University of Oxford
The Pitt Rivers Museum Annual Report 1 August 2009 to 31 July 2010

MISSION STATEMENT
The Pitt Rivers Museum aspires to be the best university museum of anthropology and archaeology in the world, using its unique galleries as a focus for exemplary teaching and research and as an inspirational forum for the sharing of cultural knowledge amongst the widest possible public

Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum as of 1 August 2009
The Vice Chancellor (Professor Andrew Hamilton) The Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education, Academic Services and University Collections) (Professor Ewan McKendrick) The Proctors (Professor Martin Williams, Dr Philip Robins) The Assessor (Dr John Muddiman) Dr John Landers (Chairman) Ms Janet Vitmayer (Chief Executive, Horniman Museum) Ms Caroline Dudley, OBE (Head of South East Hub & Hampshire Museums Service) Dr Claude Ardouin (British Museum) Professor Roger Goodman (Head of Social Sciences Division) Professor Jim Kennedy (Director, University Museum of Natural History) Dr Christopher Brown (Director, Ashmolean Museum) Professor John Mack (University of East Anglia) Professor Chris Gosden (School of Archaeology) Professor Harvey Whitehouse (ISCA) Professor David Gellner (School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography) Dr Jim Bennett (Director, Museum of the History of Science)
Dr Michael O’Hanlon (Museum Director, Secretary to the Visitors) Dr Clare Harris (Pitt Rivers Museum)

The Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum, having received from the Director the following report for the period 1 August 2009 to 31 July 2010, presented it as their report to Congregation.

DIRECTOR’S INTRODUCTION
This year—the first in which all the Museum’s galleries have been open since the start of the redevelopment in 2004—has been an exceptionally successful one. The Museum’s upper gallery, the last space to reopen, was launched on 1 May 2010, complete with a wonderful new permanent display of firearms and related accessories (General Pitt-Rivers’s original interest). On 3 June, the Museum’s first purpose-designed exhibition in the new special exhibition gallery opened. Wilfred Thesiger in Africa: A Centenary Exhibition, curated by Christopher Morton and Philip Grover, was accompanied by a substantial hardback edited volume, and both the exhibition and the catalogue received well-deserved coverage in the national press.

With the upper gallery reopened, a new exhibition, and the education service rolling out programmes they had trialled in the previous year, annual visitor figures to the Museum climbed to 334,000. This is two-thirds higher again than the previous highest visitor figure, and nearly three times the number of visitors the Museum used to receive only a decade ago. Independent polling (commissioned by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council) revealed that 99% per cent of visitors were ‘very satisfied’ with their visit (a picky 1% were merely ‘fairly satisfied’) against a national average of 82%: a tremendous tribute to the Museum’s professional and committed front-of-house staff. We also learned that the Museum, in conjunction with the University’s other museums and collections and the Bodleian Library, had been awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education for its entry ‘Opening Gates’. This prize is held for four years and was awarded at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, preceded by a dinner in the Guildhall. The University’s museums and collections education service was also jointly awarded more than £400,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund for a four-year project training education interns.

In Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884–1945 (Oxford, 2007), their intriguing volume on the early history of the Museum, Chris Gosden and Frances Larson argue that while it is undeniable that the Museum is physically located in Oxford, this hides a broader truth. Rather than seeing the Museum merely as a large building off South Parks Road filled with artefacts, Gosden and Larson propose viewing it instead as an enormous, shifting network of connections between people and artefacts, a network that extends far beyond today’s Oxford, in both time and space. A good deal of the Museum’s other activity during the last year could plausibly be advanced to support this view. For example, four major, externally funded research projects traced, interrogated, and reforged links between collectors, collections, and communities across the world. As described in more detail below, some twenty members of the Haida community from western Canada travelled to the Museum in September 2009 to renew their links with, and improve scholarly knowledge about, 300 important Haida artefacts in the Museum, as part of a project funded by a grant from The Leverhulme Trust. Subsequently, the Haida community requested the repatriation of an unmodified human remain in the Museum’s collections and—following agreement by the University’s Council—the remain, accompanied by both Haida and museum representatives, travelled back to Haida territory where it was ceremonially interred. The remain travelled home in a decorated box that the Haida representatives brought with them especially for the purpose, and a duplicate of the box has been commissioned for adding to the Museum’s collections, where it will constitute an especially evocative artefact of this renewed relationship.

A second such research project, this time funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), entailed five nineteenth-century ceremonial Blackfoot shirts in the Museum’s collections travelling to two venues in Canada, where Museum staff safely oversaw handling sessions. But before this could take place, senior Blackfoot had visited the Museum, instructing staff in the significance of the shirts and ritually protecting them against the dangers considered to lie in preparing the garments for loan. The presence of the shirts back in Blackfoot territory in turn helped reinvigorate discontinued Blackfoot cultural practices. Both these grants had been awarded to lecturer-curator Laura Peers who, along with her colleagues—especially Heather Richardson and Julia Nicholson—had an especially lively year in undertaking all the complex and delicate negotiations and oversight necessary to produce the deeply rewarding outcomes. We thank not only them, and their colleagues, but also our Haida and Blackfoot partners.

A third project, ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth- Century Collector’, funded by another grant from The Leverhulme Trust successfully applied for by Jeremy Coote of the Museum and former lecturer-curator Chris Gosden, has begun another kind of reconnection, this time reuniting conceptually all the materials collected by General Pitt-Rivers, including the contents of the General’s second museum in Farnham in Dorset. These latter have been dispersed, but they had been recorded in detail in a wonderfully illustrated nine-volume catalogue, now in the University Library in Cambridge. As part of the project, the catalogues have been scanned, and the artefacts listed there entered into a database alongside the collection that came to Oxford, allowing a range of questions to be asked about the broader context of collecting in the second half of the nineteenth century.

One of the guises in which General Pitt-Rivers was best known was as an archaeologist, and the fourth research project the Museum ran during the reporting year was ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum: Defining Research Priorities, 2010–20’, co-managed by Dan Hicks and Jeremy Coote. This brought some thirty archaeologists to the Museum to provide specialist overviews of the collections, a process that has been exceptionally well managed by Alice Stevenson, the researcher on the project. This work and the resulting project report will enhance access and stimulate further research use of the collections, as the ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’ project earlier helped do for the ethnography collections.

A further manner in which the Museum has demonstrated its global ubiquity is via its loans, in particular that of 62 fragile Pacific artefacts to the exhibition James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific in Bonn. There they found themselves in the company of other loaned ‘Cook-voyage’ artefacts, which they had presumably encountered in their earlier artefactual lives, before they were all scattered to find homes in, mostly, European museums. This convoy of loan artefacts moved on to Vienna during the reporting year and will move on again to Bern, before the objects return to their various home museums in early 2011.
Accompanying all this energy and success, however, is heightened anxiety regarding the future of the principal funding streams that support the Museum. To date, the Museum’s single most substantial source has been HEFCE’s ‘core funding’ for museums and galleries. We spent many weeks preparing a comprehensive application to the new round of this competitive funding stream and were pleased to be awarded a new annual award of £725,000. This is more or less ‘flat funding’, but in the more straitened circumstances that now affect us all, flat funding counts as success. The application was made under new criteria, which place much more emphasis on the teaching and research use made of the Museum and its collections by researchers and students at other higher education institutes. These are criteria that play to our strengths, given the significance of the collections, the extent to which a raft of recent Museum-based research projects has made them more accessible, and the unique nature of the Museum’s galleries, which exercise a strong appeal to those studying art, design, technology, and museum studies, as well as anthropology and archaeology. However, while HEFCE had originally indicated its intention that the funding award would be for five years, reductions in its government grant make this much less certain and the future for this vital funding stream beyond July 2012 is unclear. Nevertheless, we are deeply grateful to the many scholars and teachers who allowed us to cite in our application to HEFCE their testaments concerning the continuing and unique importance of the Museum’s collections for their research and teaching.

The security of Renaissance funding, a second enormously valued source of support, has also been placed in some doubt by the Government announcement, right at the close of the reporting year, that the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (which distributes Renaissance funding) is to be abolished. We anxiously await news of the future of this funding stream, which has underpinned the Museum’s award-winning education service and much else. Partly in response to the evident fragility of future funding, the University has decided to initiate a collective review of its four museums in the coming year, rather than the traditional individual reviews of each separate institution.

In the face of this uncertainty, Museum staff continued to be very active in their approaches to other sources of collections-related funding. We were delighted to be able to sign a contract with the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage for £165,000 for a project, to be overseen by Christopher Morton, for enhanced digitization of Wilfred Thesiger’s photographs relating to the United Arab Emirates. We applied successfully to the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council’s Designation Development Fund for £78,000 for a project to improve accessibility to the Museum’s remarkable collection of body arts; and as part of this we were pleased to sign an agreement with Ruskin College whereby their students will have volunteer placements with the Museum, a valuable initiative on the Museum side from Kate White. We also made a substantial application to the Esmée Fairbairn Fund for a project to produce a new management system to link digitized images to the collections database, and were delighted to learn that it had been successful.

New high-level display cases were installed at the east end of the Museum’s upper gallery, one of the fruits of our last application to that wonderful source of support, DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund. The cases are being filled with a display of shields from across the globe, installed—like all the new firearms displays—by the Museum’s own ‘engine room’, its team of technicians. A great range of generous donors contributed to the funding for ‘Hands on Music in Museums’, an innovative project energetically led by Isabelle Carré, which delivers music education lessons both at the Museum and in schools. Finally, we are also giving thought to the opportunity for a much larger project, one that will redisplay collections on all three of the Museum’s floors, improving their conservation and enhancing their accessibility.

I should not close without thanking all those who contributed to the year’s success. Not only our funders, donors, and every member of staff whether named in this overview or not— but just as importantly all those who gave unremunerated support to the Museum: its volunteers, its Guides, its Friends, their Council, Chairman and President. Neither our need for support nor our appreciation of it will lessen in the years ahead.

ACCESS
This year has seen a return to the core activities that had been put on hold last year during preparations for the reopening. Budget expenditure for Access was targeted at expanding the provision of basic information about and interpretation of the displays, as well as at the promotion of Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, the first special exhibition to be installed in the new gallery since the reopening.

Interpretation
New forms of interpretation were developed over the year. A fresh souvenir guidebook was designed by Kate Webber, using a selection of images to great effect alongside a brief introductory text. This proved a popular format, which could be used as a template for other booklets on different aspects of the displays. The introductory text on the gallery plan was translated into the six most locally used languages other than English.
The series of fact sheets about the collections—renamed as ‘Introductory Guides’—are now available at the Information Point as well as on the Museum’s website, where they prove extremely popular, providing ten of the twenty most visited pages. The original fact sheets had been produced at different times over the last ten years, and many needed considerable editing and redesign work to bring them up to a consistent standard. Much of the redesign work was carried out by Thomas Nicolaou, one of the Museum’s gallery attendants who happens also to be a freelance graphic designer and photographer.
The Museum’s audio guide had been withdrawn in 2006, when the Museum partially closed for the building of the new extension. The recording is too good to abandon altogether, however, including as it does Sir David Attenborough in conversation with three previous members of staff (director Schuyler Jones, and lecturer-curators Howard Morphy and Hélène La Rue) as they browse the displays. A project principally involving Kate White and Suzy Prior has created an audiovisual presentation from this recording, illustrated with historical and object photographs. This has been shown on the Clore Learning Balcony at weekends as a relaxing ‘drop in’ introduction to the displays.

From May 2010, Helen Hales turned her attention to researching and writing more than sixty new texts for the refreshed audio guide. We had decided that this should be an in-house production, with Clare Harris, Helen Hales, Chris Morton, and Andrew McLellan reading the scripts, and other staff and musicians making additional contributions. The recordings have now been collated, edited, and loaded on to new ‘wands’ to be tested by staff and public as soon as the labelling is in place, ready for a full launch in September 2010.

Marketing and Press
Staff absences meant that this was a difficult year, in which the Museum’s marketing and press services were carried out through a series of part-time posts, under the guidance and with the support of Kate White. The press work was covered by Nicky Temple, while Kate Webber, Thomas Nicolaou, and Rachel Cramp (a new temporary member of staff) variously assumed responsibility for marketing. It did not prove possible within the year to bring to fruition the planned e-newsletter and social network presence, but progress towards this is now being made. Nevertheless, one measure of the Museum’s continuing success is its current rating as number two out of eighty-six ‘things to do in Oxford’ on Tripadvisor’s popularity index, second only to Bill Spectre’s ‘Oxford Ghost Trails’.

The Museum was featured in the BBC programme Mapping the World, exploring the contrast between Polynesian navigation and contemporary western cartography. It also featured in Norwegian, Spanish, and Travel Channel productions, and contributed to regional programming associated with the BBC ‘History of the World’ series of radio programmes.

Front of House
This year was the first full year since completion of the new extension building works in which all the galleries were fully open. Gallery staff numbers were increased to the optimum number in time for the upper gallery reopening in May 2010. During the year, with the help of a number of casual staff and deeply appreciated continued support from volunteer Felicity Wood, the gallery staff offered a welcoming and informative face to an ever-increasing number of visitors. Derek Stacey and Judith Hosking formally took on the duties of the Front of House Manager, adding this to their day-to-day supervision of the gallery staff. Training continued as part of the ongoing programme and included further fire and evacuation-chair training as well as sessions organized by collections staff, including visits to the reserve collections. Derek Stacey represented gallery staff at Health and Safety Meetings.

