University of Oxford Pitt Rivers Museum Annual Report 1 August 2006 to 31 July 2007

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 October 2006
The Vice Chancellor (Dr John Hood) The Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research, Academic Services and University Collections) (Dr E. McKendrick) The Assessor (Dr K. Andreyev) Dr J. Landers (Chairman) Ms J. Vitmayer (Horniman Museum) Ms C. Dudley, OBE (Head of South East Hub & Hampshire Museums Service) Dr C. Ardouin (The British Museum) Dr M. Spence (Head of Social Sciences Division) Professor J. Kennedy (Oxford University Museum of Natural History) Dr C. Brown (Ashmolean Museum) Professor J. Mack (University of East Anglia) Professor C. Gosden (Institute of Archaeology) Professor H. Whitehouse (ISCA) Dr J. A. Bennett (Oxford University Museum of the History of Science)
Dr M. O’Hanlon (Pitt Rivers Museum, Secretary) Dr H. La Rue (Pitt Rivers Museum)
The Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum, having received from the Director the following report for the period 1 August 2006 to 31 July 2007, presented it as its report to Congregation

DIRECTOR’S INTRODUCTION
This reporting year was one of enormous activity, considerable achievement, and great sadness. The frenetic activity, of course, surrounded the construction of the Museum’s new £8,000,000 extension, which was completed during the year—and into which almost all staff had moved by the end of it. Indeed, pressure on space elsewhere within the University meant that an advance guard of staff moved into the new extension well before it was fully complete. I am very grateful to those colleagues for their equanimity in coping with noise, the comings and goings of workmen and—how can I put this while still making clear our rigorous adherence to health and safety regulations?—the odd trailing cable and less than fully completed section of flooring.

One of the more complicated aspects of building the new extension was the creation of its intersection with the ‘old’ galleries, this breakthrough area being the last part to be completed. It was, however, wonderful to see for the first time the fresh views into the galleries from the new extension, and to be reminded that the latter is not only a wonderful new space for teaching and research but is itself an integral part of the Museum. At the same time, a good number of the displays around the intersection with the new extension—on all three floors—had to be dismantled during the construction works. Even with the energetic efforts of the Museum’s technical services team, it will take a good many months to restore them fully.

A further call on staff time associated with building the new extension was created by the need to move the collections of musical instruments and archaeological materials from the Balfour Galleries and the house at 60 Banbury Road, premises that the Museum had agreed to relinquish in return for the final tranche of funding needed to complete the new extension itself. Additional space for these collections has been found close to the Museum’s main site, but the careful packing of thousands of musical instruments and tens of thousand of flints for transport to a new location was a major task, especially when done against the clock. I am especially grateful to the Museum’s collections staff, in particular to my colleagues Heather Richardson, Marina de Alarcón, and Zena McGreevy, for their devotion to this task, and for their insistence that this should be treated not as a mere removal job, but taken as an opportunity to upgrade the storage conditions and location records of these important collections, which as a result will soon be not only closer to hand but also more readily accessible for staff and visitors.

The new extension is an exceptional facility, and it has been heart-warming to see its visitor research areas starting to come into operation, led by my colleagues Chris Morton and Philip Grover, who spent a good deal of time installing the Museum’s photograph and manuscript collections in the environmentally controlled repositories in the new extension. However, the new extension is not the final word so far as the need to renew the Museum’s buildings goes. Its completion throws into relief the inadequacy of the Museum’s entrance, with its obstructing 1960s exhibition gallery, which both blocks the entrance vista and confuses navigation within the building. The Museum’s environment has also long needed improving; no less do we need a dedicated in-gallery teaching space. I noted these shortcomings in my introduction to the previous annual report and also our intention to apply to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to remedy them. An application for £1,000,000 towards the £1,417,000 estimated costs of the project was submitted in January and I am delighted to be able to report that we heard in June that our application had been successful.

In the last nine years, we have re-roofed the Museum, moved the textile repository and conservation laboratory three times, dispersed ourselves to allow the construction of the new extension, and now regathered ourselves in it. In an ideal world, we would now have had a period of normal running. But I felt that the combination of continually rising visitor numbers (up again this year, despite the closure of galleries, to 196,000) and the declining amount of Heritage Lottery funding available (as the full costs of the Olympics emerge) meant that we should not delay a Lottery application. I am very grateful to all my colleagues for their preparedness to undertake this further major project in what will have been a decade of renewal for the Museum. The HLF award itself is a real tribute to the Museum and to its staff and supporters, and to our commitment to serving as a welcoming and accessible face of the University, as well as a centre for innovatory scholarship and teaching. The award is also a valuable external endorsement at a time when we will shortly need to compete again for two major, external funding sources—that is, ‘Hub’ funding from the government’s Renaissance programme and ‘core funding’ from the Arts and Humanities Research Council—which together provide the Museum with £1,000,000 annually. Indeed, the insecurity of funding for major university museums was highlighted by a recent parliamentary report to which the Ashmolean’s director and I both gave evidence over the course of the year.

Preparing the HLF application was itself a major undertaking. It entailed extensive research and public consultation (which substantiated the necessity for the work), and the compilation of lengthy supporting documents running into hundreds of pages, including reports from our architects, mechanical and electrical engineers, and cost consultants. I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the exceptional efforts made by everyone involved, especially the core team who pulled the bid together: my executive research assistant Imogen Crawford-Mowday; the Museum’s access and public relations manager, Kate White; the (then) development officer, Lois Sketchley; the Museum’s administrator, Cathy Wright— who somehow managed to do this as well as so much else; and Kate Gardner, whose flair as a designer gave the finished application an appearance to match its content. I would also like to thank here our HLF case officer, Sarah Tebbot, who was both encouraging and critical as appropriate.

The HLF award is also conditional upon our finding nearly £500,000 in partnership funding. With the help of generous trusts and foundations, we have already made a substantial start (the details technically fall in the 2007–08 reporting year and will be gratefully acknowledged then), but there is a good deal more still to do before the works start. Here, as always, I know that we will be able to count on the valued support of the Museum’s Friends and their Patrons. At this stage, it appears that the necessary building work will commence in July 2008 and that we will have to close the galleries for at least part of the duration of the works. Full details will of course be announced and advertised on the Museum’s website well in advance, and as soon as they are firm.

This award was not the only one the HLF made to the Museum this year. A second, ‘Young Roots’ award was made to Andrew McLellan and Suzy Prior to enable them to make films around the Museum with sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds, teaching them about heritage as well as vocational skills. This form of innovative outreach is one of many undertaken by the Museum’s education section in particular and helps feed into the targets set by the ‘Hub’, which funds the Museum’s education service as a whole. Enhanced ‘Hub’ funding this year also allowed us to increase the Museum’s opening hours by a further twelve per week, in addition to making a number of other staff appointments. We were also able to welcome as a ‘Hub’-funded trainee Nicola Tettey, with us for two years while she also undertakes a Master’s degree in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Full details of ‘Hub’ support through the Renaissance programme are provided later in this report, a testament to the work of my colleague John Hobart, who efficiently co-ordinates all the ‘Hub’-funded activities undertaken by the University’s museums as a whole.

Other grant-funded work continued or was completed during the course of the year. Three major research projects—those on the Museum’s Tibetan and Southern Sudanese collections (both funded by the AHRC) and the ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’ project—successfully concluded during the year. However, ‘concluded’ is in fact quite the wrong word, since each project has created a major innovative website, each of which continues to attract tens of thousands of ‘hits’ from unique virtual visitors. The number of visitors to the Museum’s main website was also massively up again, this time by 55% to 819,000. This is a real tribute to the work done by David Harris on the research-project websites and by the Museum’s ICT Officer Haas Ezzet, who also took on the major task of ensuring that the electronic components of the new extension’s IT, telephone, and security systems all talk to each other. The Museum’s other two major grant-funded projects— ‘Cutting Edge’ and ‘The Other Within’, on the Museum’s weaponry displays and English collections respectively—continued to make progress over the course of the year with the aid of the committed staff who work on and oversee them.

I noted at the outset this had also been a year of great sadness. Tragically, and unexpectedly, our colleague Hélène La Rue, curator of the Museum’s music collections, died in July 2007. Hélène had been a member of staff of the Museum since 1980 and a pioneer of the Museum’s efforts to reach out to families and communities—something that is now recognized as a core part of the Museum’s activities but was distinctly unusual for a university museum at the time she originally proposed it. Hélène’s warm, calm, and sympathetic personality hid both a mischievous sense of humour and an uncomplaining approach to the demands of her ‘portfolio’ post: she was also curator of the Bate Collection of Music, and a lecturer in the two University schools of Music and Anthropology, as well as being a Fellow of St Cross College. The fact that her death occurred in the midst of the packing of the music collections, for which she was responsible, ready for their move to a new repository, only added to the sense of untimely loss felt by all her colleagues. Obituaries appeared in the Independent newspaper and in the Oxford Times, while others are in preparation, and we are now seeking an appropriate way to remember her within the Museum. We were no less saddened by the death of Norman Weller—recently caretaker at the Museum’s research centre at 64 Banbury Road—so cruelly shortly after his retirement in October 2006.

More cheerfully, and finally, I would like to welcome all new staff, not least Dr Dan Hicks who joined the Museum right at the close of the year as lecturer-curator in archaeology in succession to Professor Chris Gosden.

ACCESS
Once again, the Museum’s access team worked at high pressure this year. As mentioned above, Kate White played a lead role in the preparation of the Museum’s successful bid to the HLF. She also worked extensively in collaboration with the education team to create a ‘Lifelong Learning and Audience Development Policy, 2006–9’, including action plans for the next three years, which was submitted as part of the HLF grant application.

Another sizeable project for the access team was the improvement of the Museum’s orientation and signage, supported by an award (reported last year) from the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, whose generosity has enabled many capital improvements to the Museum in recent years. Holmes Wood Consultancy were selected to design a signage system embracing both the Pitt Rivers and Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH). News of the HLF award, along with other significant work now planned for the front of the OUMNH, made it necessary to reconsider initial plans for maps and signs at the entrance to the Pitt Rivers. The signage project will now progress in two phases, the first dealing with the new extension and its south entrance. The second phase, tackling directional signage on the street and through the OUMNH and the Pitt Rivers entrances, as well as the full Museum gallery plan, will be completed later in 2008, once the knock-on effects of the HLF-funded restoration of the Museum’s entrance have been fully worked out.

