Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum as of 1 October 2003

Dr J. Landers (Chairman) The Vice-Chancellor (Sir Colin Lucas) The Junior Proctor (Dr I. Archer) 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, Secretary) Professor P. Slack (ASUC) Professor J. Kennedy (Oxford University Museum of Natural History) Ms J. Vitmayer (Horniman Museum)

The Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum, having received from the Director the following report for the period 1 August 2003 to 31 July 2004, presented it as its report to Congregation.

DIRECTOR’S INTRODUCTION
The reporting year began in the best possible way with the news that the Museum had been successful in its bid for nearly £5,000,000 for a new building interconnecting with the existing galleries on Parks Road. The new building will help consolidate the Museum on a single site, and begin the process of providing facilities equal to the importance of the collections. Funding for the new building comes partly from HEFCE’s Science Research Investment Fund and partly from Oxford University, and is a testament both to the Museum’s excellent track record in attracting research and collections grants and to the University’s support of the Museum. The next two years will not be easy. We must anticipate disruption, decanting, dust, and the occasional drama, all of which are inseparable from major building works. We shall, however, plan for and deal with them in the knowledge that we are reshaping the Museum for the new century.
All sections of the Museum have been involved in the planning that has taken place since the announcement. The architectural practice Pringle Richards Sharratt (PRS) has been appointed to develop the earlier consultative work done by Charles MacKeith of Ian Simpson Architects. That earlier work had anticipated a phased development: constructing first a research-oriented spur to the existing galleries, to be followed—once further funding had been secured—by a second fill-in building dedicated to much-needed public facilities. In contrast, the PRS scheme allows the entire site to be roofed-in in a single operation, but phases the fitting-out of the space so created. This has the enormous merit of greatly reducing the total sum needed to complete the building. It does, however, entail earlier demolition of the lean-to buildings against the main galleries, which currently house the Museum’s library, administration, and curatorial infrastructure. The knock-on effects of decanting these components of the Museum’s operations, and ensuring that they will function in new temporary homes, has affected all staff. I am grateful to everyone for their commitment to the new scheme, and their tolerance of the disruption. I am especially grateful to the Museum’s administrative team: to Julia Cousins and Sue Brooks, who both retired earlier in the year, and to Cathy Wright, Antigone Thompson, and my own Executive Research Assistant, John Hobart, all of whom joined over the course of the year and have borne an especially heavy burden.
As the PRS scheme has developed, it has also become apparent that there would be immense practical advantages and longer-term financial benefits to fitting out the new building in a single operation, rather than doing it in two phases, which is all that the current budget permits. It is possible that the shortfall in funding necessary to complete the new building in a single sweep will be reduced, fortuitously, by a change in VAT regulations announced in the government’s July 2004 spending review. This change has added university museums to the list of those entitled to reclaim VAT on goods and services where these support free public access. It seems likely that this will substantially reduce the VAT the Museum needs to pay on the construction costs of its new building, so narrowing the gap between the available budget and that needed to complete the new building in one go. We are energetically looking for ways of bridging this gap.
The Museum has been no less active during the year in building its portfolio of collections-based research projects and grants. Elizabeth Edwards and Clare Harris were successful in their bid to the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) for a £238,000 grant to research and make available on-line the Museum’s collection of historical Tibetan photographs. The project, to be carried out jointly with the British Museum, received seed-corn funding last year from the University’s own Research Development Fund. We were very grateful for this latter grant; equally, we feel we have made very good use of it. Tibet has been a major focus for the year. Wonderful photographs of Tibet were the subject of the Museum’s special exhibition Seeing Lhasa, curated by Clare Harris, and of the major accompanying catalogue by Clare Harris and the Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya. Tsering will also collaborate on the AHRB-funded project. The Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso, with us over the year as a Leverhulme- funded Artist in Residence, also created a dazzling installation to complement the exhibition.
Aside from this major AHRB grant, the Museum also heard that it had been successful in its bid for the third round of Designation Challenge Funding (DCF), receiving £134,000 (the highest single award made nationally) for the project ‘What’s Upstairs?’ This extends to the Museum’s first and second floor galleries the work of the immensely successful ‘Court Project’, which enhanced the displays, documentation, and location index for the (we now know) 28,844 artefacts in the court. I am grateful to the whole DCF team, but especially to Julia Nicholson, Marina de Alarcón, and Kate White who oversaw the process, as well as to Haas Ezzet, the Museum’s ICT Officer who copes—I am not sure how—with the vast expansion in ICT activity in the Museum. Taken together with the £100,000 project cataloguing Sir Wilfred Thesiger’s photographs (which were formally received by the Museum this year under the government’s ‘Art in Lieu’ scheme), the £224,668 AHRB-funded project to re-catalogue and make available on the web the Museum’s holdings from southern Sudan, and the £330,000 ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’ project, the Museum is now running an unprecedented one million pound’s worth of collections-based research projects of benefit to both the public and the scholarly community.
The same high level of activity also characterized the work of the Museum’s education section, now partly funded through the governmental programme ‘Renaissance in the Regions’. All four of the University’s museums now have education officers part-funded under ‘Renaissance’. Co-ordinated by Andy McLellan, the Pitt Rivers’s own energetic Education Officer, they are now an expected presence at many of the City’s events, in addition to the continuous and lively activities they organize in the museums themselves. Welcome though the ‘Renaissance’ funding is, it remains modest whilst the south-east continues to be one of the lesser-funded ‘Phase 2’ hubs. Along with half a dozen colleagues from other hubs, I was invited to meet the Secretary of State at DCMS to advocate the need for enhanced funding for Phase 2 hubs.
At 155,083, the number of recorded visitors to the Museum was up once more, albeit only by 3.7%. One of these commented in the Museum’s comments book: ‘We were so impressed by the Attendants who took time to speak and explain particular treasures to the children... It made all the difference to our visit. Thank you.’ Such comments indicate that the continuing rise in numbers of visitors in recent years is due at least in part to the welcome they receive from the Museum’s helpful Attendants and from the shop staff, of whom Shirley Careford is the most permanent fixture. However, I fear that this is likely to be a high-water mark, as the decanting and partial gallery closures associated with the building work will almost certainly cause a dip in visitor numbers, at least in the medium term. This may not be so for the number of virtual visitors to the Museum’s website, up over the year to 256,000 (5.99 million hits) from 138 countries, including Bouvet Island, Ascension, Tuvalu, Netherland Antillles, and the Maldives.
I have already referred to the acquisition of Sir Wilfred Thesiger’s photograph collection via the ‘Acceptance in Lieu’ scheme. The other way of adding significantly to the collections is through re-identifying what we already have. Extensive detective work undertaken by Jeremy Coote has uncovered intriguing circumstantial evidence that a small collection of Tahitian and Maori pieces in the Museum’s holdings are previously unrecognized members of that select company: artefacts collected on Captain Cook’s first Pacific voyage. The evidence has been set out in the handsome catalogue Curiosities from the Endeavour, which accompanies an exhibition at the Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby, to which the collection has been loaned. Other loans made over the course of the year have been to the Imperial War Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, while loans were returned from the Valencia Institute of Modern Art and the British Museum.
As we look forward to the coming year, with its decanting, re-housing of artefacts, and vibration monitoring, we are going more than ever to be dependent on the Museum’s conservation and technical services sections. We equally depend on our major sponsors beyond the University: not only the ESRC, MLA’s Designation Challenge Fund, the DCMS/Wolfson Museum and Galleries Improvement Fund, but also especially the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and in particular its Core Funding Scheme that provides the Museum with £600,000 per annum against performance targets. The first quinquennium of the Core Funding Scheme has provided an admirably light-touch and stable platform for the Museum’s operations. Equally, I hope we have justified the investment. Since our core funding award commenced in August 2001, visitor numbers have risen by 26%, we have serviced a total of 948 visiting researchers, visiting hours have been extended by 6 per week, the records for the entirety of the collections have been made available on-line, we have secured a funded education service, we have loaned 167 artefacts to 16 separate institutions, staff have published 137 books and articles, and we have leveraged £1.73 million in academic grants, and—with the University’s help—we have secured funds for a major new building that will allow us to do all these things even better. Next year we must bid to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (as it will by then have become) for the next quinquennium’s core funding, and it is on this record that we shall stand.
As always, I must also express the Museum’s gratitude to the Trusts and individuals who support us financially, and through allowing the Museum and its Friends to use their names. I should particularly mention the W. H. Delafield Charitable Trust whose generosity has assisted work on the Thesiger collection, including its exhibition at the Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock, and Michael Palin for his own steady support of the Museum over the years.
The Museum lost to retirement this year two members of staff who have contributed enormously to it: its Administrator, Julia Cousins, who has been such a support to me and to my predecessors; and Sue Brooks, whose job description is much harder to pin down since she seemed to be everywhere at once. We also said a temporary goodbye to Marina de Alarcón, who was granted one year’s unpaid leave from March 2004. Among those I must also thank are the Museum’s active and supportive voluntary Friends organization, in particular its Chairman, Richard Briant; and Susan Wales, for her continuing work on the Museum’s stone tool collections.
Finally, I am very sorry to report the deaths of John Flemming, a distinguished former Chairman of the Visitors and enthusiastic Friend; Ray Inskeep, former curator and Acting Director of the Museum, an archaeologist renowned for his teaching but someone who always longed to be back in Africa on a dig; R. J. MacRae, long an Honorary Curator of the Museum; and Francis Baden-Powell, whose generosity in 1975 allowed the founding of the Donald Baden- Powell Quaternary Research Centre, named after his geologist father, which functioned under the auspices of the Museum until its transfer to the Institute of Archaeology in 2003.