Visitor Figures
The annual visitor figure for 2009–10 was 334,767, compared with the previous highest visitor numbers for an academic year: 201,878 in 2007–8. This increase of nearly 66% is almost exactly 100,000 more than we cautiously estimated that last year’s entrance redevelopment project would add to the Museum’s visitor numbers in the longer term. The visitor numbers have levelled off since the excitement and publicity that surrounded last year’s reopening but have sustained themselves surprisingly well, despite the rival attraction offered by the reopened Ashmolean. The heavy January snows kept visitors away; however, the Museum itself remained open despite the conditions. The new visitor-counting system allows us to look in detail at visit patterns, which should help future marketing and programming.

Visitor Feedback
The visitor survey conducted in 2009–10 showed a high level of approval for the redeveloped entrance. There was also more pre-visit use of the website, one visitor commenting: ‘excellent resources/information for school visits’. Greater levels of satisfaction for visitors with disabilities were evident in feedback in the comments book—‘Excellent day out, very good disabled access, fun for all. Will definitely be coming again’—along with continued appreciation for the warm welcome and helpfulness of the gallery staff: ‘Pitt Rivers gets better and better with every visit. The whole museum staff made the experience unforgettable. Thank you (Richmond upon Thames College).’

Disability Access
Although not without its teething problems, the platform lift has greatly improved access for visitors, right through from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to the upper gallery. With the help of an external designer and considerable input from Museum staff, exhibitions in the long gallery and the Thesiger exhibition in the special exhibition gallery continued to meet the needs of all visitors.

During the year, new out-of-case lighting was introduced on the lower and upper galleries. This has improved lighting in the circulation spaces, but as we know from frequent entries in the visitor comments book, lighting in the cases themselves continues to be a real problem. We do, of course, offer all visitors wind-up torches, and for children in particular this adds an additional level of engagement to the visit, but we remain sharply aware of the need to improve in-case lighting. The Museum also offers its less mobile visitors the use of two wheelchairs and a motorised scooter and provides large-text versions of special exhibition labels, as well as magnifying glasses with which to read the very small labels that still characterise many of the Museum’s permanent displays.

Events
The new ‘Saturday Spotlight’ programme of gallery talks, presented on the Clore Learning Balcony, has continued to be well supported, with more than 400 people attending talks or tours over the year, and with high satisfaction ratings recorded on the feedback forms. The ability to show PowerPoint presentations, combined with the use of a lapel microphone, overcame most of the difficulties of using this gallery space on busy afternoons, and the benefits are significant in drawing in new visitors. Topics, mainly presented by staff, have ranged from battle shields and ‘witches ladders’ to guided tours ‘behind the scenes’ in conservation; but we are also very grateful to Paul Booth, of Oxford Archaeology, and former member of staff Chris Wingfield.

In Hilary term the Museum hosted the Oxford Ethnographic Film Society’s regular programme of documentary films, presented by their directors. Showing the films at the Museum free of charge on a Saturday morning (and occasional Wednesday) allowed the sessions to be attended by members of the public as well as by members of the University, and the programme attracted a growing number of devotees to hear filmmakers discussing their craft in person.

The Museum contributed an evening opening to Oxford City’s Christmas Light Night event on 27 November. The evening started with one of the lantern processions led by Oxford Corunna Band processing through the Museum on its way to the city centre. Afterwards, local storyteller Finlay Cowan enchanted children of all ages with his illustrated tale of the Museum mice and their Christmas party. Meanwhile, on the balcony, Doug Langley and Noel Lobley played traditional Shona music from Zimbabwe and Adam Etinson and Faith Elliott provided Balkan-influenced improvisations on fiddle and accordion. The Oxford Area Northumbrian Pipers (who practise at the Museum weekly during University terms) played traditional and festive tunes, and sitar player Vijay Jagtap and friends wound up the evening with a truly memorable performance of Indian music. Nearly 2,000 people attended this three-hour event.

This was followed by a late-night son et lumière on 28 May, developed to mark the Oxford University Museum of Natural History’s 150th anniversary. Around 1,600 people attended this four-hour event. In the Pitt Rivers, Noel Lobley played a wide variety of field recordings (of, for example, Nigerian voice-disguisers, and music made using stones and vulture quills), drawn from various sound archives throughout the world to reflect the global range of the Museum’s collections. There was also a performance by Josephine McInerney (horned dancer / performer) and MacGillivray (Kirsten Norrie) on electric harp, based on the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. Meanwhile, visitors enjoyed torchlight visits to the Museum’s court, and—perhaps even better—watched from the lower gallery the torches swimming and flickering in the darkness. New blackout curtains were purchased in order to create the darkness required for the torchlight adventure, and we are grateful to the construction company Beards for their sponsorship of these. The curtains may also provide new possibilities for future theatrical entertainments. One visitor wrote of the evening: ‘Magical— it brings tears to my eyes (believe it or not) to see this marvellous place packed and filled with music and light and darkness and mystery. Thank you!!’ Another enthusiast was Benji Lanyado from the Guardian newspaper, who was directed to the event by his Oxford TwiTrip ‘followers’, who wrote: ‘My penultimate stop was the Pitt Rivers Museum for a late- night opening, as suggested by @Jazza_uk and dozens of Twitterers. The staff had turned all of the lights out on the ground floor and were giving visitors torches to guide themselves around in the dark. This was truly awesome.’

The feedback from these two events reveals how public perception of the two museums has shifted in recent years, for they are now becoming thought of as venues for heightened expectation, excitement, and shared celebration, most noticeably among young adults. News spreads quickly, and the disappointment amongst those who arrived too late (alerted by those already enjoying the fun) and were turned away, was as marked as the expressions of thanks from those who were there. Demands for these events to be repeated more frequently have to be weighed against the demands on the staff who create them, and the tiny budget: around £1,000, shared between both museums.

One other highlight of the year’s events was ‘A Haida Happening’, the Museum’s contribution to the City’s Open Doors weekend on 13 September. More than a thousand visitors got a taste of the vibrant cultural life of Haida Gwaii as the Museum’s guests from the Haida Nation danced, sang, and gave talks and demonstrations during the afternoon.

New Collection Boxes
This year four new collecting boxes were installed to complement the now well-known ‘Anthropologists Fund-Raising Ritual’ box designed and built for the Museum by Tim Hunkin. The boxes are located at strategic points around the galleries: one at the top of the new entrance staircase, one on each of the galleries, and one in the special exhibition space. Although not as attractive or fun as Hunkin’s creation, they have already proven their worth.

EDUCATION SERVICE
As this was the first year that the Museum was fully open on all floors since the construction of the new extension, it was one of consolidation for the Education Service, in which new taught sessions and resources were trialled, evaluated, and updated as necessary. It was an opportunity to reassess the level of service that could be delivered with available resources and staffing, and to balance different age groups and audiences in line with the Museum’s five-year plan. The Education Service managed provision for drop-in family events and all booked groups to the Museum, offering introductory talks, taught sessions, and workshops to audiences of all ages through schools, colleges, further education institutions, special interest groups, and community groups. Most of the Museum’s education officers were funded by the Renaissance in the Regions programme, from which the Museum has benefited so substantially. However, Isabelle Carré, as music education officer running the innovatory project ‘Hands on Music in Museums’, which offers specialist music sessions to primary and secondary school children, was supported by a range of smaller but deeply appreciated grants from generous trusts, foundations, and individuals. Great use was made by the Education Service, and by the Museum’s other departments, of the new Clore Learning Balcony, which has proved to be the ideal ‘in-gallery’ space we hoped it would; the Clore Duffield Foundation also generously funded the running costs of activities held there.

The services of the education team continue to be provided free of charge to their many users. This year the team comprised: Andy McLellan (FT), Melody Vaughan (PT), and Becca McVean (PT). In addition, Alice LePage was employed part-time for six months to cover a period of sick leave. Isabelle Carré, the Museum’s Music Education Officer, returned (PT) with new funding in November 2009 to launch the ‘Hands on Music in Museums’ project. The work of the team was supported by posts that work across the University’s collections: Adrian Brooks (FT), Art Education Officer; Joy Todd (PT), Volunteer Coordinator; Flora Bain (FT), Community Education Officer; and Caroline Cheeseman (PT), Volunteer Assistant. Susan Griffiths (née Birch) was on maternity leave. The Volunteer Guiding Service continued its much-appreciated delivery of tours of the Museum to primary school groups. A new cohort of Education Guides was recruited and trained (Jane Yates, Jill Drake, Jodie Brookes, Caroline Byron-Patterson, Catherine Offord, and Jenni Hunt), with delivery for some starting in June 2010 (the rest will start in September 2010). They joined the existing team of Jean Flemming, Frances Martyn, Rosemary Lee, Linda Teasdale, Margaret Dyke, Anne Phythian-Adams, and Sukey Christiansen.

Schools, colleges, and other groups continued to book in large numbers. Over the year 31,072 people visited the Museum as part of booked groups (the previous highest figure had been 27,145, in 2006–7). Of these, 16,664 came with schools, 5,567 from higher education institutions, and 8,841 from language schools. The Education Service continued to teach as many of these groups as possible. Of these, 13,412 people received some form of taught session in the Museum: 6,287 primary school children took part in taught workshops, 7,125 secondary school children received taught sessions or talks. In addition, 8,346 children took part in organised family activities while 7,401 adults took part in organised activities, either as part of family activities or in those aimed specifically at adult audiences, a drop in numbers from 2007–8’s 11,329.

Other provision delivered by education officers included workshops with Open Door (adults with learning difficulties), artist-lead workshops with teenagers, film-making with sixth formers and community groups (including homeless young adults), film training for regional education officers, the ‘Making Museums’ project (now in its eighth year), training for PGCE students at Brookes, training for volunteers (in conjunction with the other University collections), an outreach gamelan music group, music study days, two late-night openings, the ‘Wow! How?’ science fair, family activities at the Cowley Road Carnival, and an MA student placement from Newcastle University.

The Education Service continued to be active in regional training days, through the Renaissance programme, and continued to be part of the Oxford University Museums and Collections (OUMC) Education Group, providing a coordinated approach to planning, marketing, and delivering education services across the University’s collections. In May 2010 the OUMC Education Group was awarded a grant of just over £400,000 from the National Lottery to run an education intern programme, to start in the spring of 2011 and run until the end of 2015.

ICT
The Museum website attracted more than 1.42 million visitors from 155 countries in 2009– 10, up 230,000 (20%) on the previous year. Many changes and additions to the Museum’s website were made over the course of the year to reflect the Museum’s research projects, new displays and exhibitions, events, and education activities. One particular highlight is the newly filmed panoramic virtual tour of the Museum, encompassing twice as many vantage points as before. The joint education website attracted more than 135,000 visitors, an increase of 23% over 2008–9.

During the year, the web pages devoted to the Museum’s photograph collections were redesigned, featuring a new introduction and regional overview, research enquiries guidance, current and past exhibition listings, as well as access to the collections web database. The website components of a range of collections-related projects were progressed over the period. The Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) project was completed. Here, the Museum is an institutional partner in a collaborative database project that brings together information on the ‘Northwest Coast’ collections of some ten major museum collections. The Museum contributed object records and associated images on the Haida collection it holds. The files are hosted on a Pitt Rivers Museum web server and accessed remotely through the RRN portal. The ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ project commenced in September 2009. A content- management system has been developed to afford the research team the ability to add and amend documents. A number of database development iterations have taken place and the site will continually evolve over the duration of the project. The ‘Blackfoot Shirts’ site was launched in September 2009. The website is intended to support teachers and students, with detailed photographs and associated lesson plans. Web pages have also been created to tie in with the Wilfred Thesiger in Africa exhibition. Through a collaboration with CabinetUK, the ability to order photographic prints online is afforded through the newly registered <www.prmprints.com> domain. Beyond the life of the exhibition it is envisaged that more images will be made available through the site. The ‘Some Thing for Every Body’ project, focused on the Museum’s exceptional collection of body arts and funded by a grant from MLA’s Designation Development Fund, also commenced. One main outcome will be a website, and progress was made towards scoping a site that would encompass records and images for the objects on display, as well as information sheets and audio and video podcasts.

Development of a web browser-based electronic education booking system also began during the reporting year. This has been devised to streamline the process of taking education bookings. It offers a number of usability advantages over the current system. The new system will be introduced at the beginning of the new academic year (2010–11) with further development taking place during Michaelmas Term 2010. It is hoped that this might in due course be rolled out to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, providing a unified education booking system for the two museums. The collections databases have undergone a number of enhancements to layouts, including further development of the photograph collections database, now incorporating more than 80,000 images within the records. A new web server has been set up and commissioned to host the collections databases. Coupled with a new version of the database-management system, speed and resilience have been enhanced.

In addition to all the above, the Museum’s ICT Officer, Haas Ezzet, continued to give IT support and advice to Museum staff, researchers, the cross-museums art education officer, hub-funded staff seconded to the Museum of Oxford, and the Renaissance manager. He also spent time drawing up the IT budget allocation, developing and updating the Museum’s IT resources, implementing the disposal of old IT equipment, and producing policy guidelines in regards to the Museum’s online output.

