University of Oxford
The Pitt Rivers Museum Annual Report 1 August 2010 to 31 July 2011
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 2010
The Vice Chancellor (Professor Andrew Hamilton) The Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education, Academic Services and University Collections) (Professor Ewan McKendrick) The Proctors (Nicholas Bamforth, the Revd C. P. Thompson) The Assessor (Dr Eric Eve) 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 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 2010 to 31 July 2011, presented it as their report to Congregation.

Director's Introduction
It is always worth keeping an eye on the Museum’s visitors’ book, which lives on a stand on the new entrance platform, just inside the door. The comments left there remind us of the passion and devotion that the Museum and its collections inspire in many who visit: ‘Stunning, overwhelming, wonderful, so much, too much, don’t stop!’, ‘This Museum is one of the most exciting things that has happened to my students—I can’t get them out!’, ‘The magical place where we had our first date, three children and eight years ago, is still as wonderful’, and ‘Sometimes a nightmare, isn’t it? But it is us—human kind.’ Remarks such as these, and the buzz of visitors transparently enjoying themselves (the 356,573 visitors the Museum received this year was another new record), stimulate us to make as many grant applications as we do to the generous trusts and foundations that help sustain the Museum and develop its collections.

This year we were especially pleased to be successful in two substantial applications to the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation: one to develop a system to add images to the Museum’s already well-used online database, the other to digitize and make more available the Museum’s important but under-utilized sound collections. At the Pitt Rivers the emphasis is not on ‘star’ objects, but were we forced to pick a star collection it might comprise the material acquired during Captain Cook’s first two voyages to the Pacific; and it was this collection that was the focus of a further grant application this year. We were extremely pleased to be successful in our bid for a two-year fellowship from the Clothworkers’ Foundation to allow Jeremy Uden, the Museum’s deputy head of conservation, to study and conserve the Cook-voyage collections. The Clothworkers’ funding will enable us to backfill Uden’s position, (re)appointing in his place Andrew Hughes, who had earlier ‘done time’ in the Museum as an intern. A further notable success during the year was winning (jointly with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History) the inaugural £10,000 Clore Award for Museum Learning, for the education department’s project ‘Making Museums’. This national award, presented at Tate Britain, gave us particular pleasure as it is funded by Dame Vivien Duffield, who had earlier generously supported the construction of the Clore Learning Balcony of which the Museum’s education staff make great use. Finally, a grant from the Wellcome Trust enabled us to make a start on documenting the enormous, largely uncatalogued collection of amulets transferred from the Wellcome Institute in the 1980s, 400 of which were subsequently loaned for exhibition at the Wellcome Collection’s own galleries in London.

Meanwhile, much energy was devoted to ensuring that the most productive possible use was made of grants awarded in earlier years. Laura Peers’s AHRC-supported research project ‘Kaahsinooniksi Aotoksisaawooya—Our Ancestors Have Come to Visit: Reconnections with Historic Blackfoot Shirts’ entered its final year, marked by the return of five ceremonial shirts from their loan to partner museums in Canada, and a substantial conference in the Museum in March 2011, at which the thirteen members of the Blackfoot Confederacy who were among those attending the conference were able to speak about the importance of the project to Blackfoot people. Jeremy Coote’s Leverhulme-supported project on General Pitt-Rivers’s lifetime of collecting activities continues to produce rich material and unanticipated spin-off benefits. Christopher Morton’s project, supported by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, to digitize and document the collection of photographs taken by Sir Wilfred Thesiger in what is now the United Arab Emirates, also made excellent progress. Much thought was devoted during the year to a project, supported by the Designation Development Fund, designed to research, conserve, and make more accessible the Museum’s remarkable collection of body arts. This award has enabled us to experiment in more detail with social media, in parallel with which the Museum established an eNewsletter, stylishly designed by Kate Webber. It is now taken for granted that every new Museum project has a digital component (often a website), and we are acutely aware both how reliant we have become on ICT and how slenderly resourced the Museum’s ICT department is.

This grant-related work took place alongside an energetic public programme that draws visitors to the galleries. The programme of photographic exhibitions in the Museum’s long gallery is now well established. People Apart: Cape Town Survey 1952—Photographs by Bryan Heseltine aroused particular enthusiasm, being picked up and made available on the BBC’s website. The main show in the Museum’s special exhibition gallery is the wonderful Made for Trade, one of the outcomes of the five-year EC-funded RIME project in which the Museum is engaged. Made for Trade opened in July, to coincide with the RIME workshop we organized for our European collaborators. I am most grateful to the Museum team, led by Julia Nicholson, who devoted themselves to ensuring that all the multifarious activities necessary to get an exhibition up and opened were completed in good time.

I opened by quoting a sample of the more enthusiastic reactions of visitors to the Museum. They are in the majority, but other comments show that we have work still to do: ‘It is very dark. The information is hard to read. Often there is no information. What does it all mean?’; or ‘It’s great to imagine oneself in one of these large boxes, an “artefact of the world”.... When are you going to give a critical analysis of this imperialist vision?’. For some visitors, at least, we are evidently failing to communicate. It is partly for this reason that we are planning a five-year project that will renew the older displays, replace ageing lighting systems, and install a new interpretive spine in the galleries, highlighting human ingenuity, design, and craftsmanship (what General Pitt-Rivers himself referred to as ‘the arts of life’)—and their deployment in solving the common problems of human existence. As always, we are sharply aware of the need to preserve the Museum’s unique atmosphere and to retain the many visitors who urge us ‘never to change’. That is why we have proposed to the Heritage Lottery Fund (whom we hope will be the project’s principal supporter) that we undertake this project—and the major associated outreach work—over a number of years, adding five new members of staff to our existing in-house teams, rather than simply buying in off-the-shelf museum services that would not necessarily be sympathetic to the Museum’s distinctive look and feel. My colleagues Kate White, Cathy Wright, Nicky Temple, and Kate Webber have devoted an enormous amount of thought and work to the Museum’s application to the HLF. While the outcome is, strictly speaking, outside this reporting year, it is a pleasure to be able to say that we have been given ‘first-stage’ approval for our application for nearly £1,000,000, along with the funding to work-up the second-stage submission. This will be the focus of intense work over the coming year, as we also turn our minds to the prospect of needing to raise the necessary £500,000 of partnership funding.

We will also be awaiting with equally anxious anticipation the outcome of decisions about the future of two other major funding streams that support the Museum. The ‘Renaissance’ programme, which supports some thirty posts across the University’s four museums, has been transferred to Arts Council England (ACE). An enormous amount of work over the course of the year was devoted by my colleagues John Hobart and Jessica Suess to ‘Oxford ASPIRE’, the bid for funding under the new criteria established by ACE. Finally, we will also shortly learn whether, in the face of government cuts, the Higher Education Funding Council will continue the same level of competitive ‘core funding’ to university museums; at £725,000 per annum this is the single largest source of funding the Museum receives.

In financially turbulent times the Museum is especially reliant on supporters. I have already mentioned the many generous trusts, foundations, and research funders that support our activities. But I would also like to thank the Museum’s Friends organization, now under its energetic new chair Felicity Wood, and of course every member of staff, whether mentioned by name in this Introduction or not. Finally, I should like to offer my thanks to a major resource whose help is not always acknowledged. This is comprised of the partners of staff, both in their vital role as supporters during Museum events and in simply enduring— whether patiently or not, I don’t know—the very long working hours the staff put in, or their occasional middle-of-the-night departures to respond to an alarm (so far, thankfully, always ‘false’) in what many visitors say is the best museum in the world.

Access
Interpretation
The focus this year was on adding to the general range of material provided for adults, in order to provide a better balance with the services offered to young families. This has encouraged a further move towards the use of digital production and dissemination, most obviously in podcasts and films made during the ‘Body Arts’ project (funded by the Designation Development Fund). Staff also developed an eNewsletter, began ‘twittering’, and are planning further ways of using social media. Volunteer Isabelle Brent carried out research into the current use of social media in other museums, and Helen Hales and Kate White attended the ‘New Media’ conference in March, as well as making a study trip to the Museum of London and the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London to explore the use of digital media in interpretation.

Kate White and Andrew McLellan made four podcasts providing a general introduction to the Museum, and these were eventually added to iTunes U in June 2011, along with a podcast by Laura Peers on the shrunken heads. These podcasts will be followed by seven others made for the ‘Body Arts’ project. A few more ‘Introductory Guides’ (previously known as ‘Fact Sheets’) were expanded into more desirable printouts and added to the range of hard copies for loan in the galleries and downloads available on the Museum’s website.

The audio-visual introduction to the Museum is now shown weekly on the Clore Balcony as part of ‘Still Sunday Morning...’, a special time for contemplation or relaxation when the galleries are relatively empty, before the influx of young families at lunchtime. The introduction provides many visitors with a welcome chance to sit down, listen to Sir David Attenborough’s insightful comments on some of the objects on display, and absorb background information. It is much enjoyed by those who encounter it. The production of a subtitled version is now underway, to help those who find it difficult to hear as the Museum begins to fill with visitors. The audio guide continues to receive good feedback from visitors, but is still underused. Trials have been run to encourage take-up, ranging from reduced pricing, to leaflets, to improved sales techniques. Plans to make it available in downloadable formats are also being explored. In June an initial meeting with representatives from the Deaf Forum led to arrangements being made for a group visit in the autumn to focus on their preferred format for new digital interpretation.

Press
There were ten press releases this year, and seventy-one press enquiries that directly generated forty-three press pieces (print, radio, TV) in addition to numerous unsolicited print and online articles. There was a range of positive articles and reviews in local, national, and international newspapers and magazines, in addition to the Museum’s own publications and several academic publications. Various members of staff, event performers, and associated artists appeared on local radio to promote events and exhibitions. Andy McLellan appeared on BBC South East News, highlighting the Museum’s top-ten position in the south-east’s most popular free museums. We are seeing more coverage of the Museum online in blogs, tweets, BBC, and Oxford Today online galleries. The Museum is also the top Oxford attraction on the TripAdvisor website.

Marketing
The Museum continued to benefit from ever-increasing visitor figures, so produced only a few promotional leaflets, and instead directed its marketing towards new methods of communication and establishing links with local community newspapers. A bimonthly eNewsletter was established in January 2011 to promote the Museum and drive traffic to the Museum’s websites. During the first six months the newsletter gained 250 public subscribers, with the addition of 165 ‘friends’ from April. Subscribers come from a number of different countries. The eNewsletter has maintained a relatively high level of ‘opens’ and ‘clicks’, with only six ‘unsubscribes’ since it began.

The Museum began tweeting as ‘@Pitt_Rivers’ in April 2011 and by the end of July had more than 250 followers from the heritage, local, artist, and public communities. Tweets are not posted every day; but followers are increasing daily, and this is driving visits to highlighted sections of the Museum’s website. Followers mainly fit a demographic of 30–60 years old. Of eighty-five tweets, twenty-two were ‘retweeted’ to a minimum of 29,000 followers. Twitter users have been found to sign up to the eNewsletter, but not vice versa, which suggests eNewsletter subscribers are comprised of a different, perhaps older, demographic who do not use social media. The next step is to analyse existing patterns more closely and to shift the use of social media from marketing alone into audience engagement and development.

Front of House
Gallery staff numbers were maintained during the year with the help of a number of casual staff and deeply appreciated continued support from volunteer Felicity Wood. Gallery staff offer a welcoming and informative face to the Museum’s burgeoning number of visitors. Derek Stacey and Judith Hosking, front of house managers, continued to carry responsibility for the day-to-day supervision of the gallery staff. As part of an ongoing programme, further sessions were offered in fire training, the use of the evacuation chair, and in collections management procedures. Staff were also offered training through courses at OUCS and OU Safety Office. Talks with the Ashmolean on sharing skills resulted in a swapping of staff for a short trial. Using feedback from this we are planning to develop a training programme for both museums that we hope will lead eventually to an NVQ. Derek Stacey represented front- of-house staff at joint health and safety meetings.

Visitor Figures
In this reporting year the Museum had 356,573 visitors, in comparison to 335,307 for 2009–10, an increase of 6.3%. Figures have continued to climb steadily; only one monthly total was less than the equivalent month in the previous year (and that was probably due to the significant snowfall in December 2010). The installation of the old electric-eye people- counter at the entrance to the special exhibition gallery in July, ahead of the opening of the Made for Trade exhibition, is also enabling us to track visitors to special exhibitions.

