using exhibition sessions with the artists as part of their GCSE and A-level course work. We also held a very successful ‘twilight’ session to introduce teachers to the exhibition. We look forward to the appointment of an Education Officer and the expansion of the Service.
Voluntary Assistance
The Museum is extremely reliant on and grateful to the volunteers who have given their time during the year. Individual acknowledgements are made in Annex C.
Friends
The Friends of the Museum continue to flourish and to give generous support to the Museum. A report from the Honorary Secretary is included as Annex D.
Teaching and Examining
The main University teaching and examining duties undertaken by members of staff were for the undergraduate degrees in Archaeology & Anthropology, Human Sciences, and Geography; the M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in Ethnology and Museum Ethnography; and variously for M.Sc., M.Phil., and D.Phil. candidates in Social Anthropology, History of Art and Visual Culture, Archaeology, and Music. Details for this year are given in Annex E.
Staff
Several new gallery attendants were recruited to provide adequate security for the new opening hours seven days a week and a training day in customer care was presented by Jane McKinlay from the South Eastern Museums Service for all front-of-house staff.
There were a number of staff changes during the year. For details, see the list of the staff of the Museum 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 was one new Museum publication this year: Transformations, The Art of Recycling (2000). Published to accompany the new special exhibition, this is a 78-page, full-colour catalogue, featuring 68 illustrations, a main essay by Jeremy Coote, Chris Morton, and Julia Nicholson, and short essays by eight contributors. The Museum is immensely grateful to the Crafts Council for the generous grant that made possible the publication of such an attractive catalogue at such an attractive price (£6.95). The following were reprinted: The Origin and Development of the Pitt Rivers Museum (by Beatrice Blackwood, revised and updated by Schuyler Jones; first published 1991); Textiles: An Introduction (by Linda Mowat; first published 1995); and Hunting for the Right Weapon (by Alison Petch; first published 1994).
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
The major estate matter over the reporting period was the re-roofing and the associated re-lighting, re-ventilation, and re-decoration in the main museum. This is dealt with in the Introduction.
Miscellaneous Financial Matters
The James A. Swan Fund
The Pitt Rivers Museum sponsors archaeological and anthropological fieldwork within areas of interest to the late James A. Swan, including the Later Stone Age prehistory of southern Africa and the study of the contemporary Bushman and Pygmy peoples of Africa. Research on museum collections relating to these fields may also be supported, as may the costs of publishing the results of fieldwork that has been aided by the Fund.
This year thirteen applications were received and eight grants were awarded to a total of £15,386. The average size of grant was £1923. In addition, part of the Fund has been used to support research on the southern African collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum itself. External grants were awarded to: Dr M. Dobres, University of South Carolina (analysis of bone artefacts from Elands Bay Cave, South Africa); Dr S. Hall, University of Cape Town (excavation of Later Stone Age sites in the Limpopo Valley); Mr J. Hobart, University of Oxford (late Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Lesotho Highlands); Mr S. Ouzman, National Museum, Bloemfontein (landscape studies of southern African rock engravings); Dr D. Phillipson, University of Cambridge (for attendance of three African scholars at the Society of Africanist Archaeologists meeting in Cambridge, July 2000); Mr M. Scott, University of Cape Town (ethnohistorical study of contact between Ju/’hoansi Bushmen and Bantu-speakers in Namibia); Dr K. Sadr, University of Botswana (early pastoralism in southern Africa); and Dr P. Vinnicombe, University of the Witwatersrand (cataloguing of rock art tracings from Lesotho and the KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg).
Grants
A number of grants were received for the Transformations exhibition, the accompanying catalogue, and related activities and events. Some of these have been acknowledged previously, but are gratefully acknowledged again here: £10,000 from the Crafts Council; £5500 from the Hulme Surplus Fund; £5000 and £1000 from Southern Arts; £4000 from South Eastern Museums Service; £2500 from Reckitt Benkiser; £1350 from Southern Electric; £440 from Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen. Sponsorship in kind was also received from TetraPak and Museum and Gallery Lighting.
The following are also gratefully acknowledged: a grant of £59,484 from the Designation Challenge Fund for the computerization of the Museum’s acquisition records and preparations for the lower gallery redisplay programme; a grant of £30,000 from Sir Wilfred Thesiger to fund the digitalization of his photographic collection (a promised bequest to the Museum); a grant of £4000 from the W. H. Delafield Charitable Trust for the care of the collections; a grant of £3000 from the Williamson Fund, University of Cambridge for Clare Harris to continue her research on collections of Tibetan material in the UK; a grant of £2858 from the British Academy to Laura Peers to carry out fieldwork with Minnesota Ojibwe on the collections made by Beatrice Blackwood in the 1920s; an overseas conference grant from the British Academy for Alison Petch to attend and give a paper at ‘A Century at the Centre: Spencer, Gillen and The Native Tribes of Central Australia’, a conference held in Melbourne Australia; a grant of £1202 from the Trustees of the Sharp Collection.
This year’s generous donations from the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum are listed in Annex D.
Museum Shops
Shop sales were good during the four months trading, and considerably more than the equivalent period in 1998. This mainly reflects the popularity of the Transformations exhibition; several items of stock also make an appearance in the displays, giving customers additional encouragement to buy. However, as the number of visitors goes up it is clearer than ever that the shop space is inadequate to meet the demand and that an opportunity to increase sales will be lost until new space can be provided. The new electronic swipe system speeded up transactions and meant a wider range of cards could be accepted. Annual overheads meant that it was not possible to produce real profits in such a limited period of trading, but simply to reduce the deficit a little.
Photographic Services
The Museum sold £5780-worth of prints and reproduction rights during the year, a little more than in the previous year. This is despite the fact that for a significant period of time research access to the collections was severely limited and also despite the fact that an embargo on sales was introduced for two months due to other pressures on staff both before and after the reopening. While the number of print orders has remained relatively constant over the past few years, the number of requests for rights has risen steadily, reflecting the technological advances in hard-copy printing and, more recently, the growth in electronic publication on CD Rom and the internet.