Marketing
The Museum received extensive publicity through the press over the reporting year. Museum events continued to be listed on a wide range of local and national websites as well as in the local press. Free advertising using the web has increased as more people use the internet to seek out information on cultural activities and attractions. We also continued to use e- marketing to promote events, and for the first time sent e-invites for a Museum event and a private view.

Front-of-House
There were considerable staff changes to front-of-house, reception, and the museum shop during the year. Derek Stacey was appointed deputy head attendant and has been assisting Brian Winkfield in the daily running of front-of-house. In addition, after many years’ service on the shop, Shirley Careford moved to take on the role of Museum receptionist, including such administrative tasks as managing school and lecture bookings.

On 1 May, the Museum’s opening hours were extended by an additional twelve hours a week, so that the Museum is now open to the public from to 10 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. from Tuesdays to Sundays (and on Bank Holiday Mondays) and from 12.00 to 4.30 p.m. on Mondays. Staff also worked very hard to ensure that the lower gallery—which had been closed during the construction of the new extension—was reopened for Easter 2007. The Museum’s attendants have an enviable reputation for presenting an especially friendly and helpful public face: they continue to attract laudatory comments in the Museum’s visitors’ book and have done an excellent job at explaining to visitors the closures that construction of the new extension made necessary.

Education Services
There were a number of additions and changes to the Museum’s education service during the year. The service continued to be led by Andy McLellan, assisted by Isabelle Carré and Menaka Rambukwella, but in January Becca McVean returned from maternity leave, whilst in May Menaka left to take up a post at Manchester Museum (to be replaced early in the next reporting year by Melody Vaughan). The section’s ‘core’ staff draws on the support of a number of cross-museum posts, also funded through the Renaissance programme: Flora Bain (assisted by Lorna Stevenson) harnessed the efforts of the hundreds of volunteers on whose help we draw, Susan Birch continued to develop community projects, while Adrian Brooks developed art resources and workshops for secondary schools. In addition, the volunteer guiding service continued to deliver programmes for primary schools. Here we would especially like to thank Jean Flemming, Frances Martyn, Rosemary Lee, Alan Lacey, Linda Teasdale, Margaret Dyke, Anne Phythian-Adams, and Sukey Christiansen for generously giving the time that makes this possible.

Despite the construction work and consequent gallery closures, the provision to schools and booked education groups flourished. Over the course of the year, 24,624 people visited as part of booked educational groups, a rise of 12% on the previous year. Of these, 8,222 (33%) were primary school pupils, 9,038 (37%) came from secondary schools, 2,074 (8%) from tertiary education, and 5,290 (21%) from language schools. More than 9,600 children (accompanied by adults) participated in family activities during the weekends and school holidays. Every Sunday, ‘Family Friendly Fun’ sessions were run in conjunction with the OUMNH, offering ‘backpack’ activities, colouring sheets, and ‘sorting boxes’. ‘Pitt Stops’ and other activities on the first Saturday of every month and during school holidays continued to grow in popularity, with activities based on such themes as ‘Museum Magic’ and ‘Drums to Didgeridoos’. Again, many of these sessions were run in conjunction with our colleagues in the OUMNH. In addition, 9,211 adults participated in on-site educational activities, demonstrating the Museum’s commitment to expanding provision of lifelong learning for all.

Meanwhile, the list of educational projects and new initiatives continued to grow. Supported by a £5,000 grant from Creative Partnerships, and a £25,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, film-making projects formed a leading part of our outreach work this year. Other creative art projects included working with ten artists and fourteen year-six classes from East Oxford to decorate two marquees as part of Oxford’s ‘InTentCity’ festival, a partnership project with Pegasus Theatre and Fusion Arts. Another aspect of ‘InTentCity’ involved working with teenagers from Blackbird Leys to create films inspired by the Museum, which were then projected on to the ‘InTentCity’ tents.

The music education programme also went from strength to strength over the course of the year. A highlight was the weekly gamelan club at St Andrew’s School, which culminated in a performance by the group at the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall in London in June. Music workshops for special needs, primary, and secondary schools also continued through the year, and several GCSE music study days were held in conjunction with the University’s Bate Collection.

Throughout the year education staff continued to provide cross-museums training for volunteer guides, museum staff, and education officers in the South Midlands Museum Federation.

Events and Activities
Aside from the enhanced programme mounted by the education service, the museum held a range of special events through the year. The largest of these was the latest in what is now becoming a regular summer evening opening. Entitled ‘In a Different Light’, and run in conjunction with colleagues in the OUMNH, this year’s event, held on Saturday 19 May, attracted an unprecedented 3,000 visitors to the two museums over the course of the evening. Indeed, the apparently endless ranks of visitors who marched relentlessly into the museums when the doors were opened at 7.00 p.m. made some staff wonder whether the advertising had not succeeded too well. The evening’s entertainment included masked dances by monks from the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in Tibet, performances by gamelan, kora, and tabla musicians, screenings of rare films (including animation and the Son of Kong (1933)), and a new mix of hands-on activities inspired by the collections. Visitors had the opportunity to explore the Pitt Rivers Museum’s galleries by torchlight (see cover image), a hundred visitors being admitted every half hour. Despite the crowds, indeed partly because of them, the event had a unique atmosphere of enjoyment and relaxation, with families, young people, and adults continuing to flock into the museums until late in the evening. The palpable feeling of goodwill towards the two museums amongst the thousands who attended is always immensely rewarding for the staff who work so hard to make the event a success. Moreover, our perception that this is so is not entirely subjective. The two museums were jointly awarded first place in the Museum and Galleries Month commendation scheme, the national competition that recognizes such events.

On 23 June the Museum contributed to both ‘Opening Doors Opening Minds’ and ‘Architecture Week’ by hosting behind-the-scenes tours of the new extension. The tours traced the path of a new acquisition, participants learning how an object might be acquired and its course through conservation, documentation, and photography to eventual display and use in an education programme.

During the year Kate White submitted a project proposal entitled ‘Behind the Façade’ as part of Oxfordshire County Council’s application to the Arts Council for ‘Oxfordshire Reflections’ a strand of the year-long celebrations entitled ‘Faces of Oxfordshire 2007’. In May we learned that the application had been successful, with £8,900 being made available to Oxford University’s museums. The project will bring together four community groups with a range of disabilities to work behind the scenes in the University’s museums with artists brook & black and the Oxford University museums community education officer. Together they will create pieces for exhibition in the museums in December 2007.

Visitor Figures
Despite the closure of the upper gallery throughout the reporting year, and the closure of the lower gallery until Easter, the Museum recorded yet another increase in visitor figures for the year: a 6.7% rise to 196,410. Month-by-month figures paralleled those of 2005–6 until May, when the extended opening hours—allied to the reopening of the lower gallery—boosted attendances. The number of visitors to the website also continued to grow (see below).

ICT
Visitors to the main website and associated research projects exceeded 1,000,000 during the reporting period. Visitor numbers to the main website increased by 55%, to more than 819,000 (2.5 times the figure for 2005–6), while the percentage of visitors who bookmarked the site was also up by 80% over the period. The Museum’s website continues to expand, with updates and additions to most of its sections. A major overhaul of the site has commenced with a view to full implementation in the coming year.

The website component of the AHRC-funded project ‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’ was completed during the year. This provides public access to the records for, and images of, more than 1,200 objects and 5,000 historic photographs from the Museum’s collections along with supporting bibliographical, biographical, and cultural resources and links to relevant literature. By the end of the reporting year, the site had been accessed by 96,000 unique visitors. In December, The Tibet Album (a product of the AHRC-funded project ‘Tibet Visual History, 1920–1950’) also went live, making available a searchable, multi-layered, and interactive ‘living’ resource. Users are now able to browse images and work with a fully integrated historical baseline from which they can develop their own albums within the resource. By the end of the reporting year, the site had attracted more than 50,000 visits. The site won the ‘Ox Talent’ 2007 award for innovative use of IT in teaching and learning at the University of Oxford. In addition, work continued on creating the website output for the ESRC-funded project ‘The Other Within’, on which project progress reports are already available.

In other developments, the University’s joint Museums and Collections education website continued to attract more visitors. In addition, ‘Artefact’, the University museums’ art education website underwent further development, with a formal launch scheduled for early 2008.

Development of the Museum’s collection management system continued with software and hardware updates in late 2006. The collections management server system software was also upgraded, followed by a ‘roll-out’ to client machines. New web-accessible layouts for the collections databases were also created.

The ICT infrastructure for the new extension was commissioned. This utilizes a new 1Gb FroDo connection to the University network. Both data and voice connection are CAT5E based, affording greater flexibility and potential for future development in terms of voice-over internet protocol. The communications room in the new extension houses new data switches that take advantage of the faster network, as well as affording a greater number of connections. It also houses the Museum’s collections, projects, and file-sharing servers. A hard drive-based CCTV and door swipe-entry system linked to central servers have also been installed. A building management system has also been established to afford remote network access to the University’s Estates department.

DISPLAY
Permanent Displays
The major change to the Museum’s permanent displays during the year was the dismantling of those in the Music Makers gallery on the Banbury Road site. These had been first opened to the public in 1986 and, with their use of then state-of-the-art technology, had continued to provide visitors with an entertaining and informative introduction to music-making around the world, as well as an inspiring context for music classes and performances. Necessitated by the arrangements for developing the new extension, the dismantling of the music displays (as with the hunter-gatherer and archaeological displays some years ago) was a sad but unavoidable moment in the history of the Museum’s development.

During the building works, a number of display cases at the main site had had to be dismantled to accommodate the intersection with the new extension on all three levels. This year all the dismantled cases were reinstated and a number extended. In addition, with support from the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, a number of new cases were installed in the lower gallery. Preparations to mount new displays in the reinstated, extended, and new cases had begun in 2005 and a number of new displays were completed during the year.

In the court a new series of displays devoted to masks was installed, featuring examples from the north-west coast of America (including many from the Museum’s important collection of Haida art), from Melanesia, and from Asia (including a selection from the Museum’s important set of Noh theatre masks). These displays have already proved very popular with visitors. On the south side of the lower gallery, new displays devoted to ball games and miniature weapons were installed, while preparations for a new display devoted to showshoes and skates, and another devoted to paints and painting, were also well advanced by the end of the reporting year. In the upper gallery, preparations were made for extending the display of Polynesian clubs along the south wall, as well as for the development of a major new firearms display at the west end.

