University of Oxford
THE PITT RIVERS MUSEUM ANNUAL REPORT 1 August 2002 to 31 July 2003

MISSION STATEMENT
The Pitt Rivers Museum celebrates human ingenuity and creative skill. It is committed to bringing its world-wide collections to public attention, encouraging the sharing of knowledge, and inspiring deeper understanding amongst people of all cultures, ages, and abilities.

Visitors for the Pitt Rivers Museum as of 1 October 2002
Dr J. Landers (Chairman) The Vice-Chancellor (Sir Colin Lucas) The Senior Proctor (Dr T.P. Softley) The Junior Proctor (Ms E.A. Chapman) The Assessor (Dr S.R. Parkinson) Professor M. Banks (ISCA) Dr J.A. Bennett (Museum of the History of Science) Dr C. Brown (Ashmolean Museum) Professor B. Cunliffe (Institute of Archaeology) Professor A. Goudie (School of Geography) Dr H. La Rue (Pitt Rivers Museum) Professor B.J. Mack (British Museum) Dr M. O’Hanlon (Pitt Rivers Museum) Professor P. Slack (ASUC) Professor K. Thomson (Oxford University Museum of Natural History) Ms J. Vitmayer (Horniman Museum)

DIRECTOR’S INTRODUCTION
Filleting the draft of this year’s annual report, in order to compose my Director’s Introduction, suggests that the year’s activities can be classified reasonably neatly under the headings of Achievements, Disappointments and Problems, Progress, Thanks, and Goodbyes.

The bad news first. Our major disappointment this year was that it was necessary for the University to decide between the Ashmolean and the Pitt Rivers for priority in taking their respective development plans to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). The HLF had indicated that it wished to see only one bid from Oxford in any one round and, for a variety of entirely understandable if locally disappointing reasons, the University decided in favour of the Ashmolean. The Pitt Rivers team—which had been working intensively on our own HLF bid for a major new annex adjoining the main Museum—therefore suspended activity while the Ashmolean’s bid was prepared for the exhaustive HLF evaluation process.
In the meantime (and here ‘disappointments’ shade into ‘achievements’), the Higher Education Funding Council for England launched a new round of Science Research Investment Funding (SRIF), designed to refurbish existing premises or in exceptional cases to build afresh. The Pitt Rivers is eligible, both because its core discipline of anthropology falls under the remit of one of the science research councils and because of its recent track record of attracting major research grants in anthropology. The Pitt Rivers team that had been working on a major HLF bid was therefore re-directed to pursue SRIF funding. Only the research components of our larger HLF scheme are eligible for SRIF funding, which will mean that the original project must be split into a ‘research component’ and a ‘public facilities and exhibition space’ component.

If I may anticipate next year’s report (this introduction is being written after the formal close of the present reporting year), I am delighted to say that the Museum, with the University’s support, has been successful in its application for nearly £4 million of funding to construct the first of what will now be a two-phase annex on the ‘green shed’ site adjoining the main galleries. This first phase will enable at long last the Museum’s academic staff, its conservation laboratory and staff, and its photograph and manuscript collections to return to South Parks Road from their present locations in 64 and part of 60 Banbury Road, which can then be returned to the University. Our major challenge in the coming years will be to see this project through. It will entail considerable decanting, the demolition of a lean-to alongside the existing main galleries in South Parks Road and the construction of a large new building alongside the existing main galleries, with which the new building will interconnect. Simultaneously, we will also have to fundraise for the second stage of the project, which will provide the desperately needed new public facilities and fresh exhibition and education space we require for our visitors, whose numbers are up again this year by another 7% to 149,000.

One further premises advance should be signalled. The University has agreed to make over to the Pitt Rivers and Natural History museums a modest amount of space just to the south of the main entrance to the latter. This will allow the two museums to develop a joint shop, education reception point and, if the space permits, a small café. Our joint bid to the DCMS/Wolfson Galleries Improvement Fund yielded £64,000 towards the cost of refurbishing this space. This is the second grant from this source I can report this year. Earlier, the Fund had generously provided £100,000 towards the costs of re-casing the last closed section of the Museum’s upper gallery, allowing artefacts stored there to be re-housed elsewhere and this space—among the best in the Museum—to be re-opened to the public.

The largest single grant success we had this year was the £224,000 AHRB Resource Enhancement Scheme grant awarded to Jeremy Coote and Elizabeth Edwards for a project focused on the Museum’s distinguished southern Sudanese collections. The project is described more fully in the main body of the report, but I may say here that it reflects not only the standard of the application but also how central the AHRB has become to the Museum’s academic operations. In addition to such grants as this, and the earlier grant awarded to Laura Peers, the AHRB also provides the Museum with nearly £600,000 a year through its Core Funding Scheme. This highly competitive yet admirably light-touch scheme is reassessed every five years; it is hoped that the exceptionally high level of activity in the Museum in recent years will be seen to justify the very substantial support we enjoy from the AHRB.

Other notable grant successes this year included one from the Leverhulme Trust to enable Gonkar Gyatso to spend nearly a year with us: the first time, we believe, that any British institution has had a Tibetan artist in residence. Gonkar’s work relates closely to Clare Harris’s planned exhibition of a selection of the Museum’s remarkable Tibetan photographs, which this year were marvellously augmented by the formal acquisition of the Richardson collection. Here we must record our grateful thanks to the executors of Hugh Richardson’s estate, in particular to Bill Pagan. Dr Harris’s exhibition falls outside this reporting period, but she and Elizabeth Edwards were also awarded nearly £32,000 by the University’s Research and Development Fund as seed-corn funding to pilot an innovative photograph cataloguing project that is intended to become the basis of a further major bid to the AHRB.

The most significant financial donation received this year also relates to the photograph collections. This is the immensely generous gift of £100,000 from Zayed Bin Sultan al-Nahyan, Head of State of Abu Dhabi, to produce a spine catalogue of Sir Wilfred Thesiger’s photograph collection, which is on deposit with the Museum. Here we should also offer our particular thanks to His Excellency Easa Saleh Al Gurg, CBE, who did so much to smooth the transfer of this gift, and whom we hope to welcome to the Museum in the next reporting year when the project is in train. Cataloguing arrangements for the Thesiger collection are already in place and will proceed smoothly, though such is the prominence of the photograph collection that the Museum is in peril of becoming the victim of its own success, with inadequate backing to service the expectations of visiting scholars and indigenous communities

I have covered disappointments, some achievements, and mentioned the occasional problem. ‘Progress’ is represented by (among other things) the accomplishments of the various substantial grants reported last year, whose work is in train. The £150,000 ‘Court Project’, supported by the Designation Challenge Fund, has been racing through the circa 30,000 artefacts displayed on the Museum’s ground floor, checking their numbering and locations and enhancing their documentation. The £330,000 ‘Relational Museums’ project, funded by the ESRC, is allowing us to correlate the multitude of factors which influenced the formation of the Museum’s collections over the colonial period. The £180,000 Heritage Lottery Access project, run jointly with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, which has consolidated the Pitt Rivers’s orientation to a wider public, ended in December with a symposium entitled ‘Academy versus Community? Access and New Audiences in University Museums’, which drew an international audience. We are exceptionally grateful to all the external funders and donors whose support has allowed the Museum to expand its operations in the way that it has been able to do in recent years. The proportion varies from year to year, but generally some two thirds of the Museum’s income now comes from extra-University sources.

This leads me neatly on to ‘thanks’. We are fortunate in the support we enjoy, not only from those already mentioned but also from many others, whether corporate groups such as the Museum’s Visitors (its governing body) and its energetic Friends organization, or the numerous individuals to whom we are indebted. Among those I should particularly thank for their support this year are Charles Chadwyck-Healey, Philip Pullman, Penelope Lively, Michael Palin, Susan Wales, Krystyna Cech, Philip Grover, Barbara Bartl, Jane Christie-Miller, Leonie Hannon, Michael Bitsko, Audrey Smith and Ruth Wickett, and the Museum’s students. I would also like to acknowledge the help and advice I receive from the staff of Academic Services and University Collections at Oxford, especially from Laurence Reynolds, Nigel Berry, John Sharp, and Paul Slack.

Finally, ‘goodbyes’. We were as sorry to lose Ann Nicol at the end of the Heritage Lottery Fund Access project as we are pleased to be able retain Andy McLellan, who was originally funded from the same source. Robert Pearce, Alison Brown, Chris Wingfield, Martin Leedham, Amy Pliszka, and Jackie Stroud were among others whom we were also sorry to see depart. An especial loss was Rachel Walker, our assistant administrator, who had been an enormous support to Julia Cousins and to me in the two years she was with us, particularly in pulling together our application for the SRIF grant. However, I have learned not to say goodbye too terminally to those who leave, as I now realise that they all find their way back: whether in further employment with us in a different capacity, as new colleagues upon appointment to posts in other museums, as volunteers, or simply as friends.

ACCESS
The Heritage Lottery Access Fund (HLAF) project funding finished in December 2002, although a number of project elements were completed after this date. This is reported more fully in the following section. One of the most important results of the work has been the shift in internal perceptions about what access can, and should, mean in the context of an academic institution that is also learning to be more outward looking. Making information available is a priority, not only at a scholarly level, but for all visitors.

As part of the change in emphasis, Kate Gardner was appointed to a new post of Front- of-House Manager in December 2002, with a remit to ensure that high standards of visitor service in the Museum are maintained. Performance-standards development continued, and a new Visitor Services Statement and comments forms were made available in the Museum. Child Protection procedures were developed and a Disability Action Plan agreed.