DISPLAY
Permanent Displays
Much of the year’s work focused on the upper gallery in preparation for its reopening to the public on 1 May 2010. A major new firearms display was installed at the west end in existing cases that were upgraded with new lock and alarm systems. The new displays incorporate almost 300 guns, tools, powder flasks, holsters, and ammunition dating from medieval times to the present day, including some rare and unique examples, and more than fifty items from the Museum’s founding collection. One section of the display highlights General Pitt- Rivers’s special interest in, and influence upon, the world of firearms and ballistics. The wooden spring-gun warning sign, a popular feature of the former firearms display in the court, was redisplayed above the upper gallery entrance.

Elsewhere in the upper gallery new labelling and numbering systems were installed in the cases devoted to swords, blowpipes, hand-fighting, and throwing-knives. Around ten items that had been affected by moth damage were removed from the Naga display on the south wall for conservation treatment. The damaged textiles were replaced with others from the reserve collections, including some notable examples acquired by James Philip Mills. Above the central section of the wall cases at the east end of the gallery, three large battle shields from Papua New Guinea (purchased in 2009 with the aid of the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund) were displayed along with a similar shield purchased for the Museum in 2002. A set of new bespoke cases were commissioned from Steve Grafton for installation above the other wall-cases at the east end, and staff began selecting from the reserve collections some fifty shields from Africa, Asia and Oceania to display in them. These ‘visible storage’ displays will mirror the existing shields displays high up at the west end of the gallery.
On the lower gallery, new labels were installed in the Recycling case. The majority of objects in the ‘Cook’ case had already been removed temporarily for loan to the major touring exhibition, James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, running until 2011. This case was further modified by the removal of the Tahitian mourner’s costume—part of the Forster collection from Cook’s second famous voyage—for conservation work.

Special Exhibitions
On 4 June 2010 Wilfred Thesiger in Africa: A Centenary Exhibition opened in the special exhibition gallery. This substantial exhibition, which will run for one year and includes more than sixty photographs and a dozen objects collected in Africa by Thesiger and his father, is the first to explore his enduring relationship with the continent of his birth and his place of residence in later years. Claire Venables, of Giraffe Corner, worked with Christopher Morton and Philip Grover to design the exhibition and publicity materials to great effect. The Museum held an evening event on 3 June to officially open the exhibition and to mark the hundredth anniversary of Wilfred Thesiger’s birth in Addis Ababa. Speeches were given by museum staff and also by Alexander Maitland, a friend of Thesiger’s and a contributor to the accompanying publication Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, published by HarperCollins in May. The exhibition and publication received excellent press coverage, with articles and reviews appearing in several national newspapers, and public interest remained high throughout the rest of the reporting year. The Museum is immensely grateful to William Delafield for his support of the exhibition, one more in the long series of Museum projects that have benefited from his generosity.

The programme of temporary photographic exhibitions continued in the long gallery. Carolyn Drake: Photographs of Central Asia continued until 28 February 2010 (see previous report for details). It was followed by The Burial of Emperor Haile Selassie: Photographs by Peter Marlow, which opened on 22 April. Renowned Magnum photographer Peter Marlow was one of the few European journalists to witness the reburial of Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa in 2000, twenty-five years after his death. The twenty-one vivid photographs in the exhibition document this remarkable event in recent Ethiopian history, and its colourful participants. The exhibition was designed to complement the Thesiger exhibition, as Thesiger was personally invited to Ras Tafari’s coronation as Emperor Haile Selassie in 1930.

There were several displays mounted in the archive case on the first floor over the course of the year. John Bradford: Pioneer of Landscape Archaeology opened on 2 October 2009 and closed on 31 January 2010. This was followed in February by Albania and the Balkans: Drawings and Photographs from the Edith Durham Collection, a display of historic material compiled by an early twentieth-century observer in the region, which opened on 1 February and closed on 4 July 2010. This was in turn followed by G. D. Aked: Photographs of East Asia, 1937–8, which opened on 19 July.

In April 2010 a temporary display of photographs illustrating the Museum’s recent research projects, special events, and capital developments was mounted in the desk cases at the east end of the upper gallery. The display, coordinated by Nicky Temple, gives visitors an impression of the vigorous research activity carried out in the Museum’s new extension, and helps counteract the popular stereotype that the Museum is an unchanging institution.
The Museum also continued to provide a venue for artists’ interventions. The exhibition DisGuise and Dolls, which was on show in the ‘Didcot’ case on the lower gallery from 5 February to 21 March, featured work created by Oxford Brookes art foundation students, following a taught session in the Museum. Using the many representations of the human form on display in the Museum as starting points, the students explored the purpose and meaning of dolls as a way of examining and representing their own identities. This was followed, from 28 April to 14 June, by Dionne Barber’s Space and Time. Her paintings and drawings captured traces of her own presence within the Museum’s displays, and architectural spaces, responding to ‘the atmosphere and potency that makes the Pitt Rivers the experience it is’. The exhibition also contained pieces created during two public workshops the artist ran with Adam Griffiths, along with a display of both artists’ own working drawings and an invitation to visitors to add their responses in a sketchbook.

From 24 to 29 April the Museum provided a venue for Oxasians, a multimedia installation, created by volunteer members of Arts Asia and funded by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. In July the Museum was pleased to be associated with the installation of Angela Palmer’s Ghost Forest on the lawn in front of the OUMNH. This exhibition of ten magnificent tree stumps from Ghana’s rain forest poses poignant questions about human activity and future survival.

COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT AND CARE
Reserve Collections
Work by collections, conservation, and technical services staff to upgrade the conditions in the Museum’s repositories continued as time allowed. For example, for the first few months of the reporting year Madeleine Ding recatalogued the fish-hooks, fishing accessories and traps stored in the upper gallery. From January to July 2009, she worked with Kate Greenaway on the Museum’s collections of southern African archaeology, with the support of the James A. Swan Fund: in total 5,223 artefacts were individually numbered, photographed, and repacked into new plastic boxes. Through the year, she spent a day a week working in the reserve collections: first recataloguing Naga textiles at the textile store then, in the summer, at Osney working with Kate Jackson on numbering and repacking the basketry collections. Similar work was carried out as time allowed in the photograph and manuscript collections. For example, in February Christopher Morton organised a major restorage project on the B and C series of prints within the photograph collections, involving their transfer into new sleeves and Solander boxes. The project was completed in April.

Acquisitions
As usual the Museum received a wide range of material by donation during the year, as well as making a few purchases and acquiring other material by transfer and bequest. The latter was a notable bequest by Veronica Berry of the Eustace Neville-Rolfe collection of Neapolitan amulets. Among the more notable donations to the object collections were two important collections of Chinese textiles, from Wendy Black and Deryn O’Connor. Among the more notable donations to the photographic collections was the collection of fieldwork photographs taken by Christopher Morton during his doctoral fieldwork in northern Botswana in 1999–2000. Other notable donations included three collections relating to exhibitions held at the Museum: a small collection of photographs taken by G. D. Aked in the 1930s, a collection of exhibition prints produced for the Museum’s exhibition Carolyn Drake: Photographs of Central Asia, and a large collection of contact prints taken by Peter Marlow at the burial of Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa in 2000. A full list of the Museum’s acquisitions is given in Annex B.

Loans
The major loan this year was of more than sixty objects from the Museum’s ‘Cook-voyage’ collections to a major multi-venue exhibition, which opened in August 2009. The first venue was the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn, where the exhibition James Cook und die Entdeckung der Südsee / James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, opened on 28 August 2009. This closed on 28 February 2010, after which the loaned material travelled to Vienna where it was reinstalled in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna in the exhibition James Cook und die Entdeckung der Südsee / James Cook and the Discovery of the South Seas. This is scheduled to close on 13 September 2010, at the beginning of the next reporting year. These exhibitions were accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published in both German and English, in which all the material loaned by the Museum was described and illustrated.

In September 2009, five objects were loaned to the Ashmolean Museum for five years (renewable), four for display in its new ‘Money’ gallery and one (the ‘Battersea’ sword) for display in its ‘England, 400–1600’ gallery. On 28 November 2009, a locally collected Neolithic handaxe was loaned to Chalgrove Local History Group for its open day. In December 2009, three examples of Berber jewellery were loaned to Brighton Museum & Art Gallery for inclusion in its exhibition Imazighen: The Arts and Identity of Berber Women; they are due to be returned in December 2011. In March 2010, five Blackfoot shirts (collected in 1841) were loaned to Glenbow Museum, Calgary for the exhibition Kaahsinnooniksi Ao’toksisawooyawa: Our Ancestors Have Come to Visit—Reconnections with Historic Blackfoot Shirts, and subsequently to the Galt Museum, Lethbridge for its installation of the same exhibition, which opened on 5 June. The shirts are scheduled to return to the Museum in August 2010. Also in March 2010, nine Naga objects and three Woodthorpe watercolours were loaned to the Musée du quai Branly for the exhibition Other Masters: Popular Arts of India; they were returned in July.
One other loan was returned during the year. In October 2009, eleven photographic portraits, sixteen cartes-de-visite, four watercolours, and a portrait in oils (thirty-two pieces in total), which had been on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge for the exhibition Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, were returned.

Cataloguing
As in previous years, a substantial amount of work was done on cataloguing collections and on enhancing existing database records. During the course of the year, 7,032 new entries were added to the Museum’s object database (compared with 3,488 in the previous year). The large increase is due to the number of new accessions processed during the year and to the fuller accessioning of a number of archaeological collections that had previously been ‘bulk accessioned’. Also, 24,115 enhancements were made to existing records during the year (compared with 284,759 in the previous year). The large number of enhancements in 2008–9 was a direct result of the work carried out as part of the project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum: Defining Research Priorities, 2010–20’. The figure of 24,115 for 2009–10 is more comparable to that of 21,922 in 2007–8.
Also during the year, 13,253 new entries were added to the Museum’s photograph database (compared with 22,202 in the previous year). Also, 3,761 enhancements were made to existing records during the year (compared with 14,832 in the previous year).
The Museum was particularly grateful to volunteer Fusa McLynn, who continued to transcribe and translate the Japanese inscriptions on a number of the objects in the Basil Hall Chamberlain collection, which comprises more than 800 objects (mostly paper amulets, but also some maps, pictures, and wooden amulets). Ms McLynn’s work has added greatly to the Museum’s records for this important collection.
From September to December the photograph collections benefited from cataloguing work on the Damian Webb collection of photographs relating to English children’s games by Angela (Corey) Green, an intern from Texas Tech University. Patti Langton also continued to visit weekly throughout the year in her capacity as a research associate in order to catalogue her collection of field photographs from Southern Sudan, donated to the Museum the previous year. In January a new electronic catalogue of the papers of Sir Baldwin Spencer was begun by volunteer Janine Rankin, based on the earlier handlist, but much corrected and updated, and presented online for the first time in June. In May and June funding from the James A. Swan Fund enabled Noel Lobley to enhance the catalogue of the Louis Sarno collection of sound recordings on audio cassette from the Central African Republic and for a collection of some of his 1,200 slides to be catalogued for the first time.

Object Collections
There were a number of staff changes during the year. Curatorial Assistant Siân Mundell was on maternity leave throughout the year, her post being filled by Kate Greenaway. Deputy Head of Collections Marina de Alarcón was on maternity leave from November 2009, her post being filled by Faye Cheesman as Acting Deputy Head of Collections. Zena McGreevy continued to be seconded to the Ashmolean Museum, her post being filled by Elin Bornemann. Madeline Ding and Kate Greenaway continued as Curatorial Assistants. As detailed elsewhere in this report, it was an extremely busy year for collections staff, who were heavily involved in the administration and couriering of loans, the mounting of new displays, supporting the various externally funded research projects, and continuing to manage an increasing number of enquiries, research visitors, and image requests.

Conservation
The reporting year started as it meant to go on for the conservation department with the first leg of the loan of Cook-voyage material to the exhibition in Bonn. The 62 fragile objects from James Cook’s first and second famous voyages to the Pacific had been prepared by the end of the previous reporting year. They were packed in early August 2009 and installed between 17 and 27 August by conservators Jeremy Uden, Jennifer Mitchell, and Heather Richardson. The exhibition was deinstalled in February 2010 and reinstalled in Vienna in April 2010, with Faye Cheesman replacing Jennifer Mitchell as a member of the team. To keep up the momentum, on returning from Bonn in late August the conservation team were soon to be involved in September 2009 with the visit of twenty-two delegates from Haida Gwaii to study nearly 300 historic Haida artefacts in the Museum’s collection. Kate Jackson coordinated the condition-checking and conservation of the collection, assisted by Charlotte Ridley and Jennifer Mitchell. As trained conservators, Ridley and Mitchell worked in the conservation department for the final few months of their contracts as Collections Move Assistants, originally recruited for the entrance redevelopment project. The Haida research visit involved all the Museum’s conservators, who were present at each session to facilitate object handling.

In late September 2009 a small loan of five objects was prepared for the soon to be re- opened Ashmolean Museum, and in December 2009 a loan of three pieces of Berber jewellery was prepared for loan to Brighton Museum.

During October and November the conservation department were fortunate in securing the funding to retain Jennifer Mitchell on a part-time contract. Mitchell’s former career in IT, along with her conservation knowledge, made her well-qualified to complete a number of important computer-related projects for the department. These included drafting clear guidelines for documentation, photography, and environmental equipment and, with Jeremy Uden, compiling the first draft of a Laboratory Manual to assist staff and interns.