Special Exhibitions
Treasured Textiles: Cloth and Clothing Around the World, which opened in May 2006 and was reported on last year, was originally scheduled to close in April 2007 but has now been extended until June 2008. It continues to attract great interest.

With the opening of the new extension, the Museum found itself with two special exhibition areas, for a short time at least. Community Music and Dance, the inaugural exhibition in the new special exhibition gallery, opened in April 2007. Bringing together the distinctive traditions of Javanese gamelan and English Morris, the exhibition was curated by Hélène La Rue with the assistance of a number of colleagues from across the Museum’s different departments. The exhibition includes a Javanese gamelan, on loan from the Music Faculty, musical instruments and a Morris outfit from the Museum’s own collection, along with a second Morris outfit loaned by a local side. These materials are complemented by large images, including contemporary photographs from Java, historic images of Morris sides and contemporary images of Morris sides taken by the Museum’s assistant photographer Suzy Prior. The exhibition also provided an opportunity to present some of the first fruits of the ESRC-funded project ‘The Other Within’ on the Museum’s English collections. The opening of the exhibition was celebrated on 1 May with performances by the Headington Quarry and Eynsham Morris, along with a performance by the Oxford Gamelan Society.

COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT AND CARE
Reserve Collections
Work by collections and conservation staff to upgrade the conditions in the reserve collections continued as time allowed. The major focus, however, was on the removal of material previously housed at 64 and 60 Banbury Road and in the Balfour Galleries.

The photograph and manuscript collections, held at 64 Banbury Road since 1994, were removed to a temporary holding area in September 2006 pending their removal to new facilities in the new extension. After a difficult eight months, during which access to the collections was severely restricted, the final move was completed in May 2007. The new repositories consist of three environmentally controlled rooms, to house film and negative material, photographic prints, and the manuscript collections in appropriate conditions. A combination of newly purchased and reused supplementary shelving from the Balfour Galleries now means that adequate space is given to the collections, as well as providing room for future growth.

From early 2007, collections and conservation staff worked with Hélène La Rue to plan the move of the music collections from 60 Banbury Road to a new repository adjacent to the main museum. The displays in the Music Makers gallery had to be dismantled and, along with the contents of the music store at 60 Banbury Road, packed ready for removal to the new repository. A new locations system was devised and material boxed according to musical instrument type. At the same time, information about the Music Makers display was recorded and the instruments’ records updated and enhanced. The development of a refined locations system means that staff will be able to access the collections much more easily and efficiently in the future. In preparation for the move and their new permanent location, objects were packed in acid-free materials. Individual boxes were made for large or otherwise problematic instruments. A total of 5,944 musical instruments were prepared for removal to the new repository.

At the same time as this work was proceeding, collections staff were also preparing the Museum’s flint and related collections for removal to the new repository. With a team of short-term staff and volunteers, collections staff sorted, bagged, and reboxed some 100,000 items. It was not possible, as part of this process, to document each individual item, but major steps were taken to improve the storage and accessibility of the collections. In addition, non- stone material—such as pottery, bone, glass, etc.—that had previously been stored with the stone was separated out and prepared for removal to more suitable locations.

Acquisitions
Each year the Museum receives an extraordinarily wide variety of material by donation. Among the more remarkable donations to the collections this year were: a collection of Gisu circumcision regalia from Uganda, from the anthropologist Suzette Heald, along with a series of twenty drawings by Gisu children collected by Amelia Breedt; four albums of photographs from Sudan compiled by district administrator Percy Coriat in the 1920s, donated by Douglas Johnson; and a collection of 9,000 photographs and slides, along with a number of films, compiled during the Anglo-Colombian Recording Expedition of 1960–61 by the donors Brian Moser and Donald Tayler. A full list of the Museum’s acquisitions during the year is given in Annex B.

Loans
There were four new loans this year, two to overseas institutions and two to United Kingdom institutions, the number of objects loaned totalling twenty-five. In April an early wampum strip (collected in Virginia before 1656) was loaned to the Jamestown–Yorktown Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia for the exhibition The World of 1607, marking the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in North America; it was returned in July. In May a ceremonial sword or ada (part of the Dumas-Egerton collection) and an ivory door-bolt were loaned to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna for the exhibition Benin: Kings and Rituals, Court Arts from Nigeria. The exhibition closes in September 2007, but the loaned objects are due to travel with the rest of the exhibition to three other venues. In May, nineteen amulets from the Hildburgh collection were loaned to the Wellcome Trust: Wellcome Collection, London for the ‘permanent’ exhibition Medicine Man; they are due to be returned in May 2012. In June, a human heart in a lead case, a dried bull’s heart pierced with nails and thorns, and a set of playing-cards were loaned to the Wellcome Trust: Wellcome Collection, London, for the exhibition The Heart; they are due to be returned in September 2007.

A number of outstanding loans were returned during the year. In August, twenty Polynesian artefacts, including a number from the Museum’s two ‘Cook-voyage’ collections, that had been on loan to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia for the exhibition Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in Polynesia, 1760–1860, were returned. In September, the ‘Raven Transformation’ mask made by Charles Edenshaw, which was a key component of the exhibition Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, was returned to take a prominent place in the new permanent display of masks in the court. Also in September, fifteen Hindu religious figures that had been loaned to the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam for the exhibition Dealing with the Gods: Rituals in Hindu Religion were returned to permanent display in the court. In November, a Neolithic stone axe with original wooden handle from Carrickfergus in County Antrim was returned from the Ulster Museum, Belfast, where it had featured in the ‘Early Ireland’ gallery since October 1996. Finally, in February 2007, a Morris dancer’s costume that had been on loan to the Museum of Oxford since 1978 was returned for inclusion in the Museum’s Community Music and Dance exhibition.

Cataloguing
As in previous years, a substantial amount of work was done on cataloguing collections and on enhancing pre-existing databases. This year much of this work was carried out as part of the preparations for moving collections from the Museum’s Banbury Road properties to the new extension and other repositories. Over the year, 1,977 new entries were added to the Museum’s object database and 123,058 enhancements made to existing records, the high number of the latter reflecting, amongst other things, work carried out by Alison Petch on the database, as part of the externally funded ‘Englishness’ project. Over the course of the year, 638 new entries were added to the photograph database and 20,441 enhancements made to existing database records.

Conservation
As for so many other of the Museum’s sections, this was an exceptionally busy year for conservation staff. The conservation studio in the new extension was opened in January 2007, with much of the furniture recycled from the previous studio in the Balfour Galleries on Banbury Road. The environmental monitoring system, from Hanwell, which had been used for more than ten years in the Museum and Banbury Road sites, was updated to include more data loggers to ensure that the environmental plant in the new extension is delivering the temperature and relative humidity required. The fine-tuning of the equipment—in consultation with the University’s Estates Office, which is responsible for running the environmental plant—continues. Monitoring of shock, vibration, and dust levels in the Museum finished as the building work came to an end. As it turned out, vibration levels were less during building work than they are normally during visits by schoolchildren and the general public. However, rises in the general level of dust were recorded. In addition, there were several unanticipated incursions of dust from an unsuspected under-floor pipe leading into the Museum. All 1,700 objects removed from display pending the construction of the new extension were checked and, where necessary, conserved to display standards. The galleries, as well as many of the items on open-display in the court, were given a ‘deep’ clean.

Unwelcome visitors, in the form of clothing moths, were a problem this year, particularly for many of the textile objects on display. The number of moths found on the traps in the case containing North American clothing was sufficient to justify implementing the Museum’s full pest-management procedure, which involved removing all the clothing from the display, freezing it, and thoroughly checking each item before returning the material to the case. All displays with similarly vulnerable materials were checked each week. The Museum is not alone in suffering from this problem, and it is now thought that the incidence of clothes moth, which has escalated throughout the UK in recent years, may be connected to climate change.

Conservation staff spent much time over the course of the year preparing the musical instrument and stone tool collections for removal from Banbury Road to a new repository in the Inorganic Chemistry building. The new repository had to be carefully redesigned to accommodate these collections, with their unique conservation demands. The space will also include study facilities for researchers. The conservation team also submitted extensive data relating to the environmental component of the Museum’s bid to the HLF. As usual, conservation staff dealt with the conservation aspects of the Museum’s national and international loans.

Even in such a busy year, training and the hosting of interns were not neglected. Following external assessment, both Heather Richardson and Gali Beiner became accredited conservators (ACR) through the Institute of Conservation. Novelette Aldoni Stewart from University College London spent three months at the Museum as an M.Sc. intern, during which she worked particularly on one of the boats on display in the court. An application to the HLF for a training internship in ethnographic conservation, to commence in the next reporting year, was successful.

Designation Challenge Fund
The Museum’s series of projects supported by the Designation Challenge Fund continued in this reporting year with the start of ‘Cutting Edge: Revealing Hidden Stories in a Cross- Cultural Collection of Arms and Armour’. Focused on the arms and armour collections on display in the upper gallery, the project has documentation, research, and interpretation components. Outputs from the project will include new collections based fact-sheets, a web gallery, improved text and captions in parts of the weaponry displays, audio-guide entries, and record-level enhancements to the catalogue databases. The project is being overseen by Julia Nicholson and Kate White and, as usual, benefits enormously from additional efforts from staff in all the Museum’s sections. The ‘Cutting Edge’ project is scheduled to end in March 2008 and its outcomes will be reported on in more detail next year.

Andrew Mills took up the post of Research Officer in October 2006, his task being to undertake in-depth research on the objects on display in preparation for use by the Interpretation Officer, the latter post being filled by Helen Adams in January 2007. Also in January, Linda Mowat returned to the Museum as Senior Project Assistant to oversee the cataloguing aspect of the project, to which Elin Bornemann and Sian Mundell were seconded from the collections section. By the end of the reporting year, 6,974 artefacts had been examined and their associated records checked and enhanced. In addition, the cataloguing team have taken more than 3,000 photographs with a high-quality digital camera for use on the web gallery and as a permanent digital resource.

A major component of the Interpretation Officer’s work involved consultation with stakeholders in order to produce new interpretive materials that are meaningful, relevant, and accessible. Formative evaluation, over a seven-month period, included more than fifty questionnaire-based consultations and fifteen focus groups. The focus groups were selected to represent the Museum’s current users and potential new audiences drawn from outreach sessions. The new audiences included local community groups, family groups, specialist interest groups, students, partner museums, and disability groups. The content of the sessions included guided tours, object handling, terminology testing, thematic discussions, and text and audio evaluation, as well as such group activities as ‘thought-showers’.

RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
The Museum’s staff continue to contribute to numerous research projects both within and outside the Museum. An indication of the range of research carried out during the year can be gleaned from the entries in Annex D: Staff Activities, Annex E: Staff Publications, and Annex F: Museum Seminars.

Research Projects
Research continues to be an integral part of many aspects of the Museum’s work, ranging from that carried out with the aid of externally funded projects to the detailed investigations that are carried out as part of accessioning procedures and cataloguing (see above). Much of the Museum’s activity in this area was again focused on the projects funded by major research grants successfully applied for in recent years that enable the institution to stay at the cutting edge of contemporary, particularly collections-based, research. This section outlines just some of the major research carried out by Museum staff during the year.

‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’, funded by a grant of £224,668 to Jeremy Coote and Elizabeth Edwards from the Resource Enhancement Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, began on 1 October 2003. The project focused on the Museum’s collections from an area of central importance for anthropology in general, and British anthropology in particular, through the work of a number of people including Oxford anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Each of the 1,200+ objects and 5,000+ photographs in the collection was recatalogued, with detailed descriptions and transcripts of existing documentation, and digital images of all objects were created. During the reporting year, further cataloguing work was carried out, and the website completed. The project came to an end in October 2006, by which time all the material created, including related biographical and cultural databases, was available online.

The research project ‘Tibet Visual History, 1920–50’, funded by a grant of £238,000 to Elizabeth Edwards and Clare Harris (and Richard Blurton of the British Museum) from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, began in May 2004. Mandy Sadan, Krystyna Cech, and Gabriel Hanganu continued working on the project until October 2006. The project continued to attract researchers to the Museum with interests in various aspects of Tibetan studies and the completed website, which was launched in late 2006, has been received with great enthusiasm, particularly in the Tibetan exile community in India and in Lhasa, Tibet. It is anticipated that the website will be launched publicly in May 2008.

The research project ‘The Other Within: An Anthropology of Englishness at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, funded by a grant of £370,500 to Chris Gosden and Hélène La Rue from the Economic and Social Research Council, began work in April 2006. The three-year project aims to analyse the collections of the museum, together with the history and motives of the people making the collections, to throw new light on what was being collected and how this was used through display and/or writing to throw light on ‘survivals’ within English culture, which were taken to be the mark of long-term histories. The overall aim of the project is to use the Museum’s collection, with its connected documentation, to illuminate the modern construction of Englishness. The changing structure of the English ethnographic collections will be analysed, focusing on the counties of Essex, Somerset, Yorkshire, and Oxfordshire, and on Greater London. Archival resources will be used to provide rich contextual information about the artefacts and the people who collected them. Researcher Alison Petch was joined on the project by Chris Wingfield in September 2006.

Research Visitors
There were 191 recorded research visits to the Museum during the year requiring retrieval of material from the displays or reserve collections. Of these, 139 were to the object collections and 52 to the photographic and manuscript collections (the latter totalling 65 study days). While the number of research visits to the object collections increased slightly (from 107), the number of visitors to the photographic and manuscript collections decreased (from 115). Given the difficulties consequent on relocating the collections twice in the year, this was to be expected. The total number of recorded research enquiries dealt with by Museum staff was 2,079. Of these, 941 were received by email, 554 by phone or in person, and 584 by post or fax. These figures represent a slight decrease in comparison to the previous year (when the total was 2,268).

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 samples for analysis. This year the Museum was able to accede to a request from Robin Torrence (Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Museum, Sydney) to provide an obsidian stemmed tool (PRM 1938.36.1154), collected for the Museum by Beatrice Blackwood in Papua New Guinea in August 1937, for Raman spectroscopic analysis by Elizabeth Carter (Professional Officer in Vibrational/Electronic Spectroscopy at the University of Sydney) at the Analytical Centre at the University of Bradford. 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. Museum staff continue to teach on the University’s undergraduate degrees in Archaeology and Anthropology, Geography, 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 reading Social Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, History of Art and Visual Culture, Archaeology, Music, and African Studies. During the year, Museum staff gave 110 University lectures and 220 seminars and tutorials. Details of the teaching and examining carried out by members of staff are given in Annex D: Staff Activities.

In addition, during the year, Museum staff produced thirty-four scholarly publications (six based on the Museum and its collections), twenty other publications (all of which were based on the Museum and its collections), attended twenty-five conferences and numerous workshops and training days, delivered sixteen conference papers, received 217 visiting researchers and academics, and dealt with numerous collections-related enquiries.

Balfour Library
For the Library the year was dominated by the reorganization required following the move into the new extension in November. Core books and works on general subjects are now sited on the ground floor, with periodicals and area studies books located in open-access stacks on the first floor. In Eric Edwards’s absence due to ill health, the Library was greatly helped in this reorganization by temporary assistance from Alan Davis and John Todd.

PADMAC
The PADMAC Unit (for the study of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic artefacts from deposits mapped as clay-with-flints in the UK, and of Palaeolithic artefacts and associated deposits in a Middle Eastern (Arabian) context) continued to be located at 60 Banbury Road until the end of the year when responsibility for it was transferred to the Institute of Archaeology. PADMAC is a multi-disciplinary, geo-archaeological unit specializing in geology, sedimentology, pedology, Palaeolithic artefact technology, landscape archaeology, spatial analysis, and geophysics. The unit offers students and researchers an opportunity to investigate geo-archaeological processes implicated in the retention, over geological time, of high-level in situ Palaeolithic sites on Karstic landforms, particularly the chalk downlands of southern England, and the genesis, variability and distribution of the associated (English) deposits mapped as clay-with-flints. Also investigated by the PADMAC unit are Palaeolithic sites found in similar high-level contexts in both continental Europe and the Middle East. In many instances, these high-level sites represent the earliest evidence of human occupation— in Britain from around 600,000 to 40,000 years ago, and in the Middle East from considerably earlier.

Included in the field investigations undertaken by the unit are geophysical surveys employing resistivity, magnetometry, and magnetic susceptibility techniques. GPS, micro- topographic, and photogrammetry survey techniques are also developed and deployed in order to identify and map subtle landscape features for inclusion in the unit’s GIS databases. Where appropriate, this geophysical data is made available to local archaeological groups. This year, the unit expanded its research in the Middle East (United Arab Emirates), in collaboration with the antiquities directorates of Sharjah, Ras al Khaimah, and Abu Dhabi. The focus of the unit’s work is the continued investigations of the Upper Pleistocene (Middle Palaeolithic) stone-tool manufacturing site discovered in Sharjah and other associated sites. An interim report was presented at the Seminar for Arabian Studies held at the British Museum in July 2007. This included analysis of the artefacts by Dr Sarah Milliken (PADMAC unit associate). The Sharjah site represents the first clear evidence of Upper Pleistocene (Middle Palaeolithic) presence in the United Arab Emirates and is of great importance in clarifying early man’s ‘southern route’ between Africa and the Far East. The unit also continued its investigations in southern England with fieldwalking at Dummer Clump, near Basingstoke, Hampshire, in preparation for excavation in late 2007.

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

Project Grants
As noted above, in June 2007 the Museum was awarded £1,000,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for the entrance redevelopment project. A further £25,000 was awarded by the HLF for the Museum’s ‘Young Roots’ film-making project. The PADMAC Unit received full funding for its annual costs from Oxford Strategic Consulting Ltd.

Research Grants
The following grants were obtained during the year. Laura Peers was awarded $2,000 by the Government of Canada for research on the nineteenth-century artist Peter Rindisbacher. She also received a grant of £7,500 from the British Academy for the pilot project ‘Digital Access for First Nations Heritage in UK Museums’. The Museum is also grateful to the Latin American Centre and Dr Malcolm Deas for the award of £500 from the Roger Brew Memorial Fund towards the costs of conserving the Brian Moser / Donald Tayler collection.

Renaissance in the Regions
During the reporting period the Museum also benefited from £93,544 of funding from Renaissance, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council’s programme to transform England’s regional museums. Since 2002, central government investment has begun to reverse the decline in the country’s major regional museums: increasing visitor numbers, improving standards, developing collections, and supporting new ways of working. The Oxford University museums (Pitt Rivers, Ashmolean, Natural History, and History of Science) form one quarter of the South East Renaissance Hub, alongside Hampshire County Museums and Archives Service, The Royal Pavilion, Libraries, and Museums, Brighton and Hove, and Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust.

In the south-east, Renaissance has funded a number of regional initiatives including some with Oxford University, many of which are delivered through the Museum, Libraries, and Archives Council (MLA) South East. Among the key programmes of wider benefit have been: the funding of the museum development officer network, which provides advice, support, training, and grants to smaller museums; the establishment and funding of a staff- placement scheme so that museum staff can gain experience and training within other museums in the region; setting up a ‘skills bank’ for museums to call upon for advice and support; piloting a new ‘family friendly’ marketing initiative in the Thames Valley, which is now being expanded across the south-east; arranging specialist training in the conservation and storage of archival collections; and organizing, buying and training teams in the use of emergency response units in each sub-region to react in case of fire or flood. More than 90% of the museums in the south-east have drawn on one or more of these resources since their inception two years ago.

Within the Thames Valley region, Oxford University museums play a leading role in the delivery of the Renaissance vision. This envisages: increased numbers of visits from diverse sectors of society, especially from schoolchildren; increased virtual and physical access to collections; improved training for staff; and better care and interpretation of collections. To meet these ends, the University museums have used their Renaissance award to fund a range of posts and activities including: a registrar’s assistant to help get more loans into other museums; education officers to deliver services to schools, family, community, and adult education establishments; collections conservators; IT officers, to increase virtual access to collections; exhibition technicians, administrative, and organizational staff.

At the Pitt Rivers Museum, funding has focused on the education service, with three staff being supported out of Renaissance funds. The exhibition programme has also received support, with funding for a technician and a photographer, as well as ‘seed-corn’ funding for the Community Music and Dance exhibition. Renaissance funds have also been used to extend Museum opening hours and to meet the travel expenses of invited representatives of source communities to visit the Museum to study collections and teach Museum staff about their cultural heritage. It is hoped that the programme will continue to be funded in the future so that the Museum can build on what has been achieved already to provide an increasingly high-quality service to schools, visitors, and researchers. Continuing Renaissance will also enable the University museums to carry on contributing to the development of regional museums through the programmes funded by Renaissance and run by MLA South East.