Annex A
The Pitt Rivers Museum
The Pitt Rivers Museum is an ethnographic and archaeological museum of international standing with more than 115,000 visitors a year. The Museum is also an important 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 Galleries (formerly the Balfour Building) beside 60 Banbury Road, which opened in 1986 and currently houses displays devoted to musical instruments and hunter–gatherers past and present. The main museum and the Balfour Galleries are open to members of the public free of charge from 1.00 p.m. to 4.30 p.m. Monday to Saturday; both sites also cater for pre-booked educational parties from 10.00 a.m. to 12.00 noon, Tuesday to Friday. The main museum is now also open from 2.00 p.m. to 4.30 p.m. on Sundays.
Two further sites are major repositories: one at the old Power House at Osney and the other off St Cross Road. The latter houses the conservation laboratory, the 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 most of the teaching staff, and associated facilities.
Annex B
Acquisitions
Purchases
Ms Alison Brown (collection of material from Canada; 1999.29); Ms Marina de Alarcón (collection of objects from Pakistan; 1999.33); Mr Stephen Goldsmith via Pitt Rivers Museum Shop (gourd used as a resonator for a Zimbabwean mbira; 1999.24); Pitt Rivers Museum Shop (lamp made from a lightbulb; 1999.35); Dr Nick Saunders (collection of trench art; 1999.45).
Donations
Ms Rosie Antrobus (plastic kettle; 2000.14); Ms Shirley Arnold (quiver, bow and arrows from Botswana; 2000.7); Dr Ruth Barnes (sailor’s hat from Lembata Island, Indonesia; 1999.37); Mrs Wendy Board (Thai basket; 1999.44); Mr Jeremy Bray (Taiwanese rainwear; 1999.38); The Estate of the late C.G.B. Brenchley (collection of twenty-two musical boxes; 2000.1); Mr A.C. Bromfield (collection of Asian textiles; 1999.32); Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healy (Moroccan carpet comb; 2000.8); Ms Julia Cousins (votive offerings from Crete; 1999.27); Mrs Davidson (Maasai necklet and ear ornaments; 1999.30); Ms Marina de Alarcón (British water pipe; 1999.41); Mr and Mrs Dodds (collection of casts of bell founders marks; 1999.40); Mrs Elizabeth Edwards (twelve colour photographs; 2000.19); Mr James Fenwick (Indian stone flake; 2000.18); Mr A. C.F. Hadfield (collection of material from South Africa and New Zealand; 2000.21); Mr James Hamilton (two wax figures; 1999.42); Ms Sophia Handaka (Greek Orthodox votive offerings; 2000.11); Ms Anne Haour (three rubber stamps from Niger; 2000.13); Mr Tony Hayward (collection of recycled objects from India; 2000.12); Ms Sara Hicks (collection of Asante gold weights from the collection of Bernard Schottlander; 2000.6); Mrs Geraldine Hobson (photographs of Nagaland; 2000.27); Miss Julia Johnson (Chinese robe; 1999.34); Mr J. D. Josephson (a set of Indian scales; 1999.43); Professor Anthony Kirk-Greene (African ceremonial loincloth; 1999.28); Ms Chantal Knowles (three pots from Quibor, Venezuela; 1999.25 / German Easter egg; 2000.17); Mrs Marie Kuhn-Oser (pot from Algeria; 2000.22); Dr Hélène La Rue (collection of musical instruments; 2000.2); Mr Michel La Rue (collection of electric and electronic organs; 2000.4); Ms Sarah Lasenby (two beadwork covered cans from Africa; 2000.10); Ms Leah Niederstadt (collection of objects from Ethiopia; 2000.23); Mr Malcolm Osman (candles from Jerusalem; 1999.31); Ms Daphne Randall (collection of Burmese material; 2000.9); Professor Paul Raymaekers (two whips from Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire; 1999.36); Ms Lorraine Rostant (bag from Tobago; 1999.39); Mr Joachim Schmid (slide collection; 2000.3); Sir Wilfred Thesiger (collection of photographs; 2000.16); Ms Wilma A. Wood (birch bark sample; 2000.25); K.H. Wylie (Amharic scroll from Ethiopia; 2000.5).
To the Library
The library gratefully received books from: the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, June Bedford, Pascal Beyls, Jacqueline Coote, Jeremy Coote, Elizabeth Edwards, Irving Finkel, Chris Gosden, Chris Holdsworth, Horniman Museum (London), Indian Institute Library (Oxford), Institute of Chinese Studies Library (Oxford), Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, Maryse Laniel-le-Francois, Museum Ethnographers Group, Museum of Greek Folk Art (Athens), National Maritime Museum (London), Julia Nicholson, Leah Niederstadt, Mike O’Hanlon, Paul Raymaekers, Burhan Ssebayigga, and Julie Stonebridge.
Annex C
Volunteers
This year we have been fortunate in the many volunteers who have enabled us to make great strides in increasing the accessibility of the collections. As always we are deeply indebted to Mrs Audrey Smith and Mrs Ruth Wickett for their invaluable work on the manuscript listings. This year they have completed listings of the Oakley papers and the uncatalogued parts of the Blackwood manuscripts. We are also extremely grateful to Kathryn Mercer who, on placement from New Zealand, developed a collection-level listing of the manuscripts to create an on-line first-reference listing that will soon be available on the Museum’s web site. We would also like to thank Rebe Taylor who made listings of the Westlake collection and undertook its restorage; Rachel Miller for work on the photograph collection listing; and Joshua du Zautay, Rosie Watt and Isobel Edwards for work on the locations index and storage of the Thesiger collection.