Visitor Research
Data from the 2010–11 visitor survey was collated by volunteer Terri Costain. Satisfaction ratings remained high. However, 37% of visitors (much as in the previous year) still feel that ‘something could be improved’: poor lighting (10% of complaints), unreadable or insufficient information, and lack of refreshments were, as usual, the main sources of dissatisfaction; all of these are being addressed in future plans. Kate White carried out an in-depth analysis of the visitor comments book, which suggested that while the new entrance has undoubtedly enhanced visitors’ enjoyment of the Museum as a whole, it has perhaps also increased a tendency to regard the displays as comprising an extraordinary spectacle, rather than encouraging serious engagement with the more complex meanings of the displays and objects themselves. In addition, or perhaps as a consequence, many visitors take away different ‘messages’ from those expected by the Museum, or expressed by staff in public talks. Further visitor research was carried out by Kate White and volunteer Isabelle Brent as part of the preparation of the application to the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Collaboration with Ruskin College
The first year of this new collaboration was run in conjunction with the DDF-funded ‘Body Arts’ project. Four Ruskin College students (Carol Cripps, Denise Pakeman, Jill Watts, and Caroline Bullock) participated. Helen Hales provided a behind-the-scenes induction session, including training on using the Museum’s databases, and provided ongoing support. The students carried out their own independent object-based or visitor research. As a result, two contributions have been loaded on to the ‘Body Arts’ project website, along with a brief film evaluating the students’ experience. Kate White and Helen Hales hosted a recruitment session in June for next year’s students.

Artists Interventions Programme
The Museum continued to work with artists and art students, with the results of some of the projects being displayed in the ‘Didcot’ case on the lower gallery. First, however, on 28 August 2010 Finlay Cowan presented ‘Midsummer Mouse Magic’, the third in his seasonal cycle of mouse tales. This was an illustrated story of exploration, courage, and summer picnics. Afterwards, children followed the story trail through the displays to discover the magic objects and characters that play a part in the story.

Inspired for Life, a display of fabrics, lampshades, and digital designs by textile design students at Chenderit School, Banbury, inspired by patterns and stories found in the collections, ran from 14 December 2010 to 16 January 2011. The pupils were supported in their work by artist Heather Barnett. The project was linked to ‘Design For Life’, a national initiative led by the V&A, seeking to develop new ways of engaging young people in design. This was followed by Gallimaufry: Brookes Cabinet of Curiosities, which ran from 4 February to 20 March 2011, featuring a selection of work by Fine Art students on the Foundation Art & Design course at Oxford Brookes University in response to the question ‘Why do we collect things?’. A smaller case on the lower gallery was used to display, from 24 January to 2 May 2011, four watercolours by artist Sue Johnson under the title The Curious Nature of Objects: Paintings by Sue Johnson. Sue Johnson’s work is inspired by images in the catalogues of General Pitt-Rivers’s now dispersed ‘second collection’ and is an outcome of the ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ research project, of which Johnson is an honorary associate. Another space was found for Kevin Farrell: Illuminated Letters, from 28 July 2011. This work, including a line from James Fenton’s poem ‘The Pitt Rivers is Shut...’, was installed under the glass table-tops on the Clore Learning Balcony, and led to a competition for Years 7 and 8 in Oxfordshire schools to design new alphabets inspired by objects in the collections, with the winners’ work being exhibited in the gallery. The overall winner was Alex Slatter (Lord Williams’s School) who designed a beautiful weapons-themed label.

Disability Access
The platform lift has greatly improved access for visitors entering from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. The Museum also offers its less mobile visitors the use of two wheelchairs and a motorized scooter; and for those with visual disabilities it provides large-text versions of labels for special exhibitions and magnifying glasses to read the small historic labels on many of the artefacts on permanent display. The Museum continues to offer all visitors wind-up torches: 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. Help from the designer, with considerable input from Museum staff, ensured that special exhibitions continued to meet the needs of all the Museum’s visitors.

Events
‘Saturday Spotlight’ gallery talks, presented on the Clore Learning Balcony, continued to be well appreciated. The ability to give PowerPoint presentations, along with the use of a new PA system, allowed us to overcome most of the difficulties we had earlier experienced in using this space when the Museum is busy and noise levels are high.

The two late-night events held jointly with the Museum of Natural History were, as usual, very popular. ‘Winter Light’, on 26 November 2010, part of Oxford City’s ‘Christmas Light Night’ event, offered a mix of mask-making activities and music in both museums. Noel Lobley created a ‘World Music Soundscape’ to accompany the torchlight sessions in the Pitt Rivers. ‘Winter Light’ attracted a total of 1,841 visitors. The programme for ‘In a Different Light’, held on 13 May 2011 in association with ‘Museums at Night’, included live kora music, along with tracks by Noel Lobley, and ‘Future Shorts One’, a screening of films by up-and-coming directors, organized through Culture24. Some 1,750 visitors attended in total (1,591 entering the Pitt Rivers over four hours). Feedback included: ‘It’s nice to see students and locals mixing’, ‘It’s nice to see a wide mix of different people all in the same venue—it creates a kind of holiday atmosphere’, and ‘Museums are a resource I have under used. I am excited about seeing more.

Education service
In 2010–11 the education service continued to road test and adapt the teaching sessions developed during the Museum’s closure in 2008–9, and to roll out a variety of new workshops and projects. The service consisted of Andy McLellan (Head of Education), Becca McVean (primary) and Isabelle Carré (music). Melody Vaughan (families and communities) left at the end of the previous year and was replaced by Abigail Hinton (families, communities, secondary schools). The education service was supported by posts that work across the University’s collections: Adrian Brooks (art), Joy Todd (volunteers), Susan Griffiths (communities), and Caroline Cheeseman (volunteers). The much-appreciated volunteer guiding service continued to deliver tours to primary schools. The guides this year were Jean Flemming, Frances Martyn, Rosemary Lee, Linda Teasdale, Anne Phythian- Adams, Sukey Christiansen, Jane Yates, Jill Drake, Jodie Brookes, Caroline Byron-Patterson, Catherine Offord, and Jenni Hunt. A new group of trained volunteers delivered tours for adults: Will French, Tom Gilligan, Simone Dogherty, Lucy Gotham, Juliane Zachhuber, Jenny Reddish, Colin Langton, Caroline Pond, Belinda Beaton, Anne-Silvie Malbranke, Mary Lalley, Salma Caller, Joseph Wu, Elizabeth Biggs, Vanessa Reeves, and Matthew Jones. Other staff members from visitor services, conservation, collections, and curatorial staff also supported education delivery.

The education service delivered its programmes free of charge to core audiences consisting of primary schools, secondary schools, higher education students, families, adults, and communities. Alongside this a range of one-off workshops, projects, and events was held. Funding for the service continued through the government’s Renaissance in the Regions initiative and the Clore Duffield Foundation. Delivery to primary schools was through guided tours with volunteers, or object- handling workshops with education officers. Throughout the year, University access groups used the Museum to promote wider initiatives. These sessions focus on research skills around object handling, working with pupils from secondary schools that do not traditionally send students to Oxford or Cambridge. Secondary schools mainly received introductory sketchbook talks, as the majority were in the Museum to develop GCSE- and A-level coursework for art, as was the case for many from higher education institutes. Others visited for more specific course requirements, such as archaeology, art history, or museum studies. These students received more in-depth, subject-specific talks, from education or other relevant members of staff. 10,406 primary school children visited the Museum, of whom 7,685 received taught sessions. 12,568 secondary school children visited, and 8,496 received a taught session or a talk. 5,138 higher education students visited as part of booked groups, and 1,699 of these received a talk. More than 8,000 language- school students visited the Museum, but these visits were not facilitated. New resources were created for schools, including downloadable teacher information sheets for all taught sessions.

The ‘Hands-on-Music’ project entered its second year, offering sessions on African music, Javanese gamelan, and music through the ages. The main focus of the project was a Year 6–7 transition project with the Headington partnership of primary schools and Cheney School. A memorable moment was when the Omukama (king) of Bunyoro visited the Museum to view the collections. His visit happened to coincide with a taught session, and he and his entourage participated in teaching the children Bunyoro dances, as well as listening to the children’s rendition of traditional Bunyoro music. There was a range of other projects with target schools throughout the year: ‘Bookfeast’ was a chance for primary school children to meet children’s authors and take part in story workshops; the annual film project with SS Phillip and James primary school entered its third year; and whole year- group visits focusing on a trade role-play were offered to Year 8s and 9s from a range of local secondary schools.

The ‘Making Museums’ project was run for the seventh year in partnership with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Around 3,500 Year 6 pupils from Oxford’s estate primary schools have now taken part. We were delighted to be awarded (jointly with the OUMNH) the inaugural Clore Learning prize for the project; the Museum received a cheque for £10,000.

Family audiences continued to visit the Museum in large numbers. Pitt Stops on the first Saturday of the month, joint activities with the OUMNH in school holidays, and weekly backpack activities on Sundays were the backbone of provision, with one-off events taking place on a semi-regular basis, such as the Cowley Road Carnival. 7,340 children took part in free family activities, a slight drop on the previous year’s figure of 8,346. A particularly busy period was February half-term when the two museums ran activities on the subject of dinosaurs and dragon hunters. Around thirty volunteers and five education officers delivered activities to 2,220 children over three days. The Pitt Rivers Museum Activity Book for Families was published and sold through the Museum shop.

The education service took over the management of the ‘Saturday Spotlight’ series of general interest talks for adults, and launched guided tours on Wednesday afternoons, delivered by trained volunteers. A range of adult workshops was offered, including regular sessions with Open Door, a group of adults with learning difficulties. The education service worked closely with collections staff on the DDF-funded ‘Body Arts’ project. A range of films and podcasts was produced with Cheney School, women in the community, and source communities. These comprise an important aspect of the new ‘Body Arts’ website.

Education officers were involved in a significant amount of training over the year. The joint-museums education teams offered a twelve-week training course in museum education for twenty regular volunteers. Monthly training programmes continued for the primary school guides, and the adult tour guides. In May 2011 the University collections received a Heritage Lottery Fund grant to run a four-and-a-half year education internship programme. Four interns were taken on, who will carry out six-month rotating placements at three of the collections. The first intern at the Museum was Vicki Wood. One-off training sessions were delivered to around 200 PGCE students from Brookes University, and two B.Ed. students did short placements. A Leicester University Museum Studies MA student did an eight-week placement over the summer, and a D.Phil. student from Oxford University Department of Education shadowed education delivery as part of her research. Education officers were also involved in a skills-sharing session with members of the Blackfoot community who were visiting the Museum as part of the ‘Blackfoot Shirts’ research project. For the fifth year, Andy McLellan spent a day teaching education and ethnography specialists on Leicester University’s Museum Studies course. Adrian Brookes launched an organization called OAR (Oxford Artreach). This is a networking group of art teachers from across the county created as a response to the loss of the LEA Advisory Service. OAR is coordinated by Adrian Brookes in partnership with Sarah Mossop at Modern Art Oxford, Rachel Payne at Brookes University, and six local art teachers.

This was the busiest year for educational delivery in the Museum’s history. 34,290 children, young people, and adults took part in facilitated activities. This comprised a 3% increase on the previous year, which itself had been the busiest on record.

ICT
In 2010–11 the Museum’s website attracted more than 1,220,000 visitors from 153 countries. Many changes and additions to the website took place over the year to better reflect the Museum’s collections, research projects, new exhibitions, events, and education activities; an online store was also created. The print-on-demand service also continues to grow with more content added.

Development of a new main website commenced at the beginning of 2010. It encompasses improved navigation, greater use of images, and more sections. It also embraces new technologies in the use of online multimedia, covering a range of material including audio and video, illustrated talks, a podcast about shrunken heads, and footage from the Museum’s film collections. The site was launched in summer 2011 and received much positive feedback. Other launches included the Museum’s eNewsletter and twitter feed as means of highlighting news and events. The Museum also has a presence on Apple iTunes U for a series of podcasts as well as online video hosting on Vimeo.

Work on a number of research project websites progressed over the period. The ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ project continues to develop, with the project’s website receiving 20,000 virtual visitors during the year. The ‘Dorothy Garrod Photographic Archive’ website was launched, giving research access to some 750 negatives taken by Dorothy Garrod (1892–1968) mostly relating to her archaeological research in the early 1930s. The ‘Blackfoot Shirts’ project website was given a major revamp, utilizing a content management system to afford greater flexibility and more seamless updates. Similarly, the online ‘Arms and Armour’ gallery has been redesigned with the addition of highlights from the firearms collection. The ‘Wilfred Thesiger’ image gallery is approaching completion, at which time it will include more than 5,000 images from Arabia. The site will be closely integrated with the print-on-demand site. The ‘Some Thing for Every Body’ project website was completed. This is the starting point for exploring the Museum’s body art collections. It highlights the objects on display, as well as providing information on related themes and the people who made and used the objects. A web page for resources arising out of the Ruskin College collaboration was also launched. A website for the Centre for Anthropology and Photography was also created, promoting the archiving of anthropological fieldwork photographs. The new project ‘Pictures Worth a Thousand Words: Developing a Digital Image Bank at the Pitt Rivers Museum’ aims to develop a management system for the Museum’s digital images and to devise a methodology for adding them to the online collections records; it will also involve the scanning and digitizing of many of the Museum’s non-digitized images. Another important ICT contribution to the Museum’s operations was the completion of a new education booking system. It has greatly streamlined the booking process and offers better reporting facilities. It has since been trialled at the OUMNH.