ACCESS
This year it proved possible to make excellent progress in raising the quality of public access to the collections, providing opportunities for focused audience research, allowing an in-depth review of service provision, and improving display interpretation aids; this last as an outcome of the DCF ‘Court Project’. In addition, the consistent delivery of regular programmes allowed the building of loyal audiences among schools and local families. This has placed us in a strong position to meet the challenges presented by the new building, fundraising, and grant applications, as well as the increased expectations set by ‘Renaissance in the Regions’, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, and new Registration standards.
A new visitor survey, covering both the Museum and the Natural History Museum, was developed by Kate White and Dr S. de Grave (Assistant Curator, Zoology) to update the audience profile provided by the 2001–2 joint survey. Most of the survey work was carried out by students from Oxford Brookes and by the Museum’s own M.Sc. students. Analysis of other visitor research, carried out as part of the DCF Project, provided much needed insights into public understanding of the displays, and resulted in data indicating where improvements were needed, the kind of information wanted, and the manner in which it should be presented. A new souvenir leaflet, a map to the displays, and orientation panels on each floor were also produced as part of the project, as well as other interpretive materials (see below).
An audit of customer service provision was carried out and a strategy drawn up to improve signage and information provision. Linked to this a new policy was developed by Julia Nicholson to ensure that communication and design within exhibitions met the high standards now expected for Designated collections. Analysis of the visitor comments throughout 2003 provided reassuring evidence of visitor appreciation of the welcoming atmosphere and helpful responses provided by Front of House staff. Front of House performance standards were reviewed and reissued, with training provided on the use of fire extinguishers and the implications of the ‘Children in Museums’ manifesto.
The process of updating the public presentation of the Museum in paper and virtual form commenced in May when Julia Cousins began the revision of the existing souvenir guide to the Museum, first published in 1993. A new publisher was found to give the book a fresh design, and a new chapter was incorporated covering the Museum’s vision for the future. Meanwhile, the rapid growth in information on the Museum’s website warranted the formation of a Website Development Working Group to take responsibility for redesigning the website to make it more visitor friendly through a revised presentation of navigation, search, and information options. The revised website will be launched early in 2005. As a spin-off benefit of the various projects focused on the Museum’s photographic collections, the Museum was able to produce a range of free postcards promoting various online projects and other services of public interest.

Education Services
The education section continued to develop a range of services delivered by education staff, the guiding service, and volunteers. School visits rose by 21% over the year, as a result of the Museum’s rising profile both locally and nationally. Most primary schools continued to be taught by the volunteer guides: Joan Shaw, Jean Flemming, Frances Martyn, Rosemary Lee, Barbara Topley, Alan Lacey, Margaret Dyke, Linda Teasdale, and Jeannine Batstone, joined this year by Johnny Acton. Training sessions continued to be delivered by the Education Officer, Andy McLellan, supported by a wide range of staff. Changes in funding led to the departure of Genevieve Bicknell during the year, but Isabelle Carré continued to deliver music programmes to secondary schools (as well as running an increasingly popular staff gamelan group). At the end of the school year the Museum appointed Becca McVean as Education Assistant.
The education service further developed a very positive relationship with the Natural HIstory Museum, to the extent that it is now almost impossible to imagine the two museums not working hand in hand. Andy McLellan and Chris Jarvis delivered object-handling sessions to all the east Oxford schools, and further developed the ‘Making Museums’ project, something that would not have been possible without the help of the Museum’s conservators, Birgitte Speake and Heather Richardson. Both museums continued to offer jointly run Sunday activities for families, and furthered this with an ‘Egyptian Extravaganza’ during February half-term, attended by more than a thousand children. Over the year something in the region of 6,000 children took part in free family activities in the Pitt Rivers Museum. None of this would have been possible without the support of all Museum staff, a small army of volunteers from the student population, and the Friends of the Museum.
While community work was below the levels it had been during the Heritage Lottery Access Fund (HLAF) project (January 2001 to December 2002), education staff continued to work with a range of community groups, particularly ‘Open Door’, an organization for adults with learning difficulties.
As the south-east hub developed, as part of the government’s ‘Renaissance in the Regions’ strategy, Andy McLellan continued to represent the University museums in the development of an education plan for the south-east. This will lead to Oxford University’s museums working together to form an integrated education service, and is likely to lead to further increases in secondary school visits as the Museum strives to become a centre of excellence for the study of art and design.

Visitor Numbers
Visitor figures rose by 3.7% to 155,083. This is not as big a rise as last year, but more in line with the current strategy of focusing on quality rather than quantity in service provision. Given the continuing competition from other attractions and free national museums, this is an excellent result. There was a rise in booked groups of 10% over the year, representing an increase in individuals visiting as part of booked groups of 8.3%. Taught sessions continue to rise steadily with an increase of 7.5%. The number of virtual visitors to the website rose by 21% to almost 256,000 unique visitors (5.99m hits) from 138 countries. Of these visitors 2.6% ‘bookmarked’ the site, an increase of 97% on the previous year.

Events and Activities
The Museum reinforced its commitment to contributing to the cultural life of Oxford and building links with local organizations. Although the City’s bid to become European Capital of Culture 2008 was unsuccessful, the Museum supported the campaign to reshape this plan to develop a county-wide festival in 2007. This resulted in a successful joint bid, by the Museum and the Natural History Museum, for funding to create a series of storytelling events in 2005 as part of the ‘Evolving City’ bid to the Urban Cultural Programme. The Museum also participated in such local Oxford festivals as the Oxford Open Water Festival, where the Museum provided a workshop building paper boats, including a model outrigger based on Salama, the East African vessel that hangs above the court. Although the weather was cold and wet, some 50 children, with accompanying parents, enjoyed making and floating their boats on a large inflatable paddling pool. The education service also took part in the Oxford Literary Festival and the Cowley Road Carnival; in fact it is now hard to imagine such events happening around the city without involvement from Museum staff.
During the summer of 2003 more than 70 visitors submitted entries for the Museum’s first ever poetry competition. The winners were announced on National Poetry Day on 9 October. The overall winner was Marwa Ahmed, from Headington, from the 12–16 age group. There were also winners in under 12, young adult, and adult categories.
Museums and Galleries Month 2004 took the theme of ‘Travel and the Art of Travelling’. The Friends took up the challenge, carrying out research on the lives of some of the Museum’s best-known donors: Beatice Blackwood, Robert Rattray, Wilfred Thesiger, J. P. Mills, and Mary Kingsley. They then presented this information to the public on two Saturdays in May through free guided tours around the Museum looking at relevant objects and displays. This was a valuable opportunity to test out the practicalities of providing regular ‘adult’ trails in the future. An excellent complementary installation entitled Travelling Friends consisted of ‘postcards home’, created by Friends about their travels, placed amongst the displays relating to the photographs and ‘postcards’ provided. In addition, a selection of material collected and provided by various Friends gave visitors the opportunity to handle objects and to hear personal stories about them.

ICT
Work this year was devoted to consolidating a number of the advances made in the previous year while embarking on new projects. As part of the ‘Court Project’ an ‘on display field’ was created for the records for all the objects on display in the Museum’s court. With the availability of this field on the online version of the database, researchers and the public have access to this information for the first time. The ‘Visual History of Tibet Pilot Project’ was completed successfully, the resulting website attracting more than 50,000 visitors in its first year and providing a good basis for the larger AHRB-funded ‘Visual History of Tibet’ project, which began in May. The AHRB-funded ‘Pacific Pathways’ project was also completed successfully and won a special award (see below). All the Museum’s current externally funded projects have major ICT components and will lead to further online provision of information on the collections.
Technological developments included the extension of the wireless network within the Museum to cover the lower and upper galleries and the setting up of a wireless system for the researchers working on the photograph collections. Front of house staff also now have access to the collections database on a computer terminal in the court, enabling them to respond more efficiently to enquiries from the public about objects on display. Meanwhile, a new projection system was installed in the lecture theatre at the Museum’s research centre. Preliminary research into how best to upgrade the management of the Museum’s digital assets has begun. This will take place alongside a general upgrading of the University’s ‘backbone network’.

DISPLAY
Permanent Displays
The key development in the permanent displays has been the introduction, in the court, of new case headers and in-case short texts. These are the direct result of the ‘Access and Interpretation’ post funded by the DCF ‘Court Project’ (see below). A further enhancement brought about by this project is the introduction of new, clearer, case numbers to aid both staff and the public in identifying cases.
A grant from the DCMS/Wolfson Museum and Galleries Development Fund paid for the installation of a new photo-case in the lower gallery and new desk cases in the previously closed east end of the upper gallery. A permanent exhibition is being planned for the desk cases; in the meantime, in response to public demand, a small display of Wilfred Thesiger’s photographs has been installed there.
Special Exhibitions
Objects Talk: Interpreting Objects through Community Groups closed on 17 August 2003 after a very successful and popular year. It was replaced by Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital, 1936–1947, an exhibition of photographs, film and watercolours, which opened on 7 September and will run until December 2004. The exhibition was devised by Clare Harris, curator for Asia. Primarily focused on the Museum’s world-class collection of photographs taken by members of British missions to Lhasa, it sought to present scholarly research on this material in an attractive and accessible way. The accompanying publication (Seeing Lhasa, published by Serindia Publications, Chicago), edited by Clare Harris and the Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya, analyses visual culture as a key aspect of Anglo-Tibetan relations. With an essay by Elizabeth Edwards, and contributions from other members of the Museum’s staff, the book reflects the strengths of the Museum’s collections and its curatorial approaches towards them. The exhibition and book were launched in conjunction with the 10th Colloquium of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, held in Oxford, thereby placing the Museum very much on the map within international academic and Tibetan communities.
Other exhibitions that ran during the year included two case displays: Losing the Thread (12 May to 7 September 2003), an exhibition by a group of local textile artists of mixed-media works inspired by the Museum’s collections; and Travelling Friends (8 to 22 May 2004), a ‘postcards home’ display, created by Friends about their travels.
The installation of the new photo-case has allowed the public to get a taste of the wide range of material in the photograph collections and of the different kinds of research in visual anthropology with which the Museum is involved. This year there were four exhibitions in the case: Prince Roland Bonaparte’s Omaha Portraits 1886 (23 August to 7 December 2003); Thesiger Photographs (8 December 2003 to 29 February 2004); We Are The People (1 March to 20 June 2004, organized in collaboration with Tom Phillips and the National Portrait Gallery); and A Congo Journey: R. Hottot Collection (21 June to 26 September 2004).
Further contributions to the Museum’s occasional series of installations by visual artists took place during the year. From 13 to 28 September the Museum hosted Osiris, an installation by Netta Jordan, an MA student at the University’s Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art. Osiris was part of the Ruskin’s MA show. Using video film taken in the Museum, and in particular in the ‘twilight underworld’ below the gratings in the court, Osiris comprised two sequences of film played simultaneously on two monitors in specially built ‘pyramids’. Union Jack (14 November to 14 January 2004) was a site-specific work by Gonkar Gyatso, an artist in residence funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. The installation commented on life as a Tibetan refugee through the medium of a Union Flag suspended in the centre of the main Museum, and linked to numerous cases by coloured streamers. Slight Shifts (29 May to 1 August 2004) was an installation by Wong Hoy Cheong, the inaugural Oxford Brookes University/Pitt Rivers Museum International Visiting Research Fellow in Art. This innovative installation used light to shift the reading of objects in the Museum.
This year the Museum organized two special exhibitions from its own collections for other institutions. In March Curiosities from the Endeavour: A Forgotten Collection—Pacific Artefacts Given by Joseph Banks to Christ Church, Oxford after the First Voyage opened at the Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby. Featuring a recently identified collection of Tahitian and Maori artefacts held at the Pitt Rivers, the exhibition was planned, designed, and installed by Museum staff. During the reporting period the exhibition was visited by 12,697 people, including 2,016 in school parties. The exhibition is due to close on 31 October 2004.
Wilfred Thesiger’s Iraq, 1948–56: Photographs of Travel, an exhibition developed by Museum staff in collaboration with the National Trust, was exhibited at the Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock, from 28 July 2004. Coinciding with the announcement of the government’s decision to accept Wilfred Thesiger’s archive as ‘Art in Lieu’, the exhibition generated enormous press interest. The exhibition will transfer to the Museum in December 2004.

COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT AND CARE
Reserve Collections
One major task carried out this year was the removal of many of the musical instruments previously held in the closed area of the upper gallery to new storage at 60 Banbury Road. A number of problems were experienced, but the move was completed by the end of Summer 2003, and improvements continued to be made to the new storage throughout the year. At Osney, work focused on upgrading the storage of the large collections of pottery held there, with more than 3,500 vessels being repacked. In addition, skulls and related material previously held at the Museum were removed to Osney and their storage upgraded.
At 60 Banbury Road, significant improvements were made to the arrangement of the stone tool collections, although an enormous amount of further work needs to be done before the Museum can claim that these collections are adequately catalogued and properly stored. The possibility of seeking funding for a major project to process these collections so as to make them fully accessible to researchers is being investigated. In relation to this work, a large number of related items not forming part of the Museum’s collections but left on Museum property over the years by former staff, students, and associates were also dealt with, though the status of a number of them remains to be resolved.

Acquisitions
The most important acquisition was the Thesiger collection of photographs, which has been on permanent loan to the Museum since 1991. Sir Wilfred Thesiger died in August 2003 and in April 2004 his archive was accepted by H.M. Government as ‘Art in Lieu of Inheritance Tax’. The collection comprises more than 35,000 negatives, 80 albums, and thousands of loose prints spanning more than fifty years of travel in Arabia, Iraq, North and East Africa. The value of the collection could have satisfied a greater tax liability on the estate than was required. It is due to the great generosity of Sir Wilfred and his executors that the difference was configured as a donation by the estate and the Museum was not required to make good the financial difference.
Another important acquisition to the photographic collections, and satisfyingly from the same region, was that of some 3,000 transparencies illustrating traditional textile production in Oman from the estate of Ms Gigi Crocker-Jones; related collections of objects and manuscripts were received from Ms Crocker-Jones’s estate during the previous year. Among donations to the manuscript collections was an important series of fieldnotes and related material on Southern Sudan, from Jean Brown Sassoon. Among the most notable acquisitions to the object collections were forty-eight Romanian icons collected for the Museum in 2003 by Gabriel Hanganu, and Dr and Mrs Juel-Jensen’s well-documented collection of Ethiopian processional and pectoral crosses dating from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. Another particularly well- documented collection is Rachel Robinson’s collection of artefacts from Kiribati, Micronesia, acquired by her during VSO work in 1999 and 2000.
A list of all the new acquisitions during the year is given in Annex B.
Loans
The Museum’s loans programme is a valuable part of its work, providing further access to some of its collections both in the United Kingdom and abroad. There were three new loans (a total of twenty-nine artefacts) from the object collections during the year, all in the UK.
In October 2003 a cartridge-belt and powder-horn from Dahomey (the modern Republique du Bénin) were loaned to the Imperial War Museum, London for the exhibition Women and War; they were returned in April 2004. In March, twenty-three Tahitian and Maori artefacts from a newly identified collection from Captain Cook’s first Pacific voyage were loaned to the Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby for the exhibition Curiosities from the Endeavour: A Forgotten Collection—Pacific Artefacts Given by Joseph Banks to Christ Church, Oxford after the First Voyage; they are due to be returned in November 2004. This loan proceeded with the permission of Christ Church, from whom the collection has been on loan to the Pitt Rivers since the 1880s. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue, containing a fully illustrated account of the collection and its history. In July, four artefacts associated with Mary Kingsley and Lady Franklin were loaned to the National Portrait Gallery for the exhibition Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers; they are due to be returned in October 2004. The artefacts were illustrated in the exhibition catalogue.
A number of outstanding loans were returned during the year. Three amulets loaned in July 2003 to the Valencia Institute of Modern Art for the exhibition The Eyesight and The Vision were returned in October 2003. Nineteen amulets, formerly belonging to the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, loaned in June 2003 to the British Museum for the exhibition Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome, were returned in November 2003.

Cataloguing
Work continued on recataloguing a number of important collections throughout the year. Much of this work was carried out as part of externally funded research projects and is reported on under the heading of ‘Research and Scholarship’.
In addition, thanks to funding from the James A. Swan Fund, the Museum was able to employ Laura Phillips to recatalogue the important Edward Dunn collection of stone tools and related ethnographic material from Southern Africa. The Museum is grateful to volunteer Susan Wales for her continuing contribution to its work, which this year focused on transcribing letters and other documents relating to the stone tools donated to the Museum by James A. Swan. This work continued into the next reporting year and will be more fully reported on there.
For the first time, the photograph and manuscript department has a full-time assistant with the appointment of Jocelyn Dudding as Senior Curatorial Assistant. This has enabled the department to open to visiting scholars an extra day per week, spreading the increasing load on research facilities, as well as allowing major inroads to be made into the cataloguing backlog. This work was aided by the secondment of a photographic technician from photographic services to the curatorial department.
Inventory catalogues of the Rivière and Posey collections were completed. The cataloguing of the Michael Aris collection was also completed (funded by the Aris Trust). Work on the Crocker-Jones and Meinhard collections progresses well. Work on the general backlog and ‘mystery boxes’ has revealed some treasures, including Henry Balfour’s original field notebooks, drawings, and negatives made during his 1922–3 visit to Nagaland. Some collections that exist only as negatives have been digitally scanned, giving full access to them for the first time. Much of this work has run in tandem with the cataloguing work.
The Thesiger Cataloguing Project made astonishing progress, creating more than 48,000 records in the course of the year, though these are yet to be incorporated into the photograph database and are not included in the figures given below. The Evans-Pritchard photographs have been re-catalogued as part of the AHRB Sudan Project and work has started on the Tibetan photograph collections, also AHRB funded.
In total, 2,677 new entries were added to the object database during the year, together with 18,920 enhancements. In addition, there were 18,117 new entries added to the photographic database this year, together with 4,561 enhancements. These figures show a fall in the creation and enhancement of object records due to the ending of the DCF 4–5 ‘Court Project’ and less records-focused work by staff working on the ‘Relational Museum’ project. The figures for the photograph and manuscript database show an increase in new entries reflecting the work of the Tibet Visual History pilot project and the efforts of the Senior Curatorial Assistant. These figures emphasize how much the Museum’s permanent records benefit from externally funded project work. It should not be forgotten that this work is of immediate public benefit, as all the records are made available online.

Conservation
It has been a busy year in conservation with one full-time post remaining vacant and an increased workload due to planning and preparation for the proposed new research centre. The new building will result in the third move for the conservation laboratory in recent years, but the chance to be on site with other departments will more than compensate for the further upheaval.

Work has also begun on monitoring shock and vibration levels in the Museum to create, before building work commences, a picture of how the building moves in normal conditions. Preparations are also underway to remove from display, or to additionally support, the most vulnerable objects during the building work. Routine pest-management work was carried out on all sites and improvements to storage of the reserve collections has continued in the textile store and at Osney.
The conservation department continued to be involved in two grant-funded projects during the year. Assistance was given to the DCF ‘Court Project’, as matching funding, until March 2004, and condition reports were prepared for all the objects being recatalogued as part of the AHRB-funded ‘Sudan’ project. These reports were added to the database and remedial conservation carried out as necessary. The number of objects treated in the laboratory during the year was 459.
In early 2004 the conservation department conserved 24 Pacific artefacts from Captain Cook’s first voyage in preparation for a large loan to the Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby. This also involved collaborating on the design and mounting of the exhibition. This year there was also the opportunity for conservation work on Mavungu, the much-loved Congolese power figure, in preparation for its loan to the National Portrait Gallery in July.
For the second year the department took part in the Museum’s joint educational activity with the Natural History Museum entitled ‘Making Museums’, which involved 360 children and 40 adults visiting the conservation laboratory, and hearing about such aspects of conservation as artefact handling and storage.
The department supervised two conservation interns, Amy Crossman (Lincoln University) and Heidrun Gassner (V&A/Royal College of Art), for short spells early in the reporting year and benefited from having several volunteers to assist with the cleaning of armour and agricultural implements in Spring 2004.

