University of Oxford
The Pitt Rivers Museum Annual Report
1 August 2008 to 31 July 2009

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

Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum as of 1 August 2008
The Vice Chancellor (Dr John Hood) The Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education, Academic Services and University Collections) (Professor Ewan McKendrick) The Proctors (Professor Donald Fraser, Dr David Harris) The Assessor (Dr John Nightingale) Dr John Landers (Chairman) Ms Janet Vitmayer (Director, Horniman Museum) Ms Caroline Dudley OBE (Head of South East Hub & Hampshire Museums Service) Dr Claude Ardouin (British Museum) Professor Roger Goodman (Head of Social Sciences Division) Professor Jim Kennedy (Director, University Museum of Natural History) Dr Christopher Brown (Director, Ashmolean Museum) Professor John Mack (University of East Anglia) Professor Chris Gosden (School of Archaeology) Professor Harvey Whitehouse (ISCA) Dr Jim Bennett (Director, Museum of the History of Science)
Dr Michael O’Hanlon (Museum Director, Secretary to the Visitors) Dr Clare Harris (Pitt Rivers Museum)

The Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum, having received from the Director the following report for the period 1 August 2008 to 31 July 2009, presented it as their report to Congregation.

DIRECTOR’S INTRODUCTION
On 30 April 2009, the Museum celebrated the completion of its entrance redevelopment project and, the following day, reopened to the public after the nine months of gallery closure it took to complete the work. The £1,600,000 project involved: demolishing the obstructing 1960s special exhibition gallery at the foot of the entrance stairs; constructing a new entrance platform, from which a wide stairway leads down into the court; installing beneath this platform much-needed environmental control machinery; installing around it a run of new display-cases, and a lift for those with mobility difficulties; establishing on it an information point and an elegant new shop; creating the Clore Learning Balcony on the lower gallery, which in itself entailed restoring to their original court locations the large cases containing displays of pottery, as well as the installation of major new displays; suspending (from the roof) Salama—the double-outrigger canoe from Zanzibar—and (off the lower gallery) an enormous dugout canoe from Peru; and, finally, installing grills in the floors of the lower and upper galleries to encourage the circulation of conditioned air throughout the Museum.

Press and public reaction following the reopening—kindly presided over by Friends’ patron Sir David Attenborough and the Vice-Chancellor John Hood, and attended by many other eminent supporters—was extremely enthusiastic. There were thoughtful extended reviews in three enlightened national newspapers, while some of the public responses as recorded in the Museum’s visitors’ book were immensely gratifying (for a selection, see below). Since we know from visitors that they do not wish the Museum to be excessively tampered with, perhaps the most rewarding comment came from the University’s own Public Orator, who observed at Encaenia: ‘The Pitt Rivers Museum has reopened, having achieved the conjuring trick of being brilliantly transformed and staying just the same.’ In the first three months after the reopening the Museum welcomed 115,509 visitors, almost double the figure for the corresponding months in the previous year, and around the same number of visitors that the Museum used to attract in an entire year little more than a decade or so ago.

At the time of writing of the previous report, we were still £100,000 short of the sum needed to complete the project, and to partner the £1,000,000 Heritage Lottery Fund award. It is a tribute to the momentum given to the project by generous earlier donors, and to the support of the University’s development office, that the target was reached. Here I would especially like to acknowledge the support of The Monument Trust, Penelope Lively, The Golsoncott Foundation, The Bartlett Taylor Charitable Trust, The Charlotte Bonham-Carter Charitable Trust, The Idlewild Trust, Renaissance South East, as well as the University’s van Houten fund, which stepped in with a further additional contribution when it was discovered mid-project that the lights in the Museum’s upper and lower galleries were failing.