The various existing pieces of visitor research, dating back to the first visitor survey of 1985, were collated and made available internally. This collection of work provides a clear picture of the way the Museum is perceived at the start of the twenty-first century, and provides a baseline against which to measure shifting patterns of use and expectation in the future

HLAF Project
The final report (submitted in November 2003 and thus outside this reporting period) made it clear that, while two years was sufficient time to establish networks and get things started, it was far too short a time to consolidate them. A wide range of activities were trialled, from mask- making for adults with learning difficulties to object handling with school-aged refugees, and the audience base widened, at any rate in the short term. Inevitably, once project staff left, issues of sustainability came to the fore. However, the Museum was fortunate to be able to retain the services of the Education and Outreach Officer, with funds from external resources including the Friends of the Museum, during the reporting period. It is now unthinkable that the Museum should be without such a post, which is perhaps the single most important outcome. Two other significant results were: (1) the development of a new Access and Learning Policy and Strategy, in accordance with current approaches to public services, which identified the target audiences and staff responsible for delivering them; and (2) the day colloquium, ‘Academy versus Community? Access and New Audiences in University Museums’ held on 29 November 2002. This well-attended and successful event, organized by the Audience Development Researcher on the project, Ann Nicol, was a joint undertaking by the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and the University Museums Group, which also supported the day financially. It fully achieved its aim of exploring access and audience development issues in university museums in the United Kingdom today.

There were other very tangible outcomes, including the special exhibition Objects Talk (see below) and reaching agreement on the designs for banners advertising the two museums. A survey of visitors to both museums over eighteen months was completed in October 2002 and the analysis presented to the staff of both museums in December 2002. This provided much- needed information on the current visitor profile, which has been used as a basis for both internal strategies for Designation Challenge Fund projects and also for regional statistics for the South- Eastern Hub. The next joint survey, based on this questionnaire but also including questions designed to meet new requirements from Resource (The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries) is now underway. A new joint leaflet designed as a friendly introduction with the aim of attracting new audiences to the Pitt Rivers and the Natural History Museum was printed in Spring 2003. The two museums continued to run Family Friendly activities every Sunday with the help of volunteers.

Education Services
The volunteer guiding service continued to deliver programmes for primary schools. Two new volunteers, Linda Teasdale and Jeannine Batstone, joined Joan Shaw, Jean Flemming, Frances Martyn, Rosemary Lee, Barbara Topley, Alan Lacey, and Margaret Dyke. The guiding service lost two committed volunteers with the death of Marlene Hinshelwood and the departure of Natasha Montgomery to a job in a local school. The guides received regular training sessions, twice a month during school terms, delivered by the Education Officer and supported by a wide range of staff members.

The loss of Ann Nicol was keenly felt at the end of 2002, as was the loss of the Education Assistant, Ollie Douglas, when he moved over to the Designation Challenge Fund Court Project. Unsurprisingly, the education service struggled to deliver the same quantity and quality of programmes and continues to rely on a range of volunteers to fill this gap. The Education Service took one student for work experience, a 15-year-old with severe learning difficulties, and a great love of the Museum, who worked for one day a week during May and June. The education handling collection grew to some 230 objects, all of which are physically numbered and entered on a database.

In June, Genevieve Bicknell and Isabelle Carré were employed (as a job-share) in the post of Widening Access Project Officer supported by a grant from HEFCE. They will be working with A-level groups, focusing on the music resources of both the Museum’s Balfour Gallery and the Bate Collection, and with a second aim of developing history resources drawing on the photographic collections.
Kate White and Andy McLellan organized two outreach trips to Grendon Prison, introducing long-term prisoners to the collections and connected ideas through a slide presentation and the handling collection.

The Museum’s Education Officer was given the additional task of being ‘Lead Education Officer’ for the University museums, representing them on the South-East Hub (funded by the governmental ‘Renaissance in the Regions’ programme), and on the University’s Committee for Museums and Scientific Collections. The Education Service continued to foster relations with community groups first generated by the HLAF project. In particular, the service continued to work with ‘Open Door’, an organization for adults with learning difficulties. Throughout the year the Education Service also continued to work closely with education staff in the Natural History Museum.

Visitor Numbers
The total number of visitors to the Museum during the year was 149,537. This was an increase of 7.22% from the previous year, despite it being a poor year for overseas tourists because of international terrorism, the war in Iraq, SARS, and a strong pound. There was a rise in booked groups of 3.6% over the year and in taught sessions of 38%. This increase was in part due to the creation of an education space in the special exhibition area during the Objects Talk exhibition. The number of virtual visitors to the web site rose by 61% to almost 212,000 unique visitors (4.4m hits) from 139 countries.

Events and Activities
There was a strong literary theme to Museum events during the year. Initially conceived as the Museum’s contribution to Museums and Galleries Month in May 2003, the series of activities ‘Write around the World’ became a theme for the year. The Friends devised and hosted ‘Cultures: Then and Now’, a cross-cultural trail challenging traditional perceptions of the Museum and showing how the collections are continually changing. Another trail focused on James Fenton’s poem ‘The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford’, enabling visitors to locate the objects amongst the displays. A weekend of creative-writing activities, run with the help of Fiona Sampson (AHRB Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts in the Research Centre for Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Oxford Brookes University), was followed by half-term activities, which included story telling. In addition, more than seventy poems and prose extracts were placed in and around the displays offering the visitor an imaginative, as opposed to a factual, approach to the objects. Some of the pieces were specifically about the Museum’s displays, others on connected topics or ideas. Finally, a creative-writing competition gave visitors of all ages the ideal opportunity to create their own poems, prose, or stories inspired by the collections. The closing date for the competition, National Poetry Day (9 October), falls in the next reporting period.

Throughout the year the Museum offered a range of family activities. Every Sunday, Family Friendly Fun was run in conjunction with the Natural History Museum, offering ‘backpack’ activities, colouring sheets, and ‘sorting boxes’, which are changed every six months.

This year the activities were ‘Games that Help you Look at the Museum’ and ‘Toys and Models’. Pitt Stops and other activities on the first Saturday of every month and during the school holidays continue to grow in popularity. During the February half-term holiday ‘Museum Magic’, organized in conjunction with the Natural History Museum and supported by a small army of student volunteers, was attended by 1000 children over three days.

In March and April outreach work was done with Barton First School as part of the Oxford Literary Festival. The children then came to the Museum and worked with a storyteller, finally generating their own stories that were performed in the Museum. From September 2002, object-handling sessions called ‘Become a Curator’ were offered. The programme was developed in conjunction with Local Education Authority advisors to encourage schools to look at wider curriculum issues and the role of museums. In June 2003 it was expanded to become a joint project with the Natural History Museum called ‘Making Museums’. Education staff from both museums did outreach work with all the Year 6 primary classes in the Kidlington area (200 children), followed by full-day visits to the museums during which the children were taken through all the museum processes resulting from an archaeological dig: recording information, researching objects, handling them correctly, conserving them, and ‘virtually’ placing them in a museum case. Conservation staff also gave expert advice. The children then returned to school and created their own museums. In May a workshop was run with the artist Dinos Chapman (of the Chapman brothers), in which children created etchings of African sculptures to complement the artist’s own etchings, then on display at Modern Art Oxford as part of the exhibition The Rape of Creativity. The Pitt Rivers offered music-making workshops for the Cowley Carnival in June.

Visits ‘behind the scenes’ continue to be extremely popular. There were a number of group visits to look at the textile collections in their new home with the new open-storage facility. These included groups from the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, the East Oxford Weavers, the Woodstock Embroidery Group, and the Cherwell Creative Arts Network.

The Museum was also the location for filming on several occasions ranging from a ‘Timewatch’ programme about Rameses III to Philip Pullman on ‘Do You Believe in Magic’. BBC Oxford came to film for Clash of the Cities, a programme about the selection of the European Capital of Culture 2008, as did BBC ‘Look North’. A sequence in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, part of the BBC’s ‘Big Read’ series, was also filmed in the Museum.

ICT
The year has seen a number of important developments as ICT takes an increasingly central role in the provision of information. The developments involving access and on-line response from users in source communities has been particularly rewarding. For the first time, a computer access point was provided within the Museum as part of the Objects Talk exhibition, offering multi-layered access to information about the objects on display. Development of the online collection catalogues continued with the addition of an ‘on display in the court’ location field, as part of the outcomes of the ‘Court Project’. Two new research projects with major ICT components began during the year: both the ‘Tibet Visual History Online’ pilot project and the ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’ project will have substantial web-accessible, collection- based research output in the near future. ‘Pacific Pathways’ and the ‘Court Project’ continued throughout the year. Development of the Museum’s collections catalogues continued, utilizing improved network, hardware, and software technologies. As did the development of the Museum’s web site, with updated listings, improved online collections catalogues, re-designed education pages, downloadable fact sheets, and an accessibility booklet. During the course of the year a new Museum committee was formed to monitor, co-ordinate, and improve web output. The burden of this greatly expanded ICT work falls on Haas Ezzet, the Museum’s tireless ICT Officer.

DISPLAY
Permanent Displays
This year the Museum was awarded £100,000 by the DCMS/Wolfson Foundation Museums & Galleries Improvement Fund. The most visible part of the project will be the re-opening of the east end of the upper gallery, which has been used as a storage area for musical instruments for many years. During the course of the year, the instruments were consolidated into the reserve collection at 60 Banbury Road so that new display cases with integral storage beneath them can be installed. This means that at long last all the display areas will once again be open to the public. The second element of the project is no less significant. A purpose-built case was installed in the lower gallery so that for the first time the Museum will be able to display original photographic material in controlled conditions. This will enable us to meet at least part of the increasing interest in the photographic holdings. These projects will only be completed during the next reporting period, but a great deal of enabling work has already been done.

An interpretation strategy for the permanent displays was developed and evaluation carried out on what improvements to the general interpretation of the displays would be most welcomed by the public. This was a key element in the application to the Designation Challenge Fund for the ‘Court Project’ and Ollie Douglas was appointed as Interpretation Officer to generate a variety of interpretative aids. A specific interpretation strategy was developed for displays in the Museum’s court and the first two of four focus-group meetings were held in June and July 2003 with adults who had first been contacted during the development of the Objects Talk exhibition. In addition, new case headers were installed in the court, each case was visibly numbered, and a team of volunteers was recruited to start researching the displays on a case-by- case basis.