Infrastructural developments included the addition of two uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) to afford cleaner electricity and managed shutdown of the network and servers in case of power outage. A new server has also been set up and commissioned to host the Museum’s databases, with a new version of the database management system; speed and resilience have been enhanced. A new 32Tb RAiD storage solution was implemented to host the digital image bank. With the cooperation of the Museum of History of Science a new network was established at the Museum’s main offsite repository. The collection databases underwent a number of enhancements to layout. In particular, there was further development of the photograph collections online database, with a view to an online launch in 2012 of a new version, incorporating images within the records. A new sound collection database and a digital assets database are in development. The joint museums and collections education website attracted more than 114,000 visitors over the period.

Display
Permanent Displays
Much staff time was taken up with the planning and installing of the major Made for Trade special exhibition, so work on permanent displays in the galleries was limited and small- scale this year. In addition, much preparatory work was carried out for the first-stage application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a major five-year project that will, if the bid is successful, involve redisplay work on all three floors of the Museum.

One significant task was the installation of a new display of shields above the central section of wall cases at the east end of the upper gallery. New, bespoke cases, generously funded by DCMS/Wolfson and made by Steve Grafton, were filled with more than sixty shields of various shapes, sizes, and materials, including a number from Australia, India, and Africa, plus others from Mongolia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Japan, and elsewhere. This display complements the shield display at the west end of the upper gallery; although it is intended primarily as visible storage, work is being done to provide labeling and information for visitors. Elsewhere in the upper gallery, modified texts, labels, and images were installed in the ‘Blowpipes’ display.

The lower gallery was closed for a period in September while a system of directional spotlighting was installed above each of the four gangways. This greatly improves the overall visibility and vibrancy of the displays. Eight dilly bags from Australia and fibre bags from New Zealand, nearly all more than a century old, were installed in the ‘Bags’ case. It was also decided to empty the upright cases to the right of this in order to redisplay the shell and tusk ornaments and related tools and equipment, in a manner that would better match the style and appearance of the adjacent displays. Work began on selecting additional objects from the reserve collections, processing the material through conservation, and writing fresh accompanying texts.

In the court, the finger-stocks were removed from near the north door to sit above the large stocks. The lace-making case was emptied after some damage was caused by a visitor knocking into it. The old case was reinstalled, but redesigned internally so as to prevent damage occurring again.

Special Exhibitions
The programme of innovatory photographic exhibitions, overseen by Christopher Morton, continued in the long gallery. The Burial of Emperor Haile Selassie: Photographs by Peter Marlow closed on 21 November 2010. It was followed by Disciples of a Crazy Saint: The Buchen of Spiti—Photographs by Patrick Sutherland, which ran from 9 December 2010 to 3 July 2011. This was followed by People Apart: Cape Town Survey 1952—Photographs by Bryan Heseltine (curated by Darren Newbury of Birmingham City University), which opened on 19 July 2011. In the Museum’s special display case for temporary exhibitions of archival material, G. D. Aked: Photographs of East Asia, 1937–8 (curated by Chris Morton) continued until 14 November 2010, when it was replaced by Among the Pueblos: John K. Hillers (1843–1925)—Photographer of the American Southwest (curated by Philip Grover), which ran from 22 November 2010 to 27 March 2011. Eighteen albumen prints, taken by Hillers for the Bureau of Ethnography, and two pottery vessels from the Museum’s collections were included in the display. This exhibition was followed by The Last Samurai: Jacques-Philippe Potteau’s Photographs of the Japanese Missions to Europe, 1862 and 1864 (also curated by Philip Grover), which opened on 11 April. The exhibition placed Potteau’s Japanese portraits within the political and historical context of the late Edo period, highlighting their significance during a decade of change.

In the special exhibition gallery the highly successful Wilfred Thesiger in Africa: A Centenary Exhibition continued until 5 June 2011. It was replaced by Made for Trade, which opened on 18 July 2011. This exhibition, which will run until 27 January 2013, includes more than 300 objects and offers insights into the world of trade. The exhibition forms part of the five-year EC-supported ‘RIME’ project, a collaboration with nine other major European ethnographic museums. Claire Venables, of Giraffe Corner, worked with Julia Nicholson, Faye Belsey, and members of the Museum’s conservation and technical services departments to design the exhibition and publicity materials.

From 19 September 2010 a gown from Sierra Leone was displayed in the ‘Didcot’ case along with supporting documentary material. The gown had recently been identified with one pictured in The Illustrated London News in 1846, thus establishing that it had been collected by Henry Mangles Denham on HMS Avon in 1845–6. The display, which ran until 12 December 2010 and was reinstalled on 14 April 2011, was curated by Jeremy Coote and designed and installed by Adrian Vizor. The Museum’s series of collaborations with artists and art students also led to a number of temporary exhibitions and installations (see ‘Artists Interventions Programme’ above).

Collections Management and Care
Reserve Collections
Work by collections, conservation, and technical services staff to upgrade conditions in the Museum’s repositories continued. By October 2010, work at the Osney repository on improving the storage and cataloguing of the basketry, navigation, and Jean Brown collections had been completed. In March 2011, collections and conservation staff spent several days at Osney putting away material that had accumulated over the previous year and preparing for a new project to recatalogue and improve the storage of the thousands of arrows in the Museum’s collections. Work began on the arrows in April 2011 with collections and conservation staff (mainly Madeleine Ding, Faye Belsey, and Jeremy Uden, along with conservation intern Lucie Monot) spending a day each week at the stores, using a new safe boxing system designed with the approval of the university’s safety office.

Acquisitions
As usual the Museum received a wide range of material by donation during the year. Among the more remarkable donations of photographic material were: a collection of photographs taken as part of the Miri Mission (1911–2) in Assam, India, by Gerald Courtenay Kerwood, ICS Subdivisional Officer of North Lakhimpur (donated by Adrian Kerwood); a collection of negatives and prints taken by John Moore on the Oxford and Cambridge Expedition to South America (1957–8); a collection of photographs of Fiji and New Caledonia taken by John Ulster Kearney around 1900 (donated by John C. Tempest); and a collection of negatives and slides from fieldwork in Ethiopia (1965–7 and 1997) and Papua New Guinea (1970–72) by the anthropologist Christopher Hallpike. The most significant addition of manuscript material was the collection of the professional papers of Oxford anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt, donated by his literary executor Ahmed Al-Shahi. Among the many notable donations to the object collections were those presented to the Museum by Anthony Pitt-Rivers, the great-grandson of General Pitt-Rivers, the donor of the Museum’s founding collection. These comprised a collection of mounted examples of nineteenth-century replicas of ancient Mexican stone figures and a collection of locks and keys. A full list of the Museum’s acquisitions is given in Annex B.

Loans
The major loan-related work during the year was the continuation of the loan of more than sixty objects from the Museum’s ‘Cook-voyage’ collections to a major three-venue exhibition. James Cook und die Entdeckung der Südsee / James Cook and the Discovery of the South Seas closed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna on 13 September 2010. In October 2010 fifty-four of the Museum’s objects from among those exhibited in Vienna were loaned to the exhibition’s next venue in Bern, where the show ran from 7 October 2010 to 13 February 2011. In September 2010 a Hawaiian image of Kuka‘ilimoku was loaned to the exhibition Willem de Rooij: Intolerance at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. The exhibition ran from 16 September 2010 to 2 January 2011. (Both the image of Kuka‘ilimoku and the Museum’s other historic Hawaiian featherwork were included in an accompanying catalogue raisonné by Adrienne L. Kaeppler.) In February 2011 seventeen basketry objects were loaned to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich for the exhibition Basketry: Making Human Nature. The exhibition ran from 8 February 2011 to 22 May 2011. The loaned material was featured in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. In April 2011 thirty amulets from the Elworthy Collection were loaned to the Museum of Somerset, Taunton for inclusion in their new galleries. This is a long-term loan, to be reviewed by April 2016.

Cataloguing
In the photograph and manuscripts department, work continued on cataloguing and digitizing collections as time permitted. The papers of Godfrey Lienhardt, which had been donated in November 2010, were catalogued and a listing made available online in March 2011. The Hallpike collection of negatives and slides from Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea, donated in April 2011, was scanned and copies sent to the donor to enable him to draw up a catalogue of the images for incorporation into the Museum’s database. Patti Langton continued to volunteer a day a week, cataloguing her own collection of photographs from South Sudan. When completed, this will be a remarkably well-documented collection of field photographs and will set the standard for other anthropologists seeking to archive their collections with the Museum. To encourage such donations, a Centre for Anthropology and Photography was established with a website highlighting case studies and the facilities provided by the Museum for potential donors. In January two members of staff began working on a project sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage to catalogue and digitize Wilfred Thesiger’s photographs from the United Arab Emirates; this had progressed well by the end of the reporting year. The department also benefited from cataloguing and digitization work carried out by three student volunteers from the M.Sc. in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography: Rosanna Blakeley catalogued the Harry Hodgkinson collection of photographs taken during a walk across Europe in 1936, Erica Tso catalogued photographs taken by Michael Aris in Bhutan between 1967 and 1973, and Jozie Kettle digitized a collection of film negatives taken in 1934–5 by John Rupert Patrick Montgomery during military service in India.

Ongoing cataloguing work on the object collections continued throughout the year as time permitted. Major inroads were made into upgrading the cataloguing for material stored on the lower gallery, including the Arkell bead collection. Volunteer Nathan Fisher worked with Zena McGreevy on the archaeological collections until June 2011. Volunteer Fusa McLynn continued transcribing and translating the Chamberlain collection of amulets and related paper ephemera.

Conservation
For the last few years conservation staff have been heavily involved in couriering and facilitating loans. In this reporting year, however, there was a gradual tailing off of loan and courier responsibilities. Heather Richardson returned to Alberta in late August to deinstall and pack the Blackfoot shirts for their return to the Museum. Almost immediately, in early September, she returned to Vienna with Jeremy Uden and Faye Belsey to deinstall the Cook exhibition before travelling on to Bern to reinstall the exhibition for the final time with Uden. Jeremy Uden and Heather Richardson deinstalled the exhibition in Bern in February, after which the objects returned to the Museum. Jeremy Uden also couriered the return of the Hawaiian feather god figure from a very cold Berlin in January. The figure then almost immediately travelled to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, along with sixteen other objects, for the exhibition Basketry: Making Human Nature later that month. Loan commitments then seemed uncharacteristically quiet until a request from the Wellcome Trust in April for a large loan of nearly 400 newly catalogued amulets from the Lovett collection for the exhibition Felicity Powell–Charmed Life opening in October 2011. To prepare condition reports for the amulets and coordinate the packing, Jennifer Mitchell returned to the department in May on a short, part-time contract.

Over the course of the year, the conservation department contributed to and organized a number of outreach events. During September and October the team once again contributed to the ‘Making Museums’ education programme, with approximately 200 children visiting the conservation laboratory. In October the team worked with staff and volunteers from Hertford Museum for a half day to provide basic conservation advice for working with ethnographic collections. In November, Heather Richardson gave a talk on conservation training to Oxford University students as part of a careers event. In December, Jeremy Uden organized a day for invited ethnographic conservators to study the dismantled Tahitian mourner’s costume. In January, Heather Richardson organized a buckram mount-making workshop for conservators and mount-makers from the Pitt Rivers and the Ashmolean, led by V&A conservation mount-maker Samantha Gatley and funded through the Renaissance programme. Also in January, Kate Jackson gave a talk to the Oxford Conservators Group about the Museum’s pest-management programme. As part of the ‘Blackfoot Shirts’ project conference in March, the team held a special session for conservators from across the UK in the Museum’s conservation laboratory to discuss remedial treatments. Several of the conference’s study sessions with the shirts were also held in the laboratory, with Kainai elder Frank Weasel Head memorably explaining one of the shirts to a group of fascinated curators and conservators from across the UK.

Kate Jackson and Heather Richardson talked to visitors from the Powell-Cotton Museum in May about facilitating object-handling sessions with source communities. Also in May, Heather Richardson recorded an interview in the museum for a Radio 4 documentary ‘What’s Eating the Museum’ about insect pests, to be aired in August. Further afield, in August 2010, Kate Jackson accompanied Laura Peers and colleagues from the British Museum to Haida Gwaii, Canada, where she assisted with workshops demonstrating basic cleaning techniques on objects, liaised with colleagues at the Haida Gwaii Museum, and served as a Museum witness to the burial of the ancestral remain repatriated last year.