Positive Action Trainee
In April 2007 the Museum welcomed its first positive action trainee, Nicola Tettey. The Positive Action Scheme is a long-term programme being run nationwide by the Museums Association and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. It offers part-time training over two years to people from minority ethnic communities who are under-represented in the museum workforce. It is hoped that through this training programme the national museum workforce can come to better represent the diverse audience that museums serve. Nicola spent her first year working in a number of different sections of the Museum, learning how they function and receiving introductory training. Alongside this training programme Nicola is studying for a Masters in Museum Studies through Leicester University.

Museum Shop and other Trading Activities
The Museum Shop reported a 55% increase in income compared with the previous year. Although it still operated at a loss, this was a significant improvement, due largely to the rationalization of staffing levels, increased input from other members of the administration team, and an improvement in the turnover of stock. Unfortunately, due to space limitations the shop is still unable to capitalize on increased visitor numbers. Plans for the closure and subsequent relocation and refurbishment of the shop as part of the larger remodelling project for the Museum’s entrance will be implemented during 2008.

A concentrated effort to sell the vast bulk of the Museum’s publications stock was successfully implemented this year, raising £5,837, whilst the sale of photographic images and reproduction fees continued to provide a steady income (£6,800) that supported a small proportion of the salary for the post of assistant photographer. Unfortunately there is little opportunity to increase the revenue from this activity in the near future, as it places a heavy demand on hard-pressed collections and photographic staff.
Once the new extension was fully functioning, it was possible once again to offer the Museum for hire as a venue for external events from January 2007. This year, external hiring provided an income of £520. Income through the collecting box increased a little from £5,493 in 2005–6 to £6,933. These very welcome donations were used to support the salary of an education officer.

ACQUISITIONS
Donations to the Museum
Suzette Heald (a set of well-documented Gisu circumcision regalia collected by the donor during her fieldwork in the Mbale District of Uganda in the 1960s, along with a series of twenty drawings by Gisu children collected by Amelia Breedtt; 2006.93); the Vice- Chancellor, John Hood (an engraved ceremonial tankard and trowel presented to him at the topping-out ceremony for the Museum’s new extension on 9 February 2006; 2006.78); Douglas Johnson (four albums of photographs from Sudan compiled by district commissioner Percy Coriat in the 1920s; 2007.34); the Estate of the late Bent Juel-Jensen (a mixed collection of ethnographic objects, including a stringed instrument, a model canoe, and a harpoon; 2007.40); Chris Morton (six photographic prints from India collected by Margaret Ross in 2005; 2006.73); Brian Moser and Donald Tayler (9,000 photographs and slides, plus related films, compiled by the donors during the Anglo-Colombian Recording Expedition of 1960–61; 2007.68); Oxford City Council via M. Saunders (a pair of figure-skates and a pair of hockey-skates, from Oxford, for the new display in the lower gallery; 2006.77); Angela Rackham (a Hausa-made mat made of palm leaf, from Nigeria; 2006.92); Patricia Roberts (twenty-nine film negatives from Tibet, compiled in 1916 by Brigadier Michael Rookherst Roberts; 2006.88); Meredith Sassoon (ethnographic and archaeological objects from the personal collection of her late father Hamo Sassoon, mainly from West Africa, especially Nigeria; 2006.80); Mary Spear (five albums of photographs from Australia and Nigeria, dating from 1910 to 1920, compiled by William Henry Freer Hill; 2006.79); John Tyman (1,000 photographs relating to his fieldwork among the Inuit of Canada and Sawos of Torembi, Papua New Guinea, compiled by the donor between 1980 and 1990; 2007.47); Eleanor Waterhouse (a piece of barkcloth from Polynesia, thought to be previously owned by George Marsden Waterhouse; 2006.76).

Donations to the Library
At the end of the year the Balfour Library received a large bequest from the library of Hélène La Rue, which will be reported on in more detail in the next annual report.
In addition the Library was grateful to receive donations from: Ross Bowden, Michael Byrne, the Computing Laboratory Library, Jeremy Coote, Elizabeth Cory-Pearce, A. B. Davidson, Mark Dickerson, the Geography and the Environment Library, Philip Grover, Robert Joost Willink, Jonathan King, Juha Komppa, Kiprop Lagat, Rosemary Lee, Ildiko Lehtinen, Peter Micklethwait, David Mills, Chris Morton, Leah Niederstadt, Veronica Passalacqua, Laura Peers, Alison Petch, Suzy Prior, Peter Rivière, the Sackler Library, Tsan- Huang Tsai, the Tylor Library, Kate White, Liz Yardley, and David Zeitlyn.

STAFF ACTIVITIES (INCLUDING TEACHING AND EXAMINING)
Gali Beiner completed her survey and analysis of archaeological metals in the Museum’s collections and gave a presentation on her research to a forum of representatives from Oxford’s museums. She attended the annual meeting and AGM of the metals section of the Institute of Conservation (ICON). During the course of the year she also visited fellow conservators at the Wellcome Trust, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Royal Armouries in Leeds to discuss methods for use in specific projects. In May, she was advised that she had been awarded a grant by the Anna Plowden Trust to attend the triennial meeting of the ICOM-CC Metal Working Group in Amsterdam in September 2007. In June she organized a workshop on conservation of photographic materials under the tutorship of Susie Clark (ACR). During the year she underwent professional accreditation with ICON.

Imogen Crawford-Mowday began the year by compiling the Museum’s annual report for 2005–6 and its financial report to the AHRC for 2001–6. She coordinated the Museum’s application to the Heritage Lottery Fund and since the announcement of its success in June she has worked on raising the matching funding required for the project. Early in 2007 she acted as project manager for the Community Music and Dance exhibition, working closely with its curator Hélène La Rue and the exhibition team.

Jeremy Coote continued to support a number of Museum-based research projects, as well as directing, with Elizabeth Edwards of the University of the Arts, London, the final stages of the project ‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’, funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Resource Enhancement Scheme; the project was completed on schedule in October 2006. In September he attended ‘Mbili’, the second colloquium of the Eastern Africa Visual Traditions group, held at the British Museum, at which he spoke about the ‘Southern Sudan’ project. In December he attended the public conference ‘Pacific Islands’, also held at the British Museum. In April he was a participant in the conference ‘The History of British Archaeology at Oxford’ at Wolfson College, Oxford. In May he attended the Museum Ethnographers Group annual conference ‘Objects of Trade’ at the National Maritime Museum and delivered a paper on ‘Joseph Banks’s Brass Patus’. He served as a participating scholar for ‘Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and the African Atlantic World’, an exhibition to be curated by Henry Drewal for the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History in 2008. Throughout the year he continued his researches into the history of the Museum’s early collections, as well as contributing regularly to a number of internet discussion lists, particularly those devoted to African arts and Captain Cook. He refereed grant applications for the National Science Foundation (USA) and other funding bodies, as well as reviewing papers for academic journals. He continued to serve on the committee of the Museum Ethnographers Group and as Editor of the Group’s Journal of Museum Ethnography, and as an associate member of the research group ‘Anthropologie, Objets et Esthétiques’ of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He gave talks about the Museum and its work to a group of anthropologists and museum curators from the Solomon Islands and to students from the universities of Manchester and Oxford. He supervised one doctoral student, served as assessor for the confirmation of status for others, and supervised undergraduate dissertations in Archaeology & Anthropology and History of Art. He examined a doctoral thesis for the University of Oxford.

Elizabeth Cory-Pearce continued her research on the Museum’s Maori collections, developing a number of conference papers, forthcoming publications, and prospective funding applications. She responded to enquiries relating to the Museum’s Maori and Pacific collections, and received one national and one international research visitor. In August 2006, she conducted comparative research in museums and communities on Canada’s west coast, funded by a Sir Ernest Cassell Award. In May she gave a paper at the joint American Ethnological Society / Cultural Anthropology Society of Canada conference at the University of Toronto on the Makereti collection, colonial museology, and subaltern scholarship. In June she attended a conference on ‘Comparative Museology’ at the History of Art Department, University of Oxford. In July she delivered a paper, entitled ‘Body Arts, Body Parts and the Limits of Embodiment’, on the Museum’s Robley collection and toi moko (Maori tattooed preserved heads), at the Royal Anthropological Institute’s annual film festival and conference at the University of Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology. She gave lectures and tutorials in the series ‘Introduction to Anthropological Theory’, ‘Social Analysis and Interpretation’, and ‘Cultural Representations, Beliefs and Practices’, and contributed to the core lecture series ‘Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology’. She also gave lectures and tutorials in the Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography core course, ‘Cultural Representations’, and the ‘Research Methods in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography’ series. She contributed to the ‘Research Methods in Visual Anthropology’ sessions, and to the ‘Ethnographic Film’ series for the Visual Anthropology degree. She gave tutorials in anthropology to first- and second-year undergraduate students in the Human Sciences, and lectured on ‘Anthropological Approaches to Art’ in the History of Art department. With Laura Peers, she convened the Museum’s seminar series in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography in Hilary Term, and gave a seminar in the series. She acted as assessor for four confirmations of status, supervised two M.Phil. students, and examined coursework, dissertations, and exam scripts for the undergraduate and graduate degrees. She served as Director of Studies for Archaeology & Anthropology at Magdalen College.

Marina de Alarcón continued to manage key aspects of the Museum’s collections work, including accessioning new acquisitions, dealing with uncatalogued historical material, developing new locations indexes for reserve collections, and administering loans. Much of her time this year was devoted to packing the music collections and preparing for their removal to a new repository. She continued to coordinate the Museum’s redisplay programme, selecting objects and preparing texts in collaboration with colleagues, and to liaise with Thames Valley Police concerning the security of the Museum’s firearms collection. In November 2006 she attended the two-day conference ‘Don’t Panic: Dealing with Hazardous Materials in Museum Collections’, organized by the Care of Collections and Metals sections of the Institute of Conservation, at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. In May 2007 she attended a symposium at Brighton Museum on the material and visual culture of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Also in May she couriered a loan to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna for the exhibition Benin: Kings and Rituals, Court Arts from Nigeria.