The opportunity provided by the fact that the North American clothing case had to be cleared to deal with a suspected insect infestation was used to create a new display in the case. Laura Peers worked with technical services, conservation, and collections staff to organize this. A specialist mount maker was also employed to customize bought-in mounts, thereby ensuring both that the objects have the best possible support and that they can be easily removed for study by visiting researchers.

Special Exhibitions
Transformations: The Art of Recycling closed on 8 September 2002 after two-and-a-half very successful years (see previous annual reports for details). It was replaced as the Museum’s main special exhibition by Objects Talk: Interpreting Objects through Community Groups which opened on 5 October (and will run until August 2003), the first special exhibition in the Museum to be devised and curated by education staff. The socially inclusive project that culminated in the exhibition was the outcome of a series of workshops that took place during the Museum’s HLAF project. These involved local community groups and societies and were aimed at encouraging audience growth amongst traditionally non-visiting local audiences.

The exhibition itself explored the many ways that objects ‘speak’ to people and people ‘respond’ to them. Fourteen different Oxford community groups contributed, including local history societies, young asylum seekers, the Indian Union, the West Indian Day Centre, Over 50s Clubs, and the Oxford Artists Network. All the groups participated in handling sessions (predominantly outreach classes), using the Museum’s education collection to focus on ways of using and interpreting objects. Most groups then visited the Museum to explore the displays and choose objects, creating their own labels to explain what the objects mean to them. Everyone who gave a response had at least one of their selected objects in the exhibition, which ultimately comprised 170 individual pieces. The exhibition also included fifteen original artworks by local artists who chose and responded to objects by creating art rather than writing texts. These included one piece made by a group of elderly people with dementia, who responded in sculpture to objects from the education collection.

The result was an exhibition with a layout that loosely echoed the typological categories of the main displays but also reflected the personal preferences, stories, interests, and knowledge of individual members of the public. There was a computer interactive incorporating the Museum’s collections database, as well as more traditional curatorial responses. As well as providing room for such ideas to be trialled, a larger-than-usual space was left in the exhibition area for educational activities.

As usual, there were other, smaller special exhibitions elsewhere in the Museum. Return to Sender: Where Do You Come From? (see previous annual report for details) continued through the year in the lower gallery. It had to close on 31 July in order to make way for the new photography case, but it is hoped to re-launch this popular exhibition elsewhere in the Museum in the future. Object Parts? From the Lighting Store, also in the lower gallery, a site-specific intervention by local artist Michelle Stevenson, which drew attention to some of the curatorial and conservation issues behind the Museum’s collections, closed on 29 September. It was followed by another installation, Mrs Cook’s Kete, which ran from 2 November 2002 to 27 April 2003. This installation, by New Zealand artists Christine Hellyar and Maureen Lander, took as its starting-point the notion that a trunk containing eighteenth-century South Seas material had recently been found in south London. Through their creation of the fictional artefacts found in the trunk and the placement of them in the Museum, the artists commented on the Museum and its collections and their relevance in the world today. Mrs Cook’s Kete was made possible by a grant to the artists from New Zealand Arts. Losing the Thread ran from 12 May to 7 September. This exhibition of mixed-media works was based on studies made during visits to the Museum by members of a group of local textile artists.

COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT AND CARE
Reserve Collections
Work by collections management, conservation, and technical staff to upgrade storage of the Museum’s reserve collections at Osney Mead and elsewhere continued through the year. Additional shelving was purchased to make better use of the existing racks at Osney and to prevent damage caused by laying objects on top of each other. The reserve collections of headgear and related items (736 items in all) were removed from Osney to the new textile store at the Balfour Building. This made it possible to remove the firearms and related material from the main museum to Osney and the reserve collections of archaeological metalwork from 60 Banbury Road to the main museum where the dry environmental conditions are more appropriate. At Osney itself, the storage of the Museum’s collection of skulls was upgraded to meet current ethical guidelines. Each skull was checked and its documentation enhanced before being placed in an individual box. Amongst other work, the African ceramic collections were re- boxed, the reorganization of the shields was completed, and work began on upgrading the storage of the reserve collections of figures, masks, and large body-adornment items.

The textile collections re-opened for research from November. The size of the collection has increased since last year due to a large donation, so the work of re-storing it as part of the visible storage system is ongoing. The locations system is being updated and there are now more lists of the textiles in the storage drawers, improving object retrieval. Staff from technical services modified the display cases in what had been the ‘Hunter–Gatherer’ gallery to create visible storage for the headgear collection. Two storage cabinets have been installed so that material from the Museum’s Cook-voyage collections can be kept together in improved conditions. Some archaeological Peruvian textiles, found stored in inappropriate glass frames, were re-stored in custom-made acid-free folders.
The musical instrument store at 60 Banbury Road had to be temporarily cleared to allow new furnishings to be installed so that the space could be more efficiently used. However, this proved more problematical than had been envisaged originally; the storage units came with a manufacturer’s error and the original tight timetable became impossible to achieve. While it is good to have more of the musical instruments on one site, what has been achieved does not fulfil all that was hoped from it in terms of improved access.

In the photographic collections, the negative collections were re-stored and the locations indexing improved. Thanks to a grant from the Hulme University Fund, good progress was made in stabilizing, copying, and making available parts of the film collection. However, the long-term provision for film remains problematic, with no curatorial and collections care available for its specific needs. This is only one element in the increasing workload of an under-resourced department demanding a wide range of specializations.

Acquisitions
A list of the new acquisitions during the year is given in Annex B. Among the most notable acquisitions was Joshua Bell’s well-documented field collection
from Papua New Guinea, commissioned by the Museum. There were also a number of notable donations. Among these were: the Gigi Crocker Jones collection, with related documents, of Omani baskets, textiles, and other material; Michael Aris’s 3000 photographs of Bhutan and neighbouring areas; Father Damien Webb’s collection of materials relating to children’s singing games; R. W. M. Clouston’s collection of materials relating to English church bells; and the personal papers of musicologist Anthony Baines. In addition, the Hoskold collection of material from Argentina that had been on loan to the Museum from the Cotteswold Naturalists’ Field Club since 1938 was formally donated.

Loans
The Museum’s active loans programme is an important aspect of its work, providing greater access to its collections both in the United Kingdom and abroad. The Museum was pleased to be able to assist a number of institutions with their special exhibitions during the year. There were two new loans (a total of twenty-two artefacts) from the object collections during the year, one in the UK and one overseas.

In June 2003, nineteen amulets formerly belonging to the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum were loaned to the British Museum for the exhibition Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome; they are due to be returned in November 2003. In July, three amulets were loaned to the Valencia Institute of Modern Art for the exhibition The Eyesight and The Vision; they are due to be returned in October 2003.

A number of outstanding loans were returned during the year. Eight Neolithic stone tools from the Channel Islands loaned in March 2002 to Jersey Museums for an exhibition at La Hougue Bie Museum were returned in November. Four Ainu artefacts from the collections of Neil Gordon Munro loaned in April to the Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture for the exhibition A Scottish Physician’s View: Craft and Spirit of the Ainu from N. G. Munro Collection, shown at the Historical Museum of Hokkaido, Sapporo, Japan and at the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History, Yokahama, Japan were returned in September. Two Australian Aboriginal clubs loaned to the South Australian Museum, Adelaide in March 2000 were returned in February 2003. Nine objects loaned to the new National Museum of Australia, Canberra in March 2001 for their inaugural exhibitions were also returned in February. In addition, a collection of material that had been on loan from the Royal Armouries since 1915 (PRM collection 1915.48) was returned, except for the retention of a few items on permanent display.

Cataloguing
With the successful completion of the DCF-funded retrospective cataloguing programme during the previous year, staff and visitors had for the first time the luxury of being able to access all the Museum’s primary records on the computerized databases, versions of which are also available online. During the current year a number of improvements were made to the design and utility of the databases and to the online facility. During the year, 4,635 new entries were added to the databases (2,454 object records and 2,181 photograph records), the majority of these relating to new accessions. An enormous number of enhancements were made to individual records: 233,597 in total (229,271 to object records and 4,326 to photograph records). This exceptional figure is due in large part to the work on the object records carried out by Alison Petch as part of the ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’ project.

Work continued on re-cataloguing a number of collections throughout the year. Sarah Milliken continued her work on the Museum’s extensive Egyptian Palaeolithic collections, which has resulted in the identification and numbering of some 1,500 stone tools of which some 1,200 will be included in her catalogue (to be published in the next reporting year). This work was supported by the efforts of volunteer Susan Wales. During the summer of 2002, Anne Haour and Chris Wingfield reordered and repacked the Museum’s collections of stone tools and related material from Southern Africa. With the support of a grant from the James A. Swan Fund, they also carried out background research into the history of the collections and their collectors, with a particular focus on the work of E. J. Dunn. Some enhancement of the Museum’s database records was also carried out, but further work will be necessary to number individually each of the 7,000+ stone tools and update each record accordingly. It is hoped to make progress with this work during the next reporting year.

With the help of a British Academy small grant, awarded to Jeremy Coote, Gilbert Oteyo carried out a detailed analysis of the Museum’s holdings of body ornaments from the Luo people of Kenya. His detailed analyses have been loaded on to the database and form the basis for on- going research.

Inroads were made into the photographic collections backlog with some large sections being catalogued and imported into the databases. The employment of a Student Assistant to assist the Curatorial Assistant in the day-to-day running of the collection and provision for research visitors has made a real difference, allowing precious staff time to be expended more usefully. Improvements to the photograph collection database continued, and a start was made on documenting the collection of lantern slides.

In a new development, the process of adding to the object database treatment reports for objects that have undergone interventive conservation was begun. This is already making information retrieval easier for conservation staff and making additional information available to collections staff.