The Museum is also grateful to Yunsun Choi for all the help she gave during her eight-months working in the conservation section. She worked on many objects including the ‘totem pole’, of which she made an excellent drawing. Sonia Konya also gave valuable assistance with making ring-stands for the pots on display in the Lower Gallery.
Arian Sheets spent August and September 1999 working with Hélène La Rue in the music collections. The Museum is grateful to her and to Mark Evans, who assisted with work on the Sharp Collection
Annex D
Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum
(Report By Liz Yardley, Honorary Secretary)
Despite the closure of the main museum, the Friends had a busy year, with a full programme of events and fundraising activities. One of the highlights of the year was the benefit evening at the Oxford Playhouse given by Friends’ patron Michael Palin. Using his recent television series Hemingway Adventure as a starting-point, he entertained a full house with lively anecdotes and fascinating insights into the making of the programmes, and concluded with tales from the Python days and a question-and-answer session. The profits of the evening were shared with the Friends of the Playhouse.
The Friends annual Beatrice Blackwood public lecture was given by Dr Irving Finkel (Assistant Keeper, Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, British Museum), who delighted a large audience with ‘Tales of the Unexpected: Board Games, Ancient and Modern’. Once again, the Friends are most grateful to the Administrator of the Inorganic Chemistry Department for allowing the use of the lecture theatre free of charge, and to Dymphna Hermans and the Warden of All Souls for hosting the supper for the speaker.
Shahin Bekhradnia arranged a most stimulating and varied lecture programme. Our Autumn speakers included Terry Wright (Visiting Fellow, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford), speaking on ‘Anthropology and Digital Imaging: Visual Ethnography’, and Chloe Colchester (Lecturer in Anthropology, University College London) illuminating ‘Diaspora Arts: Bark Cloth and Indian Studio Photography in Fiji. Chris Gosden (Lecturer–Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum) got the Millennium Programme off to a flying start with record-breaking attendance at his talk on ‘White Horse Hill and Prehistory on the Ridgeway’. This was followed by Magdalen Gorringe (Research Fellow at the Roehampton Institute) demonstrating ‘How Dasi Attam became Bharata Natyam: The History and Current Trends of the Indian Dance Style’, Caspar Fithen (Africa Analyst, Oxford Analytica) on ‘Ethnicity and The Sierra Leone Diamond Trade’, and John Gillow (author and lecturer) on ‘Hill Tribe Textiles of South Western China’. The Young Friends started their programme with a lunch to welcome new members. Their events included a talk by Clare Harris on Tibet and a gallery talk by Julia Nicholson on Transformations: The Art of Recycling. Karl-Einar Lofqvist gave a Saturday morning gallery talk on his exhibition Ladakh: Himalayan Photographs. We also visited conservation’s new home at the old rifle range, where Birgitte Speake and Lorraine Rostant gave a delightful and informative tour behind the scenes. In July we made a visit to the Ridgeway archaeological site where Friends had the opportunity to see the excavations at Alfred’s Castle and have the several layers of history explained by Chris Gosden, before they were reburied. The Christmas party, at the Balfour Galleries, included a performance of Tibetan singing and dancing.
At the Annual General Meeting in June Geoffrey Harrison, having given four years of wisdom and inspiration as Chairman of the Friends, handed over to the new Chairman Donald Tayler. The Treasurer reported that donations to the Museum during the year included £3355 from the Michael Palin benefit evening towards matching funding for the Education Officer post, £646 for the refurbishment of General Pitt Rivers’s caravan, £310 for a wheelchair, £500 for a disability access booklet, and £300 for an Evac chair. The Membership Secretary, Anne Phythian-Adams, reported that membership currently stood at 393, including 92 joint memberships, 136 ordinary, 20 Young Friends, and 53 concessions. Deborah Manley in her first year as editor, with the assistance of Sam Pay, has given the Newsletter a new format. Felicity Wood and Janet Sharpe have prepared a complete index of all issues of the Newsletter to date, and a very handsome bound volume of all the issues and the index has been presented to the Balfour Library. The evening concluded with ‘Raising the Roof’ by Mike O’Hanlon and Julia Cousins, a lively resumé of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the recent building works and an outline of some very exciting plans for the future.
The year finished with a visit to General Pitt Rivers’s recently restored Larmer Tree Gardens in Wiltshire, with promises of a reciprocal visit to the Museum in the near future
Annex E
Teaching and Examining
Jeremy Coote gave tutorials to undergraduates in Archaeology & Anthropology and co-supervised two doctoral students in social and cultural anthropology.
Elizabeth Edwards gave lectures, seminars, tutorials, and supervisions in critical history and theory of still photography within museology and anthropology to graduate students at all levels in this department and others.
Chris Gosden lectured in the series ‘People, Environment, and Culture’, ‘Material Culture, Art, and Society’, ‘The Nature of Archaeological Enquiry’, and ‘Material Culture in Papua New Guinea: Material Culture and the Anthropology of Things’ and gave tutorials to both undergraduates and graduates. He supervised 18 graduate students at various levels. He also served as external examiner in the Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton.
Clare Harris lectured in various series, including ‘People, Environment, and Culture’, ‘Material Culture, Art, and Aesthetics’, and ‘The Built Environment’; she taught the M.Sc. option ‘Key Debates in the Anthropology of Art’; and she was a discussant at the weekly M.Phil. research class throughout the year. She also chaired the Museum’s seminar series in Michaelmas and Hilary terms. She gave tutorials to both undergraduates and graduates and supervised five graduate students at various levels. Among other related duties, she was an examiner for the M.Scs. and M.Phils. in Ethnology and Museum Ethnography and Social Anthropology.
Chantal Knowles lectured in the series ‘Material Culture in Papua New Guinea: Material Culture and the Anthropology of Things’.