Designation Challenge Fund: ‘Court Project’
Until April 2004 the collections management team on the ‘Court Project’, funded by a grant from the Designation Challenge Fund, continued working through the displays and storage in the Museum court. The team, consisting of Marina de Alarcón, Chris Morton, John Hobart, Laura Phillips, and Megan Backhouse, aimed to locate, number, measure, and improve the database entries for all the objects on display and in storage. 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 the end of the project the team had completed work on not only the 9,603 objects on display but also on all 19,241 objects in (largely open) storage. The success of this part of the project has been greatly assisted by the efforts of the Museum’s ICT Officer, and those of the conservation 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 continued work as the ‘Court Project’ 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 into visitors’ enthusiasm for the displays, but also into their frustration with the lack of information on the typological basis of their organization. Based on the feedback from visitors, additional aids to interpretation were developed, notably 133 short in-case texts, 12 fact sheets, and a new map and souvenir leaflet highlighting the typological arrangement of the collections. The fact sheets are now available on the Museum’s website along with interactive panoramas of the displays. The ‘Court Project’ culminated in June with a ‘sharing skills’ day entitled ‘Orientation, Interpretation, and Education’. This was open to museum workers from across the country and allowed the Pitt Rivers staff employed on the DCF ‘Court Project’ to share the skills and understanding developed during the project in a series of presentations and workshops.

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.
In October 2002 Chris Gosden and Mike O’Hanlon were awarded £326,000 by the Economic and Social Research Council for the ‘Relational Museum’ project, which will run until March 2006. Ethnographic museums used to be seen as ‘us’ studying ‘them’. A more productive approach is to view museums as trans-cultural artefacts composed of relations between the museum and source communities. The ‘Relational Museum’ project explores the history of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s collections and the links between individuals and groups that created those collections between 1884, the date of the foundation of the Museum, and 1945, the start of the post-colonial period. This research is being conducted by Alison Petch and Frances Larson (née Knight), through a combination of quantitative analysis of the collections and investigation into archival material on the groups, collectors, and museum professionals involved in creating the collections. The project is concentrating on six major collectors: General Pitt Rivers, the donor of the founding collection; E. B. Tylor, the first Lecturer in Anthropology at a British university; C. G. Seligman, Professor at the London School of Economics; J. H. Hutton, a colonial administrator in Nagaland; Henry Balfour, who worked at the Museum from 1884 to 1938 and was its first Curator; and Beatrice Blackwood, a Demonstrator in the Museum. Each of these collectors was important both to the development of anthropology in this country and to the history of the Pitt Rivers Museum. During 2003–4 the two researchers completed the statistical analysis of the overall collections and those of each named collector and also undertook specific archival research into the named collectors’ lives and collections. Several papers have been drafted, and the first paper published (see under Petch in Annexe E).
The ‘Pacific Pathways’ project, funded by a grant of £51,084 to Jeremy Coote from the Innovations Awards Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, was successfully completed in September 2003 and launched online in January 2004. During the course of the project, a range of materials was added to the previously created Forster Collection website, including more than 70 images and a previously unpublished essay on the collection by Peter Gathercole, while the database records for the collection were updated and enhanced. The heart of the project, however, was the creation and launch of a facility allowing anyone with access to the internet to create their own electronic ‘pathways’ through and beyond the Forster Collection website, adding their own texts, images, video and sound clips. This facility was created in partnership with the Academic Computing Development Team (part of the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University Computing Services). As the most visual part of the project, ten Pacific artists, curators, anthropologists, and art historians were commissioned to create paths. By the time of the launch seventeen paths had been created, each of which provides a new interpretative approach to the collection, its creation, history, and contemporary significance. Further paths have been created since and, it is hoped, many more will be created in the future in this open-ended project. In June the project won a special award at Oxford’s IT in Teaching and Learning Awards 2004.
Another major research project, funded by a grant of £224,668 to Jeremy Coote and Elizabeth Edwards from the Resource Enhancement Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, began on 1 October 2003. Entitled ‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’, the project focuses on the Museum’s rich collections from an area of central importance for social and cultural anthropology in general, and British anthropology in particular, through the work of a number of individuals including especially the Oxford anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard. During the lifetime of the twenty-seven month project each of the 1,200+ objects and 5,000+ photographs in the collection will be catalogued or recatalogued, incorporating detailed descriptions and taking full account of existing documentation, and digital images of all objects will be created. At the end of the project, the material created, including related biographical and bibliographical databases, will be made available online. By the end of this reporting period, 330 objects had been fully catalogued by Rachael Sparks, and photographed (a total of 1,123 digital images), and 4,250 new photographic records had been created by Chris Morton. As an adjunct to this work, Gilbert Oteyo was commissioned to recatalogue the 400 photographs taken by Evans-Pritchard among the Luo of Kenya. Mr Oteyo had previously been employed to make a study of the Museum’s collection of Luo ornaments and was able to make important cross-references between the object and photograph collections as well as supplying rich contextual information for addition to the Museum’s records. The Museum is extremely appreciative of Mr Oteyo’s contribution to its work.
Following the completion of a pilot project funded by the University of Oxford’s Research and Development Fund, Elizabeth Edwards, Clare Harris, and Richard Blurton (of the British Museum) were awarded £238,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Board for ‘Tibet Visual History On-line, 1920–1950’. This project focuses on the history and ongoing significance of photographs from 1920 to 1950 as a vital record of Tibet prior to the Chinese occupation. The project manager, Mandy Sadan, began work in May 2004 and Tsering Shakya will join as a researcher in October 2004. During the project, the content and contexts of photographs of Tibet will be identified, catalogued, scanned, and made available in a fully searchable, interactive resource.

Research Visitors
There were 372 recorded research visits to the Museum during the year requiring the retrieval of material from the reserve collections. Of these, 176 were to the object collections and 196 to the photographic and manuscript collections. These visits were made by 307 unique visitors from both the UK (195) and overseas (112). The total number of recorded research enquiries dealt with by Museum staff was 2,567. Of these 1,386 were by email, 507 by phone, 140 by post or fax, and 534 in person. For the fourth consecutive year there was a substantial increase in the number of people researching the photographic and manuscript collections. This 30% rise is also reflected in the number of research enquires handled and highlights the continuing need for additional resources as both academics and source communities continue to expect improved access to the Museum’s rich resources.

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, Visual Anthropology, History of Art and Visual Culture, Archaeology, and Music. During the course of the year, Museum staff gave 83 University lectures and 501 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
It was a busy year for the Balfour Library, with around 4,600 loans. Much time was taken up with preparation for the library’s move to temporary accommodation at the Old Boys’ School on George Street in September 2004 and plans for the new library in the Research Centre. In preparation, material in store in the Green Shed was sorted and offered to other libraries as appropriate, together with some of that from 60 Banbury Road. In July we were pleased to be visited by a group from the Art Libraries Society for the UK & Ireland.

PADMAC
The PADMAC unit for the study of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic artefacts from deposits mapped as Clay-with-flints is located at 60 Banbury Road and continues to be administered through the Museum. It is a multi-disciplined, geo-archaeological unit specializing in geology, sedimentology, pedology, lithic artefact technology, landscape archaeology, and spatial analysis, which offers 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 40,000 years ago) through the study of the deposits mapped as ‘Clay-with- flints’ and associated Palaeolithic artefacts. These deposits cap the downlands of southern England from Devon in the west to Kent in the east.
The unit carried out an extensive and varied fieldwork programme during the year. The main foci of research have been: Dickett’s Field, Yarnhams Farm (Hampshire), in August 2003 (with Oxford Archaeotechnics), September 2003, and April 2004; and Rookery Farm, Lower Kingswood (Surrey), in September 2003 (with Surrey Archaeological Society’s ‘Plateau Group’) and February and April 2004. Artefact assessment of the Walls collection at the British Museum and the Harp collection at Lower Kingswood, took place in March and April 2004. Investigations have also been carried out near Winchester (at a local farmer’s request) in August 2003, at Wyke Down, Cranborne Chase (Dorset), in March 2004, and on the Isle of Wight in May 2004.
Included in the field investigations undertaken by the PADMAC Unit are geophysical surveys including resistivity, magnetometry and magnetic susceptibility. GPS and micro- topographic survey techniques are also deployed and developed in order to identify and map subtle landscape features for inclusion in PADMAC Unit GIS databases. Where appropriate this geophysical data is made available to local archaeological groups.
Members of the unit also conducted two practical workshops, gave seventy-eight tutorials to undergraduates in Archaeology and Anthropology, and delivered six lectures to undergraduate and graduate students.

FINANCIAL SUCCESS
The Museum enjoyed continued success in obtaining the external project and research grant funding so crucial to its financial health.
Project Grants
The Education Service received a grant of £30,520 from the HEFCE Aspiration Fund to continue employing a Widening Access Education Officer to work with the Music collections. The Education Officer received funding from ‘Renaissance in the Regions’ to enable him to take a lead in the setting up of a regional education policy. The Museum was also awarded £2,500 for a DCF sharing skills day, entitled ‘Orientation, Interpretation and Education’, that took place in June 2004. Elizabeth Edwards received £10,000 funding from the Delafield Trust to enable additional work to be carried out on the Wilfred Thesiger collection.
The PADMAC unit received £40,000 from the BHR group towards running costs, £10,000 towards the costs of field research, £10,000 for an M.Sc. student in Applied Landscape Archaeology (second year of funding), and £1,000 for the purchase of equipment. The unit also received £7,260 towards the preparation of sediment samples and £550 for equipment from BusinessHR Ltd, and £2,000 from AIL Ltd towards the maintenance of the unit’s relational database.
The Museum was awarded further funding of £136,000 from the Designation Challenge Fund to complete the cataloguing of objects on display in the Museum and related work.
Research Grants
The following research grants were obtained during the year: Elizabeth Edwards and Clare Harris were awarded £238,800 from the Arts and Humanities Research Board for the ‘Tibet Visual History, 1920–1950: An Online Resource’ project; Elizabeth Edwards’ perseverance and diplomacy over several years resulted in the award to the Museum of £104,280 from HH Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates to research and catalogue Wilfred Thesiger’s photographs; John Hobart was awarded £2,273 from the British Academy to carry out anthropological fieldwork in Lesotho.
Museum Shop and other Trading Activities
Total gross sales amounted to £75,477.65, a decrease of 4.3% on the previous year, resulting in a net trading profit of only £284.55. Although it is difficult to identify the precise cause of this continuing decline (it follows a similar fall of 4.1% in 2002–3), possible reasons include: the continuing rise in staff costs; the lack of a direct link between recent special exhibitions, such as Objects Talk and Seeing Lhasa, and shop stock; and the fall-off in publicity targeting specific areas of the Museum’s permanent exhibitions (e.g. Body Arts).
Other income continued at its previous levels: £5,476 from mail-order books; £5,295 from photographic orders; £6,799 from donations (comprising £4,799 from the collecting box and £2,000 from an anonymous donor); and £754 from facilities hire. This last figure is lower than in previous years as no commercial filming took place in the Museum this year.