Conservation
The move from the old conservation laboratory to the new facilities in the Balfour Building was more or less completed by August 2002. The new facilities are larger and better than they have ever been and the team already feels well established.
Some conservation time was calculated as matching funding for the ‘Court Project’. Working from the scaffolding, kitted out with facemasks and in very cramped conditions, conservation staff cleaned all the objects on display above the wall cases in the court prior to their being physically numbered and tagged. Other major tasks included checking and cleaning 271 objects in the case devoted to religious figures from Asia, as well as ongoing interventive conservation and re-packing throughout the court area.

Other routine tasks were continued: 208 objects were treated and the musical instruments from the store cleaned. Three large new collections (some 900 pieces) as well as individual new accessions were bagged and frozen as part of the Museum’s integrated pest management programme. The insect pest survey was continued in the main museum and the annual surveys of the music gallery at 60 and at Osney were completed.

The department has benefited greatly from the work of a number of interns over the year, whose help has been particularly appreciated as the staffing levels have been frozen since Robert Pearce, whose expertise has been greatly missed, left the team in March 2003. The following worked with us during the year: Katerina Koukouli, from University College London (Conservation); Pierrette Simpson, University College London (Conservation and Museum Studies); Heidrun Gassner from the V&A/Royal College of Art; Amy Crossman, Lincoln University (Conservation and Restoration); Barbara Bartl, Leicester University (Museum Studies).

Designation Challenge Fund: Court Project
In November 2002 the collections management team on the ‘Court Project’, funded by a grant from the Designation Challenge Fund, began working through the displays in the Museum court. The team, consisting of Marina de Alarcón, Chris Morton, John Hobart, and Laura Phillips, were aiming to locate, number, measure, and improve the database entries for all the objects on display. Areas of the court were screened off with Perspex screens, enabling the team to work on the collections during opening hours while allowing members of the public to see the team in action. By March 2003 work on nearly all the objects on display had been completed and the team began work on the objects in storage. By the end of the reporting period, 26,642 objects had been processed and the team is now aiming to finish work in the court by January 2004. The success of this part of the project has been greatly assisted by the efforts of the Museum’s ITC Officer, Haas Ezzet, and those of the conservators and technical services staff.
A second component of the ‘Court Project’ focused on the production of new collections- based interpretation for the displays. Ollie Douglas was appointed as Interpretation Officer with responsibility for developing a strategy reflecting the interests of existing visitors, and identifying new ways of responding to the needs of the target audiences (young adults aged 16 to 24, and young families). This resulted in the creation of individual case headers to replace the (often missing) original ones, and a numbering system to aid case identification. Amongst other forms of evaluation, four focus groups were organized, which gave us insights both into visitors’ enthusiasm for the displays and also their frustration with the lack of information on the typological basis of their organization. We are now considering additional aids to interpretation, including a selection of case notes and fact sheets, an extended audio tour, and a new map and souvenir leaflet highlighting the typological arrangement of the collections.

RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
Members of the Museum’s staff continue to be involved in numerous research projects, both within and beyond the Museum. Some idea of the range of this work can be gained from the individual entries in Annex D: Staff Activities and Annex E: Staff Publications, as well as from Annex F: Museum Seminars.
Research Projects

Research is an integral part of many aspects of the Museum’s work, ranging from that carried out with the aid of externally funded projects to the detailed investigations that are carried out as part of accessioning procedures and cataloguing (see above). As in previous years, Museum staff were again successful in obtaining the major research grants that enable the institution to stay at the cutting edge of contemporary, particularly collections-based, research. This section introduces just some of the major research projects carried out by Museum staff during the year.

‘Pacific Pathways: Multiplying Contexts for the Forster (“Cook-Voyage”) Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford’, funded by a grant from the Innovations Awards Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, continued throughout the year. Originally scheduled to be completed in April 2003, the project has been extended until September 2003 and will be reported on fully in next year’s report.

In November 2002, Jeremy Coote and Elizabeth Edwards were awarded £224,668 from the Resource Enhancement Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Board for ‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’. The collections of objects and photographs from the Southern Sudan comprise one of the Museum’s major resources of great interest to researchers around the world, not least because of the strong tradition of work in the area within Oxford anthropology. During the lifetime of the project (from October 2003 to December 2005), the 1,100+ objects and 5,000+ photographs will be individually recatalogued and images of them loaded on to computer. The final product will be an illustrated online catalogue database. Other planned aspects to the project will be reported on in future years.

Staff worked on other collections-based research projects during the year. Clare Harris worked on the development of the forthcoming special exhibition Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital 1936–1947. The concept for this exhibition was partly triggered by a series of important donations to the Museum of photographs, film, and albums made by British officials who had worked in Tibet in the 1930s and 1940s. Since 1998 the Museum has received material from Harry Staunton (the medical officer with the 1940 British Mission to Lhasa), Sir Evan Nepean (the telegraph operator with the 1936–37 Gould Mission to Lhasa), and finally in 2001 the offer of the collection of Hugh Richardson, the last British representative to Tibet who served from 1936 to 1950. Dr Harris conducted research on these new acquisitions, connecting them with photographs and documents already held in the Museum’s collections and the wider field of literature on Tibet.

A major initiative this year has been the ‘Tibetan Visual History On-Line’ project. Elizabeth Edwards and Clare Harris were awarded a grant of £31,969 from the University of Oxford’s Research and Development Fund to carry out a pilot project exploring the ways in which a flexible resource of images from Tibet might be created, with interactive facilities to encourage the articulation of alternative histories. This is now available on-line and an application has been submitted to the AHRB for a major grant to extend the project.

Amongst other developments, Hélène La Rue began a project researching the Damian Webb collection of children’s singing games and conservation staff assisted Stephen Buckley of the University of York with ‘non-destructive’ testing of tiny fragments from some of the Museum’s collection of Egyptian mummified animals to gain information about wrapping treatments and the use of ritual unguents.

Research Visitors
There were 251 recorded research visits to the Museum during the year requiring the retrieval of material from the reserve collections. Of these, 92 were to the object collections and 159 to the photographic and manuscript collections. The total number of recorded research enquiries dealt with by Museum staff was 2785. Of these, 1510 were received by email, 624 by phone, 296 by post or fax, and 355 in person. For the third year running there has been a substantial increase in the number of people researching the photographic collections. This 25% rise since last year is reflected in a similar increase in the number of enquiries handled and highlights a continuing trend and the ongoing need for additional resources. This is particularly important as another continuing trend is meeting the expectations of visiting scholars representing source communities, who often wish to place large print orders.

Teaching and Examining
The Museum’s research and scholarship shapes and influences the teaching that members of staff carry out as part of their University duties. Museum staff continue to teach on the University’s undergraduate degrees in Archaeology & Anthropology, Human Sciences, Modern History, and Geography; on the M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography; and variously for M.Sc., M.Phil., and D.Phil. students reading Social Anthropology, History of Art and Visual Culture, Archaeology, and Music. During the course of the year, Museum staff gave 260 University lectures and 158 seminars and tutorials. Details of the teaching and examining carried out by individual members of staff are given in Annex D: Staff Activities.

Balfour Library
The Balfour Library continues to be central to the Museum’s work and is used daily by Museum staff, students, and visitors. It was another very busy year; higher student numbers created the need for more books on reserve and the number of loans (4831) was close to the record. The retrospective conversion project continued: there are now 15,201 local copy records of 13,251 titles on OLIS. The Library is very grateful to Jane Christie-Miller for work on creating card catalogues for pamphlets, book, and map holdings. A list of donors is provided in Annex B: Acquisitions.

PADMAC
The PADMAC Unit for the study of Palaeolithic artefacts and associated deposits mapped as clay-with-flints is located at 60 Banbury Road and continues to be administered through the Museum. A multi-disciplined, geo-archaeological unit, it specializes in one of the most neglected areas of Palaeolithic research, offering students and researchers an opportunity to apply geological/sedimentological techniques and thinking in the context of the earliest evidence of human occupation of Britain (around 600,000 to 120,000 years ago) through the study of the deposits mapped as clay-with-flints and associated Palaeolithic artefacts.
This year was notable for the increasing recognition by the prehistoric academic community of the value and importance of Palaeolithic artefacts from deposits mapped as clay- with-flints, the deposits themselves and the geomorphological processes that have retained these ancient stone-tools on the chalk downlands over geological time. This success is due largely to the publications of Julie Scott-Jackson and the work of the PADMAC Unit in applying and promoting research techniques to aid our greater understanding of the deposits being researched.
The Unit carried out an intensive and varied programme of fieldwork during the year: at Lower Kingswood (Surrey), in September and November 2002; at Wood Hill (East Kent), at Herne Bay and Pegwell Bay (Kent), at Owl Pit, Bradfield and Pincents Kiln, Theale, (Berkshire), in November 2002; at Twyford and Croft Field, Ibworth (Hampshire), in February 2003; at Worting Wood, Ibworth, Hannington, Burnt Park Centre and Burnt Park South, Newton Valance, Alton, Farleigh Hill, Farleigh Wallop (Hampshire), in March 2003; Bayardo Farm, Marlborough (Wiltshire) and Wood Hill (East Kent) in April 2003; and at Frilford (Oxfordshire) and Bush Down, Burnt Park North and Burnt Park Centre, Newton Valance (Hampshire), in July 2003. Activities included geophysical, geological and sedimentological investigations, artifact assessment, and fieldwalking. Post-excavation investigations, including laboratory-based soil analysis, were carried out throughout the period.

Thanks to funding from the BHR Group for the purchase of some advanced deep penetrating (12m) geophysical equipment (a Tigre 64 (Resistivity)), the unit was able to undertake resistivity surveys for all field investigations, providing (where appropriate) geophysical data to local archaeological groups. Members of the Unit are also able to utilize other geophysical techniques, including magnetometry and magnetic susceptibility, as required. GPS and other micro-topographic survey techniques are now deployed and developed in order to identify and map subtle landscape features.