Remedial conservation work and conservation-based research on the collections continued throughout the year. Kate Jackson started work on a large walrus-intestine sail, which had recently been retrieved during a project at the Osney store, while—as time allowed—Jeremy Uden worked through the various components of the Tahitian mourner’s costume. Reports on both projects were accepted as posters for the ICOM–CC triennial conference to be held in Lisbon in September 2011, along with Heather Richardson’s paper on the conservator’s role in the ‘Blackfoot Shirts’ project. In addition, hundreds of objects were conserved for display, including items for the Made for Trade exhibition as well as shields and body adornment items for new displays. For the second successive reporting year a successful application for funding (jointly with a team of analytical scientists from Italy) through the Science and Technologies Research Council (STFC), made it possible for five Japanese tsubas (swords) from the collection to be analysed at the ISIS laboratory in Harwell. The analysis used neutron diffraction to determine the metallic composition of the tsubas. In April 2011, Jeremy Uden and Heather Richardson transported the tsubas to and from Harwell, with one of them returning daily to mount each tsbuba in the equipment. Another special research project involved taking a small sample of the plant material worked in with porcupine quillwork on the Blackfoot shirts—a rare technique no longer practised— and having the plant material identified as Typhus latifolia (bulrush) by Stephen Harris, curator of the Oxford University Herbaria (Department of Plant Sciences). Blackfoot people, who have forgotten this use of the plant, were delighted to have the information and have begun to experiment with the fibre.

Given the current financial climate, the department started to look at new ways to increase funding and promote its work. An application to the Icon Conservation Awards in August, based on the ‘Blackfoot Shirts’ project, proved unsuccessful. However, an application to the Clothworker’s Foundation for an £80,000 Research Fellowship grant was successful. The project, due to start in January 2012, will allow Jeremy Uden to work exclusively on the Museum’s Cook-voyage collections for two years as Senior Fellow, while his post is back-filled for the duration by former intern Andrew Hughes as Junior Fellow.

Insect pests, particularly webbing clothes moth (Tineola bisselliella), continued to present problems throughout the Museum. Recurring pest infestations in the Naga case called for the repeated removal of textiles and organic material susceptible to damage. In May, pest consultant David Pinniger visited to assess current procedures and produced a report making further recommendations. The pest-management programme is currently being redesigned as a result, and we are implementing a regular programme of cleaning of the grates in the court to try to arrest the problem.
Storage improvement work resumed at the Osney store in April, with collections and conservation staff once again working together. Improvements are targeted towards material that would prove dangerous or difficult to move in the future, such as the large collection of arrows.

The department hosted two internships over the course of the year and also benefitted from the help of four volunteers. Ian Langston, an M.A. student in Conservation and Restoration at the University of Lincoln, who started in July 2010, finished his internship in December, earlier than originally intended. In March we welcomed Lucie Monot, who is studying for an M.Sc. in Conservation for Archaeology and Museums at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, for a six-month internship. She has proved to be an excellent addition to the conservation team. In January, graduate student Chiarra Catterwell, who has some previous conservation experience, worked on more than fifty bead cards for the Made for Trade exhibition. Volunteers Gabrielle Heffernan and Otone Doi spent many unglamorous hours preparing packing materials for the arrows restorage project, and long-standing volunteer Alison Wheeler compiled a database of all the publications held in the department.

There were some temporary staff changes in the conservation team in the latter part of the year. With Kate Jackson beginning maternity leave in mid-May, conservator Tracey Wedge commenced a part-time maternity cover contract in June. Originally from New Zealand, Wedge brings to the department experience in textile conservation as well as knowledge of Pacific, especially Maori, material culture.

Technical Services
The technical services team were fully occupied during the year with designing and installing displays, working with collections and conservation, and with the general maintenance work necessary to keep a busy museum functioning smoothly. Three of the museum technicians, Chris Wilkinson, Adrian Vizor, and Alan Cooke, were heavily involved in the design and installation of the Made for Trade special exhibition. Work began well before Christmas 2010 and continued almost uninterrupted until the opening in July 2011. Ambient lighting to supplement the existing track lighting was also installed in both the special exhibition gallery and the long gallery. Adrian Vizor installed the ‘Chief’s Gown from West Africa’ temporary display in the ‘Didcot’ case in the lower gallery. This was later removed to make way for an art installation, and then successfully reinstalled. Jon Eccles worked closely with the photographic and manuscript department in installing rapidly changing temporary displays in the archive case on the first-floor landing and in the long gallery. He also provided support for art installations by Brookes University. He was also heavily involved in the successful ‘In a Different Light’ evening events. Chris Wilkinson and Alan Cooke began work on redisplaying some of the bags on the lower gallery and the adjacent shell-ornament materials. They also continued to ‘refresh’ older displays through improving mounts. Adrian Vizor made a mount to allow the finger-stocks that were on the north door to feature more prominently with the large stocks. In their capacity as couriers, John Simmons and Adrian Vizor collected a Ghanaian ‘fantasy’ coffin from Heathrow Airport. They also couriered thirty amulets to the Somerset Heritage Centre in Taunton.

One of the planning shortfalls in the new extension has proved to be an insufficiency of usable working space for technicians to prepare new mounts and displays, especially in light of the higher levels of activity in recent years. A range of potential solutions was considered over the course of the year, the most obvious of which had to be shelved as the costs were not proportionate to the space gained. Work on finding alternative solutions continues.

John Simmons has been investigating ways of improving lighting around the perimeter of the court, and in the cases at the west end of the lower gallery and east end of the upper gallery. To this end, John Simmons and Jon Eccles attended a lighting seminar at the British Museum in December 2010. John Simmons has been in contact with a number of lighting specialists and has subsequently trialled various systems in the Museum. These investigations provided important background information for the Museum’s major bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund.

All the technicians continue to liaise frequently with the University’s estates department, to supervise contractors and deal with such maintenance issues as broken case-locks, decoration, and PAT testing. Jon Eccles provides AV support to lecturers and visiting speakers, a role which is making growing demands on his time.

One event immediately before the Christmas break at the end of 2010 highlighted the commitment and improvisational skills of the Museum’s technical staff. A leak in the roof valley between the Pitt Rivers and University museums brought water cascading into the Museum. Unfortunately, it was entering down the electrical riser, perhaps the most sensitive place, short of on to the collections themselves. The technicians came up with an ingenious if unorthodox method to divert the water away from the source of ingress, which allowed the Museum to continue to function over the break until the matter could be dealt with properly.

Research and Scholarship
Members of the Museum’s staff continue 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

The AHRC-funded project ‘Kaahsinooniksi Aotoksisaawooya—Our Ancestors Have Come to Visit: Reconnections with Historic Blackfoot Shirts’ was extended to April 2012. The five Blackfoot shirts from the Hopkins collection, which were lent to two Alberta museums in spring 2010, were returned from loan in September 2010. Project activity across the year included hosting a conference at the Museum in March 2011 that brought together thirteen members of the Blackfoot Confederacy from Alberta and Montana, with eighteen museum professionals (curators and conservators) from across the UK who care for Blackfoot collections. Over two days, the conference facilitated dialogue between the groups, allowed Blackfoot people to speak about the importance of the project and report on its activities, and to plan future activities that will make Blackfoot heritage items in UK museums more accessible to Blackfoot communities. Sue Giles, senior collections officer for world cultures at Bristol Museum, said of the conference afterwards: ‘It was the most interesting, useful and inspiring meeting I think I have ever been to. I can never look at objects from the perspective of the source community, but what Frank and Herman and others said gives me some insight into what objects can mean to people, and how we might start rethinking interpretation. It showed how important it is to work with people, despite the issues that are going to be raised about repatriation. Thank you for opening that door and sharing contacts.’ A number of publications about the project are in preparation.

The three-year ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ project, funded by a grant from The Leverhulme Trust, had an extraordinarily rich second year. The highlight was the first project workshop, held at the Museum on 25 March 2011. With the title ‘The Many Faces of General Pitt-Rivers’, the invitation-only workshop consisted of a structured discussion of Pitt-Rivers’s career as a collector, punctuated by short presentations on particularly significant ‘moments’. The participants included two of the three previous ‘Pitt-Rivers’ biographers and others with specialist knowledge of particular aspects of his life and work. As with previous Museum projects, a major thrust of ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ is to make all the research carried out by the project team available on the project website. Thus all the information gathered during the year by project researcher Alison Petch is now available online. Moreover, as a result of the work of the project team, including the project’s ICT consultant Dan Burt, and the wider circle of associate researchers and students that has developed, the project website has grown enormously. With the support of Anthony Pitt-Rivers and that of our colleagues at Cambridge University Library, the illustrated databases for Pitt-Rivers’s ‘first’ and ‘second’ collections are now publicly available online. These are supported by images and transcriptions of a range of other documents. Thanks to the support of our colleagues at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, who generously loaned the project its holdings of Pitt-Rivers’s correspondence and other papers, it has also been possible this year to scan and transcribe a wealth of additional primary and secondary documents. This was an unexpected, but much-appreciated, development that has greatly increased the availability of the contents of many important documents. With his kind permission, we were also able to make available online the previously unpublished doctoral thesis of W. R. Chapman: ‘Ethnology in the Museum: A. H. L. F. Pitt-Rivers (1827–1900) and the Institutional Foundations of British Anthropology’ (Oxford, 1982). Late in the year, we were also able to arrange for our colleagues at Cambridge University Library to scan General Pitt-Rivers’s library catalogue. The project team has been both surprised and inspired by the amount of interest that ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ has stimulated and the ever-growing circle of associate researchers that it has attracted. Two History of Art undergraduates joined the project as interns for the academic year 2010–2011, working on the history of some of the materials in Pitt-Rivers’s ‘first’ collection. In addition, a History undergraduate is planning to focus on the East Asian materials in Pitt-Rivers’s collections for her third-year. The project has also benefited from the work of a number of volunteers, mostly but not exclusively undergraduate and graduate students. In addition, a number of researchers have provided ‘object biographies’ for the website. There are too many examples to list here, but among the many interesting stories are those by Lucy Shipley of the University of Southampton about an ‘Etruscan Chalice from Chiusi’ and by Yannis Galanakis about two spearheads from the site of the Battle of Marathon. We were also pleased to be able to assist Marion Unkelmann and her colleagues in identifying a Bronze Age shield (previously thought by its current owners, the Hunt Museum in Limerick, to be from County Antrim) as a well-known, but thought-to- be-lost specimen found in the River Thames in 1864.

The Museum’s involvement in the EU-funded project ‘RIME: Réseau International des Musées d’Ethnographie’ (2008–13) continued into its second 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 limited size of the Museum’s special exhibition gallery will prevent it hosting the collaborative exhibition that will be one of the project outcomes; instead, on 19 July 2011 the Museum opened its own contribution in the form of the exhibition Made for Trade and on 20–21 July hosted a two-day ‘laboratory’ in which Laura Peers, Dan Hicks, Clare Harris, and Chris Morton gave presentations to project participants on Museum-based research projects.

During the previous reporting year, the Museum had been awarded £78,120 by the MLA’s Designation Challenge Fund to enhance the accessibility of the Museum’s remarkable collection of body arts. Led by Julia Nicholson, the year-long project ran until April 2011. It had two major work streams: one devoted to enriching cataloguing information and improving storage, the other focusing on collections research and collaboration to produce a dedicated website (designed and constructed by Dan Burt) featuring object profiles and free multimedia resources. Madeleine Ding and Elin Bornemann far exceeded the project’s original cataloguing targets. Helen Hales led the development of content for the website, selecting and researching more than 250 key artefacts from the body arts displays and generating 57,000 words of information and fresh interpretation within the framework of an online gallery. Helen Hales and Andrew McLellan, with the input of more than thirty subject specialists, anthropologists, film-makers, artists, and local community groups, piloted the creation of a series of audio and video responses to various body-arts themes, which are now available on the ‘Body Arts’ website and as subscribable podcasts via the newly launched Pitt Rivers channel on iTunes U. As part of the project, Kate White initiated a collaborative relationship with Ruskin College. Four students volunteered for the scheme and spent a total of 125 hours working behind the scenes, helping with visitor research, and conducting collections-based studies. The project ended with a ‘sharing skills’ event that disseminated learning outcomes and provided practical workshop opportunities for delegates from ten local museums in Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Buckinghamshire. Since completion, the project has been selected as a case study by the funding body to support the new standard for the Designation scheme by demonstrating innovative and creative approaches to collections and highlighting good practice.

In September, a one-year project to create a new research catalogue and digital resource of Wilfred Thesiger’s photographs of the United Arab Emirates began with funding from the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH). Three project officers were recruited, Jaanika Vider, Astrid Knight, and Dan Burt, with the project being managed by Christopher Morton.