…. ACQUISITIONS
Purchases
A collection of forty-eight icons from Romania (purchased for the Museum by Gabriel Hanganu; 2004.15); two Cambodian shadow puppets (purchased for the Museum by Julia Nicholson; 2003.151).
Donations and Bequests
Giles Barber (a collection of cup-and-ball games; 2004.3); Jane Barclay (a pair of Tibetan boots, and a knife and umbrella from Burma; 2004.141); Jean Brown (fieldwork notes on Yei District, Southern Sudan and two ring-bound anthropological reports; 2003.124); Jeremy Coote (two postcards of Makereti and her family and friends; 2004.27); Gigi and Roddy Crocker-Jones (4000+ 35mm transparencies showing textile production in Oman; 2004.51); Drew Davey (photographs of the Museum’s exhibition Seeing Lhasa; 2003.143); Eiluned Edwards (a veil from Gujarat, India; 2004.143); Elizabeth Edwards (twelve postcards, colour prints, and negatives of Tibetan researchers visiting the Museum’s photograph collection; 2003.125 and 2003.138); Corine Emley (photographs taken in Kenya around 1920; 2003.132); Iris Goodacre (a Hausa man’s robe from Nigeria; 2003.154); John Hobart (a model of a creel from the Orkney Islands, Scotland; 2003.127); Dr and Mrs Bent Juel-Jensen (a collection of material from Japan, Canada, and Bhutan, and processional and pectoral crosses from Ethiopia; 2004.18); Rosemary Lee (a shawl and a pair of arm ornaments from Nagaland, India; 2004.46); Malcolm Osman (a Brocock .22 calibre Orion 3 air revolver; 2004.23); Paul Raymaeker (a Yaka Mask from Congo; 2004.20); Heather Richardson (a toy camera and a sample of tree bark from Cuba; 2004.134); Rachel Robinson (a large collection of artefacts from Kiribati; 2004.56); Hilary Stenning (costume and photographic material from Nigeria; 2004.76 and 2004.138); Laura Phillips (nine amulets from Iran; 2003.124); Sir Wilfred Thesiger (35,000+ negatives, 80 albums, and 1,000s of loose prints taken by Sir Wilfred Thesiger during more than fifty years of travel in Arabia, Iraq, North and East Africa (accepted by H.M. Government as ‘Art in Lieu of Inheritance Tax’; 2004.130 and 2004.131); Maria Watsham (three items from the Galapagos Islands; 2004.29).

Donations to the Library
We were pleased to receive a large donation of ethnographic art books, mainly on North American subjects, from June Bedford. We were also grateful for gifts from: Bruce Barker- Benfield; Bead Museum of Washington, D.C.; Jeremy Coote; Julia Cousins; Elizabeth Edwards; Green Centre for Non-Western Art; Adi Inskeep; Roland Kaehr; Jonathan King; Peter Micklethwait; Hitoshi Miyake; Rodney Needham; Laura Peers; Morgan Perkins; Sónia Silva; Janet Stanley; Pamela Stewart; Andrew Strathern; Charlotte Suthrell; Rachel Walker; and Felicity Wood.