Kate Gardner continued to have overall responsibility for the Museum’s front-of-house, but also took on the role of marketing assistant. She assisted Kate White with access matters and Museum events, developed an e-mail database, promoted the Museum through various media, and designed the Museum’s printed materials. She attended training on developing audiences and the use of targeted marketing. She continued her studies for the diploma course of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Haas Ezzet continued to represent the University museums’ IT staff at meetings of the Committee for Museums and Scientific Collections (CMSC) and, in turn, to represent the CMSC at meetings of the University’s Information Communication and Technology Committee (ICTC).

Clare Harris spent the reporting year on research leave, funded by the award of a British Academy / Leverhulme Trust senior research fellowship, during which she worked on a book provisionally entitled ‘The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics and the Representation of Tibet’. She made research trips to Scotland, India, China, and Tibet, gave lectures at the University of Vienna, and presented a paper at the International Association of Tibetan Studies conference in Bonn. Following the completion of the ‘Tibet Visual History’ project in October 2006, she gave several talks about the project’s website.

Dan Hicks joined the staff of the Museum, from the University of Bristol, in the closing days of the reporting year as Lecturer-Curator in the Archaeology of the Modern Period, in succession to Professor Chris Gosden. He is focusing his initial efforts on making preparations to survey the Museum’s archaeological collections and to submit a range of grant applications to fund research on them.

John Hobart continued to work across the four University museums, overseeing the use of Renaissance funding and advising on cross-museum policy and planning. During the reporting year much of his time was spent carrying out advocacy in preparation for the announcement of the government’s comprehensive spending review in the autumn, which will precede a new round of Renaissance funding. He continued to serve on the University museums’ education committee as well as to attend meetings of the Committee for Museums and Scientific Collections, and reported to other committees and panels as required. He also continued to serve on the Thames Valley Museum Group (and its sub-committees for strategy, grants, marketing, and learning), on Oxfordshire Museums Council (and its strategy group, the Oxfordshire Museums Joint Working Group), and the Audience Development South East committee.

Hélène La Rue continued to work on the Museum’s music collections as time allowed, responding to numerous research enquiries, and hosting research visits. She continued to support the gamelan, tabla, and bagpipe sessions held at the Balfour Galleries throughout the year. In addition to extensive teaching commitments in both music and anthropology, she continued to lead, with Chris Gosden, the ESRC-funded ‘The Other Within’ project on the Museum’s English collections, curated with colleagues Community Music and Dance—the first special exhibition in the gallery in the new extension, and worked closely with collections and conservation staff in planning and preparing for the packing and removal of the music and sound collections from Banbury Road to the new repository. She died in service on 13 July 2007 aged fifty-five.

Zena McGreevy continued to manage and supervise research visits to the Museum’s object collections throughout the year. In addition, she managed a team of contract and volunteer staff to sort, correctly identify, and develop a new locations system for the Museum’s collections of stone tools and related material in preparation for their removal to a new repository. She also worked with Adrian Vizor to complete the redisplay of the ‘Miniature Weapons’ and ‘Ball Games’ cases on the Museum’s lower gallery. In November 2006 she couriered the return to the Museum of a long-term loan to the Ulster Museum in Belfast. In March 2007 she attended the Museums Association conference ‘Crowded House: Rethinking Stored Collections’, hosted by the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, and in July she attended a training course on ‘Object Handling and Packing’, also organized by the Museums Association. In June she provided advice to National Museums Scotland about its Australian collections and its proposed new displays.

Andrew McLellan continued to manage the Museum’s ever-expanding education service. He contributed to the collaborative process of developing a joint education service across the University’s museums. In addition to his regular teaching activities, he was much involved in the planning for the Community Music and Dance exhibition and in the development of the Museum’s film-making projects.

Chris Morton continued to hold a dual post as Career Development Fellow and Head of Photograph and Manuscript Collections. He continued to pursue his research on the Museum’s collections as time allowed. As part of his fellowship he organized, with Gilbert Oteyo, a series of community exhibitions of the Museum’s photograph collections in western Kenya (see back cover). He contributed two lectures to the ‘Cultural Representations’ lecture series, supervised an undergraduate dissertation in Archaeology & Anthropology, and co- convened the Museum’s Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography seminar series in Michaelmas and Trinity terms; with Gilbert Oteyo he presented a paper in the latter series on the community exhibitions project. In July he attended a two-day conference, organized by MLA and UNESCO at the Museum in Docklands, on museum collaboration, where he was able to develop links with African museum professionals and to discuss potential future research projects on the Museum’s collections.

Julia Nicholson continued to oversee the Museum’s loans programme, updating and developing the Museum’s loan agreement documents and overseeing arrangements for the eight loan movements during the year. She also continued to serve as chair of the Museum’s Documentation Committee. From October 2006 she was again heavily involved in the Museum’s latest Designation Challenge Fund project ‘Cutting Edge’, overseeing the recruitment and management of the project team and working alongside Kate White to line- manage the project’s Interpretation Officer. She gave a number of talks about the Treasured Textiles exhibition to members of, amongst other organizations, the Lace Guild, the Textile Society Collectors Group, and the Oxford Asian Textiles Group.

Michael O’Hanlon continued to be occupied with the administrative work entailed in running the Museum. He oversaw submission of the successful bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund, continued to serve on the strategy group of the University’s Academic Services and University Collections Group, the committee of the University Museums Group UK, the management team of the South East Hub, and as vice-president of the Paul Raymaekers Foundation. He gave evidence to the parliamentary select committee on museum funding. He continued, although with reduced involvement, to contribute to teaching in Archaeology & Anthropology.

Laura Peers served on the Board of Governors of the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures, founded by Professor Ruth Phillips, Carleton University, to make Great Lakes artefacts and knowledge about them accessible to scholars, and to form new research partnerships between Native communities and museums. She also collaborated on the related database project. She continued to serve on the Department of Media, Culture and Sport’s Human Remains Advisory Group and advised the National Maritime Museum on its ‘Atlantic World’ gallery redevelopment. She presented a number of conference papers, including: ‘On the Treatment of Dead Enemies...’, at the 2007 Garrod Seminar, Cambridge University Department of Archaeology; and ‘Finding Long-Lost Relatives (Making the Absent Present): On the Potentialities of Ethnographic Collections in Ireland’ and ‘The Globe in a Glass Case: Ethnographic Collections in Ireland’, both at the Anthropological Association of Ireland conference held in Belfast, 11–12 May 2007. She obtained a grant of $2,000 from the Government of Canada for research into the nineteenth- century artist Peter Rindisbacher. She was also awarded a grant of £7,500 from the British Academy for the pilot project ‘Digital Access for First Nations Heritage in UK Museums’. She convened the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, with Chris Morton, and continued to tutor, lecture, and examine undergraduates in Archaeology & Anthropology as well as graduate students in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and in Visual Anthropology.

Alison Petch continued work as a researcher on the ESRC-funded project ‘The Other Within: The Anthropology of Englishness’ and continued to serve as the Museum’s Registrar. She also assisted with packing part of the English stone tool collections, which provided a good opportunity to review these collections more closely for the ‘Other Within’ project. As in previous years, she provided training for new members of staff and volunteers on the collections management databases. She also contributed to the series of introductory talks for the graduate students in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. She was elected to serve as a member of the committee of the Museum Ethnographers Group. She visited a number of museums and collections during the year: for example, in November 2006 she studied the Spencer and Gillen collections at Manchester Museum, while in June 2007 she provided advice to National Museums Scotland about its Australian collections and its proposed new displays. In April 2007, with Chris Wingfield, she gave a seminar in the Museum’s lunchtime series on the ‘Other Within’ project. In May she presented a paper at the Museum Ethnographers Group annual conference at the National Maritime Museum entitled ‘Commercial Gain? The Relationships between Ethnographic Collectors, Dealers and Auction Houses: A Case Study’.

Heather Richardson assisted with conservation and artefact-handling training for Museum staff and students and supervised conservation interns. Following external assessment in October 2006, she became an accredited conservator (ACR) through the Institute of Conservation in March 2007. In November 2006 she attended the two-day conference ‘Don’t Panic: Dealing with Hazardous Materials in Museum Collections’, organized by the Care of Collections and Metals sections of the Institute of Conservation, at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. In April 2007 she attended a one-day seminar ‘Responding to Climate Change’. In June she attended a three-day course on the ‘Preservation and Conservation of Photographs’ hosted by the Museum. In November 2006 and May 2007 she attended two training days as part of the Emergency Response Unit for the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire region. In February 2007 she was invited to join the Board of Trustees of the Leather Conservation Centre.

Mandy Sadan took up a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College in October 2006. In January 2007 she commenced a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Museum. Her project, for which she has been awarded a grant of £211,116, is entitled ‘“Economies of Ethnicity”: Material, Visual and Oral Cultures and the Formation of Ethnic Identities in the Burmese Colonial and Postcolonial State, 1824–2004’. During the year she co-founded the Asian Borderlands Research Network. She lectured to anthropology students at the University of Aarhus, Denmark on ethnicity in Burma and co-organized a seminar presentation by Professor Robert Anderson of Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, on transitions from ‘Hot War to Cold War’ in the Burma/China/India region for the Centre of South East Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Towards the end of the year, the major focus of her work was on preparing for an extended period of fieldwork in Thailand, Burma, China, and India from October 2007. During this work she will be making research use of some of the Museum’s photograph collections, including in particular those of G. E. Harvey.

Julie Scott-Jackson continued as Director of the PADMAC Unit and supervised the Unit’s fieldwork and research programmes. She directed extensive programmes of fieldwork, including excavations, investigations, and geophysical surveys in Sharjah (UAE), Abu Dhabi (UAE), and Dummer Clump (Hampshire, UK). Alongside post-excavation analyses, she worked on a paper that addresses the geo-archaeology of the Palaeolithic site of Rookery Farm, Lower Kingswood, Surrey. She also provided further extracts from her ‘Gazetteer of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Artefacts Found in Relation to Deposits Mapped as Clay- with-flints on Chalk Downlands of Southern England’ to support the Solent Thames Archaeological Research Framework. She continued as Palaeolithic geo-archaeological advisor and committee member of the Avebury Archaeological and Historical Research Group for the Avebury World Heritage Site (English Heritage) and as advisor to various local archaeological groups.

Birgitte Speake organized and supervised sessions on conservation and artefact handling for Museum staff, conservation interns, and graduate students in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. She also oversaw the conservation section’s move into its new studio in the new extension.