In October the Museum learnt of the success of a major Australian Research Council application in which Morton has been named as a co-investigator and the Museum as a collaborating institution: ‘Globalization, Photography, and Race: The Circulation and Return of Aboriginal Photographs in Europe’, led by Jane Lydon at Monash University in Melbourne, will run from 2011 to 2015, and has already provided funding to enhance the Museum’s records for its holdings of Australian photographic material. As part of the project, Morton will travel to Australia in 2013 to consult Aboriginal communities about the Museum’s photograph collection and to establish relationships for future research and collaboration.

The Museum was pleased to be able to continue as project partner for ‘Artefacts of Encounter’, a three-year project (2010–2013) funded by the ESRC and based at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. It was also pleased to become a project partner of two new projects: ‘Fijian Art: Political Power, Sacred Value, Social Transformation and Collecting Since the 18th Century’, a three-year project (2011– 2014) funded by the AHRC and based at the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge; and ‘Looking Back to Find Them Looking Forward: The Visionary Powell-Cotton Sisters’, an HLF-funded project based at the Powell-Cotton Museum in Kent, for which the Museum also ran a training day. The Museum was also pleased to host in May meetings of the Sawyer seminar series on ‘Human Creativity: Ecologies and Practices of Invention’ funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Research Visitors
There were 378 recorded visits to the Museum during the year requiring the retrieval of objects, photographs, and/or manuscripts. Of these, 105 came from within Oxford University and 85 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.

There were 242 recorded research visits to examine material from the Museum’s object collections during the year. The Museum’s ‘Characterising the World Archaeology Collections’ project has raised the profile of the archaeology collections, and about a third of the visits to the object collections this year were focused on archaeological material. Some visits took place as part of major research projects, such as the object-based workshops of the Sawyer seminar series on ‘Human Creativity: Ecologies and Practices of Invention’, funded by the Mellon Foundation, in May 2011, and the visit by members of the ‘Artefacts of Encounter’ team at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge to examine early Pacific material in June.

In December 2010 collections staff hosted a third visit by Itaru Chijiwa, with his colleague Koji Suga, from Kokugakuin University in Tokyo. They continued their examination of the Chamberlain collection of Japanese amulets and related artefacts. The information gathered during this visit has greatly improved staff members’ knowledge about these objects and has been used to enhance the database entries.

In March 2011 the Museum hosted a visit by thirteen members of the Blackfoot community from the United States and Canada, who took the opportunity to view nineteenth-century Blackfoot collections. Visitors to the collections also included Joanne Campbell, a Pomo basket-maker, who works to revive traditional basketry in her home region of northern California. She came to see baskets and a belt made by the Pomo and to closely examine the techniques so as to be able to replicate them in her work. She was accompanied by Margaret Mathewson of Oregon State University, who also has made a close study of Pomo basketry. There was also a week-long visit by Philip Jones from the South Australian Museum, who examined the collection of Australian objects acquired by Spencer and Gillen as part of his contribution to a project focusing on these two collectors.

Of the 136 recorded research visits to the photograph and manuscript collections during the year, 84 were to consult photographs and 52 to consult manuscript material. The photograph and manuscript collections department also answered 357 enquiries by email, eight by mail, seven by telephone, and two in person. Among the more notable visitors to the photograph and manuscript department were a group of nine staff members from the British Library to see the Damian Webb collection relating to children’s games, which was the focus of a recent British Library project with which the Museum collaborated, and Professor Itaru Chijiwa of Kokugakuin University to consult the letters from Basil Chamberlain in the Museum’s Tylor Papers. In January the department hosted a visit by Peter Worsley to show his own collection of photographs to a visiting Australian historian, Martin Thomas. Also in January the department worked with Minh Chung (Librarian for Chinese Studies) to identify Korean material for potential inclusion in a new Bodleian Library publication on ‘Korean Treasures in the University’s Collections’. In June, the Australian artist Christian Thompson began a series of research visits to the photograph collections, in preparation for an exhibition in response to the material in 2012.

In July the Museum was pleased to host a visit by His Majesty King Rukirabasaija Agutamba Solomon Gafabusa Iguru the First, the Omukama of Bunyoro-Kitara in Uganda. The Omukama and his party examined some of the Museum’s historic holdings from his kingdom and attended an impromptu performance of some Bunyoro music by schoolchildren visiting the Museum as part of the ‘Hands-on-Music’ project.

Research visitors frequently provide important information on the Museum’s collections, either during their visits or in later reports and publications, copies of which they are required to supply for the Museum’s Balfour Library. From time to time the Museum is also able to accommodate requests for materials analysis. This year the Museum was pleased to be able to provide Robin Torrence (Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Museum, Sydney) with access to a selection of Admiralty Island obsidian material for portable x-ray spectroscopic analysis. This non-destructive technique allows the analyst to ‘characterize’ the material and thus, it is hoped, to identify its geological source and thus provide clues to related social interactions.

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 lecture and give tutorials and seminars 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.

Balfour Library
This was a busier year than usual, with 8,817 loans on OLIS. Mark Dickerson continued to provide cover one day a week at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and attended several courses in advance of the introduction of new University-wide library software. In July Eric Edwards retired as library assistant after six years’ service, having previously worked for front of house.

Financial success
The Museum continued to enjoy substantial success in obtaining the external project and research grant funding so crucial to its financial health. The Museum also received £725,000 from the HEFCE ‘core funding’ programme for university museums.

New Research and Project Grants
Grants awarded over the course of the year included: £91,400 from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation for ‘Pictures Worth a Thousand Words: Developing a Digital Image Bank at the Pitt Rivers Museum’; £78,212 from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, via the Museums Association, for ‘Reel to Real: Giving the PRM Sound Collections a Voice’; £80,000 from the Clothworkers’ Foundation for a two-year fellowship to research and conserve the Museum’s Cook-voyage collections; £64,000 from the James A. Swan Fund to support work on the Louis Sarno collections at the Museum; £29,000 from the Wellcome Trust to document and catalogue the Lovett collection of amulets; £13,500 from the James A. Swan Fund to support work on the archaeology collections at the Museum; £10,000 in the form of the inaugural Clore Award for Museum Learning; and £7,218 from the Boise Fund for ‘A Comparative Study of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s Acheulean Collections’.

Renaissance
During 2010–11 the Museum benefited from £380,000 of funding from Renaissance, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council’s (MLA) programme to transform England’s regional museums. 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) are working together to deliver increased visitor numbers, higher standards of care, more accessible collections, and to support new and innovative ways of working and engaging audiences. During the course of the year the MLA was dissolved and the responsibilities for the Renaissance programme transferred to Arts Council England. As a result, a key focus has been to ensure that the work being delivered in the Museum on education, interpretation, and public access is aligned with the Arts Council’s priorities that will guide the distribution of the next round of funding from April 2012. Over the reporting year, Renaissance funding supported three education officer posts, to deliver the school and public education programme, as well as posts devoted to display and interpretation, and additional staff training. In addition, the Museum has managed a cross-museum art education post, the Renaissance manager, and two posts seconded to the Museum of Oxford to deliver community engagement projects.

Museum Commercial Activities
The Museum shop continued to trade profitably despite inclement winter weather and increasingly tough economic conditions throughout the year. Gross sales of £121,270 represented a 1% increase on the previous year, and while net sales were down on the year (primarily due to the VAT increase in January) net margin and trading profit increased. Average transaction value increased to £5.92 with the total number of transactions at 20,481 and an average spend per visitor of £0.33. Across the year, the sale of images and reproduction fees moved on to a more commercial basis through working with the online image provider Cabinet UK. In its second year of trading in its new location, the shop’s emphasis was on developing new and branded product alongside the development of exhibition-specific brochures and products. This involved working with new supply bases and with other departments within the Museum.

Of particular note was the success of the Thesiger-related book and products, which contributed a total of £10,373 to the gross sales; the book being the best cash-seller in the shop. This was closely followed by postcards, friendship bracelets, and a range of Tuareg jewellery. In June, a booklet on the shrunken heads, which has satisfied the majority of visitor requests for more information on the subject, was published; early sales have been promising. Further plans were also put in place to develop publications for future exhibitions.

In February the management and staff of the Pitt Rivers and the Oxford University Museum shops were combined. This has aided both purchasing and staffing levels, and has introduced healthy competition between the two shops, as well as facilitating standardized retail practices. Fi Dunnington left the Museum in July and was replaced by Sarah Barefield on a joint appointment across the two museums. In February, Yvonne Cawkwell took over the joint management of both shops. Beverley Stacey and Genevieve Moffat continued to work on both sites.

The Museum’s two new commercial websites for print sales and image licensing, which were established in May 2010 to coincide with the opening of the Wilfred Thesiger in Africa exhibition, performed strongly in their first year. Print sales to the value of £11,326 were received during the period, and image licences to the value of £5,634, of which the Museum receives 75% of net profits. The success of these two web services means that the Museum will seek to expand their content in the future.

Donations
Ahmed Al-Shahi (papers of Godfrey Lienhardt relating to his anthropological work in South Sudan, especially among the Dinka); Elizabeth Boyden (a collection of four albums compiled by Johannes Wanner in Indonesia in 1902–1911, and a collection of nineteenth- century albumen prints of the Vedda people, Sri Lanka; 2010.61, 2010.62); Neil Douglas Brown (an album of photographs relating to north-east India and a legal deed of land grants to the Assam Railway and Trading Company; 2010.63); John Burton (axe made by the donor in 1981 under the supervision of Tungei axe makers, from Papua New Guinea; 2011.2); Madeleine Ding (a tin of ‘Milo’ chocolate energy drink from an Asian supermarket in Cambridge; 2011.1); Roger Gilboy (a kalpak hat from Kyrgyzstan; 2011.44); Christopher Hallpike (a collection of negatives and slides taken during his fieldwork in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea; 2011.20); P. M. J. Higham (a mixed collection from Asia, India, and China; 2010.64); John Moore (negatives and prints taken by the donor on the Oxford and Cambridge Expedition to South America in 1957–8; 2010.71); Sandra Piesik (a collection of 99 digital photographs recording the reconstruction of an Arish House, United Arab Emirates; 2010.49); Anthony Pitt-Rivers (Mexican stone figures, locks and keys, and pottery material from Greece/Cyprus, all from the collections of his great-grandfather, Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers; 2010.78, 2010.79, and 2010.81); Analyn Salvador-Amores (a white cotton T-shirt printed with the image of a tattooed woman, collected during ethnographic fieldwork in the Philippines; 2011.43); John C. Tempest (a collection of photographs of Fiji and New Caledonia taken around 1900; 2011.19); and Felicity Wood (a collection of baskets; 2011.42).

Purchases
Elizabeth Ewart (a collection of beadwork from the Panará people, acquired by the donor during fieldwork; 2011.10); Clare Harris (a collection from Darjeeling, for the Made for Trade exhibition; 2011.9); Haida artist Andy Wilson, with the support of the Chadwyck Healey purchase fund (a bentwood box from Haida Gwaii; 2010.67).

Transfers
School of Geography Library, University of Oxford (a collection of albums of prints and postcards compiled by W. Chauncy Cartwright 1880–1930; 2010.75).

Bequests
Joan Gallagher (cast brass head given to the donor’s father by the Oba of Benin; 2011.21).

Donations to the Library
The Balfour library was grateful to receive donations and bequests from the following individuals and institutions: Ahmed Al-Shahi, David A. Berry, Dawn Chatty, the Captain Cook Memorial Museum (Whitby), Jeremy Coote, Melody Cox, Robert Davidson, Mark Dickerson, Lucy Dugmore, Elizabeth Edwards, Marc Felix, Anne Haour, Clare Harris, Dan Hicks, Jesus College Library, June Knowles, Sarah Lasenby, Rosemary Lee, John Mellors, Peter Mitchell, Roger Moisey, Oxford Asian Textiles Group, Anne Parsons, Laura Peers, Jabiru Prod, Nathan Schlanger, Natalia Sosnina, Alice Stevenson, Muzu Sulemanji, Tsan Huang Tsai, the Tylor Library, and Peter Wade.

Staff Activities (including teaching and examining)
Elin Bornemann finished working on the ‘Body Arts’ project in March 2011, returning to her previous role of providing general curatorial support and improving the cataloguing of objects on the lower gallery. From June 2011 she supervised the visiting researchers programme for the object collections.