… STAFF ACTIVITIES (INCLUDING TEACHING AND EXAMINING)
Jeremy Coote continued his researches into the history of the Museum’s early collections, especially, but not exclusively, those from the Pacific. To this end he visited a number of institutions holding relevant artefact and/or manuscript collections, including the Registrary at the University of Cambridge; Christ’s College Cambridge; the McManus Galleries, Dundee Art Galleries and Museums; Glasgow Museums Resource Centre; and the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh. In April, he attended and presented a paper at the Museum Ethnographers Group annual conference, held in Cambridge. Also in April, a paper he had co-written with Jill Salmons was presented by Salmons at the Thirteenth Triennial Meeting of the Arts Committee of the African Studies Association held in Boston. In May he attended, chaired a session, and presented a paper at ‘Polynesian Collections: Interpretations of the Past in the Present’, a conference organized by the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. In June he spoke about the history of the Museum’s Banks and Forster ‘Cook-voyage’ collections at a meeting, held at the Museum, of the Oxford University Museums Collections Histories Group. In July he attended the conference ‘The Art of Exploration’ at the National Maritime Museum. As well as supporting a number of other Museum-based research projects, he directed, with Elizabeth Edwards, the project ‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’, funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board’s Resource Enhancement Scheme. Through the year he contributed regularly to a number of internet discussion lists, particularly those devoted to African arts (‘H.Afr.Arts’) and Captain Cook. 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. For the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, he supervised two doctoral students in social and cultural anthropology and served as assessor for a number of others.
Elizabeth Edwards continued to serve on the editorial boards of History of Photography, Visual Studies, Visual Anthropology Review, and The Oxford Companion to the Photograph; and was appointed to the editorial boards of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Material Religion. She was co-opted on to the Committee for National Photograph Collections. She continued to serve on the Photographic Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute and to hold a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of the Arts, London (London Institute). In September, together with Chris Gosden and Ruth Phillips, she convened a Wenner- Gren Symposium in Sintra, Portugal, entitled ‘Engaging All the Senses: Colonialism, Processes of Perception and Material Objects’, which brought together a small group of invited scholars from around the world. She also presented at the University of Basel Festschrift Symposium for Paul Jenkins, and at seminars at the University of Munich (Historisches Seminar), University of Oxford (the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar), De Montfort University (Leicester), and University of the Arts, London, as well as attending a conference at Tate Britain entitled ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and Science: Painting, Photography and the Investigation of the Visible World’. She delivered public lectures in connection with the exhibitions The Veil at Modern Art Oxford and We Are The People at the National Portrait Gallery in London. After the publication of the government’s ‘Art in Lieu’ report much of her time has been spent responding to media interest in the Wilfred Thesiger collection. In Oxford, she continued to co-convene and teach the M.Sc. in Visual Anthropology, as well as organizing the Museum’s Friday seminars during Trinity term, and giving lectures and classes in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (including the ‘Anthropology of Art’ option). She supervised one undergraduate dissertation and co-supervised four doctoral students, one of whom, David Odo, successfully completed during the year. As a supervisor and examiner she acted as assessor for the M.Sc. in Visual Anthropology and the ‘Anthropology of Art’ option; examined two D.Phil. theses, one internal and one external (Leipzig); continued to act as external examiner for the M.A. in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London; and continues to be in demand as an external supervisor for M.Phil. and Ph.D. students in other universities. She also refereed for the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the South African Research Council, the Getty Trust, and a US tenure-track board.
Chris Gosden continued as a member of the ‘Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology’ panel of the Arts and Humanities Research Board. He is the British editor for the Journal of Social Archaeology (Sage), and continues to sit on the editorial boards of Archaeology in Oceania, World Archaeology, and Ethnograpisch-Archäologishe Zeitschrift. In September, together with Elizabeth Edwards and Ruth Phillips, he convened a Wenner-Gren Symposium in Sintra, Portugal, entitled ‘Engaging All the Senses: Colonialism, Processes of Perception and Material Objects’, which brought together a range of scholars from around the world. In Hilary Term he ran a seminar series in Classical Archaeology (together with John Bennet) called ‘Things First...’ on the links between material culture and texts in the ancient world. He gave a paper at the Society for American Archaeology conference in Montreal. He and Megan Price ran a weekend in the Museum for the family of E. B. Tylor, as part of the ‘Relational Museum’ project. During July he excavated (with Gary Lock) at the Romano-British site of Marcham, south Oxfordshire. Teaching commitments included giving lectures and tutorials in ‘Material Culture, Art, and Society’, ‘The Nature of Archaeological Enquiry’, ‘Landscape Archaeology’, and ‘Material Culture in Melanesia’, and the supervision of fourteen D.Phil. students in archaeology and anthropology. He was Chair of Examiners for Honours Moderations in Archaeology and Anthropology. He acted as an external examiner in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Manchester.
Clare Harris presented papers at the University of Coimbra (Portugal), University College London, the LhaTse Institute (USA), the British Museum, the Asia Society (UK), and within Oxford. She co-managed ‘Tibet Visual History Online’ (funded by the University’s Research Development Fund) with Elizabeth Edwards. She continued to give lectures, tutorials, and seminars for undergraduates in Archaeology and Anthropology, postgraduates in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (MAME) and Visual Anthropology, and to provide supervision for dissertations up to D.Phil. level. She was co-ordinator for the MAME M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees, director of studies for Archaeology and Anthropology at Magdalen College, and Chair of the Standing Committee for this degree across the University. She examined two doctorates at the University of London and during her sabbatical in 2004 conducted fieldwork in Ladakh (India) for a forthcoming book on material culture in that region.
Hélène La Rue devoted a great deal of time over the year to re-organizing the music stores after their move from the Museum’s upper gallery to 60 Banbury Road. She was co-organizer of the first joint conference in more than 50 years of the American Musical Instrument Society and the Galpin Society, the two major international learned societies devoted to the study of musical instruments. She also chaired one of the conference sessions. She collaborated with and advised colleagues at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh on the exhibition Eden’s Orchestra held in the garden until 10 September 2003, as well as acting as an advisor for the HLAF. In addition she continued to act as an examiner at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology for the graduate M.Phil. and M.Sc. degrees, and over the course of the year delivered forty-two lectures, gave fifty tutorials, and supervised five D.Phil. students.
Andrew McLellan represented the Oxford University museums in the creation of the Education Programme Delivery Plan for the ‘Renaissance in the Regions’ south-east hub, and represented Education in the University Museums on the Committee for Museums and Scientific Collections. With the education officers from the Natural History Museum and the Ashmolean, he began the process of creating an integrated education service across the University museums. He attended several training sessions of the Group for Education in Museums and was an active member of the web-based discussion group on educational issues.
Peter Mitchell continued to serve on the Council of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and on the editorial boards of African Archaeological Review, Before Farming, the South African Archaeological Bulletin, Southern African Humanities, and World Archaeology, to which he added membership of the editorial boards of Antiquity and the Journal of African History. He was on sabbatical leave for the entire year and used it to complete a book on Africa’s interactions with the rest of the world, to begin writing up fieldwork carried out in Lesotho from the 1990s, and to produce several journal papers. He also tutored one student for the M.St. in Landscape Archaeology, organized the ninth annual Archaeology & Anthropology Open Day, and examined a doctoral thesis at University College, London. He presented papers at major conferences on African archaeology in Kimberley (South Africa), Bergen (Norway), and Oxford and was elected to serve a two-year term as President of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists.
Julia Nicholson worked on a number of collections-based projects during the year. She also co- ordinated the Museum’s draft application for registration to the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council’s new pilot scheme. After working with colleagues to prepare the Museum’s application to the next round of the Designation Challenge Fund (DCF), she co-ordinated a DCF-supported ‘Sharing Skills’ day for museum professionals and volunteers in the region jointly hosted by the Museum and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on 14 June 2004. She attended sessions, organized by South East Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, on bulk accessioning procedures for large collections. In addition, she gave a number of talks, including one to the Guild of Weavers and Spinners as part of their visit to the Museum’s textile store, as well as practical sessions on documentation and collections management for students studying for the M.Sc. and M.Phil. in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography.
Michael O’Hanlon spent much of the year engaged in discussion and planning in relation to the new Research Centre. Along with the Ashmolean’s Deputy Director, Dr Mayhew, he continued to lead for the University in connection with the programme ‘Renaissance in the Regions’. He also lectured on the postgraduate degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, supervised three D.Phil. students, two of whom submitted their doctorates during the year, and continued to serve on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Journal of Material Culture. He organized a collective presentation by the University’s Museum Directors to senior officers of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, in advance of the next round of bidding to the AHRB’s Core Funding Scheme.
Laura Peers continued to serve on the Working Party on Human Remains (set up by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport) and contributed to the writing of the Working Party’s final report and recommendations, published in November 2003. She gave several conference presentations at the Museums Association meetings in Autumn 2003 and a keynote lecture for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Spring 2004. While on sabbatical during Hilary Term 2004 she researched seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North American collections, including Tradescant material. She continues to research the Hopkins and Pope collections from the northern Plains. Her teaching commitments included twenty tutorials and seven lectures.
Alison Petch continued to work as Senior Researcher on the ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’ project and as Registrar. She prepared further detailed analysis of the collections and undertook archival research both within the Museum and at external libraries and archives. She continued as a co-opted member of the Museum Ethnographers Group Committee, and convened the third meeting of the Oxford University Museums and Collections Histories Group. She also gave talks to the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum and graduate students studying for the degree in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at Oxford and for the Masters in Artefact Studies at University College, London. She provided advice to other institutions, including the University of East Anglia’s Polynesian Project and the Wallace Collection, on establishing object databases.
Heather Richardson assisted with conservation and artefact-handling training for members of Museum staff, students on the Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography course, and conservation interns. She also attended a seminar in October at the Leather Conservation Centre, Northampton University, and the United Kingdom Institute of Conservation’s Ethnography Section Seminar and AGM at the Museum of London in April, where she officially stepped down as Treasurer.
Julie Scott-Jackson continued as Director of the PADMAC Unit and supervised the Unit’s fieldwork and research programmes. She continued 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 as advisor to various local archaeological groups. She directed extensive programmes of fieldwork, including excavations, investigations, and geophysical surveys at the Palaeolithic sites of Rookery Farm, Lower Kingswood (Surrey), and Dickett’s Field, Yarnhams Farm (Hampshire). Utilizing the Museum’s Palaeolithic artefact collection she continued preparing for publication a ‘Gazetteer of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Artefacts Found in Relation to Deposits Mapped as Clay-with-flints on Chalk Downlands of Southern England’. In February she gave a joint presentation on the earliest occupation of Britain for the Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre seminar series, and in May gave a seminar at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art. She is currently carrying out collaborative research with colleagues from: the Archaeometry Unit of Daresbury Laboratories in Warrington; University College, London; BRGM, Orleans, France; and the British Geological Survey at Keyworth. Throughout the year she supervised the work of D.Phil. student Alice Thomas and post-doctoral Research Fellow Vicky Winton.
Birgitte Speake organized and supervised sessions on conservation and artefact-handling for Museum staff, graduate students on the Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography course, and conservation interns. She attended a seminar in October at the Leather Conservation Centre, Northampton University, and the United Kingdom Institute of Conservation’s Ethnography Section Seminar and AGM at the Museum of London in April. She also attended the ‘Polynesian Collections’ conference at the University of East Anglia in June and a UKIC conference in Liverpool entitled ‘Working with the Project Culture’ in July. In June she also visited the newly opened British Museum textile store at Blythe Road, Kensington.
Helen Walkington continued post-excavation analysis of the soil samples collected by the PADMAC Unit, focusing on the Palaeolithic sites and general areas of Rookery Farm, Lower Kingswood (Surrey), and Dickett’s Field, Yarnhams Farm (Hampshire), including the preparation of full written reports. She continued her professional development by taking a short course on Quaternary Soils and Soil Micromorphology at Royal Holloway, University of London. During the year she gave guest lectures on soils and sustainability to the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education, and on soils as an environmental archive to undergraduates in Geography. Her research includes collaborative projects with colleagues at: University College, London; BRGM, Orleans, France; and Oxford Brookes University.
Kate White continued to lead the Museum’s marketing and public relations initiative and proceeded with her programme of continuous professional development, taking Institute for the Advancement for University Learning courses on presentation skills, attending a conference organized by Oxford City’s Tourism Forum, and helping organize a seminar on Museum and Galleries Marketing run by the Museums Marketing Group and Arts Marketing Group. She also attended seminars on copyright and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. She also continues to hold positions on national committees, being selected in September to serve a second two-year term on the Museums Association’s Ethics Committee, and also being invited to become the Oxford University Museums’ representative on the Museums Joint Working Group. In February she was accepted as an Associate of the Museums Association. As part of the DCF Sharing Skills Day, ‘Orientation, Interpretation and Education’, she gave a presentation on ‘Interpretation at the Pitt Rivers Museum’.
Vicky Winton continued her research into the Palaeolithic artefacts found in deposits mapped as clay-with-flints. She helped to organize and conduct PADMAC Unit fieldwork at a number of sites throughout the year. She also gave a number of presentations and seminars: on the earliest occupation of Britain for the Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre seminar series (jointly with Julie Scott-Jackson); on palaeolithic butchery, at the University of Wales (Newport); and a workshop on stone-tool knapping, in Oxford. Her teaching commitments included seventy-eight tutorials to undergraduates in Archaeology and Anthropology, on ‘Human Evolution and Ecology’ and ‘The Nature of Archaeological Enquiry’.