The PADMAC Unit obtained funding, from the BHR Group, for the training of its members in use of GIS and AutoCAD. Two associates joined the Unit during the year: Penny Horlicks (spatial analysis and geographical information systems) and William B. Scott-Jackson (M.Sc. student in Applied Landscape Archaeology). With their assistance, GIS mapping is now routinely employed for all the Unit’s field projects including overlays of geology, historical maps, aerial photography, and SMR data.

FINANCIAL SUCCESS
The Museum enjoyed continued success in obtaining the external project and research grant funding so crucial to its financial health.

Project Grants
Clare Harris was awarded £10,000 from the Leverhulme Fund for an artist’s residency at the Museum and a further £9,000 from other sources towards the costs of the forthcoming Tibet exhibition. Elizabeth Edwards and Clare Harris were awarded £31,969 from the University of Oxford’s Research and Development Fund for the ‘Tibet Visual History Online’ project. A grant of £5,123 was received from the Sata Foundation through the Michael Aris Memorial Trust towards the costs of cataloguing Michael Aris’s photographs of Bhutan. The Education Service received a grant of £44,520 from the HEFCE Aspiration Fund to employ a Widening Access Education Officer to work with the music collections and the photographic collections. The PADMAC Unit received £40,000 from the Empower Group towards running costs; £25,000 from the BHR group for equipment and £10,000 for an M.Sc. student in Applied Landscape Archaeology; £5,000 from AIL Ltd to develop a relational database; and £250 from the Keble Association Fund/Bursary to enable Alice Thomas to attend a conference.

Research Grants
The following research grants were obtained during the year. Jeremy Coote and Elizabeth Edwards were awarded £224,668 from the Resource Enhancement Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Board for ‘Recovering the Material and Visual Histories of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’. Elizabeth Edwards was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grants to enable her to carry out work in Sydney on nineteenth-century anthropological photographs. Vicky Winton was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant of £4300 to carry out geophysical investigations and excavations at Dickett’s Field, Hampshire.

Museum Shop and other Trading Activities
Total gross sales amounted to £78,842, a drop of 4.1% on the previous year, resulting in a net trading profit of only £2,632. There does not appear to be any single cause for this drop, though among the significant factors are the increases in University staff salary costs, the cramped space in which the shop has to operate (a deterrent factor when the Museum is full), the fact that weekday visitors are spending less, and the lack of any merchandise that could be directly linked to the new special exhibition Objects Talk. Its predecessor, Transformations, was notable for stimulating a high turnover in the many recycled products on sale, which were particularly attractive to the growing numbers of secondary-school groups visiting the Museum.

Other income generated by the Museum included: £2,874 from mail-order book sales; £2,806 from facility hire and filming: £5,504 from photographic services; and £5,291 received in donations (£4,312 through the collecting box).

…. ACQUISITIONS
Purchases
A field collection from Papua New Guinea (purchased for the Museum by Joshua Bell; 2002.85); a Filofax from England and a bag from North America, both made from recycled materials (purchased for the Museum by Julia Nicholson; 2002.100); collections of body ornaments, clothing, and household implements from North America (purchased for the Museum by Laura Peers; 2003.62 and 2003.63); a candlestick, a candelabra, a figurine, and a model, all made from recycled materials (purchased from the Pitt Rivers Museum shop; 2002.61).
Donations and Bequests

Anthony Aris (his late brother Michael’s photographs of Bhutan, Sikim, and Burma, with related materials; 2002.75); Mrs Anthony Baines (a temporarily closed collection of her late husband’s papers and manuscripts; 2003.43); Iris Bars (a tile from North America; 2003.77.1); George Bristow (gloves and socks from Pakistan; 2003.34); John Latto Farquharson Buist (a snuff horn, from Kenya; 2003.12); the estate of the late R. W. M. Clouston (a collection of materials relating to English church bells; 2003.71); Sandra Costello (a collection of mining-related materials from Western Australia; 2003.95); Roger Croston (four photographic portraits of Sir Evan Nepean; 2002.86); Gerard Dekker (a wooden stool from Nigeria; 2003.118.1); Andrew J. Dyer (a knife and sheath, from Melanesia; 2003.28); Elizabeth Edwards (a photograph and two postcards from Africa; 2002.68 and 2003.105); Catherine Fagg (a collection of textile samples from Ghana; 2002.69); Freitag Bros. (a bag made from recycled materials; 2002.101.1); Mrs R. Herklots (three bamboo-and-dough figurines from China; 2002.71); M. J. Hinchcliffe (toy gun and rattle, from Dogon, Mali; 2003.112); E. R. L. Jones (documents relating to the Crocker Jones collections from Oman; 2003.74); Gigi Crocker Jones (collections of basketry, textiles, and other objects from Oman; 2003.9, 2003.10, and 2003.11); Dr H. B. Jones (a collection of objects from Africa, Asia, and India, with photographs from Africa; 2002.91 and 2003.13); Russell Jones (a bird whistle from Malaysia; 2003.54); Denis A. LaShier (three neckties and a bow tie made from recycled rubber; 2002.67); Lichfield District Council (a collection of clothing and accessories from Canada and the United States of America; 2002.84); Stuart Maw (a grass skirt from Papua New Guinea; 2003.24.1); B. Milner (her late son Michael Stewart-Smith’s collection of clothing, jewellery and ornaments from Polynesia; 2003.89); Linda Mowat (two bookmarks from North America; 2003.25); Fuyubi Nakamura and Hisao Yugami (a calligraphic work by Hisao Yugami; 2002.72.1); Olive J. Newnham (samples of Maori embroidery; 2003.86); Sylvia Platt (a Japanese sword; 2002.59.1); N. Redhead (a skirt and weapons from Africa and Oceania; 2003.4); the estate of the late Hugh Richardson (two book covers, a seal, and an ornament from Tibet; 2003.72 and 2003.106); Jean Brown Sassoon (four ciné films taken during her fieldwork in Kenya; 2003.16); Joachim Schmid (a collection of postcards from the Museum’s Transformations exhibition; 2002.79); Mary Smithwick (a stone disc from Yap, Micronesia; 2003.87.1); the executors of the late Aileen Grace Smyly (two silver trays from West Africa; 2003.92); S. Vatsala (four envelopes made from recycled paper; 2003.36); Father Damian Webb (field recordings, photographs, papers, and manuscripts, mainly relating to children’s singing games in Europe and Africa, 2003.88); Chris Wingfield (a collection of beads and other artefacts from Southern Africa; 2003.60); Russell Winterburn (a limited edition print of his portrait of Maggie Papakura (Makereti); 2003.104); George and Felicity Wood (a collection of textiles from Asia and Europe; 2003.69).

Donations to the Library
The Balfour Library received donations of books and pamphlets from or on behalf of: Duane Anderson, Auckland Memorial Museum, Alison Brown, Sally Chilver, Jeremy Coote, Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, Helen Hughes-Brock, Merata Kawharu, Hélène La Rue, the Latin American Centre Library, Peter Micklethwait, the Museum of the History of Science, Cicely Nepean, Laura Peers, Roger Pensom, Steven Seidenberg, and the Tylor Library. In addition, a generous donation allowed the purchase of a number of technical works on textiles for use in the conservation laboratory and textiles store.