Faye Belsey (née Cheesman) served as Deputy Head of Collections until Marina de Alarcón’s return from maternity leave in November 2010, spending most of the rest of the year cataloguing new acquisitions and working on the Made for Trade exhibition, which she co-curated with Julia Nicholson. She began work on preparing the Museum’s Fijian collections for examination by members of the team working on the AHRC-funded ‘Fijian Art’ project, for which the Museum is a project partner. For part of the year she worked on the joint collections–conservation project focused on the Museum’s arrow collection. In September 2010 she was part of the team that deinstalled the loan of Cook-voyage material to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In January 2011 she was part of the team that couriered a loan of basketry for exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. During the year she joined the Museum Ethnographers Group, and assisted in the arrangements for its annual conference, held at the Museum in April 2011. She attended several seminars and conferences, including the Tahitian mourner’s costume workshop, the ‘Blackfoot Shirts’ conference, and the RIME laboratory.

Jeremy Coote continued to carry out personal research into the history of the Museum’s collections, particularly those from Polynesia and Africa, and to contribute to internet discussion lists, 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). He was appointed to serve on the editorial board of The Grove Encyclopedia of African Art (to be published by Oxford University Press, New York). As part of his contribution to the research project ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector’ in October he attended the conference ‘100 Years of Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum’ and presented a joint paper about the project with Alison Petch. Also with Alison Petch he gave a talk about the project at the Museum of English Life at the University of Reading in March 2011. Also in March he organized, again with Alison Petch, a project workshop at the Museum, and gave the introductory presentation. In May he attended ‘Lost Museums’ a study-day at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. As part of his continuing work on the Museum’s collections from South Sudan, he attended the Sudanese sessions of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom’s biennial conference held at St Antony’s College, Oxford in September 2010, and the British Institute in Eastern Africa’s research day, held at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, in March 2011. In June he attended the symposium ‘Governance and Government in South Sudan’ held at the History Faculty. In April 2011 he co-organized with Alison Petch the Museum Ethnographers Group’s annual conference ‘Objects and Words: Writing On, Around, and About Things’, held at the Museum, and gave the opening presentation. In September 2010 he couriered the loan of a Hawaiian feather god figure to the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. 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 the University of Manchester and elsewhere. In Hilary term he convened, with Christopher Morton, the Museum’s seminar series in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. He examined one doctoral thesis for the University of Oxford, supervised one doctoral student, served as assessor for others, and supervised undergraduate essays and dissertations in History of Art and Visual Culture.

Marina de Alarcón returned from maternity leave on 3 December 2010 and resumed her work as Deputy Head of Collections.

Madeleine Ding finished working on the ‘Body Arts’ project in March 2011, returning to her previous role of providing general curatorial support and improving the cataloguing of objects on the lower gallery. For part of the year she worked on the joint collections– conservation project focused on the Museum’s arrow collection. In January 2011 she was part of the team that couriered a loan of basketry for exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

Haas Ezzet, the Museum’s Head of ICT—and the sole permanent member of staff responsible for many dozens of computers, servers, and the Museum’s websites—continued to offer ICT support and advice to staff, researchers, the cross-museums art education officer, hub-funded staff seconded to the Museum of Oxford, and the hub manager. He also obtained an ITIL v3 Foundation Certificate (IT Service Management).

Philip Grover continued to manage and supervise research visits to the photograph and manuscript collections. He supplied images for numerous publications and for exhibitions in New York and London as well as for the Royal Museum Project (World Cultures Gallery) at National Museums Scotland. He catalogued collections of photographs by John Baddeley and Carolyn Drake, albums by Adolfo Farsari and Henry Goold-Adams, and another, purchased recently at auction, by an unidentified Japanese photographer. He researched and catalogued a collection of early photographs of New Mexico and Arizona taken for the Bureau of Ethnography by John Hillers; he also digitized the prints, making them available on the Museum’s prints website, and in November curated an archive-case display of the material. He also researched and catalogued a set of rare early portraits of Samurai taken in Paris by Jacques-Philippe Potteau (1807–1876), curating an archive-case display of the material in April. In October he gave a ‘Saturday Spotlight’ talk on the Museum’s special exhibition Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, which he co-curated with Christopher Morton; and in December he contributed to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thesiger at 100’ half-hour documentary, marking the centenary of the celebrated traveller’s birth, presented by Frank Gardner and produced by Alyn Shipton. In May he gave a staff talk on The Last Samurai archive-case display and a public ‘Saturday Spotlight’ talk on The Japanese Missions to Europe, 1862 and 1864: Photographs by Jacques-Philippe Potteau.

Helen Hales took up the role as coordinator for the DDF-funded ‘Some Thing for Every Body’ project in summer 2010. Working with other staff, she selected, researched, and created web content for more than 300 objects relating to body adornment and modification across the world. Other project duties included producing a series of audio podcasts featuring subject specialists, managing and training student volunteers as part of a new partnership venture with Ruskin College, running a family fun day with Maori artist George Nuku, and helping to organize and present a sharing-skills workshop aimed at building relationships with local museum partners and disseminating project learning outcomes. As part of wider work supporting the Museum, she hosted work experience students, helped train volunteer guides, responded to research enquires, and gave talks about aspects of the Museum’s collections to visiting groups from Leicester University, the Society for the Promotion of Traditional Archery, the Institute of Tourist Guiding, and a ‘Body Image’ sixth-form art workshop. She presented a paper on early firearms at the Battlefields Trust’s conference on the Second Battle of St Albans (1461), hosted a Saturday Spotlight session on body arts films, chaired a session at the Museum Ethnographers Group’s annual conference, presented as part of the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series, and delivered a half-day training course for regional museum staff in ‘Writing Effective Museum Text’ for MLA Renaissance South-East. She also attended Museum Association conferences on digital content and social media and a ‘Battlefield Archaeology’ study day at University College London.

Clare Harris was on sabbatical from September to December 2010. Although she continued to supervise doctoral students and contributed to the examining process for postgraduate students at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology during that time, she also spent time reading, writing, and travelling. She gave several invited lectures: at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, at the Latse Institute for Tibetan Studies (also in New York), and at the British Council conference on ‘Contemporary Art in the Age of Cultural Relativism’ in New Delhi, India. In New York she interviewed a number of Tibetan artists living in exile. In India she investigated the history and ongoing role of photographic studios in Darjeeling and Kalimpong (West Bengal) and examined photographic material from the colonial period in archives in Delhi. Whilst in India, she collected objects for the Museum’s Made for Trade exhibition and took photographs of traders and their wares in the Himalayan foothills, which have since been displayed in the exhibition. In Hilary term she returned to her usual duties as a tutor for the graduate degrees in material anthropology and museum ethnography (M.Sc. and M.Phil.) and as director of studies and tutor for archaeology and anthropology at Magdalen College. She also lectured and/or gave tutorials to undergraduate students in archaeology and anthropology, human sciences, and the history of art and graduates in the school of anthropology. She taught the graduate option in ‘The Anthropology of Art and Visual Culture’ and acted as supervisor for three D.Phil. students. She examined two doctoral theses, one at Oxford and the other at the University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies), and contributed to examining for the graduate degrees in material anthropology and museum ethnography and visual anthropology. She was a full examiner for finals in human sciences in June 2011. She served on a number of committees, including the social sciences divisional board and the inter-faculty committee for the history of art. In Hilary term she convened, with Ulrike Roesler (of the Oriental Institute), a lecture series on Tibetan art, held at the Museum, giving a talk in the series. In July 2011 she helped to convene the RIME workshop ‘First Encounters with Museums: Trading Identities, Places and Things’ at the Museum and gave a paper. She also spoke at an international workshop on ‘Colonial Archives’ at St Johns College in June 2011.

Dan Hicks represented the Museum at the RIME meeting in Oxford, and gave a talk to the Edgar Wind Society at St John’s College. Beyond Oxford he convened a full-day session titled ‘Manifestos for Materials’ at the Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference in Bristol (December 2010). He gave seminar papers at the Centre for Museums, Heritage and Material Culture Studies at University College London and at the Department of Archaeology at Reading University. He also gave special lectures to the Public History Group (Ruskin College) and the ‘Material Life of Things’ research project at the Courtauld Institute. He gave a presentation about the undergraduate degree in archaeology and anthropology to the Regional Teachers Conference in Birmingham in June 2011. He was chairman of examiners for the M.St. and M.Phil. in archaeology, assessor for the Clarendon Fund, and 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 two D.Phil. theses, and external examiner for a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Cambridge. He also continued as a member of the AHRC peer review college, and was elected to the Wenner-Gren Foundation panel of reviewers (2011–2013). He continued to oversee the ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections’ project, supported by the John Fell OUP Research Fund, and began work on editing the forthcoming publication. He was awarded a further grant from the Boise Fund for work on the Museum’s collections of sub-Saharan stone tools.

Kate Jackson travelled to Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada, in August as part of a reciprocal visit following her extensive work on the Haida project at the Museum. During the visit she assisted with workshops demonstrating basic object-cleaning techniques and helped to disseminate knowledge of the Museum’s Haida collections to the wider community. She continued to serve as secretary of the ICON Ethnographic Group and helped to organize a one-day ‘Conservation of Basketry’ symposium at Kew Gardens in September. She also attended a three-day workshop on the ‘Conservation of Basketry’ prior to the symposium. She attended the Tahitian mourner’s costume study day in December and the ‘Blackfoot Shirts’ conference in March, both held at the Museum. She gave a talk on pest management issues to a meeting of the Oxford Conservators Group in January. Prior to commencing maternity leave in May 2011, she prepared a poster, on the conservation of a walrus-intestine sail in the Museum’s collection, for the ICOM-CC triennial conference to be held in Lisbon in September 2011.

Christopher Morton continued to hold the 60% post of Head of Photograph and Manuscript collections. His 40% career development fellowship ended in September, but his adjunct fellowship of Linacre College was extended by a further three years. In September he took up a fifteen-month, 40% post as manager of a project focused on the photographs taken in the United Arab Emirates by Sir Wilfred Thesiger, sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH). The high level of demand on the photograph and manuscript collections continued to make managing this section on a part-time basis very difficult. He spent much of the year managing the ADACH project, with its three project staff. He co-curated the exhibition Disciples of a Crazy Saint: The Buchen of Spiti—Photographs by Patrick Sutherland in the Museum’s long gallery, coordinated the exhibition People Apart: Cape Town Survey 1952—Photographs by Bryan Heseltine, also in the long gallery, and contributed to the Made for Trade special exhibition, curating a display of postcards on the theme of ‘trading stereotypes’ that demonstrate the persistence of certain types of representation of indigenous peoples. He continued to serve on the photograph committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute, which met several times during the year. In February he initiated a project on the Louis Sarno collection of sound recordings from the Bayaka of the Central African Republic, funded by the James A. Swan fund. On 15 March he attended the conference ‘Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age’ at the British Library. On 19 March he attended the British Institute in Eastern Africa research day at St Hugh’s College. On 25 March he presented a paper at the workshop ‘Rethinking Pitt- Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector’, on the founding collection of photographs in the Museum. On 9 June he attended the symposium ‘Governance and Government in South Sudan’ at the History Faculty, University of Oxford. On 24 June he attended the conference ‘Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography’, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. On 4 July he was awarded £78,212 as principal investigator for a project on the Museum’s sound collections, titled ‘Reel to Real: Giving the PRM Sound Collections a Voice’, funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, via the Museums Association. On 21 July he presented a paper at the RIME laboratory, held at the Museum, titled ‘Trading Places, Revealing Identities: A “Visual Repatriation” Project in Western Kenya’. He also continued to contribute lectures and seminars on photography to both the material anthropology and museum ethnography and visual anthropology degrees.

Siân Mundell returned from maternity leave on 15 September 2010. She catalogued a number of collections during the year, including the Arkell bead collection and the Lovett collection of amulets.

Zena McGreevy returned from her secondment to the Ashmolean Museum on 1 October 2010 and resumed her post as Assistant Curator managing access for visiting researchers to the Museum’s object collections.

Julia Nicholson continued to oversee the Museum’s busy loan programme and to chair the Museum’s documentation committee. Much of the year was taken up with curating the Museum’s major special exhibition Made for Trade, which opened in July.

Michael O’Hanlon continued to be occupied largely by fund-raising and administrative matters: within the Museum, in connection with the application to the Heritage Lottery Fund; within the University, in connection with a range of working groups and committees; and beyond the University, in connection with the Renaissance programme and with the University Museums Group’s national committee.
Laura Peers spent much of the reporting year working on two major research projects focused on the Haida and Blackfoot collections. She fulfilled her teaching commitments on the MAME course, lectured students from archaeology and anthropology and advised students reading history of art and human sciences. She gave a number of talks and lectures: ‘On the Social Power of Objects: Blackfoot Shirts, Blackfoot Ancestors, and Blackfoot People Today’, at the workshop ‘Power, Materiality and Objectification in the Americas’, in Oxford; ‘Making, Gifting, Healing: The Blackfoot Shirts Project’, an invited paper at the conference ‘Material Culture, Craft & Community: Negotiating Objects Across Time & Place’, held at the University of Alberta, Canada, 20–21 May 2011; a tour of the Museum for the Bizot group of European museum directors; a talk to staff from the Powell- Cotton Museum on source-community research; ‘Dancing in the Contact Zone: The Haida Project at the PRM’, to the University of Bristol archaeology and anthropology seminar; ‘The Haida Project: Ethnographic Collections Linking UK Museums and Indigenous Communities’ to the University of Cambridge museum anthropology postgraduate class and to the University of Leicester museum studies graduate seminar. She also carried out fieldwork during the year in Blackfoot territory.