Undertaking a major project in a museum like the Pitt Rivers, which consists of a single galleried space with 100,000 artefacts on display that have to be either moved or protected— or both, is an extraordinarily intricate process. A ‘move team’ of five new members of staff was recruited for a year to log, pack, move, store, and then redisplay the 5,000 artefacts that it was necessary to shift. The energy, speed, and collective intent with which the team went about its business soon resulted in their being named the ‘meerkats’. (I had looked forward to assuring David Attenborough at the reopening that the Museum was infested with meerkats, and asking whether he would like to meet them, but the opportunity never arose.) Meerkats aside, the work of every section of the Museum was profoundly affected by the project. Once the galleries had closed, many of the Museum’s front of house team were redeployed to work in the Museum’s photograph and manuscript collections—a role they adopted with great enthusiasm. The Museum’s conservation staff and others had to monitor and keep within acceptable limits shock and vibration caused by the works, and repeatedly to clean the galleries to prevent build up of the inevitable dust. Artefacts had to be selected for the newdisplays, and the displays themselves researched, designed, and installed. The Museum’s website was overhauled to reflect the changes and new programmes, and in addition live database access to the collections at the new information point and wireless access in the galleries was introduced successfully. The Museum’s education team focused on preparing fresh materials and programmes for use once the galleries reopened. Though the special exhibition gallery remained closed, a programme of excellent photographic exhibitions was prepared for the long gallery. Additional senior members of the vital front of house team had to be recruited and trained, the press kept informed, a media campaign launched, and the whole enterprise coordinated by the Museum’s administration.

Over the past ten years we have: reroofed the Museum; relocated the Museum’s conservation laboratory and textile research store a number of times to make way for other University developments; constructed the new extension, which opened in 2007; and now restored and enhanced the Museum’s entrance. I would like to add my own warmest congratulations to those of the chairman of the Museum’s Visitors to each and every member of the Museum’s devoted staff who have together brought to a successful conclusion what has been a decade of redevelopment.

While energies were naturally concentrated on the redevelopments in the galleries, the Museum’s new extension—which did not close—was the focus of much other vital activity. For an institution like the Pitt Rivers, which relies on a portfolio of mainly insecure sources of support, nothing is more vital than funding. Museum staff maintained their very high level of applications for research awards, with an astonishingly high level of success. Laura Peers’s application (with Alison K. Brown of the University of Aberdeen) to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for £183,000 for ‘Our Ancestors Have Come to Visit: Kaahsinooniksi Aotoksisaawooya—Reconnections with Historic Blackfoot Shirts’ was successful, so that these important ceremonial garments are due to travel to two venues in Canada in 2010. Dan Hicks and Jeremy Coote were similarly successful in their application to the John Fell OUP Research Fund for £116,000 for their collections-based project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum: Defining Research Priorities, 2010–2020’. Hicks was also successful with an application (jointly with Caitlin DeSilvey of Exeter University and the English Heritage Science Advisory Group) to the AHRC/EPSRC’s ‘Science and Heritage’ programme for a grant of £30,000 for ‘Ecologies of Modern Heritage: Studying the Cultural & Material Environments of Recent Historical Change’, while Coote was successful with an application (jointly with Chris Gosden, late of the Museum, now of the Institute of Archaeology) to The Leverhulme Trust for £248,335 for ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector’. The Museum was also successful in its bid for five years of European Union funding for ‘Ethnography Museums and World Cultures’, a collaborative project with the other principal European ethnographic museums that will culminate in 2013 with an international conference at the Museum on the future of ethnographic museums. The major ESRC-supported project ‘The Other Within’, which focused on the Museum’s English collections and concluded during the reporting year, was classified as ‘outstanding’ by the official evaluators.