Hélène La Rue gave two lecture series in the Music Faculty for the First Public Examination in Ethnomusicology and a Schools special subject ‘Musical Instruments Worldwide’. She also participated in the acoustics course. She gave a Ethnomusicology seminar for the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
Peter Mitchell lectured for the undergraduate degree in Archaeology & Anthropology, tutored for his college (St Hugh’s) and others, and co-ordinated the Honour Moderations course ‘Introduction to World Archaeology’. He also served as Chairman of Examiners for the M.St. in World Archaeology and as an assessor for the Final Honour School in Archaeology & Anthropology.
Michael O’Hanlon lectured in the series ‘People, Environment, and Culture’ and ‘Material Culture, Art, and Aesthetics’, co-taught an option on Melanesian material culture, and gave tutorials to graduate students. Among other related duties, he served as examiner for an Anthropology & Archaeology undergraduate option.
Laura Peers lectured in various series, including ‘People, Environment, and Culture’ and ‘Material Culture, Art, and Aesthetics’, and taught the M.Sc. option ‘Museum Studies’. She gave tutorials to both undergraduates and graduates and supervised eight graduate students at various levels.
Derek Roe was on sabbatical leave for Hilary and Trinity terms. He gave the first term’s lectures in his usual course on Palaeolithic Archaeology and associated topics, for graduates taking the taught M.St and M.Phil. qualifying courses. He supervised or co-supervised three doctoral research students throughout the year, one of whom, Mr Hyeong Woo Lee, successfully completed his thesis and was given permission to supplicate for the D.Phil degree
Annex F
Staff List
(Part-time staff are indicated by * and staff on temporary contract by +.)
Director Michael O’Hanlon
Administration Julia Cousins (Administrator)
Sue Brooks (Administrative Assistant)
Christina Fox (Museum Secretary)
Marketing Kate White (Marketing & Visitor Services Officer)
Shirley Careford (Shop Manager)
Neville Dowley (Shop Assistant; from March 2000)
Lecturer–Curators Chris Gosden
Clare Harris
Hélène La Rue (also Curator of the Bate Collection)
Peter Mitchell
Laura Peers
Lecturer Derek Roe
Curators Jeremy Coote*
Elizabeth Edwards*
Julia Nicholson*
Registrar Alison Petch
Museum Assistants Marina de Alarcón
Gwyneira Isaac (to January 2000)*/+
Lynn Parker (from January 2000)+
Conservation Birgitte Speake (Head of Conservation)
Lorraine Rostant
Robert Pearce
Technical Services Bob Rivers (Head of Technical Services & Head Technician)
Andy Munsch (retired May 2000)
John Simmons
Caspar Muncaster (until March 2000)
John Todd
Adrian Vizor (from June 2000)
ICT Officer Haas Ezzet
Library Mark Dickerson (Balfour Librarian)
Elizabeth Carr (to March 2000)
Miyuki Mizunoya (from October 1999 to June 2000)
Photography Malcolm Osman
Security Staff Emma Buchanan (from March 2000)
Paul Fitzpatrick (from March 2000)
Colin Joyce (from March 2000)
Neil Owen
Daphne Palmer (from March 2000)
Sue Phillips (to February 2000)
Peter Stimpson
Roger Taylor
Benjamin Wilkes (from March 2000)
Brian Winkfield
Caretaker Norman Weller
(at 64 Banbury Road)
Cataloguers (DCF) Alison Petch (Project Manager; from November 1999)+
Sandra Dudley (from March 2000)*/+
Claire Freeman (from November 1999)+
Gwyneira Issac (from March 2000)*/+
Linda Mowat (from September 1999 to March 2000)*/+
Jennifer Peck (from November 1999)+
Màiri Robertson (from November 1999)+
Claire Warrior (from November 1999)*/+
Researchers John Hobart (Swan Fund)*/+
(fixed-term) Chantal Knowles (ESRC)+
Meghan O’Brien (DCF; from July)*/+
Katherine Scott (ARC Limited)+
Julie Scott-Jackson (Company Services Associates)+
Annex G
Staff Activities
Jeremy Coote presented a paper, jointly with Sarah Porter of the University’s Humanities Computing Development Team, to the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series in May. He gave advice to Worcester City Art Gallery and Art Museum on items from their ethnographic collections and was commissioned by the National Museum of Australia to select objects for a forthcoming exhibition. He attended day-seminars organized by the Museums and Galleries Commission, for representatives from museums with designated collections, on interpretation strategies and evaluation. He continued to serve as an Associate Editor of JASO: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford.
Marina de Alarcón was commissioned to make a private collection of textiles and other materials in Pakistan in September 1999. She took the opportunity to also make a collection for the Museum, mostly of recycled objects for the Transformations exhibition. In November she attended the Museum Ethnographers Group study session at the British Museum’s new North American galleries.
Elizabeth Edwards had a deliberately quiet year (after an accidentally busy year in 1998–99). She gave seminars at the University of East Anglia, Manchester University, the Department of the History of Art, Oxford, at the National Maritime Museum, and in the Museum’s own Friday lunchtime series. She also gave a gallery talk at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, in connection with their Weegee exhibition. She continued to teach as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Photography at the Royal College of Art, London, and to serve on the editorial boards of Visual Anthropology Review and History of Photography. She also continued to serve on the Photographic Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Chris Gosden attended the meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group in Cardiff. He gave lectures in Reykjavik and Akureyri in Iceland. With Chantal Knowles he made two research trips to Germany to study material from Papua New Guinea in ethnographic collections in Stuttgart, Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig. With Gary Lock of the Institute of Archaeology, he carried out a third season of excavations at the Iron Age and Romano-British site of Alfred’s Castle. He continued to sit on editorial boards for Routledge and the journals Archaeology in Oceania and Ethnogräphische Archäologische Zeitschrift. With Chantal Knowles he is writing up an investigation of material culture and colonialism in Papua New Guinea for publication.