In November we began preparations for the second large-scale North American collections-related project of the year: the ‘Blackfoot Shirts’ project. Working closely with curator Laura Peers and other project partners, the three conservators conserved and documented five immensely important Plains hide shirts given by Blackfoot people to the head of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1841. Before treatment of the shirts commenced, the conservation team spent several days studying the shirts with visiting Blackfoot ceremonialists Allan Pard and Charlene Wolfe, who helped to inform the selection of the most suitable treatment options. The conservators and other collections staff were also ritually blessed and painted to protect them while working with these sacred objects. The preparation of the shirts for loan to exhibitions at the Glenbow and Galt museums in Alberta, plus handling sessions for more than 500 Blackfoot people, would prove to be a substantial time commitment for the team for the remainder of the reporting year.

In January 2010 the conservators opened the laboratory doors to some 300 people for the annual ‘Making Museums’ programme for schoolchildren and in connection with a ‘Saturday Spotlight’ event.

In March 2010 the conservation team split in a number of directions. At the beginning of the month all the conservators attended the training course ‘Radiation Safety and Safe Use of Handheld XRF’ funded by the Renaissance programme. Heather Richardson acted as courier to take the five Blackfoot Shirts to Alberta for a three-week period from 12 March. Also in March Jeremy Uden acted as courier, with Julia Nicholson, for the loan of six Naga artefacts and three Naga works on paper to the Musée du quai Branly, Paris. The conservation work to prepare the works on paper for loan had been contracted to two private conservators, Victoria Stevens and Celia Bockmuehl, earlier in the reporting year.

During April, May, and July each conservator acted as courier for further loan obligations already detailed. Also in April the department recommenced regular visits to the reserve collections at Osney, along with colleagues in collections, to improve storage, cataloguing, and locations.

With so many loan commitments it was difficult for the department to host as many internships and placements as in other years, but some were achieved. Samantha Jenkins undertook a short placement during her university vacations at Christmas and Easter. Alison Wheeler continued to volunteer within the department, primarily assisting with packing loans, but also undertook a formal work placement to rehouse a collection of photographs. On 14 June Katharina Kuntz, a conservation student from the University of Erfurt in Germany, began an internship (which will come to an end early in the next reporting year) during which she was able to contribute to a diverse array of projects. In early July, Ian Langston started in the department for two days a week before commencing his MA studies in Conservation and Restoration at the University of Lincoln in September 2010. He plans to undertake the practical elements of his course at the Museum during 2010–11.

Conservation staff gave a number of papers and other presentations during the year, for which details are provided in Annex D ‘Staff Actitivies’.

Technical Services
From August 2009 until the beginning of May 2010 most of the effort of the technical services team was directed at designing and installing the new firearms displays in the upper gallery. Chris Wilkinson, Adrian Vizor, and Alan Cooke worked within the closed gallery, constructing mock-ups and crafting the required fittings before installing the artefacts in the cases. After the gallery opened in May, Adrian Vizor and Jon Eccles continued to install new interpretive texts and labels in the upper gallery. Two new display cases were made to order and installed above the wall cases at the east end of the upper gallery, for which Chris Wilkinson and Alan Cooke planned the installation of a selection of shields to complement the displays at the west end. Adrian Vizor also installed four contemporary shields from Papua New Guinea between the new cases. As with all display projects, the technical services team worked closely with their colleagues in the collections and conservation departments.

Technical services staff were also involved in the installation of several special and temporary exhibitions this year, including the new Wilfred Thesiger in Africa exhibition in the special exhibitions gallery, and the series of photographic displays in the long gallery. Jon Eccles also assisted in installing the series of photograph and manuscript exhibitions in the archive case.

There were two significant purchases during the year. First, the Museum purchased a mobile elevating work platform to allow staff to access artefacts and equipment at high levels. John Simmons, Chris Wilkinson, Adrian Vizor, Jon Eccles, and conservation staff were trained in its use on site. This has already proved to be an extremely useful purchase. Secondly, in the spring of 2010, John Simmons oversaw the replacement of the Museum’s old transit van, purchased in 1996, with a new, more ‘museum friendly’ van. In addition, a much-needed, new storage cupboard for ladders was installed near to the stairwell in the new extension, and a storage cupboard for mobile scaffolding was built and installed next to the Blackwood Room.

Members of the technical services department continued to support the work of the Museum by participating in a range of public programmes. John Simmons gave a talk to the Friends of the Museum, comprising a personal assessment of the Museum’s displays over the past twenty-five years. Chris Wilkinson assisted Helen Hales with a ‘Saturday Spotlight’ talk about the new firearms displays. Jon Eccles continued to carry out day-to-day maintenance, but also took on the job of looking after the Museum’s AV equipment and assisting speakers, lecturers, and those managing special events. He also began removing bark-chippings and pebbles from the bases of cases around the Museum, with a view to helping minimize possible insect infestations. This work is ongoing.

Staff training undertaken during the year included the mobile scaffold training courses, which were held at the Museum. All the technical staff were trained (or retrained) and were joined by staff from conservation, and by staff from the Ashmolean Museum and the Bodleian Library. John Simmons and Chris Wilkinson attended the ‘known consignor’ training course, along with members of staff from other sections. Adrian Vizor, Alan Cooke, and Jon Eccles attended a day-seminar in London entitled ‘Re-imagining Display’. They also attended an abrasive-wheels course held in the Museum workshop. John Simmons attended monthly ‘neighbours’ meetings to monitor and comment on any impact that the new Earth Sciences building works adjacent to Robinson Close would have on the Museum. He also supervised a work-experience student, Lauren Tilley, for one week in August 2009 and a mature student, Caroline Morrell, in February 2010.

RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
Members of the Museum’s staff continued to lead, collaborate on, and contribute to many varied research projects, both within the Museum and with colleagues in other institutions elsewhere in the United Kingdom and around the world. An indication of the range of research carried out during the reporting year can be gleaned from the entries in Annex D: Staff Activities, Annex E: Staff Publications, and Annex F: Museum Seminars.

Research Projects
Research continued to be an integral part of many aspects of the Museum’s work, ranging from that carried out as part of major externally funded projects to the detailed investigations that are carried out as part of accessioning procedures, cataloguing, and display preparation. In recent years much of the Museum’s activity in this area has been focused on projects funded by major research grants that enable the institution to stay at the cutting edge of contemporary, particularly collections-based, research.

The John Fell OUP Research Fund project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum: Defining Research Priorities, 2010–20’, led by Dan Hicks and Jeremy Coote, continued throughout the reporting year. This year, the project, which aims to characterize the range, significance, and research potential of the Museum’s world archaeology collections, hosted visits from thirty archaeologists representing a range of regional and period expertise. In all, some 30,000 archaeological objects were examined during the year. Moreover, as a result of research conducted in preparation for these visits by Matt Nicholas and Alice Stevenson, the research field in more than 19,500 object records has been enhanced, while information on provenance and publication history was also improved. Record-quality photographs were also taken of a large number of the objects that were examined. The project also hosted two interns: Caroline Butler, through the University of Oxford’s Continuing Education Masters in Professional Archaeology, and Cassia Pennington, though the University of Leicester’s Masters in Museum Studies. Alice Stevenson is leading the editing of the reports submitted by the specialists, which will in due course be published on the Museum’s website and as a monograph. Members of the project team have also liaised with several other national and international projects to share information about the Museum’s collections. Museum staff have also noticed a marked increase in the number of enquiries received relating to the archaeological collections, as well as increased numbers of requests for research access and for publication-quality images.

The project ‘Haida Material Culture in British Museums: Generating New Forms of Knowledge’, funded by a grant from The Leverhulme Trust was completed during the reporting year, although the strong relationship created between the Museum and the Haida Nation will continue. In September 2009, twenty-one members of the Haida community paid a ten-day visit to the Museum in order to examine some 300 Haida objects. The visit reconnected people with objects made by their ancestors more than a hundred years ago. The Haida visitors were able to provide Museum staff with a great deal of information about the artefacts and their significance within the community, all of which has now been added to the Museum’s records by the project’s Network Facilitator, Cara Krmpotich. In addition, the Museum’s staff, Friends, and visitors were given a taste of the vibrant cultural life of Haida Gwaii through demonstrations of weaving, argillite carving, and singing and dancing. Some forty of the Museum’s Friends attended a gala dance performance and feast, and an estimated 400 people watched dance performances on the lawn in front of the OUMNH. A conference was held at the Museum with guests from the Haida Nation attending, as well as curators from museums across Britain holding Haida material culture within their collections. During the course of the project, a request was made for the return of a Haida human remain. The subsequent repatriation ceremony took place on 28 July 2010 and was attended by Andrew Hamilton (Vice-Chancellor) and Kumar Gupta (Head of Advocacy at the Canadian High Commission) and witnessed by members of the Museum staff and the School of Anthropology, as well as by two visiting Maori researchers. In June 2010 the Museum said goodbye to Network Facilitator and project researcher, Cara Krmpotich, who took up a tenure-track post in Museum Studies at the University of Toronto.

During the year, work began on a new research project entitled ‘Kaahsinooniksi Aotoksisaawooya Our Ancestors Have Come to Visit—Reconnections with Historic Blackfoot Shirts’ funded by a grant of £183,401 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project is led by Laura Peers with co-investigator Alison Brown of the University of Aberdeen. The project focuses on five spectacular Blackfoot men’s shirts, some decorated with porcupine quillwork, hair, and painted designs, and brings together British and Canadian museums and universities with Blackfoot people in Canada and the United States. The shirts were collected in 1841 by Sir George Simpson, the Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and have been in the Museum’s collection since 1893. Historic shirts with hair-locks were part of sacred religious bundles, but were collected for museums and private collectors following assimilation policies enacted in the Indian Act revisions of 1884; they were part of traditional spiritual ways suppressed by the government and missionaries. This project has served as a stimulus for reviving the making and ceremonial use of such shirts. Thanks to funding from Renaissance in the Regions, in November 2009 Piikani Blackfoot ceremonialists Allan Pard and his wife Charlene Wolfe visited the Museum. They provided advice to Museum staff about hair-lock shirts, which are sacred items for Blackfoot people, and painted and prayed for all members of staff who would handle the shirts during the course of the project. This was a protective measure for those working with spiritually powerful items. Pard gave two lectures while at the Museum, one for staff and another for students. Following this visit, staff working with the shirts were asked to observe traditional Blackfoot menstrual taboos when working with them, treating the shirts as animate beings, speaking to them, and telling them what was happening to them. In February 2010, a second group of Blackfoot ceremonialists—Narcisse Blood, Alvine Mountain Horse, Ryan and Adrienne Heavy Head, and Frank Weasel Head—visited the Museum in order to give some final advice to the project team. Then, from 12 March onwards the shirts were transported to Alberta, Canada for loan to, first, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and, then, the Galt Museum in Lethbridge, for both exhibition and handling sessions. A total of 550 Blackfoot people from all four Blackfoot communities attended the handling sessions. Elders, artists, ceremonialists, teachers, and high-school students were invited to the sessions, which provoked memory, song, traditional stories, the retrieval of old Blackfoot language terms no longer commonly used, the transfer of traditional knowledge, prayer, and learning by all. At each museum, one of the workshops trained Blackfoot teachers in working with the shirts; this has been followed up with a gift of posters depicting the shirts for classroom use. Blackfoot people drove for up to six hours to attend these sessions. Some people gave presents to the ancestral spirits associated with the shirts of traditional ceremonial smudging materials (sweetgrass, sage) and offerings of cloth. Others offered songs or spoke to the ancestral spirits. The sessions were facilitated by Heather Richardson, Laura Peers, and Alison Brown.

Back at the Museum, volunteer graduate students made ten copies of a pattern that had been traced by members of the conservation department from one of the shirts. These copies were then given to Blackfoot seamstresses and, as a result, new shirts are being made for senior men in Blackfoot communities, and rights are being ceremonially transferred to these shirts, for the first time in some fifty years. In order to ‘welcome the ancestors home’, a class of high-school students at the Kainai High School learned to tan hide and do porcupine quillwork during the school year 2009–10. Their teacher sponsored the making and transfer of a new shirt for elder Pete Standing Alone, which was transferred in ceremony to him in the presence of the old shirts on loan from the Museum in June 2010. Feedback from Blackfoot people has been exceptionally positive; we have been thanked repeatedly for allowing people to make contact with and learn from these important heritage items. One college student said the experience changed her life, making her determined to learn about her culture and to develop her traditional identity. Interest in quillwork, formerly an art practised by less than a handful of people in the confederacy, has soared. A website has been developed and lesson- plans related to the shirts are being commissioned from Blackfoot teachers for posting on the site; images and information are already available and it is being used by educators and students in Blackfoot communities.

The Museum’s involvement in the European Union funded project ‘Réseau International des Musées d’Ethnographie’ (2008–13) deepened over the course of the year. The project’s main objectives are to encourage links between ethnographic museums, universities, and research centres across Europe, and to contribute to the process of redefining the role of ethnographic museums in the twenty-first century. The lead museum is the Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale de Tervuren (Belgium), while the other partners are the Musée du quai Branly, Paris (France), the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden (Netherlands), the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico ‘Luigi Pigorini’, Rome (Italy), the Världskulturmuseet, Göteborg (Sweden), the Linden-Museum Stuttgart (Germany), the Museo de América, Madrid (Spain), the Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna (Austria), and the Nàprstek’s Muzeum, Prague (Czech Republic), as well as the Pitt Rivers Museum itself. The limited size of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s special exhibition gallery will prevent it from hosting the collaborative exhibition that will be one of the project outcomes; instead the Museum will make its own contribution in the form of an exhibition devoted to the topic of trade (opening July 2011), as well as hosting the major international conference to mark the conclusion of the project in 2013.