… STAFF ACTIVITIES (INCLUDING TEACHING AND EXAMINING)
Jeremy Coote continued his researches into the history of the Museum’s early collections. To this end he visited a number of institutions holding relevant manuscript collections: Christ Church, Oxford; Harrow School; the Sudan Archive at Durham University; the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum archive at the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London; and the M. D. W. Jeffreys collection in the University Archives at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. (The visits to the Wellcome Library and to Johannesburg were made as part of a pilot study, funded by a grant to David Zeitlyn, of the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing at the University of Kent, from the Nuffield Foundation Social Sciences Small Grant Scheme, devoted to the collections of Jeffreys-related material in London, Johannesburg, and Oxford.) As well as supporting a number of Museum- based research projects, he also managed two research projects of his own during the year: the first, funded by a small grant from the British Academy, focused on the Museum’s collection of Luo ornaments; the second, ‘Pacific Pathways’, funded by a grant from the Innovations Awards Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, focused on the Forster Collection from Captain Cook’s second famous voyage. In September, he attended ‘Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments’, a conference at the University of Teeside, chairing a session. In December he attended ‘Exploration in the Wake of Captain Cook’, an ‘Open Museum’ short course at the National Maritime Museum, London. In January he attended ‘Sustaining the Research Agenda: Enhancing the Digital Resource’ a workshop run by the Archaeology Data Service at the University of York. Through the year he contributed regularly to a number of internet discussion lists, particularly that devoted to African arts: H.Afr.Arts. He refereed grant applications for the AHRB and papers for academic journals. He continued to serve as an editor of JASO: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford and as an associate member of the research group ‘Anthropologie, Objets et Esthétiques’ of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He was appointed to the editorial working party of New Africa Arts Books (Dar-es-Salaam). For the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, he supervised two doctoral students in social and cultural anthropology and served as an assessor for others. He gave occasional supervisions to undergraduates, supervised one undergraduate dissertation, and served as assessor of another for the Final Honour School in Archaeology & Anthropology.
Elizabeth Edwards gave the keynote address at ‘MuseumsAustralia’ in Perth in May 2003, as well as giving a session paper and an informal report. During her time in Australia she was invited to the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research (CCR) at the Australian National University, where she gave seminars and met with students at both the CCR and the Department of Anthropology. She also gave a public lecture at the National Library of Australia. Thanks to a British Academy Small Research Grant she was also able to spend ten days in Sydney, working in the Mitchell Library and elsewhere on the history of collecting anthropological photographs in the nineteenth century. While in Sydney, she gave a seminar in the Department of Humanities at the University of Technology. In March she gave a paper at a workshop in the Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Leipzig. During the year, she also gave lectures and seminars at the University of Kent and the National Galleries of Scotland, as well as a gallery talk in association with the David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. She continued to serve on the Photographic Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute and on the editorial boards of History of Photography, Visual Anthropology Review, Visual Studies, and the Oxford Companion to the Photograph. She continued to hold a Visiting Research Fellowship in History of Photography at the London Institute. In Oxford, she continued to contribute lectures, seminars, and tutorials to both undergraduate and post-graduate teaching. She was appointed Departmental Lecturer in Visual Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and taught the new M.Sc. in Visual Anthropology, as well as giving lectures and classes in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (including the anthropology of art option). She gave some 22 lectures and 46 tutorials in all. She co-supervised five doctoral students; one of whom, Kitty Hauser (History Faculty), successfully completed during the year. She also served as an external supervisor for M.Phil. and D.Phil students in other universities; examined one doctoral thesis; and continued to serve as external examiner for the M.A. in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmith’s College London.
Chris Gosden co-organized, with Sir Colin Renfrew and Elizabeth De Marrais, a double- symposium meeting at the McDonald Institute at the University of Cambridge in March; the two symposiums were ‘Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World’ and ‘Art as Archaeology and Archaeology as Art’. Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome, the exhibition that he had been co-curating, opened at the British Museum in June 2003. He was the British editor for the Journal of Social Archaeology (Sage), and continued to sit on the editorial boards of World Archaeology, Archaeology in Oceania and Ethnograpisch- Archäologishe Zeitschrift. He also continued as a member of the Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology Panel of the Arts and Humanities Research Board. During July he excavated with Gary Lock at the Romano-British site of Frilford, South Oxfordshire. For the Institute of Archaeology he gave lectures and tutorials in ‘People, Environment, and Culture’, ‘Material Culture, Art, and Society’, ‘The Nature of Archaeological Enquiry’, and ‘Material Culture in Melanesia’. He was an examiner for the M.Sc. and M. Phil. examinations in European Archaeology and World Archaeology and for Honours Moderations in Archaeology and Anthropology. He acted as an external examiner in the Department of Art History & Archaeology, University of Manchester. He supervised fourteen D.Phil. students in archaeology and anthropology.
Clare Harris gave an invited lecture on contemporary Tibetan art at the Central Asian Institute of the University of Bonn, as part of a symposium on Ladakh (Western Himalayas). She also gave an invited lecture to an international research seminar on the future of ethnographic museums at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Berlin). She gave another invited lecture at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aarhus (Denmark). She also gave a seminar in the Museum’s MAME Friday series on the Tibet Museum, Dharamshala, India. She continued to serve on the editorial board of the journal Ethnos and became a member of the board of Art History. She was successful in obtaining a grant from the Leverhulme Trust for Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso to become the Museum’s first artist-in-residence and worked with him in developing an installation for the Museum. Much of her year was taken up with researching, organizing, and fundraising for the forthcoming exhibition Seeing Lhasa and the accompanying book. With Elizabeth Edwards she co-managed the ‘Tibet Visual History Online’ pilot project and contributed to the cataloguing of the Richardson Tibetan photograph collection. She was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College in September 2002 and is now Director of Studies for Archaeology & Anthropology in the College and a tutor for undergraduate students taking degrees in Archaeology & Anthropology and Human Sciences. She also took over as Chair of the University Standing Committee for the undergraduate degree in Archaeology & Anthropology and as course co-ordinator for the M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. She continued to give lectures and tutorials for these degrees and also taught and examined for the new M.Sc. in Visual Anthropology. She examined three doctoral theses for the universities of Cambridge and Sussex.
Hélène La Rue attended the seventeenth International Congress of the International Musicological Society, in Leuven, in August 2002 and lectured on ‘“And all the Trumpets Sounded for Him”: A Comparative Study of Two Royal Trumpet Traditions, England and Benin’. For the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Music Faculty, she continued to teach ethnomusicology options and supervised the work of six graduate students. She was assessor for the Music Honours examination and an examiner for the M.Sc. and M.Phil. in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography.
Andrew McLellan attended the conference of the Group for Education in Museums in Edinburgh in September 2002. In May, he delivered a paper with Ollie Douglas on the special exhibition Objects Talk at the annual conference of the Museum Ethnographers Group. Also in May he gave a gallery talk at Modern Art Oxford in association with the Chapman brothers’ exhibition The Rape of Creativity.
Peter Mitchell continued to serve on the Council of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, as Secretary of the James A. Swan Fund, and on the editorial boards of World Archaeology, African Archaeological Review, and Before Farming. He was also invited to join the editorial boards of the South African Archaeological Bulletin and Southern African Humanities. He wrote or revised for publication several papers during the year, and work on a book on Africa’s interactions with the rest of the world was largely completed. He was asked to review the operations of the Rock Art Research Unit of the University of the Witwatersrand. He lectured for the undergraduate degree in Archaeology & Anthropology, tutored for his own college (St Hugh’s) and others, supervised graduate students, and co-ordinated the Honour Moderations courses ‘Introduction to World Archaeology’ and ‘Perspectives on Human Evolution’. He also served as an examiner for the Final Honour School of Archaeology & Anthropology, as chairman of Honour Moderations in Archaeology & Anthropology, and as chairman of examiners for the M.St. and M.Phil. degrees in European Archaeology and World Archaeology. He organized the eighth annual Archaeology & Anthropology Open Day and co-organized the fourth Sutton Trust Summer School for Archaeology & Anthropology. He continued to act as Tutor for Admissions at St Hugh’s College. He acted as an external examiner for one doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge and two M.Sc. theses at the University of Cape Town.
Julia Nicholson worked on a number of collections-based projects during the year. In May she attended the Museum Ethnographers Group conference in Leicester, at which she chaired a session.
Michael O’Hanlon was invited to Emory University in Atlanta to give two lectures and to act as a conference discussant, to Queen’s University in Belfast to give the Department of Anthropology’s Distinguished Lecture for 2002, and to present a paper at a conference at University College London. He attended the meeting of the European Ethnography Museum Directors in Leiden, where he acted as panel discussant and visited Brussels to discuss the Tervuren Museum’s development plans with its Director. He was asked to join the Overseers Committee of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, became a member of the University’s Academic Services and University Collections Strategy Group, and served as one of the University’s two representatives on the management board of the South East’s regional Hub. He continued to serve as a trustee of the James Green Centre for World Art at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, as a member of the Policy Advisory Group for the South East Museum, Library & Archive Council (SEMLAC), and on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Journal of Material Culture. He supervised three doctoral students, assisted in teaching the postgraduate degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, and gave talks on the Museum to many visiting groups.
Laura Peers continued to serve on the Working Party on Human Remains (set up by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport), exploring issues related to human remains in UK museums. She continued her research on the Museum’s North American collections, including the Hopkins collection, the Charles A. Pope collection, and the masks from the northwest coast (assisted by Barbara Bartl, an intern from the Museum Studies course at the University of Leicester); she also produced a resource list on Native American cultures. She directed the redisplay of North American Indian clothing in the Museum. In May, and as specified in the Protocol Agreement with the Mookaakin Cultural and Heritage Foundation of the Kainai Nation, she deposited copies of Beatrice Blackwood’s photographs and project research materials, such as transcripts of interviews, with the Red Crow Community College Library on the Blood (Kainai) Reserve in Alberta. In conjunction with Alison Brown, she gave out ‘educator packs’ (including a CDRom containing the photos as well as information about the people in them and the Pitt Rivers Museum) to teachers at all levels in the community. Tribal members present at a feast held to celebrate the handover expressed delight that people in the community would have access to the material. She continued to give lectures and tutorials to undergraduates in Archaeology & Anthropology and Geography, as well as graduates in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and Social and Cultural Anthropology. She was an examiner for Honour Moderations in Archaeology & Anthropology and for the M.Sc. and M.Phil. examinations in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and Social and Cultural Anthropology. She was also an external examiner for a Ph.D. at the University of Glasgow.
Alison Petch was employed from October 2002 as Senior Researcher on the ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’ project. She prepared geographically based statistics on the collections up to 1945 and compiled detailed information on all the Museum’s field collectors and donors, and other people associated with the collections. She continued as a co-opted member of the Museum Ethnographers Group Committee and attended the Group’s annual conference in Leicester in May. She also attended the inaugural meeting of the Museums Histories Group at the National Gallery in London
Heather Richardson assisted with conservation and artefact-handling training for members of the Museum staff and graduate students in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. She attended a seminar on ‘Conservation of Arms and Armour’ at the Royal Armouries in Leeds in April and another on ‘Bone, Antler and Ivory’ at the Horniman Museum in July. She continued to serve as treasurer on the committee of the Ethnography Section of the United Kingdom Institute of Conservation (UKIC). While in New Zealand in September/October 2002, she took the opportunity to visit the stores and conservation departments of Auckland Museum and Te Papa in Wellington.
Julie Scott-Jackson continued as Director of the PADMAC Unit. She acted as Palaeolithic geo- archaeological advisor and committee member of the Avebury Archaeological and Historical Research Group for the Avebury World Heritage Site (English Heritage) and advisor to local archaeological groups on the geo-archaeology of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic and associated deposits mapped as clay-with-flints. She directed and supervised an extensive programme of fieldwork (including resistivity survey and excavation) at the Palaeolithic site of Rookery Farm, Lower Kingswood, Surrey during August and September 2002. With Helen Walkington she worked on a paper to be submitted to the Journal of Archaeological Science. She continued updating the (unpublished) gazetteer of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic artefacts found in relation to deposits mapped as clay-with-flints on chalk downlands of southern England, drawing in part on the relevant collections in the Pitt Rivers Museum. She continued to establish links with relevant departments in the University of Oxford, and at other universities and research establishments. In April 2003 she attended the UK Archaeological Science 2003 conference in Oxford and the ‘Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Day Meetings’ at the British Museum. She supervised the completion of Vicky Winton’s D.Phil. thesis and continued to supervise the work of D.Phil. student Alice Thomas. She also directed the research of Helen Walkington and Vicky Winton.
Birgitte Speake organized sessions on conservation and artefact-handling training for members of the Museum staff and graduate students in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. In April 2003 she attended the seminar on ‘Conservation of Arms and Armour’ at the Royal Armouries, Leeds. While in Australia on Museum business, she visited various conservation laboratories and museum stores, including those at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, the Natural Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, the National Museum in Canberra, and the National Gallery of Australia.
Helen Walkington continued her post-excavation analysis of the soil samples collected by the PADMAC unit, contributing to the interpretation of the context of the Palaeolithic archaeology from Dickett’s Field on deposits mapped as clay-with-flints. With Julie Scott-Jackson she worked on a paper to be submitted to the Journal of Archaeological Science. In October 2002 she started teaching part-time at Oxford Brookes University. In April 2003 she attended the UK Archaeological Science 20003 conference in Oxford and the ‘Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Day Meetings’ at the British Museum, where she gave a seminar on ‘The Contribution of Pedology to Archaeological Investigation: Implications for a Study of Palaeolithic Artefacts on Deposits Mapped as Clay-with-flints’.
Kate White continued to serve on the Ethics Committee of the Museums Association. She continued the two-year programme of Continuous Professional Development, working towards Associate status within the profession. She attended the Museums Association Conference in Manchester in September 2002, and took part in presenting the session organized by the Ethics Committee. In October she attended ‘Employ People? Then Employ Good IP Strategies’ and attended a SEMLAC (South East Museum, Library and Archive Council) event introducing the new access and learning team in the South East. She attended two courses run by the University on ‘Project Management for Administrative Staff’ and ‘Leading Teams’. She also attended ‘Changing Culture: Restructuring in Museums’, a Museums Association seminar focusing on the future direction and management of UK Museums in April 2003. In June she presented a case- study at the Visitor Studies Group seminar ‘Just Visiting? Engaging with Visitors: Why We Should and How to Do It’. She participated in various consultations contributing to Oxford’s bid to be the European Capital of Culture, the concurrent development of Oxford Inspires Social Inclusion Strategy, and the subsequent refocusing of this strategy to invigorate a county-wide festival of culture. She undertook study trips to Manchester Museum, the River and Rowing Museum, Henley, University College London, and the ethnographic museum in Berlin in relation to the Museum’s proposed new building.
Vicky Winton was awarded a doctorate for her thesis ‘A Study of Palaeolithic Artefacts from Selected Sites on the Deposits Mapped as Clay-with-flints of Southern England, with Particular Reference to Handaxe Manufacture’ and was appointed to the position of PADMAC Unit Post- Doctoral Fellowship in Palaeolithic Artefact Technology. She organized a seminar series for the Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre and a flint-knapping demonstration by leading expert, John Lord, for Oxford University undergraduates. In October 2002, she gave a seminar to the Lithic Studies Society at Franks House, British Museum, entitled ‘An Investigation of Acheulian Knapping Skill Development’. She taught four seminar groups at Oxford Brookes University on the subject of early human cognition and tool making and gave eight practical flint-knapping sessions for Oxford undergraduates. During the latter part of the year she made preparations for the proposed PADMAC Unit’s field investigations and excavation at Dickett’s Field, Hampshire. Post-excavation analyses and the preparation of publications resulting from her recent research took up much of her time. She also started to format her thesis for publication by British Archaeological Reports. In April 2003, she attended the UK Archaeological Science 2003 conference in Oxford and the ‘Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Day Meetings’ at the British Museum.