Alison Petch continued as researcher on the ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ project, the major outcome for the year comprising the enormous amount of research information that was added to the project website. With Jeremy Coote she gave two papers about the project: at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum in September 2010 and at the Museum of English Life at the University of Reading in March 2011. Also in March she organized, again with Jeremy Coote, a project workshop at the Museum. She completing her final year as Chair of the Museum Ethnographers Group, including organizing and hosting the 2011 annual conference at the Museum, again with Jeremy Coote. She trained several members of staff and volunteers in how to use the Museum’s databases.

Heather Richardson continued to promote the work of the Museum’s conservation department to visitors and to conduct object-handling sessions for staff and students. She supervised two conservation interns and four volunteers during the year. She continued to facilitate and courier the loan of Cook-voyage objects to venues in Vienna and Bern, finally couriering their return to the Museum in February. She returned to the Galt Museum in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, for the final time in late August to pack the Blackfoot shirts for their return to the Museum. She gave a presentation on the conservator’s role in the project at the ‘Blackfoot Shirts’ project conference held at the Museum in March. In November she gave a presentation on conservation training at a careers evening for Oxford University students. In May she recorded an interview on insect pest issues for a Radio 4 documentary ‘What’s Eating the Museum’, to be aired in August. She represented the Museum at the one- day seminar ‘Life Without Air Conditioning’, organized by the University Museums Group and attended the Tahitian mourner’s costume study day at the Museum, both in December 2010. She also attended a barkcloth study day at Kew Gardens in July. She organized a buckram mount-making course for University museum staff, held at the Museum in January. She continued to serve on the board of trustees for the Leather Conservation Centre as honorary secretary. In November she began a three-year term as the conservation representative on the University’s committee for museums and scientific collections.

Alice Stevenson completed working on the ‘Characterization of the World Archaeology’ project at the end of 2010 and moved on to a short project, funded by a grant from the Boise fund, to document key Palaeolithic hand-axe collections in the Museum. From April she undertook research into the life and work of Museum donor James A. Swan and prepared a temporary archive exhibition on the Museum’s photographic and object collections from the archaeologist Dorothy Garrod. In January 2011 she presented at the University of Liverpool a workshop (for the subject specialist network for museum curators looking after archaeological collections from Egypt and Sudan in the UK) on how to identify excavator’s marks on museum objects. She contributed a talk to the ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ workshop in March, as well as articles to the project’s website. In September 2010 she presented a paper on the Museum’s Egyptian collection at the British Egyptology Congress, held at the British Museum, and in summer 2011 she gave a conference paper at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, as part of the ‘Egypt at its Origins’ conference. In December 2010 she was elected a trustee of the Egypt Exploration Society. Throughout the year she continued to provide tutorials for archaeology undergraduates at Hertford and Keble colleges, as well as for Oriental studies students taking Egyptology options. She also continued to contribute to the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit’s project ‘A New Chronology for the Formation of the Egyptian State’. She gave other lectures to various bodies and meetings, including: Wessex Ancient Egypt Society and Sussex Egyptology, in October 2010; St Cross College Colloquia, in February 2011; North East Ancient Egypt Society, Durham, in April; North Kent Egyptology Society, in May; and Bloomsbury Summer School, in July.

Nicky Temple assisted the director with the running of his office and minuted various committee meetings. Also acting as press officer, she responded to image enquiries, produced press releases, and supervised filming in the Museum. She continued to act as the co-ordinator for the Associateship of the Museums Association support group for the Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Berkshire region.

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. In addition to working on the Tahitian mourner’s costume, he conserved objects for the Made for Trade exhibition. He helped facilitate the large loan of Cook-voyage material and was one of the couriers on the Vienna and Bern legs of the tour. He also couriered the return of a Hawaiian feather god figure from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin in January. He worked with a group of Italian researchers and spent time with them at the ISIS laboratory in Harwell, where they carried out neutron diffraction analysis on five tsubas from Japanese swords from the Museum collection. He attended a seminar on showcase specification and air exchange, and took part in a training course on the use of buckram for mount making. He attended the ‘Blackfoot Shirts’ conference at the Museum in March and a barkcloth study day at Kew Gardens in July. In December 2010 he organized a study day on the Tahitian mourner’s costume for ethnographic conservators from the UK and Europe.

Kate Webber returned to work in August 2010, taking up the role of Marketing and Press Officer. She spent three days with the University’s head of press and undertook training in Dreamweaver. She continued to design publicity material, designed a booklet for the shop on the shrunken heads, and assisted Haas Ezzet in the development of a new style and layout for the Museum’s website. In addition, she continued to serve on various committees and assist in the planning of another successful late-night event in May.

Kate White spent most of her time on the development of the application to the Heritage Lottery Fund (which was submitted in August 2011). This was supported by visitor research and carried out alongside the development of associated interpretation and social media strategies. She continued to chair the Museum’s access committee, to oversee the collaboration with Ruskin College, to coordinate the artists’ interventions programme, and to contribute to the ‘Body Arts’ project and its final seminar. She also attended the ‘New Media’ seminar in Manchester.

Staff publications
Publications relating directly to the Museum’s collections are indicated by [*].
(NB For reasons of space it is not possible to include here more than a small selection of the many contributions by members of the Museum’s staff to the website of the ‘Rethinking Pitt- Rivers’ project at http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/rpr/.)
Elin Bornemann, ‘Add.9455vol1_p.84/2 Hercules: A Bronze Statuette of Hercules from Pitt- Rivers’ “Second Collection”’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011).
Jeremy Coote, ‘Joseph Banks (1743–1820)’, in James Cook et la Découverte du Pacifique, edited by Adrienne Kaeppler et al., Bern: Musée historique de Berne (2010), pp. 61–2.
Jeremy Coote, ‘26 Georg Forster (1754–1794) Catalogue of Curiosities sent to Oxford’, ‘66 Casque fau’, ‘74, 75 Deux figures (masculine et féminine) ti’i’, ‘83 Flûte nasale vivo’, ‘87 Tambour pahu’, ‘95 Écope de pirogue tata’, ‘101 Battoir à tissu d’écorce i’e’, ‘109 Pièce de tissu d’écorce’, ‘122 Visière’, ‘126 Boîte de rangement piha’, ‘142 Gourde hue ’aroro’, ‘147 Lame d’herminette faoa’, ‘148 Ciseau tohi’, ‘151 Hameçon à requin’, ‘175 Benjamin West (1738–1820) Sir Joseph Banks’, ‘176 Manteau kahu waero (kuri purepure?)’, ‘177 Manteau kaitaka’, ‘179–181 Trois ceintures tatua’, ‘182 Pieu à tisser turuturu’, ‘190 Peigne heru’, ‘198 Pendentif hei tiki’, ‘202 Pendant d’oreille kuru’, ‘206 Ornement’, ‘212 Trompette ou flûte- clairon putorino’, ‘227 Long bâton / massue de combat taiaha’, ‘236–240 Cinq massues, patu paraoa, patu, kotiate, wahaika, patu onewa’, ‘241 Eleanor Gyles et Thomas Orpin (actifs 1770–1780) Replica patu onewa’, ‘243 Arme de main / lame d’herminette mere pounamu / toki pou tangata’, ‘244 Herminette cérémonielle toki pou tangata’, ‘246 Couteau maripi’, ‘247 Battoir de racine de fougère patu aruhe’, ‘249 Écope de pirogue tiheru’, ‘283 Seau’, ‘285 Panier kato mosi kaka’, ‘295 Panier kato’, ‘300 Jupe sisi fale’, ‘317 Natte portée à la taille
kie fau’, ‘320, 321 Deux pièces de tissu d’écorce ngatu tabina, ngatu ‘uli’, ‘333 Flûtes de Pan mimiha’, ‘347, 348 Deux outils à inciser’, ‘361 Pendentif’, ‘362 Pièce de tissu d’écorce mahute’, ‘363 Coiffure’, ‘367 Coiffure tapi uma’, ‘369 Coiffure uhikana’, ‘370 Ornement de cheveux’, ‘372 Pectoral tahi poniu’, ‘375 Ornement de bras ou de jambe’, ‘377 Éventail tah’i’, ‘380 Ornement’, ‘389 Massue mwemwe p’h’mandre’, ‘390 Flûte’, ‘392 Flûte de Pan’, ‘396 Peigne ou grattoir’, and ‘403 Propulseur de lance’, in James Cook et la Découverte du Pacifique, edited by Adrienne Kaeppler et al., Bern: Musée historique de Berne (2010), pp. 130, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 168, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 179, 183, 183–4, 184, 185, 195, 197, 198, 202, 205, 208, 213, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 224, and 225. [*]
Jeremy Coote. ‘Peter Gathercole’, Museum Ethnographers Group Newsletter (October 2010), p. 8.
Jeremy Coote, ‘A “Costume of a King” from West Africa’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford Newsletter, no. 71 (June 2011), pp. 1 and 3. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Speaking for Themselves’, Interpretation Journal [Journal of the Association for Heritage Interpretation], Vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 22–23. [*]
Jeremy Coote (with Christopher Morton). ‘Visual Traditions of Eastern Africa: Report on a Colloquium’, ACASA Newsletter [Arts Council of the African Studies Association], Vol. 86 (Fall 2010), pp. 27–8.
Jeremy Coote (with Alison Petch and Chris Wingfield), ‘Museum Ethnography at Home: An Introduction’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 22 (December 2009), pp. 3–8 [published April 2011].
Jeremy Coote (with Alison Petch), ‘1884.32.3 Nuer Headdress: Research Note on a Beaded Headdress Collected by John Petherick in the Southern Sudan’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*]
Alan Davis, ‘The Breton Skull Box’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford Newsletter, no. 69 (November 2010), p. 11. [*]
Eric Edwards, ‘HMS Leopard 1884.54.44: Model of HMS Leopard (1790) from the Founding Collection of General Pitt-Rivers’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt- Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2010). [*]
Eric Edwards, ‘An Irish Bronze Brooch (1884.79.13)’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2010). [*]
Eric Edwards, ‘Human Heart in a Heart Shaped Cist 1884.57.18’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2010). [*]
Eric Edwards, ‘Manilla or Penannular Bracelet Currency’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2010). [*]
Madeleine Ding, ‘Cedar Bark Cape 1884.140.1047’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*]
Philip N. Grover, ‘The Last Samurai’, Royal Photographic Society Journal, Vol. 151, no. 5 (June 2011), pp. 278–80. [*]
Helen Hales, ‘Shaping Up at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford Newsletter, no. 70 (March 2011), p. 1. [*]
Helen Hales (with Jeremy MacClancy), Body Arts: Scent, Pain and Exchange [podcast], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*]
Clare Harris, Kesang Lamdark and Palden Weinreb: Generation Exile—Exploring New Tibetan Identities [catalogue of an exhibition held at Hanart Square, Hong Kong, 5 September to 8 October 2011], London and New York: Rossi and Rossi (2011).
Dan Hicks (edited, with Mary C. Beaudry), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2010).
Dan Hicks (with Mary C. Beaudry), ‘Introduction: Material Culture Studies—A Reactionary View’, The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2010), pp. 1–21.
Dan Hicks, ‘The Material-Cultural Turn: Event and Effect’, in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2010), pp. 25–98.
Dan Hicks, ‘A Model of Wayland’s Smithy’, The Edgar Wind Journal, no. 1 (Hilary 2011; ‘Materiality and Temporality’), unpaginated [October]. [*]
Dan Hicks, Review of A Passion for the Past: The Odyssey of a Transatlantic Archaeologist, by Ivor Noël Hume (Charlottesville, 2010), Times Literary Supplement, no. 5,644 (3 June 2011), p. 29.
Kate Jackson, ‘Conserving the Umiak Sail: A Rare Walrus Intestine Sail from the Hudson Strait’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford Newsletter, no. 70 (March 2011), p. 3. [*]
Andrew McLellan (with Melody Vaughan), The Pitt Rivers Museum Activity Book for Families: Six Exciting Things to Make & Do Inspired by the Museum’s Collections, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (no date [2010]).
Andrew McLellan (with Kate White), Introduction to the Pitt Rivers Museum [podcast in four parts], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*]
Andy McLellan, ‘Remembering Margaret’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford Newsletter, no. 69 (November 2010), p. 3.
Christopher Morton (with Gilbert Oteyo), ‘Paro Manene: Exhibiting Photographic Histories in Western Kenya’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 22 (December 2009), pp. 155–64 [published April 2011]. [*]
Christopher Morton (with Jeremy Coote), ‘Visual Traditions of Eastern Africa: Report on a Colloquium’, ACASA Newsletter [Arts Council of the African Studies Association], Vol. 86 (Fall 2010), pp. 27-8.
Chris Morton, ‘Ten Queensland Photographs in the Founding Collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*]
Julia Nicholson (with Vibha Joshi), Body Arts: The Naga People [podcast], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*]
Michael O’Hanlon (with Peter Rivière), Body Arts: Feathers, Beads and Paint [podcast], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*]
Michael O’Hanlon (with Stanley Ulijaszek), Body Arts: The Flexible Body ([podcast], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*]
Laura Peers, Shrunken Heads, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*] Laura Peers, Shrunken Heads at the Pitt Rivers Museum [podcast], Oxford: Pitt Rivers
Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*]
Laura Peers, ‘Afterword: “Nothing is Impossible”—A Discussion in Leiden about Museums and Source Communities’, in Laura Van Broekhoven, Cunera Buijs, and Pieter Hovens (eds), Sharing Knowledge & Cultural Heritage: First Nations of the Americas—Studies in Collaboration with Indigenous Peoples from Greenland, North and South America (Mededelingen van het Risksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden, no. 39), Leiden: Sidestone Press, pp. 183–8.
Laura Peers (contributor), ‘Appendix: Discussions—Workshop and Expert Meeting: Sharing Knowledge & Cultural Heritage’, in Laura Van Broekhoven, Cunera Buijs, and Pieter Hovens (eds), Sharing Knowledge & Cultural Heritage: First Nations of the Americas—Studies in Collaboration with Indigenous Peoples from Greenland, North and South America (Mededelingen van het Risksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden, no. 39), Leiden: Sidestone Press, pp. 189–240.
Laura Peers (edited, with Carolyn Podruchny), Gathering Places: Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories, Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press (2010).
Laura Peers (with Carolyn Podruchny), ‘Introduction: Complex Subjectivities, Multiple Ways of Knowing’, in Gathering Places: Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories, edited by Laura Peers and Carolyn Podruchny, Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press (2010), pp. 1–21.
Laura Peers (with Robert Coutts), ‘Aboriginal History and Historic Sites: The Shifting Ground’, in Gathering Places: Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories, edited by Laura Peers and Carolyn Podruchny, Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press (2010), pp. 247–93.
Laura Peers (with Udi Mandel Butler and Cara Krompotich), Everything was Carved [film], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2010); online at <http://www.prm.ox.ac. uk/haida.html>. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘To Hyphen or Not to Hyphen: Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford Newsletter, no. 70 (March 2011), p. 11. [*]
Alison Petch, Review of Material Histories: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Marischal Museum, University of Aberdeen, 26–27 April 2007, edited by Alison K. Brown (Aberdeen, 2008), Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 22 (December 2009), pp. 188–90 [published April 2011].
Alison Petch (with Jeremy Coote and Chris Wingfield), ‘Museum Ethnography at Home: An Introduction’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 22 (December 2009), pp. 3–8 [published April 2011].
Alison Petch, ‘Status and Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2010). [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Gold Belt Buckle from Hungary Add.9455vol3_p.752/12: Judging the Qualities of Artefacts from Pitt Rivers’ Farnham Collection’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2010).
Alison Petch (with Jeremy Coote), ‘1884.32.3 Nuer Headdress: Research Note on a Beaded Headdress Collected by John Petherick in the Southern Sudan’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*]
Maegan Reed, ‘The Christmas Party: A View from the Gallery’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford Newsletter, no. 70 (March 2011), p. 2.
Alice Stevenson, ‘Ancient Egypt in the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Egyptian Archaeology, no. 37 (November 2010), pp. 41–44. [*]
Alice Stevenson, ‘Material Culture of the Predynastic Period’, in Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization (Oriental Institute Museum Publications, 33), edited by Emily Teeter, Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (2011), pp. 65–74.
Alice Stevenson, ‘Petrie and Pitt-Rivers’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford Newsletter, no. 71 (June 2011), p. 9. [*]
Alice Stevenson, ‘The Egyptian Boat’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford Newsletter, no. 71 (June 2011), p. 11. [*]
Alice Stevenson, ‘The A-Group Cemetery at Tunqala West’, The EES Newsletter [Egypt Exploration Society], no. 2 (Summer 2011), p. 3.
Alice Stevenson, ‘Egyptian Boat 1884.81.10’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*]
Alice Stevenson, ‘The Pitt Rivers Egyptian Flint Knife’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analyzing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector [website], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011).
Jeremy Uden, ‘Bonn Voyage: Sending Our Iconic Objects on Loan’, The Journal of the Institute of Conservation, Vol. 34, no. 1 (March 2011), pp. 53–65. [*]
Melody Vaughan (with Andrew McLellan), The Pitt Rivers Museum Activity Book for Families: Six Exciting Things to Make & Do Inspired by the Museum’s Collections, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (no date [2010]).
Jaanika Vider (with Elizabeth Ewart), Body Arts: The Panará People [podcast], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*]
Kate White (with Andrew McLellan), Introduction to the Pitt Rivers Museum [podcast in four parts], Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011). [*