Clare Harris gave papers at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford; the ‘Representations of Empire’ conference, Oxford; the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; the meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, Krakow; and the International Association of Tibetan Studies, Leiden. She gave a gallery talk on the Museum’s exhibition Ladakh: Photographs by Karl-Einar Lofqvist. She continued her research on Tibetan visual culture with a visit to Northern India, spent mainly in the Tibetan ‘capital-in-exile’ Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh. During this visit she worked with the Tibetan government on their visual archive and museum projects, co-organized the International Association of Ladakh Studies conference in Leh, Ladakh, and gathered further research materials. With support from the Williamson Fund, University of Cambridge she continued her research on collections of Tibetan material in the UK with visits to the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, the India Office Library, London, and museums in London, Cambridge, Oxford, and Norwich. She gave a number of media interviews during the year, including one for BBC Radio 3’s ‘Nightwaves’ programme about her new book In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Visual Culture after 1959. In March 2000 she served on the committee appointing the new University lecturerer in Himalayan and Tibet Studies.
Chantal Knowles completed the second year of her ESRC-funded research assistantship to Chris Gosden on the project ‘Material Culture and Colonialism in German New Guinea’. With Chris Gosden she made two research trips to Germany to study material from Papua New Guinea in ethnographic collections in Stuttgart, Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig. In May and June she made a research trip to West New Britain accompanying a research team from the Australian Museum in Sydney. She continued in her role as Secretary to the Museum Ethnographers Group.
Hélène La Rue organized a number of activities and events in the Bate Collection, some of which also made use of the facilities at the Balfour Galleries. She gave a key-note lecture at a symposium to mark the retirement of Felix van Lamsweerde held in the Tropical Institute, Amsterdam. She continued to be the Chairman of the Musical Collections Forum and a Music Advisor for Southern Arts.
Peter Mitchell organized the fifth Archaeology & Anthropology Open Day and served as Secretary of the Swan Fund, Chairman of the Archaeology & Anthropology Tutors’ Forum, Organizing Secretary for Archaeology & Anthropology Admissions, and Tutor for Admissions at St Hugh’s College. He continued to serve on the Council of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and the editorial board of World Archaeology and completed a book to be published by Cambridge University Press on the archaeology of Southern Africa. Other papers were also brought to a conclusion or revised for publication and presentations made at the World Commission on Dams symposium on ‘Dams and Archaeology’ at the University of Florida and at the Society of Africanist Archaeologists conference in Cambridge. In April he lectured at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, as part of a course, sponsored by the ERASMUS Project, for European Union students leading to an International Certificate in African Archaeology.
Julia Nicholson attended the Museum Ethnographers Group study session at the British Museum’s new North American galleries in November 1999. She chaired a session at the Museum Ethnographers Group Annual Conference at Exeter Museum in April. In May, she gave a talk about the Transformations exhibition to the Young Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum. She also attended the ‘Exhibiting Empire’ conference at the National Maritime Museum.
Michael O’Hanlon gave an invited paper ‘The Field of Collecting: Back to the Future’ at ‘The World Mirrored’ a conference at the National Museum of Denmark in May 2000. He acted as visiting consultant to the new ethnography gallery in the National Museums and Galleries, Merseyside, and became a Trustee of the Green Centre at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. He continued to sit on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Journal of Material Culture, and Ethnos
Robert Pearce attended two seminars organized by the Metals Section of the United Kingdom Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works: ‘Back to Basics: Mechanical Cleaning and Stabilisation Techniques’ at the Conservation Centre, Liverpool in October, and ‘Back to Basics: Surface Finishes’ at the Royal Dockyard, Chatham, Kent in January. He attended the ‘Indoor Air Quality Conference 2000’ at Oxford Brookes University in July.
Laura Peers gave lectures at the Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford and the University Club, Oxford and organized a session and gave a paper at the meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory in October 1999. In June she lectured for the University of Leicester’s Museum Studies Programme on ‘Should We Modernize the Pitt Rivers Museum? And other Museological Dilemmas’. She continued to serve on the committee of the Museum Ethnographers Group. She carried out a collections survey and assisted with exhibition development at the National Museums of Scotland.
Alison Petch gave a paper at the conference ‘A Century at the Centre: Spencer, Gillen and The Native Tribes of Central Australia’ in Melbourne, Australia in October 1999 and then carried out further research in the Mitchell Library, Sydney. Also in October, she gave a paper, jointly with Sandra Dudley, at the ‘Visions & Voices Conference: The 50th Anniversary of Manchester Anthropology, 1949–1999’ in Manchester. She took advantage of a trip to Adelaide on Museum business in February 2000 to carry out further research at Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide, the South Australia Museum, and the State Library of South Australia.
Derek Roe concentrated on writing this year, and made useful progress with a book on the Palaeolithic period, aided by a small grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), which provided a few months of research assistance. He also spent many weeks helping Professor J. Desmond Clark with the proofs for publication of volume 3 of his important monograph on Kalambo Falls. He attended a week-long international conference on the ‘Earliest Stages of the European Palaeolithic’, at Tautavel in France during April 2000, contributing a paper on the earliest Palaeolithic of Britain, and he also took part in a productive one-day workshop meeting at Southampton University in January on the Palaeolithic and Pleistocene successions in the Solent region, again contributing a paper. The Tautavel conference included a study visit to the very important cave site of Caune l’Arago. As usual he advised on work at a number of British Palaeolithic sites during the year, notably Rainbow Bar at Fareham, Hampshire, and on individual finds of early Palaeolithic artefacts from various British sites. This was also the second year of the two-year AHRB-funded project, in which he is co-principal investigator with Professor Clive Gamble of Southampton University, to study the effects of differing raw materials on handaxe manufacture at a selection of Lower Palaeolithic sites across the Old World from Southern Africa to Britain.