Success with research funding applications is all the more important as the future of two of the central financial planks supporting the Museum—the competitive ‘core funding’ stream administered by the AHRC and Renaissance funding—are secure only in the relatively short term. We learned over the course of the year that the Higher Education Funding Council for England is to reabsorb ‘core funding’ into its own budget and will extend our current award (2006–9) for a single year only, after which the programme (which also supports the other main university museums in the country) will be reviewed under as yet unknown criteria. We were very relieved that resubmission of the South East region’s Renaissance two-year business plan was successful, so that funding for a number of vital posts at the Museum is secure until March 2011. But given that ‘core funding’ and Renaissance amount to around 50% of the Museum’s budget, having so high a percentage of the Museum’s funding at risk is worrying, however successful we may currently be at generating external research funding.
The new extension is the focus of much else besides serving as a nursery for funding applications. Here I will note just one of them, principally because of its scale. This is the energy devoted to international loans, which require the coordinated efforts of the Museum’s different sections. A major loan of some twenty immensely important Polynesian pieces was retrieved from Musée du quai Branly in Paris, a further substantial loan of photographs and related material went to Yale University’s Center for British Art in New Haven—and subsequently to the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, while preparations were also begun for an even larger loan (of some sixty pieces, again from Polynesia) to Bonn, Vienna, and Berne for an exhibition that will set the agenda for studies of the material associated with the famous voyages of Captain Cook for a generation or more. All these exhibitions are accompanied by magnificent catalogues, in which the objects loaned by the Museum are described, discussed, and illustrated, thus fully justifying the energy the Museum devotes to ensuring where possible that its collections are exhibited and published in such prominent places. I will also note here one further publication produced during the year for a collection that was not loaned. This is the lavish catalogue of the Museum’s Cypriot collection—prepared by Vassos Karageorghis in collaboration with Jeremy Coote and Marina de Alarcón of the Museum, and others—whose publication was generously supported by the Leventis Foundation.

We were sorry to say goodbye to a number of colleagues during the year, including Mandy Sadan, who relinquished her British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to take up the post of Lecturer in History at the School of Oriental and African Studies. But as with others who notionally left, we know they can never really escape the powerful gravitational pull of the Pitt Rivers, and we look forward to continuing visits and collaborations.

ACCESS
For the access team, the entire year was dominated by the relaunch of the Museum, with its new entrance, and coping with the repercussions of its success. In the six-month lead-up to the reopening members of the team made regular contributions to: the design for the new platform and education areas, the completion of the internal and external signage scheme (to the satisfaction of both the Pitt Rivers and our colleagues in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History); the recruitment and training of new gallery staff; the production of an updated range of printed materials; the implementation of a national press campaign and marketing strategy; and the organization of the opening four-day events programme. Three weeks before the reopening it became clear, to our relief, both that we would meet our deadline and that the completed changes would be aesthetically satisfactory and make a major contribution to enhancing the Museum’s accessibility.

The opening weekend was a huge success, with a record 8,787 visitors welcomed over four days. The doors opened on Friday 1 May at 10.00 a.m. to a queue of dedicated visitors determined to be the first to see the changes, while two local Morris sides performed on the lawn outside. A programme of talks and activities was offered over the weekend, all the events being extremely well attended. Opening hours on the first day were extended to 7.00 p.m. with the provision of music in the evening: Noel Lobley and Doug Langley playing Zimbabwean mbira music and Isabelle Carré playing Chinese flute music. The Museum’s regular Saturday ‘Pitt Stop’ was devoted to the topic of body arts, while on the Sunday Magnus Sigurdssen provided a hands-on introduction to metalworking and members of the Museum’s Friends guided groups of visitors around a selection of their ‘favourite things’. On the Monday the suitability of the new Clore Learning Balcony to serve as a location for illustrated talks was tested when Clare Harris gave an introduction to the Museum, a talk she had to repeat immediately due to popular demand. Despite the increased numbers of visitors (3,037 on the Monday alone) the atmosphere in the galleries remained fresh and cool, suggesting that the new environmental-control system would cope well with the increased numbers of visitors. Much credit is due to the new team of gallery staff for the professional way in which from day one they managed the unprecedented number of visitors.

Publicity and Public Relations
The PR campaign for the reopening was handled entirely in-house. It proved to be extremely effective, with excellent national and local press coverage. The redeveloped branding ‘Showing Off a New View’ caught the eye of a wide range of visitors and was adapted for use on shop merchandizing and new education materials. The branding has been sustained through a poster, on sale in the shop, and a new edition of the introductory guidebook, designed by Kate Webber. The new gallery plan, displayed in donations boxes designed by Holmes Wood, is consistent with the fresh signage scheme for the Museum. This scheme, funded by a grant from the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, has provided new weatherproof poster cases on the front lawn, as well as updatable directories for each floor and way-finding signage embracing both the galleries and the new extension.