In September 2009 work started on another project generously funded by a grant from The Leverhulme Trust: ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth- Century Collector’. The principal investigator of this three-year research project is Jeremy Coote (with Chris Gosden of the University’s Institute of Archaeology as co-investigator). The project researcher is Alison Petch. The project focuses on General Pitt-Rivers’s collecting activities broadly conceived and throughout his life, including the building-up of his now-dispersed ‘second’ collection, which formed the basis of the ‘other’ Pitt-Rivers Museum in Farnham, Dorset. During the first year, the manuscript catalogue of the ‘second’ collection was scanned at high resolution by our colleagues at Cambridge University Library, where it is held, a database of all the objects listed in the catalogue was compiled, and a project website designed, built, and launched. By the end of the project, the team will be able to provide a far more comprehensive account of Pitt-Rivers’s collecting activities than has been available before, and to contribute to a greater understanding of collecting and related intellectual activities in the second half of the nineteenth century. The project team was delighted to welcome Emeritus Professor Peter Rivière as a contributor to the project and student volunteer Rachel McGoff who diligently set about proofreading the database entries created for the ‘second’ collection.

In summer 2010 a small grant from the Boise Fund allowed a detailed examination of some elements of the Museum’s East African Stone Age collection by postdoctoral researcher Ceri Shipton.

In December 2009, following a successful application for funding through the Science and Technologies Research Council (STFC) with a team of analytical scientists from Italy, two historic Japanese swords (1913.48.1 and 1940.7.0399) from the Museum’s collections were analysed at the ISIS laboratory in Harwell. The analysis used neutron diffraction to determine the metallic composition of the two blades in order to further understand the forging process. Senior conservator Jeremy Uden accompanied the swords to Harwell and remained on site for a week to facilitate movement of the swords within the equipment.

Research Visitors
There were 307 recorded research visits to the Museum during the year requiring the retrieval of objects, photographs, and/or manuscripts from the reserve collections. Of these, 40 came from within Oxford University and 45 from other higher education institutions in the UK. Visitors also included staff members of other museums, students and academics from non- UK universities, as well as visual artists and private researchers. Of the 307 visits, 156 were to the object collections and 151 to the photographic and manuscript collections. The total number of recorded research enquiries was 1,884. Of these, 1,531 were by email, 64 by post, 138 by phone, and 151 in person. These figures are slightly up on the previous year.

Of particular note among the visitors to the object collections this year were the 30 archaeologists who, supervised by Alice Stevenson, examined some 30,000 archaeological objects as part of the project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum: Defining Research Priorities, 2010–20’. Visitors to the object collections also included Professor Itaru Chijiwa of Kokugakuin University, Tokyo (who had also visited in the previous year) accompanied by Seiji Hoshino, Assistant Professor at the same university, and Norifumi Shimazu of Jinja Honcho, the Association of Shinto Shrines. They examined more than 300 objects from the Basil Hall Chamberlain collection of Japanese amulets, providing valuable information about the objects, as well as about the subject of shrines in general. This information was used to enhance the relevant database entries. The visit also strengthened the relationship between the Museum and Professor Chijiwa, who is hoping to return for a third visit next year.

An extensive visit was made by Chia-yu Hu, Yu-chin Su, and Tzu-lan Liu of the National Taiwan University. They viewed a large number of objects and photographs from Taiwan held in the Museum’s collections with a view to creating a database of Taiwanese collections held overseas. Other visitors of particular note included Francois Wadra, an archaeologist from the Loyalty Islands, Ukjese van Kampen, a Tutchone artist from Whitehorse, Canada, and Othniel Oomiituk, an artist and hunter from Alaska.

Among the notable visitors to the photograph collections were the Australian film director Scott Hicks, who was born and grew up in East Africa, and who came to conduct research on the Thesiger collection from that region, and Professor Peter Worsley who brought the Australian linguist Michael Walsh to view his field photographs from Groote Eylandt.

The Museum also hosted visits from many visiting scholars and academics. In September 2009, for example, the Museum hosted a second visit from Professor Dr John T. Agberia of the Department of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, holder of the University of Oxford Titular Fellowship of the Association of Commonwealth Universities for 2009. In November the Museum also hosted a visit by Ms Tina Baum, Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, National Gallery of Australia, who was visiting the United Kingdom to undertake leadership training and a series of meetings and visits. Ms Baum was one of the 2009 recipients of funding from ‘ACCELERATE: Indigenous Australian Creative Leadership Program’ run by the British Council in Australia with local partners, which aims to address the lack of representation of Indigenous artists and arts managers at senior levels in the Australian cultural sector. In July 2010 the Museum hosted a visit from Kikrulhounya Paphino, an art curator based at the museum in Kohima, Nagaland, who was visiting the United Kingdom as the holder of a Visiting Fellowship from the Nehru Trust (for the Indian Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum).

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. Staff continued to teach on the University’s undergraduate degrees in Archaeology and Anthropology, Human Sciences, and History of Art and Visual Culture; 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 in Social Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, History of Art, Archaeology, and African Studies. During the year, Museum staff gave 62 lectures and 205 seminars and tutorials. Details of teaching and examining carried out by members of staff are given in Annex D: Staff Activities, and of their publications in Annex E. In addition, during the year Museum staff attended 44 conferences (and numerous workshops and training days) and delivered 27 conference papers.

Balfour Library
Work continued on the retrospective conversion on to OLIS (Oxford Libraries Information System) of periodical holdings. Librarian Mark Dickerson received further training in Oracle financials and OLIS Serials. In addition, following the retirement of the previous librarian, from May he was seconded to run the Hope and Arkell Libraries at OUMNH one day a week. The library was pleased to receive visits from the Tozzer Librarian, Harvard University, and a party from the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA). There were 7,217 loans during the year.

FINANCIAL SUCCESS
The Museum continued to enjoy substantial success in obtaining the external project and research grant funding so crucial to its financial health. Apart from the research grants mentioned below, the Museum also continued to benefit significantly from an award of £721,000 from the AHRC core-funding programme. In addition, £260,787 was received from ‘Renaissance in the Region’ and £78,120 from the Designation Development Fund, the latter for an innovative project based around the Museum’s body arts displays.

The Museum also received £3,500 from Rosanna Taylor’s 1987 Charity Trust, £5,000 from the Radcliffe Trust, £3,000 from the Charity of Thomas Dawson, £1,000 from the Bishopsdown Trust, £1,500 from the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and £15,500 from the Foundation for Sport and the Arts towards the ‘Hands on Music in Museums’ project. In addition, the Museum received £5,000 from the William Delafield Trust as part of its continued support for work on the Wilfred Thesiger collections. A generous donation of £7,500 was also received from the Friends towards new lighting and new display cases on the upper and lower galleries. £19,327 was received in donations from the Museum’s visitors.

Research Grants
Research continued to be an integral part of many aspects of the Museum’s work. The project ‘Haida Material Culture in British Museums: Generating New Forms of Knowledge’, led by Laura Peers and funded by a total grant of £104,748 from The Leverhulme Trust, was completed during the reporting year.
Work continued on the project ‘Réseau International des Musées d’Ethnographie’, funded by a total grant to the Museum of €150,575 from the European Union over five years (2008–13). Work also continued on the project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum: Defining Research Priorities, 2010–20’, led by Dan Hicks and Jeremy Coote and supported by a total grant of £116,325 from the John Fell OUP Research Fund (2009–2010).

Work began on the project ‘Kaahsinooniksi Aotoksisaawooya: Our Ancestors Have Come to Visit—Reconnections with Historic Blackfoot Shirts’, led by Laura Peers (with co- investigator Alison Brown of the University of Aberdeen) and supported by a total grant of £183,401 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In September 2009 work also began on the three-year project ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector’, led by Jeremy Coote (and Chris Gosden of the University’s Institute of Archaeology) and supported by a total grant of £248,000 from The Leverhulme Trust.

Renaissance
During 2009–10 the Museum benefited from £260,787 of funding from Renaissance, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council’s programme to transform England’s regional museums. Since 2002, central government investment has begun to reverse the decline in the country’s major regional museums: increasing visitor numbers, improving standards, developing collections, and supporting new ways of working. The Oxford University museums (the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of the History of Science) form one quarter of the South East Renaissance Hub, alongside Hampshire County Museums and Archives Service, The Royal Pavilion, Libraries, and Museums, Brighton and Hove, and Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust.

Over this reporting year, Renaissance funding has supported four education officer posts, to deliver the school and public education programme, as well as posts devoted to the display and interpretation of the newly reopened upper gallery, front-of-house management, and additional staff training. The Museum has also played a key role in administering two new partnership projects with the County and City Museum services; the first of these provides a reminiscence service to older people in the City of Oxford, while the second project focuses on working with groups of both younger and older people in the city to develop skills and community cohesion.

Museum Shop and Other Trading Activities
The shop achieved just over £120,000 in turnover, and made a small net profit for the first full year since it was relocated to its new site and professionally refurbished. This constituted a major increase in turnover of more than 100% in relation to previous years, and not only set the foundations for the Museum to capitalize on increasing visitor numbers, but permitted the development of specific product to match demand from visitors. Average spend per visitor continued to increase from 23p to 33p over the year, and average price per transaction increased from £4.80 to £5.24. With the opening of the Wilfred Thesiger in Africa special exhibition in June, new products were developed to coincide with the launch, and these have proved to be best sellers at a very early stage. As turnover grew, discounts were negotiated with key suppliers to increase overall margins and new products introduced with new suppliers. The ethical trading stance and individuality of product has begun to create loyalty amongst regular, local shoppers that will be developed further. Shop staff worked very hard and were dedicated to ensuring that trading ran smoothly and there were no unnecessary closures. Support from administrative staff was much appreciated in facilitating the invoicing procedures and in the setting up of new suppliers, and helping with floor cover at key times.

The sale of images and reproduction rights continued to increase over the year, but any benefits were outweighed by the amount of time and number of staff required to deal with each enquiry. After a useful presentation by Cabinet UK, a print-on-demand company, it was decided to invest in a site that would initially meet the increased demand for images that the Wilfred Thesiger in Africa exhibition was expected to create. This was a large investment for the Museum, but the benefits were very clear and the product was already endorsed by nationals such as the Victoria and Albert Museum. The site went live at the same time as the exhibition and the first two months of trading were very encouraging. Other requests received directly from researchers, students, and academics have continued to provide a steady income. It is anticipated that other images will be added to a new ordering site over the coming years.
The Museum is aware of the need to explore all income-generating opportunities. With the assistance of conservation staff, therefore, and with the support of senior members of staff, the Museum has started to develop private-event hire. During the reporting year Museum staff set about testing the market. A proposal to introduce a realistic charging structure was approved, which will be implemented in the new financial year

Donations
Elizabeth Allen (a set of sandals, knife, and sheath, and two fans, from Nigeria; 2009.171); Paul Baxter (a collection of Borana material, from Kenya; 2010.45); Wendy Black (a collection of textiles, mostly from the Miao people and other groups in south-west China; 2010.3); Fiona Burton (a dogs’ tooth necklace, pubic covering, and head ornament with cassowary feathers, from Papua New Guinea; 2010.41); Itaru Chijiwa (a paper amulet, from Japan; 2009.159); Amanda Comford (a mixed collection of twenty-three photographs, mostly taken by G. D. Aked in the 1930s; 2010.42); Michael Crouch (three examples of the ‘Baihan chair’, from Yemen; 2009.137); Clark E. Cunningham (a photograph of T. K. Penniman with candidates for the diploma in anthropology, outside the University’s examination schools in 1958; 2009.114); Ana Avelina de Pina Cabral (ten wax ex-votos, from Portugal; 2009.131); Carolyn Drake (a collection of exhibition prints produced for the Museum’s exhibition Carolyn Drake: Photographs of Central Asia; 2010.30); Elizabeth Edwards (a postcard of an Australian Aborigine; 2010.14); Charlotte Harland (rope plaited from strands of plastic bag, from Zambia; 2009.157); Giles Hopkinson (a model of a Mongolian nomadic tent with furnishings; 2009.150); Paul Hurwood (three tupilaqs, from Greenland; 2009.158); Alison James and Nigel Westaway (a Stroud pound; 2010.18); Margaret E. Kenna (three photographic portraits of E. E. Evans-Pritchard; 2010.17); Katie McKeown (a collection of thirty-one digital scans from photographs taken by the donor during fieldwork in Mbouda, Cameroon; 2010.33); Andrew McLellan (a Brixton pound; 2009.140); Marion Mappen- Walter (a bound typescript entitled ‘Report on Bhanamatti’ by L. B. Goad, Indian Police; 2010.15); Peter Marlow (a collection of photographs taken by him at the burial of Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa in 2000; 2010.31); Christopher Morton (a collection of photographs taken by him during fieldwork in northern Botswana in 1999–2000; 2009.168); Deryn O’Connor (a collection of textiles from south-west China; 2009.135); Michael Osborn (a collection of reel-to-reel and cassette audio tapes of field recordings made in the 1970s by Ann Osborn among the Uwa of Colombia; 2009.142); Barbara Tallis (a beer bowl, from Norway; 2009.141); Donald Tayler (a collection of objects from Colombia and Sudan; 2010.13); Jacques Tousellé (a collection of exhibition prints produced for the Museum’s exhibition Studio Cameroon: The Everyday Photography of Jacques Tousellé; 2010.29); Isabella Whitworth (plastic tokens, from Nunavut, Canada, and Nome, Alaska; 2010.16, 2010.24); Laurie Wilkie (plastic beads from a carnival parade, from New Orleans; 2009.143).