Lorraine Rostant attended an open day at the University of Southampton’s Textile Conservation Centre at Winchester and the ‘Indoor Air Quality Conference 2000’ at Oxford Brookes University, both in July. In November she attended a meeting on ‘Anoxic Environment, Oxygen Scavengers and Barrier Films’ in Cardiff.
Katherine Scott completed her excavations for the ‘ARC Oxford Mammoths Project’ at the important Middle Pleistocene site at Stanton Harcourt in August 1999. The emphasis of the project then shifted to laboratory study of the finds and the preparation of a definitive publication.
Julie Scott-Jackson continued her four-year research fellowship at the Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre, in which she is working on the high-level Lower Palaeolithic sites of the clay-with-flints areas of the English chalk downlands. Long-term funding from the Company Services Associates Fund for Palaeolithic Archaeology has provided for a specialist geoarchaeological unit, PADMAC, to study these deposits and the associated artefacts. One D.Phil. student, Vikki Winton, is currently researching Palaeolithic artefact technology and further funding is in place for additional D.Phil. students, specifically to focus on the geology, geomorpohology, and sedimentology of these sites. Encouragingly, PADMAC is establishing a wide associate membership both within and outside the University. Current research is centred on four high-level sites on deposits mapped as Clay-with-flints where specific geological and archaeological techniques are being developed. A gazetteer of relevant sites and artefacts, together with an associated database, is being continually updated. Case studies are included in a newly published book, which also details a methodology for the investigation and excavation of high-level Palaeolithic sites on deposits mapped as Clay-with-flints.
Birgitte Speake attended ‘Cultural, Heritage and Public Buildings: Improving the Bottom Line’, presented by Drivas Jonas at Tate Britain in June, and an open day at the University of Southampton’s Textile Conservation Centre at Winchester. She attended the ‘Indoor Air Quality Conference 2000’ at Oxford Brookes University in July and organized a reception in the Museum for delegates. She gave talks about the Museum and the re-roofing project to the Headington branch of the University of the Third Age, the Rotary Club of Woodstock, and the Combe Historical Society.
Kate White gave a talk on ‘The Ethics of Buying from Third World Countries’ at a seminar on ‘Counter Culture: Retailing in Museums’ organized by the Museums Trading and Publishing Group at the Museums and Heritage Show in February 2000. A more comprehensive version of the same talk, ‘Fair Trade and Museum Retailing’ was given at the annual conference of the Museum Ethnographers Group at Exeter in May. She attended a number of other meetings: ‘What are You Going to Change and How Will You Do it?’, a seminar organized by the Museums and Galleries Disability Group’, in November; the Museums Trading and Publishing Group First Annual Trading Convention at Kew Gardens, in November; an E-commerce master class presented by Rouse and Co. International, in January; the ‘Exhibiting Empire’ conference, at the National Maritime Museum; ‘Cultural, Heritage and Public Buildings: Improving the Bottom Line’, presented by Drivas Jonas at Tate Britain in June; the OXFAM FairTrade Review, also in June; and ‘A Guide to Copyright for Museums and Galleries’, also in June. She also attended a day-seminar organized by the Museums and Galleries Commission for representatives from museums with designated collections, on interpreation strategies, and ‘What do the Public Want?’, a session on audience surveying presented by Marketing the Arts in Oxfordshire, in December. She also attended the general meetings of the Museum Marketing Group, the Visitor Services Group, and the Tourism Forum
Annex H
Staff Publications
Jeremy Coote, ‘The Transformations Catalogue’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum Newsletter, no. 32 (March 2000), p. 3.
Jeremy Coote, ‘A Sunday Afternoon in Oddington’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum Newsletter, no. 33 (July 2000), p. 7.
Jeremy Coote (with Peter Gathercole and Nicolette Meister), ‘“Curiosities Sent to Oxford”: The Original Documentation of the Forster Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. XII, no. 2 (2000), pp. 177–92.
Jeremy Coote (with Chris Morton), ‘A Glimpse of the Guinea Coast: Regarding an African Exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 12 (May 2000), pp. 39–56.
Jeremy Coote (with Chris Morton and Julia Nicholson), Transformations: The Art of Recycling, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum (2000).
Marina de Alarcón, ‘Pitt Rivers on Loan’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum Newsletter, no. 30 (October 1999), pp. 9–10.
Marina de Alarcón, ‘Where to See the Games for Yourself’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum Newsletter, no. 33 (July 2000), p. 6.
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Exchanging Photographs: Some Preliminary Thoughts on the Currency of Photography in Collecting Anthropology’, Journal des Anthropologues, nos. 80/81 (May 2000), pp 21–46.
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘The Joachim Schmid Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, in Transformations: The Art of Recycling, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum (2000), pp. 72–5.
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Making Histories: The Torres Strait Expedition of 1898’, Pacific Studies Vol. XX, no. 4 (December 1997), pp. 13–34.
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographs as Objects of Memory’, in Material Memories: Design and Evocation (Materializing Culture), edited by Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley, Oxford: Berg (1999), pp. 221–36.
Chris Gosden (with Gary Lock), ‘The Hillforts of the Ridgeway Project: Excavations at Alfred’s Castle 1999’, South Midlands Archaeology, no. 30 (2000), pp. 82–90.
Chris Gosden (with Yvonne Marshall), ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’, in World Archaeology, Vol. XXXI, no. 2 (October 1999), pp. 169–78.
Chris Gosden (co-editor, with Yvonne Marshall), The Cultural Biography of Objects (Special Issue of World Archaeology, Vol. XXXI, no. 2, October 1999).
Clare Harris, ‘Alternative Centres: India’, in The Oxford History of Western Art, edited by Martin Kemp, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2000), pp. 478–81.