Museum seminars and talks
The Museum’s series of Friday lunchtime ‘brown bag’ seminars continued during term-time throughout the year.
15 October 2010: Museum staff and others: ‘Current research’.
22 October: Laura Rival (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford), ‘Hammocks, Blowpipes, Manioc Squeezers, and the Materiality of Life in Amazonia’.
29 October: Darren Newbury (Birmingham City University), ‘Images, Practices, Stories: Researching Photographic Histories in South Africa’.
5 November: Charlotte Joy (University of Cambridge), ‘The Empty Museum: Contestation Over World Heritage in Djenné, Mali’.
12 November: Marilyn Strathern (University of Cambridge) ‘What’s In An Argument? Preliminary Reflections on Knowledge Exchanges’.
19 November: Michael Galban (Ganondagon Historic Site / Wanuken Traditional Arts, NY), ‘Making Historic Woodlands Artefacts’.
26 November: Rosanna Raymond (Artist, London), ‘Working in Museums’.
3 December: Inge Daniels (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford), ‘At Home in Japan: Beyond the Minimal House—An Exhibition at the Geffrye Museum, London’
28 January 2011: Jeremy Coote and Alison Petch (both Pitt Rivers Museum), ‘Rethinking Pitt- Rivers: A Preliminary Report’.
4 February: Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp (University College London), ‘Encounters of Culture, Heritage and Development at the Sierra Leone National Museum’.
11 February: Robin Boast (University of Cambridge), ‘Autoethnography: The Forgotten Feature of the Contact Zone’.
18 February: Patrick Sutherland (London College of Communication), ‘Disciples of a Crazy Saint: Photographing the Buchen of Spiti’.
25 February: Laura Jopson and Andrew Burn (British Library), ‘Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age’.
4 March: Aaron Fox (Columbia University), ‘Re-Animating Audio Archives through Community-Partnered Repatriation: A Report from Alaska’s North Slope’.
11 March: Petra Kalshoven (University of Manchester), ‘Perceptions of Replication: An Ethnographic Inquiry into the Sensory and the Illusory in European Re-Enactments of Native American Material Culture’.
6 May: Philip Jones (Department of Anthropology, South Australian Museum, Adelaide), ‘Three Tangled Strands: Reconstituting Spencer and Gillen’s Material Culture, Photographs and Texts’.
13 May: Alana Jelinek (AHRC Creative Fellow, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Cambridge), ‘Words and Objects: The Many Things We Know But Don’t Communicate’.
20 May: Elizabeth Ewart (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford), ‘Making and Unmaking Things: Panara Beadwork from Central Brazil’.
27 May: Sumakshi Singh (Artist, Chicago and New Delhi), ‘Circumference Re-Forming’.
3 June: Helen Hales, Andrew McLellan, and Kate White (all Pitt Rivers Museum), ‘“Some Thing for Every Body”: Interpreting the PRM’s Body Arts Displays Within and Without the Museum’.
Swan Fund
The Pitt Rivers Museum sponsors archaeological and anthropological fieldwork within areas of interest to the late James A. Swan, including the Later Stone Age prehistory of southern Africa and the study of the contemporary Bushman and Pygmy peoples of Africa. Research on museum collections relating to these fields may also be supported, as may the costs
of publishing the results of work that has been aided by the Fund. The Fund supported the costs of two projects during the reporting year. The first was a year-long project to undertake research and documentation work on the Louis Sarno collection of sound recordings and photographs relating to the Bayaka people of Central African Republic. The second was a six-month project to enhance, as a research resource, the correspondence between James A. Swan and the Museum and, taking account of the stone tools donated to the Museum by Swan, to provide a plan for a new display relating to stone technology in the desk-cases at the east end of the Museum’s upper gallery.

Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum
Report by Felicity Wood (Chairman)
In June we heard the sad news of the death of Margaret Dyke. For three years she had been secretary to the Friends’ council and she had been one of the museum guides since their first trainee intake in 2001.
Membership remained steady at around 300, although there continued to be a major concern with the relatively high number of overdue and underpaid subscriptions.

Membership secretary, Rosemary King, and treasurer, Laura Manifold, put a great amount of effort into checking records and preparing a major overhaul in this area, as a result of which we now have a much more up-to-date and manageable list of paid-up members.
The annual Beatrice Blackwood Lecture series was resumed in September, with a talk on Wilfred Thesiger’s times in Africa, by his friend and biographer Alexander Maitland. Coinciding as it did with the Museum’s special exhibition Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, which attracted huge interest, the talk brought in such large numbers that, rather late in the preparations, Rosemary Lee and her team had to find a larger auditorium in Rhodes House. This was all managed successfully, demonstrating again the resilience and strength of teamwork that the Friends produce for their events. The lecture is now available, via the Museum’s website, as a podcast. After twelve years Rosemary Lee stepped down as the coordinator of the lecture series and, on behalf of the Friends, she was given very warm thanks by Adam Butcher. We ended the evening with a very congenial dinner at which the speaker and his wife were guests of the council. Our evening lecture series, managed by Terry Bremble, continued with an enterprisingly full and varied programme. A ‘convener’ is now appointed for each talk, who not only introduces the speaker but also helps to publicize the event. The theme of the 2011 Kenneth Kirkwood Lecture Day in March was ‘Man’s Relationship with Animals’. There were five speakers, invited by Shahin Bekhradnia, addressing this topic, with a break for a buffet lunch based on recipes from the Friends’ cookbook. The Christmas party was another triumph of organization and support, with a varied and entertaining programme of music, conducted tours of the upper gallery, a silent auction, and a quiz to identify mystery objects from the Friends’ own ‘Mystery Museum’.

Adam Butcher stepped down from his role as Chair at the end of 2010. At the Friends’ AGM in June 2011 Felicity Wood was elected Chair, having been Acting Chair from January 2011. After four years as an excellent editor of the Newsletter Barbara Topley stepped down; Peter Finn agreed to edit the October issue. Adam Butcher continues to act as the production manager. Alison Bolton, who had been helping with publicity, stepped down from the council. We were delighted to welcome new members Juliette Gammon and Sarah Wood as publicity officer and secretary respectively.

An activities team has now been formed, and it is hoped that, in addition to the regular talks, there will be a programme of other events on offer. Away-days have been reinstated. In April there was a successful visit to the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading, where we were given a very enjoyable tour by Ollie Douglas, the assistant curator. In August we visited the Horniman Museum in south London, where we were fortunate to be given two talks by Fiona Kerlogue, deputy keeper of anthropology: in the morning a talk on the Horniman’s centenary gallery and in the afternoon an introduction to the exhibition Bali: Dancing for the Gods.
Income remained stable, totalling £11,817 for the year, comprising subscriptions, donations, and fundraising through events, sales of the Ravishing Morsels cookbook, and gift aid. The Friends made the strategic decision to save its funds this year, with the aim of supporting the Museum with a larger donation in the near future when it embarks on new projects. The Friends will, however, continue to support the Museum and its staff with smaller donations for items such as travel, training, and staff development, supporting staff to promote the fantastic collection and work within the Museum. One such donation, of £500, was made at the end of the financial year to support one of the Museum’s conservators, Jeremy Uden, to attend an ethnographic conservation conference, where he presented a poster on the subject of ‘The Conservation of a Tahitian Mourner’s Costume’.

As always the Friends are most grateful to the staff of the Museum for all their support of the Friends in so many ways. We hope that—even if only in very modest ways—we can help the Museum.