Front of House
Peter Stimpson carried out security duties for the duration of the building works, while Derek Stacey, Fernando Calzada, and Alan Davies were seconded to the photograph and manuscript collections, where they digitized and catalogued several series of photographs and manuscripts. With considerable help from Derek Stacey, in the new post of Gallery Supervisor (Security), four new members of the gallery staff team were recruited: Judith Hosking (full-time Gallery Supervisor (Information)), Giorgio Garippa, Sana Ali, and Rosaleen Croghan (all part-time Gallery Staff). To cope with the rise in visitor numbers (coupled with staff summer holidays), two members of the previous team, George Kwaider and Dennis Cockerill, came back as casual staff, while Tom Nicolaou joined us to assist in the design and preparation of new publicity and other materials. We have also had much- needed lunch-hour support from volunteers Felicity Wood and Paul Slay and from many work-experience students. The induction pack was updated and a two-week full-time induction course was attended by all permanent gallery staff prior to the Museum’s reopening. The course included orientation days, and covered such key topics as child protection, health and safety, fire drills, use of the collections database, disability matters, and customer care. This proved vital, as the immediate upsurge in the number of visitors the moment the doors opened allowed little opportunity for later training.

Education Service
This year the work of the Museum’s education service was dominated by the closure of the Museum and preparations for reopening, followed by coping with the workload once the Museum had reopened. The education service continued to manage provision for drop-in family events and for all booked groups to the Museum, offering introductory talks, taught sessions, and workshops to audiences of all ages, from schoolchildren through to college and further education students, and special interest and community groups. The education service continues to be free, and to be funded by the Renaissance programme, with support from the Clore Duffield Foundation. Education service staffing comprised Andy McLellan and Melody Vaughan (both full time); Becca McVean (part-time) was on maternity leave. The service was supported by the other Renaissance-funded posts working across the University collections: Adrian Brooks (Art Education Officer), Flora Bain (Volunteer Coordinator), Susan Birch (Community Education Officer), and Caroline Cheeseman (Volunteer Assistant), all bar the latter being full-time. During the closure the volunteer guiding service continued their training programme and developed new tours focusing more specifically on object- based learning. The invaluable volunteer guides this year were Jean Flemming, Frances Martyn, Rosemary Lee, Linda Teasdale, Margaret Dyke, Anne Phythian-Adams, and Sukey Christiansen; Alan Lacey retired due to ill health. Education delivery was also supported by a wide range of other staff members. With the closure of the Museum for redevelopment, the Oxford gamelan was returned to the Bate Collection, bringing to an end the Museum’s popular music sessions for primary and secondary schools. Isabelle Carré, the Museum’s Music Education Officer, left us in April 2009.

During the closure of the galleries, all teaching sessions and resources were redeveloped, with a particular focus on resources for visiting art groups and art teachers. The reopening of the Museum led to a rapid return of visiting schools, colleges, and adult groups, with the new Clore Learning Balcony now available as a teaching space. During the school summer term, 2,131 primary schoolchildren visited the Museum, 2,024 doing taught sessions. Of the 1,861 secondary schoolchildren who visited, 1,668 received taught sessions, as did 245 of the 321 tertiary education students. Some 1,473 children took part in family activities, accompanied by more than 800 adults, while around 500 adults took part in adult-focused activities. In addition, 2,236 language-school students visited the Museum.

Programmes included Pitt Stops (family activities on the first Saturday of the month); family activities during school holidays and half terms; guided tours for primary schools; object-handling sessions for primary and secondary schools; talks for secondary schools and adults; training for volunteer guides; a volunteer training course, held in conjunction with the other University collections; continued work with the University and College access officers to deliver object-handling sessions to schoolchildren attending Aspiration Days; and attendance by education staff at meetings of the Oxfordshire Education Network, and by Andy McLellan at the Thames Valley Museums Learning Group.