Antigone Thompson attended a training session organized by the Association of Cultural Enterprises (Museum Publishing Forum) at the British Library. She also completed thirteen Oxford University accountancy training courses.

Kate White continued to serve as a member, for a fourth term, of the Museums Association Ethics Committee. As a member of the Museums Marketing Group (part of the Arts Marketing Association), she helped to organize the Arts Marketing Association Museums and Galleries annual seminar ‘Because We’re Worth It’ at Tate Modern. She continued to build up the Museum’s links with the city of Oxford. She was invited to the city’s cultural forum and participated in the cultural inspection workshops, part of the self-assessment of cultural services by the city council. She also attended, as a stakeholder, the arts and cultural development workshop run by Oxford Inspires, helping to shape the city’s cultural and community strategies. During the year she also agreed to sit on the EU-funded European Arts Management Programme Advisory Group led by Oxford Brookes University. Her continued professional development included attending: ‘Getting Engaged, Museums Libraries and Archives Working with their Communities’, an MLA seminar held at Pallant House; ‘Community Engagement’, training organized by MLA South East; an ‘Interpretation Consultation Day’, at the Ashmolean Museum; ‘New Audiences, Different Research? Moving into 21st Century Visitor Studies’, organized by the Visitor Studies group at the British Library; and ‘Looking Back, Looking Forward’, organized by the Museums and Galleries Disability Association. In early 2007 her job was retitled Access and Public Relations Manager.

Cathy Wright continued to manage the construction of the new extension, the refurbishment of the ICL (Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory) space as a repository for the Museum’s music and stone tool collections, the refurbishment of other ICL space for joint use with the OUMNH, and the preparation of plans for the HLF-funded remodelling of the Museum’s entrance. In addition, she continued to manage the administration of the Museum, including its finances, health and safety compliance, and personnel processes. As part of that management, she attended a number of divisional and university-wide meetings as a representative of the Museum. She also undertook additional training on new aspects of the University’s finance system. As part of her management of the Museum’s trading activities, she introduced a new policy covering the sale and reproduction of images to be implemented in the new financial year. In collaboration with Kate White she began work on the Museum’s new ‘way-finding’ project to provide improved signage and orientation for visitors to the Museum. She assisted teaching and research staff in the preparation of grant applications to research councils and the Director and other staff with grant applications to DCMS/Wolfson and HLF. With the assistance of other Museum staff, and in collaboration with the Oxfordshire Education Business Partnership scheme, she organized work-experience placements for students from local Oxford schools and colleges. She produced and maintained the Museum’s risk register and, as required by legislation, a number of health and safety risk assessments, including a detailed fire risk assessment for the ‘In a Different Light’ event. She continued to be an Associate Member of the Association for Project Managers.

Chris Wingfield returned to the staff of the Museum in September 2006, joining the ESRC- funded project ‘The Other Within: An Anthropology of Englishness’ as a project researcher. His research has focused on the early publications of the Folk-Lore Society as well as the Museum’s collections from Somerset and their connections with E. B. Tylor. He assisted in the teaching of an optional paper for undergraduates and postgraduates on ‘Material Culture and the Anthropology of Things’, run by Chris Gosden in Hilary Term. During the year he presented a number of papers: at the conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Bristol, at the ‘Beyond Text’ conference in Manchester, at two meetings of the Oxford University Museums Collections History Group, as well as (jointly with Alison Petch) at the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series. He was also selected for the ‘NaMu’ workshop on National Museum Narratives at the University of Leicester (funded by a European Union ‘Marie Curie’ grant), where he presented a poster relating to his research. He also continued to serve as treasurer of the Museum Ethnographers Group and attended its annual conference at the National Maritime Museum, as well as guest editing the conference section of the 2007 issue of the group’s annual Journal of Museum Ethnography.

STAFF PUBLICATIONS Those publications relating directly to the Museum’s collections are indicated by [*].
Helen Adams, ‘The Cutting Edge’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), p. 6. [*]
Gali Beiner, ‘Indian Mica Paintings’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), p. 7. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Flints, Flakes, Adzes, Axes, and Cores’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 59 (July 2007), p. 9. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Lienhardt’s Photographs’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 57 (November 2006), p. 10. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Grave Figure. South-Western Sudan’, in Arts of Africa and Oceania: Highlights from the Musée Barbier-Mueller, edited by Laurence Mattet, Geneva: Musée Barbier-Mueller (2007), pp. 249, 391.
Jeremy Coote, Review of Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, a new gallery at the British Museum, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 19 (March 2007), pp. 135–41.
Jeremy Coote, Review of Mana: Ornament and Adornment from the Pacific, an exhibition at the Cuming Museum, Southwark, London, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 19 (March 2007), pp. 156–60.
Jeremy Coote, Review of James Cook: Gifts and Treasures from the South Seas—The Cook/Forster Collection Göttingen / Gaben und Schätze aus der Südsee—Die Göttinger Sammlung Cook/Forster, edited by Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin and Gundolf Krüger (Munich and New York, 1988), Pacific Arts, n.s., Vol. 6 (2007), pp. 41–6.
Elizabeth Cory-Pearce, ‘Locating Authorship: Creativity and Borrowing in the Writing of Ethnography and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge’, in Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (Association of Social Anthropologists Monographs, no. 44), edited by Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold, Oxford: Berg (2007), pp. 127–49. [*]
Elizabeth Cory-Pearce, Review of Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self, by Greg Dening (Philadelphia, 2004), Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 26, no. 4 (2006), pp. 490–91.
Elizabeth Cory-Pearce, Review of Pasifika Styles, an exhibition at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 19 (March 2007), pp. 160–65.
Eric Edwards, ‘Mermaids, Sirens or Goddesses?’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 57 (November 2006), p. 9. [*]
Eric Edwards, ‘Ancient Egyptian Dwarf God: Ptah Sokar’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), p. 4. [*]
Clare Harris, ‘British and German Photography in Tibet in the 1930s: The Diplomatic, the Ethnographic, and Other Modes’, in Tibet in 1938–1939: Photographs from the Ernst Schäfer Expedition to Tibet, edited by Isrun Engelhardt, Chicago: Serindia Publications (2007), pp. 73–90.
Clare Harris, ‘The Buddha Goes Global: Some Thoughts towards a Transnational Art History’, in Art History, Vol. 29, no. 4 (2006), pp. 698–720 (also in Location, edited by Deborah Cherry and Fintan Cullen, Oxford: Blackwell (2007), pp. 166–88).
Clare Harris, ‘From Lhasa to London: Gonkar Gyatso’, in Art Asia Pacific, no. 50 (Fall 2006), pp. 110–13.
Clare Harris, ‘Encounters in Intercultural Spaces: Gonkar Gyatso and Peter Towse’, in Oh! What a Beautiful Day: Peter Towse and Gonkar Gyatso’s Shared Visions, London, Rossi & Rossi (2006), pp. 10–13.
Dan Hicks, ‘The Garden of the World’: An Historical Archaeology of Sugar Landscapes in the Eastern Caribbean (Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology, 3; BAR International Series, 1632), Oxford: Archaeopress (2007).
Dan Hicks (edited, with Mary C. Beaudry), The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006).
Dan Hicks (with Mary C. Beaudry), ‘Introduction: The Place of Historical Archaeology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006), pp. 1–9.
Dan Hicks (with Audrey Horning), ‘Historical Archaeology and Buildings’, in The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006), pp. 273–92.
Dan Hicks, ‘From Material Culture to Material Life’, in Journal of Iberian Archaeology, nos 9/10 (2007), pp. 245–55.
Dan Hicks, Review of The Politics of Archaeology and Identity in a Global Context, by Susan Kane (Boston, Mass., 2003), in Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 32, no. 3 (2006), pp. 665–7.
Dan Hicks (with Olivia Hicks), ‘Urban Ecologies of Hope’, in ‘Situations Papers: Responses to Heather and Ivan Morison’s I lost her near Fantasy Island. Life has not been the same (2006)’, part of the Situations website of the University of the West of England (2006), at <http://www.situations.org.uk/_uploaded_pdfs/SituationsPaper-HeatherandIvanMorison.pdf>
Hélène La Rue, ‘“Hello, Here’s Music, How Did That Get Here?” Presenting Music to the Unsuspecting Museum’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 19 (March 2007), pp. 43–56. [*]
Zena McGreevy, ‘Update on the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Museum Ethnographers Group Newsletter (January 2007), [pp. 3–5]. [*]
Zena McGreevy (with Adrian Vizor), ‘Exciting Changes!’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 59 (July 2007), p. 9. [*]
Chris Morton, ‘Remembering the House: Memory and Materiality in Northern Botswana’, Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 12, no. 2 (July 2007), pp. 157–79.
Julia Nicholson, ‘Treasured Textiles: Cloth and Clothing Around the World’, Journal for Weavers, Spinners and Dyers, no. 219 (September 2006), pp. 20–23. [*]
Laura Peers, Playing Ourselves: Interpreting Native Histories at Historical Reconstructions (American Association for State and Local History Book Series), Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, Rowan & Littlefield Publishers (2007).
Laura Peers, ‘On Missionaries, Artists, Bears, and “Grandfathers”: Peter Rindisbacher’s Paintings, John White’s Collection, and the Red River Ojibwa’, in Three Centuries of Woodlands Indian Art: A Collection of Essays (European Review of Native American Studies Monographs, 3), edited by J. C. H. King and Christian Feest, Altenstadt: ZKF Publishers (2007), pp. 103–12.
Alison Petch, ‘Chance and Certitude: Pitt Rivers and his First Collection’, Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. 18, no. 2 (2006), pp. 257–66.
Alison Petch, ‘Notes and Queries and the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Museum Anthropology, Vol. 30, no. 1 (Spring 2007), pp. 21–39. [*]
Alison Petch, Review of Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums, by Ken Arnold (Aldershot, 2006), Museum Anthropology, Vol. 30, no.1 (Spring 2007), pp. 64–6.
Alison Petch, ‘Collections Research and the Web: Reflections on a Successful (Half-)Day’s Work at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, in Museum Anthropology Weblog (2007), online at <http://museumanthropology.blogspot.com/>. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Notes on the Opening of the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 19 (March 2007), pp. 101–12. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Paddy Cahill of Oenpelli’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 57 (November 2006), p. 8. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Isolation and Anthropology: The Correspondence of Patrick Byrne’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), p. 8. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Upholding the Law—Central Australian Style’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 59 (July 2007), p. 8. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘One Last Time with Feeling: The Final Move of the Pitt Rivers Museum Conservation Department’, Icon News [The Institute of Conservation], no. 9 (March 2007), p. 3. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘Raven Travelling’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 57 (November 2006), p. 9. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘Not So Friendly Visitors’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 57 (November 2006), p. 11. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘One Last Time with Feeling’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), p. 2. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘Restoration of the Noh Masks’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 59 (July 2007), p. 6. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘Conservation of the Noh Masks’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 59 (July 2007), p. 6 [*]
Mandy Sadan (co-editor with François Robinne), Social Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering Political Systems of Highland Burma by E. R. Leach (Handbook of Oriental Studies / Handbuch der Orientalisk, Section 3, Southeast Asia, Vol. 18), Leiden: Brill (2007).
Mandy Sadan, ‘Translating Gumlau: History, the “Kachin” and Edmund Leach’, in Social Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering Political Systems of Highland Burma by E. R. Leach (Handbook of Oriental Studies / Handbuch der Orientalisk, Section 3, Southeast Asia, Vol. 18), edited by François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, Leiden: Brill (2007), pp. 67–87.
Mandy Sadan (with François Robinne), ‘Preface’, in Social Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering Political Systems of Highland Burma by E. R. Leach (Handbook of Oriental Studies / Handbuch der Orientalisk, Section 3, Southeast Asia, Vol. 18), edited by François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, Leiden: Brill (2007), pp. ix–xv.
Mandy Sadan (with François Robinne), ‘Postscript: Reconsidering the Dynamics of Ethnicity through Foucault’s Concept of “Spaces of Dispersion”’, in Social Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering Political Systems of Highland Burma by E. R. Leach (Handbook of Oriental Studies / Handbuch der Orientalisk, Section 3, Southeast Asia, Vol. 18), edited by François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, Leiden: Brill (2007), pp. 299–308.
Mandy Sadan, ‘Constructing and Contesting the Category “Kachin” in the Colonial and Post- Colonial Burmese State’, in Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Burma (NIAS Studies in Asian Topics, 39), edited by Mikael Gravers, Copenhagen: NIAS Press (2007), pp. 34–76.
Adrian Vizor (with Zena McGreevy), ‘Exciting Changes!’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 59 (July 2007), p. 9. [*]
Christopher Wingfield, ‘“Feeling the Vibes: Dealing with Intangible Heritage”—An Introduction’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 19 (March 2007), pp. 9–20.
Cathy Wright, ‘Almost There’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), p. 1.
Cathy Wright, ‘Lurking in the Garden’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), pp. 6–7. [*]