STAFF PUBLICATIONS
Those publications relating directly to the Museum’s collections are marked [*]. Marina de Alarcón (with Claire Warrior), ‘Power and Collecting: MEG Conference 2002’, Museum Ethnographers Group Newsletter (Ocober 2002), unpaginated [pp. 1–2].
Joshua A. Bell, ‘Looking to See: Reflections on Visual Repatriation in the Purari Delta, Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea’, in Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, edited by Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown, London: Routledge (2003), pp. 111–22.
Alison K. Brown (editor, with Laura Peers), Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, London: Routledge (2003).
Alison K. Brown (with Laura Peers), ‘Introduction’ to Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, edited by Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown, London: Routledge (2003), pp. 1–16.
Alison Brown (with Laura Peers), ‘Talking Pictures’, Oxford Today: The University Magazine, Vol. XV, no. 2 (Hilary 2003), pp. 23–5. [*]
Jeremy Coote (with John Hobart and Peter Mitchell), ‘A Rock Art Pioneer: Louis E. Tylor, and Previously Undescribed Painted Rock Fragments from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’, Southern African Humanities, Vol. XIV (2002), pp. 65–78. [*]
Ollie Douglas, ‘Rediscovering the Court’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 44 (April 2003), p. 5. [*]
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Introduction [to Part 2: Talking Visual Histories]’, in Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, edited by Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown, London: Routledge (2003), pp. 83–99.
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Negotiating Spaces: Some Photographic Incidents in the Western Pacific, 1883-84’, in Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, edited by Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan, London and New York: I. B. Taurus (2003), pp. 261–79. [*]
Elizabeth Edwards, Review of Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities, by Anne Maxwell (London and New York, 1999), Aboriginal History, Vol. XXVI (2002), pp. 257–9.
Elizabeth Edwards, Review of You Look Beautiful Like That: The Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, by Michelle Lamunière (Cambridge, MA, 2001), History of Photography, Vol. XXVII, no. 2 (Summer 2003), p. 192.
Eric Edwards, ‘Modern Carib Lidded Basket from Dominica’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 45 (July 2003), p. 8. [*]
Claire Freeman, Review of Collected Sights: Photographic Collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1860s-1930s, by Robin Boast, Sudeshna Guha, and Anita Herle (Cambridge, 2001), Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 15, pp. 138–9.
Chris Gosden, Prehistory: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions, 96), Oxford: Oxford University Press (2003). Chris Gosden, ‘Object Lessons and Wellcome’s Archaeology’, in Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome, edited by Ken Arnold and Danielle Olsen (London: British Museum Press, 2003), pp. 161–83.
Chris Gosden, ‘Frilford/Marcham: Site of Mysteries’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 44 (April 2003), pp. 6–7.
Chris Gosden (with Gary Lock), ‘Frilford: A Romano-British Ritual Pool in Oxfordshire?’, Current Archaeology, no. 184 (Vol. XVI, no. 4; February 2003), pp. 156–9.
Chris Gosden (with Gary Lock and others), ‘The Hillforts of the Ridgeway Project: Excavations at Marcham/Frilford, Oxfordshire 2001’, South Midlands Archaeology, no. 32 (2002), pp. 22–32.
Clare Harris, Review of English in Tibet: Tibet in English: Self-Presentation in Tibet and the Diaspora, by Laurie Hovell McMillin (New York, 2001), Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. LXI, no. 4 (November 2002), pp. 1325–6.
John Hobart (with Peter Mitchell and Jeremy Coote), ‘A Rock Art Pioneer: Louis E. Tylor, and Previously Undescribed Painted Rock Fragments from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’, Southern African Humanities, Vol. XIV (2002), pp. 65–78. [*]
Frances Knight, ‘Exploring the Wellcome Library’ in Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome, edited by Ken Arnold and Danielle Olsen (London: British Museum Press, 2003), pp. 99–131.
George Kwaider, ‘A Bridal Headdress’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 43 (January 2003), p. 9. [*]
Hélène La Rue (editor), The Bate Collection of Musical Instruments: Checklist of the Instruments, Oxford: The Bate Collection of Musical Instruments, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford (2003).
Hlélène La Rue, ‘The Stones Resung: Ethnomusicology and Cultural Property’, in Claiming the Bones, Naming the Stones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity (Issues & Debates), edited by Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute (2002), pp. 224–42.
Peter Mitchell, The Archaeology of Southern Africa (Cambridge World Archaeology), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2002). [UK edition.]
Peter Mitchell, The Archaeology of Southern Africa, Cape Town: Cambridge University Press (2002). [South African edition.]
Peter Mitchell, ‘Recent Archaeological Work in Lesotho: An Overview of Fieldwork, 1988–2001’, National University of Lesotho Journal of Research, Vol. IV (2001), pp. 1–24.
Peter Mitchell, ‘East African Archaeology: A Southern African Perspective’, in East African Archaeology: Foragers, Potters, Smiths, and Traders, edited by Chapurukha M. Kusimba and Sibel B. Kusimba, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications (2003), pp. 167–82.
Peter Mitchell (with Ina Plug and Geoff Bailey), ‘Animal Remains from Likoaeng, An Open-air River Site, and its Place in the Post-classic Wilton of Lesotho and Eastern Free State, South Africa’, South African Journal of Science, Vol. XCIX, no. 3/4 (March/April 2003), pp. 143–52.
Peter Mitchell (with John Hobart and Jeremy Coote), ‘A Rock Art Pioneer: Louis E. Tylor, and Previously Undescribed Painted Rock Fragments from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’, Southern African Humanities, Vol. XIV (2002), pp. 65–78. [*]
Peter Mitchell, Review of The First Bushman’s Path: Stories, Songs and Testimonies of the /Xam of the Northern Cape, by Alan James (Pietermaritzburg, 2001), African Book Publishing Record, Vol. XXVIII, no. 4 (2002), p. 309.
Peter Mitchell, Review of Southern Africa and the Swahili World (Studies in the African Past, 2), edited by Felix Chami and Gilbert Pwiti (Dar es Salaam, 2002), African Book Publishing Record, Vol. XXIX, no. 1 (2003), p. 11.
Julia Nicholson, ‘Pandora’s Box: Body and Cosmos in Amazonia—Beatrice Blackwood Annual Lecture’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 45 (July 2003), p. 4. [*]
Michael O’Hanlon (with Linda Frankland), ‘Co-Present Landscapes: Routes and Rootedness as Sources of Identity in Highlands New Guinea’, in Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (Anthropology, Culture and History), edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, London: Pluto Press (2003), pp. 166–88.
Michael O’Hanlon, ‘Objects Talk’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 42 (October 2002), p. 1. [*]
Jenny Peck, ‘Mrs Cook’s Kete’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 43 (January 2003), p. 6. [*]
Laura Peers (editor, with Alison K. Brown), Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, London: Routledge (2003).
Laura Peers (with Alison K. Brown), ‘Introduction’ to Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, edited by Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown, London: Routledge (2003), pp. 1–16.
Laura Peers, ‘Strands Which Refuse to Be Braided: Hair Samples from Beatrice Blackwood’s Ojibwe Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Journal of Material Culture, Vol. VIII, no. 1 (2003), pp. 75–96. [*]
Laura Peers (with Alison Brown), ‘Talking Pictures’, Oxford Today: The University Magazine, Vol. XV, no. 2 (Hilary 2003), pp. 23–5. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Spencer and Gillen’s Work in Australia: The Interpretation of Power and Collecting in the Past’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 15 (March 2003), pp. 82–93.
Alison Petch, ‘Documentation in the Pitt Rivers Museum: The Contribution of Sir Francis Knowles (1886–1953)’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 15 (March 2003), pp. 109–14. [*]
Laura Phillips, ‘Court Project Update’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 45 (July 2003), p. 1. [*]
Megan Price, ‘The Relational Museum: A Major ESRC-Funded Project, October 2002–September 2005’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 45 (July 2003), p. 4. [*]
Rhianned Smith, ‘Seeing Lhasa’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 45 (July 2003), p. 3. [*]
Benjamin Wilkes, ‘Tibetan Amuletic Dough Moulds’, Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 44 (April 2003), p. 8. [*]