Clare Harris, A Camera in Tibet: The Photographs of Charles Bell and F. Spencer Chapman, London: Atlas Books (2000).
Clare Harris, In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Visual Culture after 1959 (Envisioning Asia) London, Reaktion Press (1999).
Clare Harris, ‘Imagining Home: The Reconstruction of Tibet in Exile’, Forced Migration Review, no. 6 (December 1999), pp. 13–15.
Clare Harris, ‘Shangri-La among the Dreaming Spires’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum Newsletter, no. 31 (January 2000), p. 8.
Chantal Knowles (with Jeremy Coote, Nicolette Meister, and Alison Petch), ‘Computerizing the Forster (“Cook”), Arawe, and Founding Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Pacific Arts, nos. 19/20 (July 1999), pp. 48–80.
Hélène La Rue, ‘Instrumentalism’, in Transformations: The Art of Recycling, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum (2000), pp. 68–71.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Pressure-Flaked Points in Lesotho: Dating, Distribution, and Diversity’, South African Archaeological Bulletin, Vol. LIV, no. 170 (December 1999), pp. 90–96.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Landmark Synthesis of Archaeological Heritage [review of Human Beginnings in South Africa: Uncovering the Secrets of the Stone Age, by H. J. Deacon and Janette Deacon (Walnut Creek, CA, and London, 1999)]’, South African Journal of Science, Vol. XCV, no. 10 (October 1999), p. 432.
Peter Mitchell (with Ruth Charles), ‘Later Stone Age Hunter–Gatherer Adaptations in the Lesotho Highlands, Southern Africa’, in Human Ecodynamics: Proceedings of the Association for Environmental Archaeology Conference 1998, Held at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (Symposia of the Association for Environmental Archaeology, no. 19), edited by Geoff Bailey, Ruth Charles, and Nick Winder, Oxford: Oxbow Books (2000), pp. 90–99.
Peter Mitchell (with C. Wingfield), ‘Leopards in the Lesotho Highlands’, Africa Environment and Wildlife, Vol. VII, no. 5 (1999), pp. 9–10.
Michael O’Hanlon, ‘McGuffins and More about kwoi’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum Newsletter, no. 30 (October 1999), pp. 2–3.
Michael O’Hanlon, ‘“Mostly Harmless?”: Missionaries, Administrators and Material Culture on the Coast of British New Guinea’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. V, no. 3 (September 1999), pp. 377–97.
Michael O’Hanlon, Review of An Anthropologist in Melanesia: A. B. Lewis and the Joseph N. Field South Pacific Expedition, 1909–1913, by Robert L. Welsch (Honolulu, 1998), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. V, no. 3 (September 1999), pp. 512–13.
Michael O’Hanlon, Review of An Ethnology of the Admiralty Islanders: The Alfred Bühler Collection, Museum der Kulturen Basel, by Sylvia Ohnemus (Bathurst, NSW, 1996), Pacific Affairs, Vol. LXXII, no. 3 (Fall 1999), 479–81.
Julia Nicholson, ‘Transformations: The Art of Recycling’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum Newsletter, no. 32 (March 2000), p. 2.
Julia Nicholson (with Beatrice Clayre), ‘Melanau Sickness Images in the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford’, Sarawak Museum Journal, Vol. LIV (n.s., no. 75), pp. 105–41
Julia Nicholson (with Jeremy Coote and Chris Morton), Transformations: The Art of Recycling Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum (2000).
Julia Nicholson (with Chris Morton), ‘Transformations: The Art of Recycling’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum Newsletter, no. 31 (January 2000), p. 4.
Jennifer Peck (with Alison Petch), ‘Computers, Cups of Tea, and Scrabble: The Start of a New Museum Project’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum Newsletter, no. 32 (March 2000), p. 7.
Laura Peers (with Jennifer S. H. Brown), ‘“There Is No End to Relationship among the Indians”: Ojibwa Families and Kinship in Historical Perspective’, The History of the Family: An International Quarterly, Vol. IV, no. 4 (2000), pp. 529–55.
Alison Petch (with Jeremy Coote, Chantal Knowles, and Nicolette Meister). ‘Computerizing the Forster (“Cook”), Arawe, and Founding Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Pacific Arts, nos. 19/20 (July 1999), pp. 48–80.
Alison Petch (with Jennifer Peck), ‘Computers, Cups of Tea, and Scrabble: The Start of a New Museum Project’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum Newsletter, no. 32 (March 2000), p. 7.
Derek Roe, ‘The Neopalaeolithic [review of The Palaeolithic Settlement of Europe (World Archaeology Series), by Clive Gamble (Cambridge, 1986)]’, The Review of Archaeology, Vol. XX, no. 2 (Fall 1999), pp. 48–52 [reprinted, with a new ‘Addendum’, from The Review of Archaeology, Vol. IX, no. 3 (1988)].
Lorraine Rostant, Review of The World Cultures Galleries (a new permanent display at The Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter), SSCR Journal [The Quarterly News Magazine of the Scottish Society for Conservation and Restoration], Vol X, no. 4 (November 1999), pp. 20–21.
Lorraine Rostant (with Emma Hook and Birgitte Speake), ‘Making a Show of Ourselves: Braving the Elements—A Conservation Exhibition’, SSCR Journal, Vol. XI, no. 1 (February 2000), pp. 21–22.
Julie E. Scott-Jackson, Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Artefacts from Deposits Mapped as Clay-with-flints: A New Synthesis with Significant Implications for the Earliest Occupation of Britain, Oxford: Oxbow Books (2000).
Birgitte Speake, ‘Conserving the Largest Object on Display in the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum Newsletter, no. 31 (January 2000), p. 3.
Birgitte Speake, ‘Report on the ICOM–CC Triennial Meeting in Lyon, France’, ICOM UK News, no. 54 (December 1999), pp. 11–12.