Purchases
Sanders of Oxford (an engraved portrait of Johann Reinhold Forster; 2009.138); Peter Kinjap (a collection of netted items from Highland Papua New Guinea; 2010.44); Chris Baylan (four Highland shields, from Papua New Guinea; 2009.139); Blackfeet Heritage Center and Art Gallery (a pair of porcupine quillwork earrings; 2009.136); John Randall (two albums of photographs taken in Tibet in the 1900s; 2010.34).

Transfer
Royal Welch Fusiliers Museum (two ‘homemade’ Mau Mau rifles, from Kenya; 2010.4).

Bequest
Veronica Berry (the Rolfe collection of Neapolitan amulets; 2010.46).

Donations to the Library
The Balfour library was grateful to receive donations and bequests from the following individuals and institutions during the year: Mark S. Anderson, Balliol College Library, Bodleian Library Rare Books Section, Corey Boling, Adam Butcher, Captain Cook Birthplace Museum, Rosie Chard, Robert Chenciner, Simon A. Clarke, Audrey Colson, Jeremy Coote, Mark Dickerson, Caroline Dudley, English Heritage Library, Sophie Forgan, Peter Gathercole, the Goethe-Institut, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kate Greenaway, Philip Grover, Pauline Hayton, Herri Musikaren Txokoa Oiartzunen, Anita Herle, Dan Hicks, Indian Institute Library, Wendy James, Jesus College Library, Simon Kanero, Vassos Karageorghis, Patti Langton, Rosemary Lee, Musée du Quai Branly, Museum für Völkerkunde Wien, Helen Newman (ex-libris Adrian Digby), Mike O’Hanlon, Laura Peers, Suzy Prior, John Simmons, Stanley South, Alice Stevenson, Z. S. Strother, Donald Tayler, Tylor Library, and Kate White.