STAFF PUBLICATIONS Those publications relating directly to the Museum’s collections are marked [*].
Jeremy Coote, Curiosities from the Endeavour: A Forgotten Collection—Pacific Artefacts Given by Joseph Banks to Christ Church, Oxford after the First Voyage, Whitby: Captain Cook Memorial Museum (2004). [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘An Interim Report on a Previously Unknown Collection from Cook’s First Voyage: The Christ Church Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (2004), pp. 111–21. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Major New Development at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Museum Ethnographers Group Newsletter (April 2004), pp. 4–5.
Jeremy Coote, ‘Southern African Rock Art’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 48 (April 2004), p. 7. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Curiosities from the Endeavour: A Forgotten Collection’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 49 (July 2004), pp. 6–7. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Rock Music [letter]’, Antiquity (online at < http://antiquity.ac.uk/Letters/ responses.html >, June 2004).
Jeremy Coote, Review of Museums & History in West Africa, edited by Claude Daniel Ardouin and Emmanuel Arinze (Washington, DC, and Oxford 2000), in African Affairs, Vol. CIII (no. 411; April 2004), pp. 307–8.
Jeremy Coote, Review of The Furthest Shore: Images of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook, by William Eisler (Cambridge, 1995), in Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. XVI, no. 1 (May 2004), p. 133.
Jeremy Coote, Review of Collected Curios: Missionary Tales from the South Seas, by Barbara Lawson (Montreal, 1994), in Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. XVI, no. 1 (May 2004), p. 134.
Jeremy Coote, Review of Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Kim Sloan (London, 2003), in Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (March 2004), pp. 192–5.
Jeremy Coote (edited with an introduction), ‘The Significance for Polynesian Ethnohistory of the Reinhold Forster Collection at Oxford University’, by Peter Gathercole, at < http://projects.prm.ox.ac.uk/forster/polynesian.html > (January 2004). [*]
Jeremy Coote (with Sophie Forgan), Curiosities from the Endeavour: A Forgotten Collection, Whitby: Captain Cook Memorial Museum (2004) [exhibition brochure]. [*]
Jeremy Coote (with Sophie Forgan), ‘Forgotten Treasures from Cook’s First Voyage’, Cook’s Log, Vol. XXVII, no. 2 (April 2004), pp. 4–6. [*]
Jeremy Coote (with Chris Morton), Review of Encounters with Africa: Cheltenham’ s Collections Revealed, an exhibition held at Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum from 24 November 2002 to 16 February 2003, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (2004), pp. 173–6.
Mark Dickerson, ‘An Immensely Useful Collection’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 48 (April 2004), p. 5. [*]
Oliver Douglas (with Andrew McLellan), ‘“Objects Talk”: Interpreting Objects through Community Groups’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (March 2004), pp. 56–63. [*]
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Some Thoughts on Photographs as History’, in Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital, 1936–1947, edited by Clare Harris and Tsering Shakya, Chicago: Serindia (2003), pp. 127–39. [*]
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Little Theatres of Self: Thinking about the Social’, in We Are The People: Postcards from the Collection of Tom Phillips, edited by Tom Phillips, London: National Portrait Gallery (2004), pp. 26–37.
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Martin Gusinde’s Photography in a Wider Anthropological World’, in The Tierra del Fuego Photographs of Martin Gusinde, edited by P. Mason, Santiago: Fundaçion Americana (2004), pp. 41–71.
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Shifting Relations: Writing Photography in Anthropology’, Source [The Photographic Review], no. 38 (Spring 2004), pp. 34–7.
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Sir Wilfred Thesiger’s Photographs’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 46 (October 2003), p. 2. [*]
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘A Hive of Activity: What’s Happening in the Photograph Collections’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 47 (January 2004), pp. 4–5. [*]
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘The New Photographic Case’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 47 (January 2004), p. 5. [*]
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Another Pitt Rivers Success’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 48 (April 2004), p. 3. [*]
Elizabeth Edwards, Review of The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome, by Ingrid D. Rowland (Chicago, 2000), Visual Anthropology, Vol. XVII, no. 2 (April–June 2004), pp. 209–11.
Elizabeth Edwards, Review of True Stories, an exhibition held at Wolverhampton Art Gallery from 20 September to 15 November 2003, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (2004), pp. 177–8.
Elizabeth Edwards, Review of Native American Photography at the Smithsonian: The Shindler Catalogue, by Paula Richardson Fleming (Washington, DC, 2003), in Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. XVI, no. 1 (May 2004), pp. 137–8.
Elizabeth Edwards, Review of Native American Photography at the Smithsonian: The Shindler Catalogue, by Paula Richardson Fleming (Washington, DC, 2003), in Great Plains Quarterly, Vol. XXIV, no. 1 (Winter 2004), p. 70.
Elizabeth Edwards (with Janice Hart), ‘Introduction: Photographs as Objects’, in Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images (Material Cultures: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Material Construction of Social Worlds), edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, London and New York: Routledge (2004), pp. 1–15.
Elizabeth Edwards (with Janice Hart), ‘Mixed Box: The Cultural Biography of a Box of “Ethnographic” Photographs’, in Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images (Material Cultures: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Material Construction of Social Worlds), edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, London and New York: Routledge (2004), pp. 47–61. [*]
Elizabeth Edwards (editor, with Janice Hart), Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images (Material Cultures: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Material Construction of Social Worlds), London and New York: Routledge (2004).
Kate Gardner, ‘The Only European Dragon’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 48 (April 2004), p. 2. [*]
Chris Gosden, Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present (Topics in Contemporary Archaeology), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2004).
Chris Gosden, ‘Shaping Life in the Late Prehistoric and Romano-British Periods’, in Time and Temporality in the Ancient World, edited by Ralph M. Rosen, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (2004), pp. 29–44.
Chris Gosden (with Gary Lock), ‘Becoming Roman on the Berkshire Downs: The Evidence from Alfred’s Castle’, Britannia [A Journal of Romano-British and Kindred Studies], Vol. XXXIV (2003), pp. 65–80.
Chris Gosden (with Gary Lock, David Griffiths, and Patrick Daly), ‘The Ridgeway and Vale Project: Excavations at Marcham/Frilford, 2002’, South Midlands Archaeology, no. 33 (2003), pp. 84–91.
Chris Gosden (with David Miles, Simon Palmer, Gary Lock, and Anne Marie Cromarty),
Uffington White Horse and its Landscape: Investigations at White Horse Hill, Uffington, 1989–95, and Tower Hill, Ashbury, 1993–4 (Thames Valley Landscapes Monograph, no. 18), Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, for Oxford Archaeology (2003).
Chris Gosden (with Barry Cunliffe, Colin Renfrew, and Helen Geake), ‘The British Museum at 250 [review of The Museum of the Mind: Art and Memory in World Cultures, an exhibition held at the British Museum from 17 April to 7 September 2003]’, Antiquity, Vol. LXXVII (no. 298; December 2003), pp. 828–33.
Philip N. Grover, ‘[Tibetan Photographic Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum:] Henry Martin and the Macdonald Collection’, in Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital, 1936–1947, edited by Clare Harris and Tsering Shakya, Chicago: Serindia (2003), pp. 156–7. [*]
Clare Harris, ‘Seeing Lhasa: British Photographic and Filmic Engagement with Tibet, 1936–1947’, in Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital, 1936–1947, edited by Clare Harris and Tsering Shakya, Chicago: Serindia (2003), pp. 1–76. [*]
Clare Harris ‘The Photograph Reincarnate: The Dynamics of Tibetan Relationships with Photography’, in Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images (Material Cultures: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Material Construction of Social Worlds), edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, London and New York: Routledge (2004), pp. 132–47.
Clare Harris, ‘Seeing Lhasa at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 46 (October 2003), p. 1. [*]
Clare Harris, ‘Dekyi Lingka Revisited, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 46 (October 2003), p. 3.
Clare Harris (edited, with Tsering Shakya), Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital, 1936–1947, Chicago: Serindia (2003). [*]
John Hobart, ‘An Old Fashioned Approach to a Modern Hobby; Fishing in the Lesotho Highlands’, in Researching Africa’s Past: New Contributions from British Archaeologists—Proceedings of a Meeting Held at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, Saturday April 20th, 2002 (Oxford University School of Archaeology Monograph No. 57), edited by Peter Mitchell, Anne Haour and John Hobart, Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology (2003), pp. 44–53.
John Hobart (with Peter Mitchell and Anne Haour), ‘Introduction’, in Researching Africa’s Past: New Contributions from British Archaeologists—Proceedings of a Meeting Held at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, Saturday April 20th, 2002 (Oxford University School of Archaeology Monograph No. 57), edited by Peter Mitchell, Anne Haour, and John Hobart, Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology (2003), pp. 1–8.
John Hobart (editor, with Peter Mitchell and Anne Haour), Researching Africa’s Past: New Contributions from British Archaeologists—Proceedings of a Meeting Held at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, Saturday April 20th, 2002 (Oxford University School of Archaeology Monograph No. 57), Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology (2003).
Andrew McLellan (with Oliver Douglas), ‘“Objects Talk”: Interpreting Objects through Community Groups’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (March 2004), pp. 56–63. [*]
Peter Mitchell, ‘Anyone for Hxaro? Thoughts on the Theory and Practice of Exchange in Southern African Later Stone Age Archaeology’, in Researching Africa’s Past: New Contributions from British Archaeologists—Proceedings of a Meeting Held at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, Saturday April 20th, 2002 (Oxford University School of Archaeology Monograph No. 57), edited by Peter Mitchell, Anne Haour and John Hobart, Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology (2003), pp. 35–43.
Peter Mitchell, ‘The Archaeological Study of Epidemic and Infectious Diseases’, in World Archaeology, Vol. XXXV, no. 2 (October 2003), pp. 171–9.
Peter Mitchell (editor), Archaeology of Epidemic and Infectious Diseases (Special Issue of World Archaeology, Vol. XXXV, no. 2 (October 2003)).
Peter Mitchell (with Anne Haour and John Hobart), ‘Introduction’, in Researching Africa’s Past: New Contributions from British Archaeologists—Proceedings of a Meeting Held at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, Saturday April 20th, 2002 (Oxford University School of Archaeology Monograph No. 57), edited by Peter Mitchell, Anne Haour, and John Hobart, Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology (2003), pp. 1–8.
Peter Mitchell (editor, with Anne Haour and John Hobart), Researching Africa’s Past: New Contributions from British Archaeologists—Proceedings of a Meeting Held at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, Saturday April 20th, 2002 (Oxford University School of Archaeology Monograph No. 57), Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology (2003).
Alex Nadin, ‘Wilfred Thesiger’s East Africa’, Tribal, no. 34 (Spring 2004), pp. 126–33. [*] Alex Nadin, ‘Cataloguing Thesiger’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter,
no. 49 (July 2004), p. 5. [*] Julia Nicholson, ‘Working with the Naga, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford,
Newsletter, no. 46 (October 2003), p. 7. [*] Michael O’Hanlon, ‘Preface’, in Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital,
1936—1947, edited by Clare Harris and Tsering Shakya, Chicago: Serindia (2003), p. vi. [*] Michael O’Hanlon, ‘The Plans for a Wonderful New Research Centre’, The Friends of the Pitt
Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 49 (July 2004), pp. 1, 3. Alison Petch, ‘Collecting Immortality: The Field Collectors who Contributed to the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (March 2004), pp. 127–39. [*] Alison Petch, Review of Museum of the Mind: Art and Memory in World Cultures, by John
Mack (London, 2003), in Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (March 2004), pp. 204–5. Laura Phillips, ‘An Investigation into the Life of A. D. Passmore, “A Most Curious Specimen”’,
Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, Vol. XCVII (2004), pp. 273–92.
Laura Phillips, ‘FRA[g]ME[ntary view]S: Approaching Historic Aegean Landscape through Text, Image and Archaeology [review of a lecture by John Bennet to the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum on 11 February 2004]’, in The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 48 (April 2004), p. 9.
Heather Richardson, ‘Conservation of a Maori Canoe Baler’, Conservation News [United Kingdom Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works], no. 90 (May 2004), pp. 27–9. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘Caught in a Compromising Position’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 49 (July 2004), p. 8. [*]
Rachael Sparks, ‘Approaches to the Iron Age Levant [review of Preliminary Excavation Reports and other Archaeological Investigations: Tell Qarqur Iron I Sites in the North-Central Highlands of Palestine, edited by Nancy Lapp (Boston, MA, 2003), and Busayra: Excavations by Crystal-M. Bennett, 1971–1980, by Pitor Bienkowski (Oxford, 2002)]’, in Antiquity, Vol. LXXVIII (no. 299; March 2004), pp. 194–6.
Kate White, ‘Improving Access to the Collections’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 46 (October 2003), p. 5. [*]
Kate White, ‘New Photographic Case’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 46 (October 2003), p. 9. [*]
Kate White, ‘Write around the World’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 47 (January 2004), p. 8. [*]
Nick Wicker, ‘The Ultimate Alchemy’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 46 (October 2003), p. 5. [*]
Vicky Winton, A Study of Palaeolithic Artefacts from Selected Sites on Deposits Mapped as Clay-with-flints of Southern England with Particular Reference to Handaxe Manufacture (British Archaeological Reports, British Series 360), Oxford: Archaeopress (2004).
Vicky Winton (with Anne Haour), ‘A Palaeolithic Cleaver from the Sahel: Freak or Fact?’, Antiquity, Vol. LXXVII (no. 297; September 2003), at < http://antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/ haour/haour.html >.