Birgitte Speake (with Emma Hook and Lorraine Rostant), ‘Making a Show of Ourselves: Braving the Elements—A Conservation Exhibition’, SSCR Journal, Vol. XI, no. 1 (February 2000), pp. 21–22.
Claire Warrior, Review of Native Nations: Journeys in American Photography (an exhibition held at the Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, London, 10 September 1998 to 10 January 1999), Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 12 (May 2000), pp. 169–71.
Claire Warrior, Review of Inuit Art: An Introduction, by Ingo Hessel (London, 1998), Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 12 (May 2000), pp. 172–4
Annex I
The Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre
(Report by Professor Derek Roe, Honorary Director)
The Centre continued to operate as best it can in financial circumstances which have allowed little in the way of badly needed new equipment to be purchased; a new slide projector and overhead projector being the triumphant exceptions. The Centre’s ageing computers have now reached a particularly parlous state.
Some members of the Pitt Rivers Museum Review Committee managed to spend a few moments in the Centre during their visit to the Balfour Building, and a little space was made in the Review’s report to be generally supportive of the Centre and to make interesting preliminary suggestions for its possible future role, looking ahead beyond the retirement of the present Honorary Director.
Graduate and undergraduate students, as well as visitors, have continued to enjoy what the Centre has to offer. As usual, Derek Roe provided a number of lecture–demonstrations on the subject of Palaeolithic artefacts for parties of visiting students. Two outstanding series of seminars were organized in Hilary Term and Trinity Term by research associate Dr Sarah Milliken, on a selection of Palaeolithic topics and on ‘work in progress’. The PADMAC Unit, directed by Dr Julie Scott-Jackson, has had a good year. Dr Bill Waldren also had another fine excavation season on Mallorca, with significant new discoveries. As usual he spent half the year in Oxford, working on his finds, and while he was with us he gave a very popular and well-attended two-day workshop on computer graphics. Dr Kate Scott and Mrs Christine Buckingham have been working towards the definitive publication of the important material gathered over so many seasons’ fieldwork at Stanton Harcourt, and were also able to achieve a valuable short rescue operation on another Middle Pleistocene site at Latton, near Cirencester: this yielded information directly related to the Stanton Harcourt study.
Distinguished overseas visitors to the Centre included Professor Mina Evron and Dr Josef Garfinkel (Israel), Professor Hilary Deacon (South Africa), and Professor Michael Walker (Spain). It was also a particular pleasure to welcome to the Centre in early August Francis Baden-Powell, to whose kindness we owe our foundation twenty-five years ago. Our Library looks ever more cared for and better organized, thanks to the continuing volunteer efforts of Mrs Joy Crammer and Mrs Jane Christie-Miller, of the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum.
At the end of this year, we lost Dr Milliken, who is taking up a post at the University of Cork, Eire. We wish her well, and thank her warmly for all her contributions to the Centre’s life over the past three years; we shall profoundly miss all the things she has been able to do for us. We also say goodbye to Mr H. W. Lee, who returns to his native South Korea after successfully completing his doctoral research. We wish him well in his new teaching post at Chonnam University
Annex J
Museum Seminars
Peter Ucko (University College London), ‘Why Do the Questions of Principle Raised by the Sir Flinders Petrie Palestinian Collection Create such “Angst” amongst Museum Professionals?’.
Chris Dorsett (freelance artist and curator), ‘A and B are friends...’.
Roslyn Poignant (independent scholar), ‘Exhibiting “Captive Lives”: Representations of Australian Aborigines in the 1880s and the 1990s’.
Arthur MacGregor (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), ‘Museum Ethnography in Oxford before the Pitt Rivers’.
Ruth Barnes (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), ‘“Ritual Reborn”: Filming an Annual Ceremony in Kedang, Eastern Indonesia’.
Kitty Hauser (Wadham College, Oxford), ‘Revenants in the Landscape: The Discoveries of Aerial Photography’.
Jeremy Coote (PRM) and Sarah Porter (Humanities Computing Development Team, Oxford University Computing Service), ‘Around the World Again: Putting the “Cook-Forster Collection” on the Web’.
Ali Brown (Linacre College, Oxford), ‘Artefacts as “Alliances”: First Nations’ Perspectives on Collectors and Collecting’.
Howard Morphy (Australian National University, Canberra), ‘Narritjin Maymuru: A Life Conceived through Art’.
Nick Thomas (Goldsmiths College, London), ‘On Savage Island’.
Philip Jones (South Australia Museum, Adealide), ‘The Toa Sculptures of Killalpaninna Mission: A Case for an Australian Ethnographic Hoax’.
Cesare Poppi (University of East Anglia), ‘Were Mannhardt and Frazer Right? Cultural Ecology, Knowledge and Masks in West African and Alpine Cross-Cultural Perspective’.
Raminder Kaur (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), ‘Martial Murti: The Changing Iconography of Ganesh in Colonial India’.
Anita Herle (Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology), ‘Objects and Agency: Continuing Dialogues between Cambridge and Torres Strait’.
Elizabeth Edwards (PRM), ‘Tylor, Haddon, and Friends Swap Photos: Preliminary Thoughts on the Social Life of Anthropological Photographs’.
Marius Kwint (History of Art, Oxford), ‘First Steps Towards a History of the Souvenir’.
Robin Osborne (Corpus Christi, Oxford), ‘The Social Construction of Painted Pottery in Classical Athens’.
Jim Bennett (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford), ‘Planning and Practice in the Redevelopment of the Museum of the History of Science’.
Chris Gosden and Chantal Knowles (both PRM), ‘Collecting a Colonial Culture: German Collectors in South-West New Britain, 1884–1914’.
Brian Catling (Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford), ‘The Burr: Poetics and Atmosphere, Dispersal and Infection’.
Sam Maddra (Glasgow University), ‘Glasgow’s Lakota Ghosts’.