Staff ACTIVITIES (INCLUDING TEACHING AND EXAMINING)
Faye Cheesman spent the year covering the post of Deputy Head of Collections, while Marina de Alarcón was on maternity leave. Her main duties involved the accessioning of new acquisitions, including a large donation of Miao textiles from south-west China, which she researched and catalogued. She coordinated the movement and managed the security of the firearms during the upper gallery redisplay and participated in the logistical management of the visit to the Museum of a delegation of Haida in September 2009, serving as note taker. She couriered several loans, including a number of currency objects and a Viking sword to the Ashmolean for their new galleries, with Julia Nicholson, and Berber jewellery to Brighton Museum. She was also a member of the team, with Heather Richardson and Jeremy Uden, responsible for installing and deinstalling the major loan of Cook-voyage material to museums in Bonn and Vienna. With Julia Nicholson she selected textiles from the reserve collections for the redisplay of the Naga case in the upper gallery and selected and coordinated new displays of shields at the east end of the upper gallery. She trained front-of-house staff and museum guides on using the museum database. She attended IT training on InDesign, a training day on environmental monitoring, and a training day on condition reporting and object assessment. She gave a talk on the entrance redevelopment project to the annual general meeting of the South Midlands Museum Federation.
Jeremy Coote continued, as his Museum duties allowed, to carry out personal research into the history of the Museum’s collections, particularly those from Polynesia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and to contribute to a number of internet discussion forums, particularly those devoted to Captain Cook and African arts. He continued to serve as Editor of the Museum Ethnographers Group’s Journal of Museum Ethnography, as an associate member of the research group ‘Anthropologie, Objets et Esthétiques’ of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, as a member of the Scholarly Advisory Board for the Southern Sudan Cultural Documentation Center at Brandeis University, and to participate in the Sudan Programme series of lectures and conferences at St Antony’s College, Oxford (sponsored by the Middle East Centre and the African Studies department). As part of his contribution to the new research project ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth- Century Collector’, he attended the Museums and Galleries History Group annual conference ‘Museums and Biographies’ held at the National Gallery in September 2009. Also in September he attended ‘Historical Connections: The Legacy of Science and Collecting in the 18th Century’ the annual conference of the Pacific Arts Association–Europe held in Bonn. In April 2010 he attended the Museum Ethnographers Group’s annual conference ‘Making Things’, hosted by the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading, and gave a presentation on the ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ project. In Hilary term he convened, with Christopher Morton, the Museum’s seminar series in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. On 23 July he co-convened (again with Christopher Morton) the colloquium ‘Tatu: East African Visual Traditions’, the third in a series of irregular meetings for specialists in the field, held at the Museum. He refereed grant applications for funding bodies and papers for academic journals. He gave talks about the Museum and its work to visiting groups from Manchester University, Swansea University, and elsewhere. He examined one doctoral thesis for the University of Oxford, supervised one doctoral student, served as assessor for the confirmation of status for others, and supervised undergraduate dissertations in History of Art and Visual Culture.
Philip Grover continued to manage and supervise research visits to the photograph and manuscript collections, which this year again received a record number of researchers. In addition, he catalogued the papers of Sir Charles Bell, colonial administrator and Tibetologist, and completed a detailed listing of the Hottot Papers. He catalogued collections of photographs by Katie McKeown, Sandra Piesik, and Jacques Tousellé; and he researched and enhanced more than 3,000 database records for Wilfred Thesiger’s photographs for two new online resources: ‘Pitt Rivers Museum Prints’ and ‘Pitt Rivers Museum Images’. Much of the year was taken up with preparing and co-curating (with Christopher Morton) the Museum’s major special exhibition Wilfred Thesiger in Africa. He also contributed to and co- edited, with Christopher Morton, the substantial companion volume, published by HarperPress in association with the Museum. In April he co-curated an exhibition of recent photographs by Magnum photographer Peter Marlow, The Burial of Emperor Haile Selassie, chosen to reflect a central theme in the concurrent Thesiger exhibition; and during June and July he gave several gallery tours of both exhibitions. In October he co-curated an exhibition of early aerial photographs, John Bradford: Pioneer of Landscape Archaeology; and in February he co-curated Albania and the Balkans: Drawings and Photographs from the Edith Durham Collection. In March he attended a conference on ‘Vernacular Photography in the Middle East’ at St John’s College, Oxford. In July he participated in ‘Tatu: East African Visual Traditions’, a colloquium held at the Museum.
Helen Hales (née Adams) continued as the Museum’s Special Projects Officer, in a post funded by the MLA’s ‘Renaissance in the Regions’ scheme. She spent the first half of the year working on the new firearms displays in the upper gallery, which involved the selection, research, and interpretation of more than 300 objects, as well as site visits and consultative work with the Wallace Collection, the National Army Museum, the Imperial War Museum, the Royal Armouries, and the Royal Gunpowder Mills. Alongside this she expanded the online diary on the website, the Museum’s first venture into ‘blogging’, which helped sustain access to collections by keeping the public up to date with progress and stories from the upper gallery while it was closed. The second half of the year was devoted to coordinating the new Museum audio tour: selecting and researching objects and topics, sourcing music, scripting, voicing, and working with external contractors to record and produce a major new visitor resource. She continued working towards her AMA. In March 2010 she attended the Museums Association’s conference ‘Well Said: How to Write Effective Gallery Text’. She contributed towards the wider work of the Museum by supporting work-experience students, assisting with research enquiries, providing introductory tours, and hosting three well- attended ‘Saturday Spotlight’ sessions on Aboriginal Art, African Weapons, and Firearms.
Clare Harris continued to act as course director and tutor for the M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and as director of studies and tutor for Archaeology and Anthropology at Magdalen College. Throughout the year she taught undergraduate students in Archaeology and Anthropology, Human Sciences, and the History of Art, and postgraduates in the School of Anthropology. She convened the ‘Cultural Representations’ lecture series (contributing several lectures to it) and taught the graduate option in ‘The Anthropology of Art and Visual Culture’. She acted as supervisor for five doctoral students and assessed two other doctoral students for their ‘confirmation of status’ in the School of Anthropology. She was an examiner for the graduate degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and Visual Anthropology. She attended the meetings of the Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and served on the School of Anthropology Management Board and many other University committees. In December 2009 she was an external assessor for a review of the Department of Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. In what was a busy year for invited lectures, conferences, and seminars, she spoke about ‘The Potala Palace: Remembering to Forget in Contemporary Tibet’ at the ‘Afterlives of Monuments’ conference at the University of the Arts in London in April 2009. For the Heidelberg University Centre for Research on Asia– Europe, she gave an invited lecture on contemporary Tibetan art and a seminar for research students within the ‘Multi-Centred Modernisms’ series. In November 2009 she was a discussant for the Royal Geographical Society’s conference on ‘Hidden Histories of Exploration’ and gave a seminar for the Circle of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at the University of London based on her research in Lhasa, Tibet. She gave papers on ‘The Invention of Tibetan Contemporary Art’ at Goldsmiths College, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the University of East Anglia. In December 2009 she was a keynote speaker at the ‘Re-Imagining Tibet’ conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She was also an invited speaker at the Goldsmith’s College workshop on ‘Creating the Global Image Archive’. In January 2010 she travelled to Austria to speak at a seminar on the histories of photography in Asia at the University of Vienna. In the spring of 2010 her work was presented as the opening keynote lecture at ‘In the Image of Asia’, a major international conference at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. In May 2010 she gave a talk on ‘The Imperial Archive and its Avatars’ at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts) and in June she chaired part of the international Tibetology conference held at Wolfson College, Oxford. She also gave public talks at the Museum, including a ‘Spotlight’ session drawing on her fieldwork and the Tibetan collections at the Museum, and a talk for the Museum’s Friends on contemporary Tibetan art. She acted as a consultant to ‘The Cultural History of the Western Himalayas’ project funded by the Austrian government at the University of Vienna, and as an assessor for The Art Fund and the Prince Claus Fund in the Netherlands. She also continued to contribute to the EU- funded ‘Ethnographic Museums’ project (RIME) in which the Museum is a partner. Throughout the year she helped to organise research visits and seminars at the Museum, including the visit of Tsewang Tashi, Professor of Fine Art at Tibet University in Lhasa. She was also greatly relieved to finally send the manuscript for her next book to the University of Chicago Press.
Dan Hicks continued to co-manage with Jeremy Coote the project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum’, which is supported by the John Fell OUP Research Fund. The results will be published during 2010–11. His publishing activities were focused on completing editorial work on the 800-page Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, which will be published in August 2010 (edited with Mary C. Beaudry). He represented the Museum at RIME meetings at the Världskulturmuseet in Gothenburg in April, and at the Náprstek Museum in Prague in July. He convened a major international conference on the theme of ‘Modern Materials’ at Keble College in October 2009. He gave seminars at the Research Laboratory for Art History and Archaeology and at the Centre for Visual Studies. Beyond Oxford, he gave a keynote paper in the plenary session at the December 2009 meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group at Durham University, and gave a paper in the ‘Reconsidering Detachment’ conference hosted by CRASSH at Cambridge University. He also gave talks in the Museum to visitors from the East Dorset Heritage Trust, the University of the Arts, and the Antiquities Department of the Ashmolean Museum, as well as to a group of librarians from major North American art history and anthropology research libraries. With colleagues from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, he represented the University at London Anthropology Day at the British Museum in July 2010. Beyond the Museum, he was Assessor for the Clarendon Fund, served on the History of Art Teaching Committee, and the Committee of the Gerald Avery Wainwright Near Eastern Archaeological Fund. He was internal examiner for four D.Phil. theses, and acted as External Assessor for tenure-review cases at Cornell University and Northwestern University, and as Examiner for a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Cambridge. He also continued as a member of the AHRC Peer Review College.
Kate Jackson, in her role as secretary of the ICON Ethnographic group, helped organise the one-day conference ‘Scraping Gut and Plucking Feathers: The Deterioration and Conservation of Feather and Gut Materials’ held in York in October 2009. She also co- authored and co-presented, with former intern Andrew Hughes, a paper at the conference detailing the conservation work carried out on the intestine pieces displayed in the ‘Arctic Clothing’ case in the Museum’s court. She also co-wrote the paper ‘A New Dialogue: Conservators Working with Source Communities’, presented by Heather Richardson at the ‘Museums Curators and Communities: Embedded Approaches to Participation, Collaboration, Inclusion’ conference held at the Horniman Museum, London in November 2009. She attended the training day ‘Radiation Safety and Safe Use of Handheld XRF’ in March 2010. She was invited to judge the student poster competition held at the ‘CF10: Conservation in Focus’ conference in Cardiff in March 2010. She also presented the paper ‘Bonn Voyage: Sending Our Iconic Objects on Loan’ on behalf of Jeremy Uden at the conference. With Julia Nicholson, in July 2010 she couriered the return of six objects and three works on paper loaned to the Musée du quai Branly, Paris.
Christopher Morton continued to hold the dual post of Head of Photograph and Manuscript Collections (60%) and Career Development Fellow (40%). The increased level of demand on the photograph and manuscript collections continues to make managing this section on a part- time basis very difficult. He completed final editorial work on the volume Wilfred Thesiger in Africa (co-edited with Philip Grover), which was published in May by HarperPress, and co- curated (with Philip Grover) the major exhibition Wilfred Thesiger in Africa: A Centenary Exhibition. In the long gallery he co-curated (with Philip Grover) the exhibition The Burial of Emperor Haile Selassie: Photographs by Peter Marlow. He co-curated three exhibitions in the archive case on the first floor: John Bradford: Pioneer of Landscape Archaeology; Albania and the Balkans: Drawings and Photographs from the Edith Durham Collection; and G. D. Aked: Photographs of East Asia, 1937–8. In September he presented a paper entitled ‘Humanism and the Comparative Method: The Construction of an Anthropological Archive’ at the conference ‘Humanising Photography’, held at the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies, Durham University. In October 2009, he couriered the return of material from the collections that had been on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge for the exhibition Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts. In November he presented a paper entitled ‘Fieldwork Photography and Indigenous Agency: Evans-Pritchard’s Zande and Nuer Photographs in Comparative Perspective’, at the workshop ‘The Image Relation: Towards an Anthropology of Photography’ held at Wolfson College, Oxford. On 23 July he co-convened (with Jeremy Coote) the colloquium ‘Tatu: East African Visual Traditions’, the third in a series of irregular meetings for specialists in the field, held at the Museum. He co-convened (again with Jeremy Coote) the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar in material and visual anthropology in Trinity Term, and continued to contribute lectures and seminars to both the Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and Visual Anthropology degrees. He also continued to supervise one doctoral student, who was examined in June.
Julia Nicholson continued to oversee the Museum’s loan programme, which was particularly busy during this reporting year, and to chair the Museum’s Documentation Committee. With Faye Cheesman, she couriered a number of currency objects and a Viking sword to the Ashmolean for their new galleries. In March, she couriered the Museum’s loan of Naga material to Paris with Jeremy Uden, and in July she couriered the material back to the Museum with Kate Jackson. With Faye Cheesman, she selected textiles from the reserve collections for the redisplay of the Naga case in the upper gallery.
Michael O’Hanlon continued to be occupied largely by fund-raising and administrative matters: within the Museum, in connection with the various grants that sustain the institution, in particular the reapplication under changed criteria for HEFCE ‘core funding’; within the University, in connection with a range of working groups and committees; and beyond the University, in connection with the Renaissance programme (oversight of which has become more demanding as the level of funding awarded has risen) and with the University Museums Group’s national committee. With the support of the MLA/V&A Purchase Fund, he acquired on behalf of the Museum four battle shields, decorated in innovatory ways, from the Papua New Guinea Highlands, his area of ethnographic expertise.
Laura Peers spent much of the reporting year working on the two major research projects devoted to the Museum’s Haida collections and the Blackfoot shirts (discussed elsewhere in this report). She fulfilled her teaching commitments on the Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography graduate degree courses, lectured to students from Archaeology and Anthropology, and advised students reading for degrees in History of Art and Human Sciences. Aside from her teaching and supervisory commitments for University of Oxford students, she also hosted and taught student groups from several other universities, including Leicester and Manchester. During the reporting year, she also examined a Ph.D. for the University of Cambridge.
Alison Petch spent the first month of the reporting year checking database entries and compiling statistics for the project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum’. On 1 September 2009 she began work as the project researcher on the three-year ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ project. She continued to serve as Chair of the Museum Ethnographers Group, with this year being the most busy to date as the group was given a grant by the MLA under its SSN programme to improve its marketing and website. She was also heavily involved in arranging for the Group’s Journal of Museum Ethnography to be made available via JSTOR. She attended the 2010 MEG conference held at the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading, where she chaired the AGM and contributed to Jeremy Coote’s presentation on the ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ project. In October 2009 she gave a paper to postgraduate students at the Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester on ‘Muddying the Waters: The Pitt-Rivers Collection from 1850 to 2009’. In February 2010, she also gave a talk in the Museum to members of the public about General Pitt-Rivers and the early history of the Museum. She continued to provide training for new staff on the use of the databases, to provide advice about best practice both internally and externally, and to ensure that the highest possible database standards are maintained.
Heather Richardson continued to promote the work of the conservation department to visitors and to conduct object-handling sessions for staff and students. She supervised two conservation interns, one work placement, and one volunteer during the year. She helped to facilitate and courier the loan of more than sixty Cook-voyage objects to venues in Bonn and Vienna. She also managed the conservation aspects of preparing five Blackfoot plains hide shirts for handling workshops and exhibitions at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary and the Galt Museum, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. She travelled with the Blackfoot project in Canada for extended periods in March and May 2010, where she helped to facilitate handling workshops. In November 2009 she presented a paper (co-authored with Kate Jackson) at the Horniman Museum, London entitled ‘A New Dialogue: Conservators Working with Source Communities’. She undertook training in the use of portable XRF (X-ray fluorescence) equipment, used for elemental analysis, and attended a one-day seminar on advances in environmental monitoring equipment. She was re-elected as a trustee of the Leather Conservation Centre, starting a second term as Honorary Secretary.
Alice Stevenson continued to coordinate specialist visits and undertake research for the ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections’ project. During the year she also served as a tutor for undergraduates taking the ‘World Archaeology’ module at Hertford College and as tutor for several undergraduate students studying Egyptian archaeology modules. She also acted as a Teaching Fellow in Egyptian Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London for two months (February–March). She presented papers about the Museum’s collections at the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference in Durham, the ‘Disciplinary Histories’ conference at University College London, and the Egypt Exploration Society Study Day held at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Within Oxford she was invited to present seminars in Hilary Term as part of the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series and the ‘Topics in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Egyptology’ seminar series. She was invited to collaborate on the project ‘A New Chronology for the Formation of the Egyptian State’, funded by a grant from The Leverhulme Trust, being undertaken with University College London, the University of Oxford, and Cranfield University. She was elected to the Fellowship of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland. During the year she also gave talks to local Egyptology societies, including The Friends of the Petrie Museum, Egyptology Scotland, and the Egyptian Society Taunton. She also provided classes for the Bloomsbury Summer School held in July 2010.
Nicky Temple took up the position of Executive Research Assistant in October 2009 and began by compiling the Museum’s annual report for 2008–9. She assisted the Director with the running of his office and served as minute-taker for various committee meetings. Also acting as Press Officer, Nicky responded to image enquiries, produced press releases and supervised filming in the Museum. In April 2010 she coordinated the installation in the upper gallery of a temporary exhibition of photographs illustrating the Museum’s various research projects and special events. In November 2009, she passed the Museums Association’s professional review and became an Associate of the Museums Association (AMA). She continued to act as the coordinator for the AMA support group for the Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Buckinghamshire sub-region.
Antigone Thompson was awarded full membership of the Association of Accounting Technicians in December 2009.
Jeremy Uden continued to support the Head of Conservation in promoting the work of the department to visitors and assisting in object-handling sessions and the supervision of students and interns. He helped facilitate the large loan of Cook-voyage material and co- couriered the objects to Bonn and Vienna. He also worked on a loan to Brighton Museum and, with Julia Nicholson, couriered a loan of Naga material to Musée de quai Branly, Paris, in March. He participated in the Haida visit, and also worked on one of the hide shirts for the Blackfoot project. He also facilitated the work of a group of researchers, spending a week at ISIS research centre (at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford), where they carried out neutron diffraction analysis on two Japanese swords from the Museum’s collection. He undertook training in the use of portable XRF equipment, and attended a seminar at University College London where the use of this equipment on museum collections was discussed. He also attended a seminar on advances in environmental monitoring equipment, and another on the conservation of objects made from gut and feathers.
STAFF PUBLICATIONS
Publications relating directly to the Museum’s collections are indicated by [*].
Jeremy Coote, ‘Sir Joseph Banks: Wissenschaftler und Sammler auf der ersten Reise’, in James Cook und die Enteckung der Südsee, edited by Adrienne Kaeppler et al., Bonn: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland / Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum mit Museum für Völkerkunde und Österreichischem Theatermuseum / Bern: Historisches Museum (2009), pp. 61–2.
Jeremy Coote, ‘26 Georg Forster (1754–1794) Catalogue of Curiosities sent to Oxford’, ‘66 Helm fau’, ‘74, 75 Männliche und weibliche Figur ti’i’, ‘83 Nasenflöte vivo’, ‘87 Trommel pahu’, ‘95 Ösfass für ein Kanu tata’, ‘101 Baststoffklopfer i’e’, ‘109 Rindenbaststoff ’ahu’, ‘122 Augenschutz’, ‘126 Kiste zur Aufbewahrung von Gegenständen piha’, ‘142 Kürbisgefäß hue ’aroro’, ‘147 Dechselklinge faoa’, ‘148 Meißel tohi’, ‘151 Haihaken’, ‘175 Benjamin West (1738–1820) Sir Joseph Banks’, ‘176 Umhang kahu waero (kuri purepure?)’, ‘177 Umhang kaitaka’, ‘179–181 Drei Gürtel tatua’, ‘182 Webpflock turuturu’, ‘190 Kamm heru’, ‘198 Halsschmuck hei tiki’, ‘202 Ohrschmuck kuru’, ‘206 Schmuckstück’, ‘212 Trompete oder Signalf[l]öte putorino’, ‘227 Stockwaffe taiaha’, ‘236–240 Fünf Keulen patu paroaa, patu, kotiate, wahaika, patu onewa’, ‘241 Eleanor Gyles und Thomas Orpin (beide tätig 1770er Jahre) Replikat eines patu onewa’, ‘243 Keule mere pounamu / Klinge einer Dechsel toki pou tangata’, ‘244 Zeremonialdechsel toki pou tangata’, ‘246 Messer maripi’, ‘247 Farnwurzelklopfer patu aruhe’, ‘249 Ösfass für ein Kanu tiheru’, ‘283 Holzbehälter mit Korbgeflecht überzogen’, ‘285 Korb kato mosi kaka’, ‘295 Korb kato’, ‘300 Überrock sisi fale’, ‘317 Mattenschurz kie fau’, ‘320, 321 Zwei Stücke Baststoff ngatu tabina, ngatu ‘uli’, ‘333 Panflöte mimiha’, ‘347, 348 Zwei Ritzwerkzeuge’, ‘361 Anhänger’, ‘362 Baststoff mahute’, ‘363 Kopfschmuck’, ‘367 Kopfbedeckung tapi uma’, ‘369 Kopfschmuck uhikana’, ‘370 Kopf-, Arm- oder Beinschmuck’, ‘372 Brustschmuck tahi poniu’, ‘375 Arm- oder Beinschmuck’, ‘377 Fächer tahi’i’, ‘380 Schmuckstück’, ‘389 Keule mwemwe p’h’mandre’, ‘390 Flöte’, ‘392 Panflöte’, ‘396 Kamm oder Kratzer’, and ‘403 Speerschleuder’, in James Cook und die Enteckung der Südsee, edited by Adrienne Kaeppler et al., Bonn: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland / Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum mit Museum für Völkerkunde und Österreichischem Theatermuseum / Bern: Historisches Museum (2009), pp. 130, 145, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 168, 168–9, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 179, 183, 184, 185, 195, 197, 198, 202, 205, 208, 213, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 224, and 225. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Joseph Banks (1743–1820)’, in James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, edited by Adrienne Kaeppler et al., London: Thames & Hudson (2009), pp. 61–2.
Jeremy Coote, ‘26 Georg Forster (1754–1794) Catalogue of Curiosities sent to Oxford’, ‘66 Helmet fau’, ‘74, 75 Two figures (male and female) ti’i’, ‘83 Noseflute vivo’, ‘87 Drum pahu’, ‘95 Canoe-baler tata’, ‘101 Barkcloth-beater i’e’, ‘109 Piece of barkcloth’, ‘122 Sunshade’, ‘126 Storage box piha’, ‘142 Gourd vessel hue ’aroro’, ‘147 Adze-blade faoa’, ‘148 Chisel tohi’, ‘151 Shark-hook’, ‘175 Benjamin West (1738–1820) Sir Joseph Banks’, ‘176 Cloak kahu waero (kuri purepure?)’, ‘177 Cloak kaitaka’, ‘179–181 Three belts tatua’, ‘182 Weaving peg turuturu’, ‘190 Comb heru’, ‘198 Neck pendant hei tiki’, ‘202 Ear pendant kuru’, ‘206 Ornament’, ‘212 End-blown trumpet or bugle-flute putorino’, ‘227 Long staff/club or quarterstaff taiaha’, ‘236–240 Five clubs, patu paroaa, patu, kotiate, wahaika, patu onewa’, ‘241 Eleanor Gyles and Thomas Orpin (fl. 1770s) Replica patu onewa’, ‘243 Hand-weapon / adze blade mere pounamu / toki pou tangata’, ‘244 Ceremonial adze toki pou tangata’, ‘246 Knife maripi’, ‘247 Fernroot beater patu aruhe’, ‘249 Canoe-baler tiheru’, ‘283 Bucket’, ‘285 Basket kato mosi kaka’, ‘295 Basket kato’, ‘300 Overskirt sisi fale’, ‘317 Waist-mat kie fau’, ‘320, 321 Two pieces of barkcloth ngatu tabina, ngatu ‘uli’, ‘333 Panpipes mimiha’, ‘347, 348 Two incising tools’, ‘361 Pendant’, ‘362 Piece of barkcloth mahute’, ‘363 Headdress’, ‘367 Headdress tapi uma’, ‘369 Headdress uhikana’, ‘370 Hair ornament’, ‘372 Breast ornament tahi poniu’, ‘375 Arm or leg ornament’, ‘377 Fan tahi’i’, ‘380 Ornament’, ‘389 Club mwemwe p’h’mandre’, ‘390 Flute’, ‘392 Panpipes’, ‘396 Comb or scratcher’, and ‘403 Spear-thrower’, in James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, edited by Adrienne Kaeppler et al., London: Thames & Hudson (2009), pp. 130, 145, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 168, 168–9, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 179, 183, 184, 185, 195, 197, 198, 202, 205, 208, 213, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 224, and 225. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘An Incidental Collection: Objects Donated by Wilfred Thesiger to the Pitt Rivers Museum’, in Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, edited by Christopher Morton and Philip N. Grover, London: HarperPress (2010), pp. 116–26. [*]
Jeremy Coote (with Alison Petch), ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector’, Museums and Galleries History Group Newsletter, no. 9 (December 2009), pp. 6–7. [*]
Alan Davis, ‘How a Porcupine Catches a Moose’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 67 (March 2010), p. 5. [*]
Eric Edwards, ‘A Reindeer Bone Whistle: The Oldest Musical Instrument in the PRM’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 66 (December 2009), p. 11. [*]
Eric Edwards, ‘The Storm-Petrel Bird Candle’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 68 (July 2010), p. 10. [*]
Philip N. Grover, ‘The Quiet American: Carolyn Drake’, Royal Photographic Society Journal, Vol. 149, no. 7 (September 2009), pp. 406–9. [*]
Philip N. Grover, ‘African Travels: Sir Wilfred Thesiger’, Royal Photographic Society Journal, Vol. 150, no. 6, (July/August 2010), pp. 356–9. [*]
Philip N. Grover (edited, with Christopher Morton), Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, London: HarperPress (2010). [*]
Philip N. Grover, ‘Bibliography of Works by Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003)’, in Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, edited by Christopher Morton and Philip N. Grover, London: HarperPress (2010), pp. 144–5. [*]
Philip N. Grover (with Christopher Morton), ‘Wilfred Thesiger’s Photographs of Africa: A Centenary Selection’, in Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, edited by Christopher Morton and Philip N. Grover, London: HarperPress (2010), pp. 144–5. [*]
Helen Hales, ‘Chasing Dreamings’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 66 (December 2009), p. 5. [*]
Dan Hicks, Review of Militant Modernism, by Owen Hatherley (Ropley, Hampshire, 2008), Planning Perspectives, Vol. 25, no. 2 (2010), pp. 272–4.
Dan Hicks, ‘The Smallest Rooms’ [review of Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies: Outbuildings and the Architecture of Daily Life in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic, by Michael Olmerts (Ithaca, NY, 2009)], Times Literary Supplement, nos 5,568–9 (Christmas 2009), p. 35.
Andy McLellan, ‘Today in the Museum’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 66 (December 2009), p. 4. [*]
Christopher Morton, ‘Fieldwork and the Participant-Photographer: E. E. Evans-Pritchard and the Nuer Rite of gorot’, Visual Anthropology, Vol. 22, no. 4 (July 2009), pp. 252–74. [*]
Christopher Morton (edited, with Elizabeth Edwards), Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame, Farnham: Ashgate (2009).
Christopher Morton (with Elizabeth Edwards), ‘Introduction’, in Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame, edited by Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards, Farnham: Ashgate (2009), pp. 1–24.
Christopher Morton, ‘The Initiation of Kamanga: Visuality and Textuality in Evans- Pritchard’s Zande Ethnography’, in Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame, edited by Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards, Farnham: Ashgate (2009), pp. 119–42. [*]
Christopher Morton (edited, with Philip N. Grover), Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, London: HarperPress (2010). [*]
Christopher Morton (with Schuyler Jones), ‘Wilfred Thesiger’s Photograph Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, in Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, edited by Christopher Morton and Philip N. Grover, London: HarperPress (2010), pp. 127–43. [*]
Christopher Morton (with Philip Grover), ‘Wilfred Thesiger’s Photographs of Africa: A Centenary Selection’, in Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, edited by Christopher Morton and Philip N. Grover, London: HarperPress (2010), pp. 144–5. [*]
Christopher Morton, ‘Fotografie dell’Africa del Pitt Rivers Museum, Università di Oxford’, in Sguardi sull’Africa, edited by Walter Liva, San Vito al Tagliamento: Comune di San Vito al Tagliamento (2010), p. 9. [*]
Christopher Morton (with Heather Richardson), ‘Conservation of the Woodthorpe Albums’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 68 (July 2010), p. 5. [*]
Julia Nicholson, ‘George Washington Connects with the Kalipau’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 68 (July), p. 11. [*]
Michael O’Hanlon, ‘Foreword’, in Kaahsinnooniksi Ao’toksisawooyawa, Our Ancestors Have Come To Visit: Reconnections With Historic Blackfoot Shirts, by Alison K. Brown, Laura Peers, and Heather Richardson, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2010), p. 1. [*]
Laura Peers, ‘Material Culture, Identity, and Colonial Society in the Canadian Fur Trade’, in Women and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies, edited by Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, Farnham: Ashgate (2009), pp. 55–73.
Laura Peers (with Alison K. Brown), ‘“Just by Bringing these Photographs...”: On the Other Meanings of Anthropological Images’, in Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame, edited by Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards, Farnham: Ashgate (2009), pp. 265–80. [*]
Laura Peers (with Alison K. Brown and Heather Richardson), Kaahsinnooniksi Ao’toksisawooyawa, Our Ancestors Have Come To Visit: Reconnections With Historic Blackfoot Shirts, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2010). [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Walter Baldwin Spencer and the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 21 (March 2009), pp. 254–65 [published 2010]. [*]
Alison Petch (with Jeremy Coote), ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector’, Museums and Galleries History Group Newsletter, no. 9 (December 2009), pp. 6–7. [*]
Heather Richardson (with Alison K. Brown and Laura Peers), Kaahsinnooniksi Ao’toksisawooyawa, Our Ancestors Have Come To Visit: Reconnections With Historic Blackfoot Shirts, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2010). [*]
Heather Richardson (with Christopher Morton), ‘Conservation of the Woodthorpe Albums’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 68 (July 2010), p. 5. [*]
Alice Stevenson, The Predynastic Egyptian Cemetery of el-Gerzeh: Social Identities and Mortuary Practices (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 186), Leuven: Peeters (2009).
Alice Stevenson, ‘Palettes’, in UCLA Encyclopaedia of Egyptology, edited by Willeke Wendrick, Los Angeles: Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California at Los Angeles (2009); online at <http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dh0x2n0>.
Alice Stevenson, ‘Predynastic Burials’, in UCLA Encyclopaedia of Egyptology, edited by Willeke Wendrick, Los Angeles: Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California at Los Angeles (2009); online at <http://escholarship. org/uc/item/2m3463b2>.
Nicky Temple, ‘Keynote: Democratic Heritage’, in Journal of Education in Museums, no. 30 (December 2009), p. 7.
Jeremy Uden, ‘Looking After Our Figures’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 66 (December 2009), p. 3. [*]