MUSEUM SEMINARS IN MATERIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND MUSEUM ETHNOGRAPHY
13 October 2006: Led by Michael O’Hanlon (PRM) ‘Introduction to Current Projects at the Pitt Rivers Museum’.
20 October 2006: Thomas Shaw (ex Fort Snelling Historic Site, Minnesota), ‘Dakota Sioux Women’s Dress and its Cross-Cultural Development throughout the Nineteenth Century’.
3 November 2006: Marius Kwint (History of Art and Centre for Visual Studies, University of Oxford), ‘Desiring Structures: Exhibiting the Dendritic Form’.
10 November 2006: Elizabeth Edwards (University of the Arts London), ‘Photography as Public History in Britain, 1885–1918’.
17 November 2006: Sam Alberti (Manchester Museum, University of Manchester), ‘Constructing Disciplines in the University Museum’.
24 November 2006: Amy Staniforth (University of Bristol and British Empire and Commonwealth Museum), ‘Returning Zinj: Popular and Museological Consumption of the Objects and Landscapes of Human Origins’.
1 December 2006: Elizabeth Hallam (University of Aberdeen), ‘Material Cultures of Anatomy: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives’.
19 January 2007: Elizabeth Cory-Pearce (PRM), ‘Anthropology Begins at Home? Makereti’s Ethnographic Manuscripts at the Pitt Rivers Museum’.
26 January 2007: Andrew McLellan (PRM), ‘“Can We Film the Shrunken Heads?”: Interpretation, Sound, and Filmscapes in the Pitt Rivers Museum’.
2 February 2007: Laura Peers (PRM), ‘Heritage and Healing: Exploring the Virtual Repatriation of First Nations Material Culture’.
9 February 2007: Vibha Joshi (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford), ‘Naga Textiles as Diasporic Objects in the Field and in Museums during and since Colonialism’.
16 February 2007: Claire Warrior (National Maritime Museum), ‘Displaying Atlantic Histories at the National Maritime Museum: The Development of a New Permanent Gallery’.
23 February 2007: Nicholas Thomas (Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology), Sean Mallon (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa), and Peter Brunt (University of Victoria, Wellington, New Zealand), ‘Rethinking Indigenous Art History in the Pacific’.
2 March 2007: Roger Sansi-Roca (Goldsmiths College, University of London), ‘Indexes and Symbols: Candomble Altars and their Museographic Representation’.
9 March 2007: Bruce Bernstein (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC), ‘Un-Tie the Moorings, Re-Inventing and Re-Vitalizing the Museum Object’.
27 April 2007: Chris Wingfield (PRM) and Alison Petch (PRM), ‘The Other Within: An Anthropology of Englishness’.
4 May 2007: Frank Korom (Boston University), ‘Bengali Scroll Painters and the Challenge of Modernity’.
11 May 2007: Dean Sully (University College London), ‘Decolonizing Conservation, Decolonizing Hinemihi, the Maori Meeting House at Clandon Park, UK’.
18 May 2007: Gilbert Oteyo (Oxford) and Chris Morton (PRM), ‘Exhibiting Photographic Histories in Western Kenya’.

JAMES A. SW AN FUND
The Pitt Rivers Museum sponsors archaeological and anthropological fieldwork within areas of interest to the late James A. Swan, including the Later Stone Age prehistory of southern Africa and the study of the contemporary Bushman and Pygmy peoples of Africa. Research on museum collections relating to these fields may also be supported, as may the costs of publishing the results of work that has been aided by the Fund. The Fund was not open for applications during the reporting year.

FRIENDS OF THE PITT RIVERS MUSEUM REPORT BY MARGARET DYKE (SECRETARY)
After the exuberance of the past two reports this one starts rather quietly. Despite the limitations of the Narnia-style ‘wardrobe’ link between the old and the new, on 9 December the Friends were able to use the new entrance in Robinson Close to gain access, via the food and drinks tables, to the familiar, dimly lit Museum. This year the emphasis was on family members, with an earlier starting time and entertainment provided by magician Uncle Wiggy, who enthralled his young, and not so young, audience with his virtuosity. The highlight of the Christmas raffle was the Giant Lizard Lamp of which Ander Parker is now the proud owner. The evening was a happy, well-attended occasion—and someone was heard to say, ‘the Friends do a good party’.

Barbara Isaac, the Programme and Events Secretary, organized a varied selection of talks throughout the year. This began in September with a gallery talk by Julia Nicholson who spoke to a group of Friends about the exhibition Treasured Textiles: Cloth and Clothing Around the World. The first Wednesday talk was then, appropriately, ‘Textiles, Dress and Identity in Kachchh District, Gujarat, India’, by Eiluned Edwards of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Later in the month, Dr Diana Martin, of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, talked on ‘Water Buckets, Baby Baths and Coffee Tables’. In November, Dr Paul Oliver, from Oxford Brookes University, gave the first Friends talk in the new lecture theatre on ‘Vernacular Architecture in the New Century’. The New Year began with Dr Stephanie Dalley, of the Oriental Institute, on the subject of ‘The Hanging Gardens of Babylon’. Valentine’s Day was celebrated with a fascinating talk on ‘Exploring Meaning in West Polynesian Weapons’, given by Andrew Mills of the Museum. The final talk was in March: ‘Acadie: The Archaeology of a Lost Colony in North-Eastern North America’, by John Fowler from the Institute of Archaeology. In July, Barbara persuaded her daughter Dr Gwyneira Isaac from Arizona State University, to give Friends an extra talk entitled ‘Tribal Museums and Native American Knowledges’. Barbara is to be thanked for her commitment and enthusiasm in arranging such a fascinating programme for the year.

On 23 May, the Beatrice Blackwood lecture was delivered by Marina Warner, writer, critic, and professor of literature at the University of Essex. In ‘Dreams of Empire, Magic Powers, Spirit Travel, Soul Theft’ she kept her audience enthralled with her expert knowledge of the supernatural worldwide and through the centuries. Our thanks go to Professor Mayer for hosting this event at the Said Business School, and to Rosemary Lee for her impeccable organization.

As usual, throughout the year a faithful band of Friends continued to help at the ‘Family Friendly’ and ‘Pitt Stop’ sessions, and also to give support to the education service guiding school groups around the Museum. On 19 May, numerous Friends were also involved in helping with the main event of Museums and Galleries Month, when the Pitt Rivers joined with the Natural History Museum to celebrate ‘In a Different Light’.

At the AGM on 20 June four new members were elected to Council: Terry Bremble, Martin Burgess, Rosemary King, and Colin Langton. Sally Odd agreed to continue as Treasurer. It was noted that the final payment of £7,500 pledged for the ‘Partnership with Palin Appeal’ had been given to the Museum and that £1,000 had been awarded to Gilbert Oteyo to enable him to continue his research in Kenya. The Membership Secretary Anna Kingston-Jones retired earlier in the year and was replaced by Rosemary King, who will be joined in January by Barbara Isaac. We are very grateful to Cathy Wright, who valiantly kept the paperwork under control until a new Secretary was elected. Richard Briant, the Chairman, thanked members of Council for their commitment and hard work during the year, before the evening concluded with a passionate talk from Dr Laura Peers called ‘Seeking Knowledge, Seeking Life: PRM Collections and First Nations Communities in Canada’.

By the end, a year that had started so quietly was gaining momentum. The Director was able to tell us that the bid for a Heritage Lottery Fund grant to remodel and improve the Museum’s entrance had been successful, and that subject to the usual conditions work should start in 2008. This was closely followed by more good news, as we learned that the Friends’ Newsletter was runner-up in the British Association of Friends of Museums newsletter competition (under 500 members category) for 2007. It is gratifying that our Newsletter finds an appreciative audience beyond the membership for the three issues produced each year.