MUSEUM SEMINARS IN MATERIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND MUSEUM ETHNOGRAPHY
17 October 2003: Susan Hazan (Israel Museum, Jerusalem), ‘The MuseSphere and the E- Museum’.
24 October: Mark Elliott (Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge), ‘Inappropriate Behaviour in the Indian Museum, Calcutta’.
31 October: Elizabeth Edwards (PRM), ‘Photography, “Englishness”, and Collective Memory: The National Photographic Record Association, 1897–1910’.
7 November: Tag Gronberg (Birkbeck College, University of London), ‘The Voice of Modern Vienna: Peter Altenberg (1859–1919) and the Exoticism of Everyday Life’.
14 November: David Wengrow (Christ Church, Oxford), ‘The Skin as a Symbolic Form in Early Egypt’.
21 November: Chris Gosden, Alison Petch, and Fran Knight (all PRM), ‘The “Relational Museum” Project: An Update’.
28 November: Clare Harris (PRM), ‘Seeing Lhasa: A Curator’s View’. 5 December: Maurice Davies (Museums Association), ‘Cultural Property Issues and UK
Museums: An Overview’.
23 January 2004: Jeremy Coote (PRM), ‘Pacific Pathways: Multiplying Contexts for the Forster (“Cook-Voyage”) Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum’.
30 January: Yangdon Dhondup (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), ‘Dancing to the Beat of Modernity: The Rise and Development of Tibetan Pop Music’.
6 February: Richard Sandell (Leicester University) ‘Museums and the Combating of Prejudice’.
13 February: John Picton (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), ‘When was Yoruba Art?’.
20 February: Joy Hendry (Oxford Brookes University), ‘Does the Spirit Sing Now? Some New Displays in Museums in North America’.
27 February: Fran Knight (PRM), ‘The Collection of a Lifetime: Henry Wellcome and His Historical Medical Museum’.
5 March: Hugh Brody (Magdalen College, Oxford), ‘The Washing of Tears’, a film showing and discussion. 12 March: Emma Tarlo (Open University), ‘Re-dressing the Issues: Clothing and Identity in the South Asian Diaspora’.
30 April: Wong Hoy Cheong (Oxford Brookes University / PRM Visiting Fellow in Fine Art), ‘Deconstructing “Texts”’.
7 May: ‘Paul Coldwell (Camberwell College of Art, London Institute), ‘Integrating the Computer: The Development of Digital Resources at the V&A’.
14 May: Elizabeth Cory-Pearce (Goldsmiths College, University of London), ‘A Trail of Things: Following Maori Museum Collections Back to their Source’.
21 May: Tim Thomas (University of Cambridge), ‘Material Culture and the Abstraction of Agency in Roviana, Solomon Islands’.
28 May: Elizabeth Edwards (PRM), ‘Shifting Representation: The Making of the Ethnographic in Nineteenth-Century Photography’.
4 June: Judy Hall (Museum of Civilization, Ottawa), ‘Layered with Meaning: Canadian Inuit Clothing Traditions’.

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 Fund made the following grant: £2,864 to Laura Phillips for curatorial work on the Museum’s collections of stone tools and related material from Southern Africa.

FRIENDS OF THE PITT RIVERS MUSEUM REPORT BY LIZ YARDLEY (SECRETARY)
Approaching the twentieth year since their formation, the Friends took the opportunity to review their organization by examining methods of working to support the Museum and finding new ways of increasing an active membership. As with many voluntary organizations today, the Friends find themselves in strong competition with many other worthy causes, so that in a climate of increased demands on everyone’s time, it is a challenge to find volunteers to fulfil vital tasks to maintain the smooth running of the organization. The ‘traditional’ pool of volunteers, mainly among retired people and women not in employment, has been rapidly diminishing, and volunteering has increasingly become a donation of time and expertise from professional people in full or part-time jobs. It thus becomes essential to ensure we operate effectively and efficiently as a team with clear structures and close liaison with the Museum, but in such a way that it remains an enjoyable and rewarding experience. The Friends are most grateful to Danby Bloch, one of our patrons, for lending his expertise to ensure a positive outcome for this appraisal.
Much enjoyment was surely gained from the excellent programme of lectures and events organized by programme co-ordinator Megan Price. The Wednesday-evening programme of talks began in October with Alison Petch from the Museum revealing more of ‘Life in the Northern Territory, Australia 1894–1914: Spencer’s other Friends: Byrne, Cahill and Cowle’. In December, broadcaster and director of the Oxford Waits, Tim Healey, took us on a very merry ethnographic romp through Oxford in ‘Drink, Sex and Death in the Seventeenth Century: The Original Oxford Waits’. In January we paid a visit behind the scenes at the University Museum of Natural History with Malgosia Nowak-Kemp for an informative and amusing glimpse of some of the historic collections of ‘Human Skulls and Bones’, while in February Clare Harris, Lecturer/Curator at the Museum gave a most enlightening gallery talk on the stunning current exhibition Seeing Lhasa. Also in February, John Bennet, Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Sheffield talked on ‘FRAMES (FRA[g]ME[ntary view]S): Approaching Historic Aegean Landscape through Text, Image and Archaeology’, followed in March by Shahin Bekhradnia, Friend and past Programme Co-ordinator, illuminating the ritual significance of Norooz offerings in ‘The Spring New Year: Seasonal Landmarks in the Zoroastrian Calendar’. The programme concluded in June with Derek Roe, Emeritus Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology, Oxford University and member of the Friends, sharing his East African experiences while assisting with Mary Leakey’s autobiography in ‘A Leakey Story: Time Spent in the Olduvai Gorge’. The theme of the Kenneth Kirkwood Memorial Fund study day in March was ‘Hunters and Gatherers’. It was held in the Saïd Business School and was again organized by Shahin Bekhradnia and introduced by Mike O’Hanlon. The morning speakers were Laura Rival, of Queen Elizabeth House and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, on ‘We Blow-Hunt and We Spear-Kill: The Weapons of an Amazonian Hunting Society’, and Peter Mitchell, of the Museum, with ‘People and Paintings: Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology in Lesotho’. A conducted tour of the Saïd Business School was followed by a buffet lunch, accompanied by gentle West African drum music by Odeetee. In the afternoon Raj Puri of the University of Kent spoke on ‘Deadly Dances in the Bornean Rain-Forest: Learning to Hunt with the Penan’. The day concluded with film-maker Hugh Brody giving a disturbing and thought-provoking view of the realities of modern times for hunters with ‘Inuit Children: Hunter-Gatherers and the Shaping of the World’. The Friends are indebted to Richard Briant for organizing the venue, to Fred Davis for his indispensable help with audio-visual equipment, and to Blackwell’s Publishing for their generous sponsorship of the event.
The Saïd Business School also kindly hosted the Beatrice Blackwood Lecture in May when Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector of the Royal College of Art and Chairman of the Arts Council, delighted a large audience with ‘Museum Without Walls: The Image of the Museum in the Movies’, a wonderful catalogue of screen excerpts ranging from Hitchcock’s celebrated Blackmail to the bizarre Deathline, and with a Pitt Rivers connection in The Daughters of Cain, illustrating how cinematographers have used the sense of the forbidden and the arcane suggested by museums and their collections. The Friends are very grateful to Professor Hopwood and the Saïd Business School for their generous hospitality.
For Museums and Galleries Month in May, the theme of ‘Travel and the Art of Travelling’ gave the Friends the opportunity of working with Museum staff to research various collectors and to lead brief tours of objects collected for the Museum by these travellers. The Friends also mounted a ‘postcards home’ installation in the Museum.
In June the Friends were given the opportunity to visit Sheila Paine’s magnificent textile collections at her home in Blewbury and to discover with Birgitte Speake some of the hidden treasures in the Museum’s textile store at 60 Banbury Road.
A number of Friends continue to be involved in schools guiding, helping with holiday activities, and hosting the Family Friendly Fun sessions on a Sunday afternoon, all organized by the Museum education service.
At the Friends Annual General Meeting in June, Richard Briant was elected as Chairman (after a period as Acting Chairman) and Sally Odd as Treasurer. Dymphna Hermans retired as Secretary and was replaced by Liz Yardley. Megan Price retired as Programme Co-ordinator and was replaced by Margaret Dyke and Barbara Isaac. Carol Quarini retired as Newsletter Editor, with a replacement yet to be found. Donations to the Museum included a £3,000 contribution to the costs of the Education Officer and a bursary to Gilbert Oteyo for research and collecting. Thanks were expressed to all who have given support through their gifts, time, and skills, and particularly to Donald Tayler and Dymphna Hermans, the retiring Chairman and Secretary for their greatly appreciated contributions. The Newsletter Editor thanked all those who assist with the compilation and the mailing.