MUSEUM SEMINARS
16 October 2009: Museum staff, ‘Behind the Scenes at the Pitt Rivers Museum: Research and Other Projects’.
23 October: Ian Cook (University of Exeter), ‘Citizenship, Kinship, Thingship: Hydrocortisone Relatedness’.
30 October: Felix Driver (Royal Holloway, London), ‘Exhibiting Geographical Collections: Hidden Histories of Exploration’.
6 November: Marcel Vellinga (Oxford Brookes University), ‘Anthropology and the Materiality of Architecture’.
13 November: Dimitrios Dalakoglou (Sussex University), ‘Road Ethnography and the Materiality of Transnationalism’.
20 November: Paolo Fortis (St Andrews University), ‘Sculptural Forms among the Kuna: Images of Person in an Amerindian Society’.
27 November: Laura Peers (Pitt Rivers Museum), ‘Replacing Objects with People: Fieldwork, Source Communities and the Pitt Rivers Museum’.
4 December: Elizabeth Shove (Lancaster University), ‘The Design of Everyday Life’.
22 January 2010: Patrick Wright (Nottingham Trent University / London Consortium), ‘Heritage and the Place of Criticism’.
29 January: Norman Hammond (Boston University), ‘Early Maya Economy, Society and Culture at Cuello, Belize’.
5 February: Kate Brindley (Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art), ‘Banksy vs Bristol Museum’ (a conversation with Dan Hicks).
12 February: Nick Thomas (University of Cambridge), ‘The Museum as Method’. 19 February: Josh Pollard (University of Bristol), ‘The Aesthetics of Deposition’.
26 February: Jennifer Bajorek (Goldsmiths College, University of London), ‘The Anthropology of Photography in West Africa’.
5 March: Lisa Le Feuvre (Goldsmiths College, University of London), ‘Curating Contemporary Art at the National Maritime Museum’.
12 March: Nick Mayhew (Ashmolean Museum), ‘Current Research into the History of Modern Currency’.
7 May: Sophie Day (Goldsmiths College, University of London), ‘Repatriating Photographs: An Example from Ladakh (North India)’.
14 May: Laura Peers and Cara Krmpotich (Pitt Rivers Museum), ‘The Haida Project at the Pitt Rivers Museum: The Video’.
21 May: Catherine Moore (University of Kent and Powell-Cotton Museum, Birchington, Kent), ‘Filming Making: The Powell-Cotton Film Archive and Some Contemporary Material Responses’.
28 May: Paul Basu (University College London), ‘Reanimating Cultural Heritage: Digital Repatriation, Knowledge Networks and Civil Society Strengthening in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone’.
4 June: Alice Stevenson (Pitt Rivers Museum), ‘Most Ancient Egypt in the Pitt Rivers Museum’.

JAMES A. SW AN 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 work that has been aided by the Fund. During the year, the Fund supported work on the numbering and reboxing of the Museum’s holdings of stone tool collections from southern Africa and on the enhancement of the catalogue of the Louis Sarno collection of sound recordings from the Central African Republic and the cataloguing of some 1,200 related photographs. The Fund was not otherwise open for applications.

FRIENDS OF THE PITT RIVERS MUSEUM
REPORT BY ADAM BUTCHER (CHAIRMAN)
At the start of the year under review, the Council of the Friends welcomed new members elected at the 2009 AGM: Alison Boulton and the incoming Treasurer, Laura Manifold. Felicity Wood took up the post of President, and set about it with energetic practical help as well as wise advice drawn from long experience of the Friends organisation. At the AGM in June 2010 the Council was further strengthened by the election of Linda Lye. During the year there were thirty-four new subscriptions; taking into account joint and family membership, however, this figure actually represents some fifty new Friends. We are grateful to Membership Secretary Rosemary King for all her work in this area, as well as for her efforts in tracing late payments and reminding Friends of up-to-date subscription rates.

It was a busy year for special events, starting with an evening in September dedicated to the delegation from the Haida Nation. The occasion was a great success, with the visitors demonstrating their traditional costumes and dances, and responding warmly to the interest and hospitality of the Museum and the Friends. Everyone enjoyed the splendid feast, which completed the evening.

We were able to hold a full-scale Christmas party in December, following the restricted event in 2008 when space was limited by the Museum’s refurbishment. Despite the unkindest sort of weather, nearly 100 people came for an excellent programme of eastern music, including hulusi, dizi, the welcome return of a gamelan orchestra to the Museum, and a koto. We are grateful to Isabelle Carré and the Friends’ magnificent catering team for doing so much to make all this possible, and were happy to contribute the surplus from ticket sales to the ‘Hands-On Music in Museums’ project.

In April we were treated to a splendid Kenneth Kirkwood Day of lectures on the theme of food. The programme was varied, entertaining and informative, another in the remarkable series of lecture days masterminded by Shahin Bekhradnia. Lunch was provided by a band of inspired volunteers, and matched the occasion triumphantly.

Through each term the programme of lectures continued, covering an extraordinary range of subjects, geographical areas, and cultures. Talks by John Simmons and Chris Wingfield gave fascinating insights into particular aspects of the Pitt Rivers Museum itself. For the first time in several years the Friends, led by
Felicity Wood, also welcomed visiting Friends of other museums, from Bristol and Ulster.

The Friends’ Newsletter again won a well-deserved award from the British Association of Friends of Museums, this time the runner’s up prize; congratulations once more to Barbara Topley and Liz Yardley for constant inspiration and imaginative presentation of the content. The Newsletter is the flagship of the association, and maintains a consistently high standard, reaching all Friends regularly through the year. This is particularly important because not all of our members manage to attend events at the Museum.

Financial management was very ably taken over by the Council’s new Treasurer, Laura Manifold. In the accounting year (ending 30 April) income of £12,200 was slightly down on the previous year through lack of a comparable incoming special donation, although subscription receipts increased a little. The three major events of the year provided a surplus of more than £800. Expenditure of £14,500 was marginally down on the 2008–9 level thanks to effective control of costs, but over the accounting year there was a net outflow of £2,300. Donations made to the Museum included £7,500, as the second instalment of a pledge to the ‘Phase 2’ development project, and £1,500 to the ‘Hands-On Music in Museums’ project. Smaller donations, amounting to £350, were made for a member of staff to attend a conference and for conservation of the Woodthorpe albums, an important nineteenth-century collection of photographs and documents from Assam and Nagaland.

The year ended on a sad note. Margaret Dyke, a dedicated Friend and Volunteer Guide, who also served as Secretary to the Council of the Friends, died in June. She will be remembered with the greatest respect and affection.