MUSEUM SEMINARS IN MATERIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND MUSEUM ETHNOGRAPHY
18 October 2002: Chris Gosden (PRM), ‘The Relational Museum’.
25 October: Ruth Phillips (Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver), ‘“Disappearing Acts”: Traditions of Exposure, Traditions of Enclosure and Iroquois Masks’.
1 November: Maureen Lander (University of Auckland) and Christine Hellyar (UNITEC, Auckland) ‘Mrs Cook’s Kete’.
8 November: Chloe Colchester (Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, UCL), ‘Room Theology: Cloth, Gifts and the Redefinition of Colonial Space in Fiji’.
15 November: Rachel Payne (Junior Research Fellow, The Queen’s College, Oxford), ‘Noh Masks in the Pitt Rivers Museum’.
20 November: Paul Tapsell (Director Maori, Auckland War Memorial Museum) and Merata Kawharu (Research Fellow, James Henare Maori Research Centre, University of Auckland), ‘Bringing Together Museum and Indigenous Knowledge and Practices: Joint Management of Cultural Treasures’.
22 November: Diane Moon (Independent Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art), ‘The Elegant Solution: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Fibre Arts’.
29 November: Max Cacocci (RAI Index), ‘Healing or Worshipping? Native American Traditional Medicine, Material Culture, and the AIDS Crisis’.
6 December: Sharon Webb (Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge), ‘Contested Histories: Museum Representation and the Sámi’.
24 January 2003: Amiria Henare (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge), ‘Artefacts in Theory: Anthropology and Material Culture’.
31 January: Hassan Arero (Horniman Museum), ‘The Phallus and the Snake: Interpreting a Borana Ritual Object’.
7 February: Clare Harris (PRM), ‘Exhibiting Exile: The Tibet Museum, Dharamsala’.
14 February: Joshua Bell (University of Oxford), ‘If the Purari Was a Kina Shell Who Would Wear It? Dilemmas of Development and History in the Wake of Industrial Logging in the Purari Delta, Gulf, Province, PNG’.
21 February: Simon Harrison (University of Ulster), ‘Landscape and Memory in the Middle Sepik, Papua New Guinea’.
28 February: Richard Gale (University of Oxford), ‘Urban Multicultures and the Politics of Architectural Meaning: Three Mosques in Birmingham’.
7 March: David Neufeld (Parks Canada), ‘Our Land is Our History Book: A Yukon First Nation Perspective on Their Traditional Lands’.
14 March: Peter James (Birmingham City Library), ‘Photography, Outreach and Minority Communities: The Birmingham Experience’.
2 May: Quintin Colville (Linacre College, Oxford), ‘Jack Tar and the Gentleman Officer: The Role of Uniform in Shaping the Class-and Gender-Related Identities of British Naval Personnel, 1930–1939’.
9 May: John Morton (La Trobe University, Melbourne), ‘Such a Man Would Find Few Races Hostile: Imagining Dialogue Between Experts and Aborigines in the Museum’.

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.

The decline in the value of the South African rand along with communication difficulties with the South African bank where the Swan Fund is held, hindered the Fund’s operations during this reporting year. Nevertheless, the Fund made the following grants: £7,754 to Anne Haour and Chris Wingfield for curatorial improvements to the Museum’s collections of stone tools and related material from Southern Africa; £1,170 retrospectively towards the cost of participants attending the Association of Social Anthropology’s conference in Arusha, Tanzania; and £250 towards the costs of research in southern Africa by John Hobart.

FRIENDS OF THE PITT RIVERS MUSEUM REPORT BY LIZ YARDLEY, HONORARY SECRETARY
The Friends enjoyed an active and stimulating year, with a varied programme of talks, visits, glimpses behind the scenes, and fundraising events. The Wednesday evening lecture programme, organized by Megan Price, began in October with Peta Ree, biographer of Henry Salt, on ‘Abyssinia Observed 1804–1830: Three Englishmen Abroad’ and was followed in November by Roger Moorey from the Ashmolean Museum on ‘Idols of the People: Clay Figures in Old Testament Times’. At the Christmas party, the Friends and their friends, staff, and past speakers were entertained by the musical group Cachet. The new year was celebrated by two behind-the- scenes visits; the first to conservation’s new home in the Balfour Building, kindly hosted by Birgitte Speake and Heather Richardson, with the second being a delightful and amusing family evening, ‘Behind the Scenes with George: The Skeleton of the University Museum of Natural History’ with George McGavin. In February, the new Friends welcome party was combined with an invitation to all to hear about work on the Museum’s ‘Court Project’ from Ollie Douglas (Access and Interpretation Officer). At the beginning of March there was a most enjoyable visit to the Horniman Museum and, at the end of the month, there was a fascinating talk on ‘The Relational Museum: New Developments at the Pitt Rivers Museum’ by Chris Gosden. In May, we visited Snowshill Manor, while the final lecture of the year was given in June by Beverly Lear on ‘An Anthropology of Gardens’.

For many, the highlight of the year was the major fundraising event, ‘Inspired’, at which the celebrated authors Penelope Lively and Philip Pullman delighted a capacity audience in the lecture theatre of the Natural History Museum by explaining how the Pitt Rivers had influenced their writings. This was followed by drinks and a buffet in the Museum. It was a wonderful collaborative event between Friends and Museum staff, kindly sponsored by Cazenove fund managers, Lafarge Cement, Borders bookshop and Weston Turville Golf Club. The event not only reached out to an audience beyond the Friends, but raised £3,600 for the Museum’s Education Service. Moreover, it gave the Friends great encouragement for their commitment to supporting the Education Service and for the fundraising that will be needed for the Museum's development on the ‘Green Shed’ site. The Friends were delighted when Philip Pullman later agreed to become a Patron.

There was a reminder of the Museum’s rich South American collections when Stephen Hugh-Jones, Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology spoke on ‘Pandora’s Box: Body and Cosmos in Amazonia’ for the Friends annual public event, the Beatrice Blackwood Lecture, in May. As usual, we are very grateful to the Administrator of the Inorganic Chemistry Department for allowing the use of the lecture theatre free of charge, and to Donald and Ione Tayler for hosting a delicious supper.

The theme of the Kenneth Kirkwood Memorial Fund study day in March was ‘Pastoralists’. Organized by Shahin Bekhradnia and introduced by Mike O’Hanlon, speakers Peter Parkes (University of Kent), Katherine Homewood (University College London), Dawn Chatty (Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford), and Charles Ramble (Oriental Institute, University of Oxford) transported participants to Pakistan, sub-Saharan Africa, Oman, and Tibet. We are again grateful to Rhodes House for hosting the event and to Haas Ezzet and Sue Brooks for so generously giving up their Saturday to ensure the smooth running of the audio-visual and catering facilities.

Museums and Galleries month was celebrated in May when Friends hosted a trail entitled ‘Cultures Then and Now’, to show that the Museum’s collection is a living, growing one, reflecting the changes in time across cultures. Throughout the year, a number of Friends continued to be involved in the schools guiding service, in helping with holiday activities, and in hosting the Family Friendly Fun sessions on Sunday afternoons, all organized by the Museum’s education service.

At the Friends Annual General Meeting in June, Donald Tayler, having served three years as Chairman, agreed to continue until a suitable replacement could be found. (Later, in September, Richard Briant agreed to act as Chairman until the 2004 Annual General Meeting.) José Allen, Shahin Bekhradnia, Deborah Manley, Anne Phythian-Adams, and Liz Yardley (Secretary) retired from the Council after more than thirty years’ service between them. Dymphna Hermans was elected as Secretary, and Margaret Dyke, Barbara Isaac, and Linda Teasdale were warmly welcomed as new Council members.

Among the contributions to the Museum agreed at the AGM were: £3,000 for the Education Service, £200 for a sewing machine for the conservation department, £500 towards the cost of the publicity and poster material for the Seeing Lhasa exhibition, and £3000 towards the costs of the new photographic case in the lower gallery. Thanks were expressed to all who have given support to the activities of the Friends, through their gifts, time and skills. It was also reported that the Newsletter had yet again been nominated for the ‘Liveliest Newsletter’ award of the British Association of Friends of Museums. Carol Quarini, the editor thanked all those who assisted with the compilation and the mailing.