Other education service projects and achievements included the ‘Making Museums’ programme (now in its sixth year, run in partnership with OUMNH and supported by the Museum’s conservation and collections sections), which involves 300 children from six primary schools in East Oxford; the publication of the Pitt Rivers Museum Art Handbook, a ‘how to’ book aimed at GCSE art teachers and students; the addition to the Museum’s website of a range of new art resources for secondary-school groups; and hosting (along with OUMNH) the first MADNet (Museum Art and Design Network) training day, which was attended by sixty education officers from across the south-east region.

Visitor Figures
The cost of the marketing campaign, in terms of print and publicity, was under £700—but it achieved a doubling of the visitor figures in May 2009, with 40,171 visitors compared to just 19,861 the previous May. A new thermal-imaging people-counter was installed for the reopening, and the high visitor figures recorded were checked and found to be accurate. This high footfall was maintained throughout the first three months (May to July 2009), with 115,509 visitors welcomed, as against the 60,000 or so whom we might have expected on the basis of previous years’ figures. The increase is, of course, also reflected in the OUMNH’s figures. It is clear that the predicted rise in visitor numbers, which helped persuade the Heritage Lottery Fund to support the entrance project, has been more than met.

New Information Point
The considerable visitor research undertaken before the construction of the new information point has amply justified itself. We now have an excellent point at the front of the Museum from which new visitors can orient themselves, with a splendid view of the maze of cases in the court. From here, gallery staff provide a warm welcome and offer torches, maps, ‘What’s On?’ leaflets, factsheets, and the now famous ‘mouse’ trail for children. Staff can now also direct wheelchair and pushchair users towards the platform lift. They also regularly carry out database searches for visitors with specific interests. The area is constantly busy.

Visitor Feedback
The response to the redevelopment and the new displays has been overwhelmingly positive. Nearly everyone has approved of the changes, which respect the original style of the Museum while improving access to them. The visitors book was filled with positive comments: ‘I was so worried I would miss the “old” Pitt—but it’s great seeing across to all the fabulous treasures and feel the buzz at the entrance! Well done.’ ‘So glad to see none of the splendour has been lost.’ ‘Glad it’s back—new access for disabled people is brilliant. Well done for these positive changes.’ ‘Fantastic! I was afraid it would lose its great sense of adventure and discovery, but it hasn’t. Thank you.’ ‘So immensely pleased to see the spirit of the Pitt Rivers remains the same—well done to all involved in the hard work.’ ‘This has been my favourite place to visit for almost 40 years—so glad you’re back and it’s still perfect—just better. We were worried it was going to be all white and bright lights! Thank you!’ ‘Superb. Never seen the place as vibrant as this in all the years I’ve been visiting. Go for it.’ ‘Thank God you haven’t ruined it with the refurbishment. Thank you!’ ‘We loved our visit and couldn’t believe that the refurbishment has been so sensitively done.’ ‘Haven’t been here in 20 years and I think the way you’ve developed the museum is fabulous.’ ‘First visit in 20 years—the renovation is superb. Thank you. Many more people here now! Still as enjoyable though.’ ‘Wonderful. Great to see the museum sticking to the founding principles in so modern a way.’ ‘Haven’t been for 10 years. Very improved with new toilets! And how you have kept the old curiosity feel—children loved the mouse hunt. Thank you.’ Really well done, such a fantastic improvement on something that was amazing already.’ ‘My first visit since the reopening. VERY impressed. Rather splendid toilets. Still “Pitt Rivers” thank goodness.’
Disability Access

A vital component of the entrance redevelopment was the improvement made in access for disabled visitors. The Museum took advice early on from Peter Quinn (the University’s Senior Disability Advisor) and Lynne Hooper (City Council Access Officer). On two occasions they came with the Oxford Access Group to test the new arrangements and ensure they met with expectations. One significant issue was the placing of the large display-cases near the foot of the entrance stairs. It was vital to allow easy wheelchair access, while not losing the visual impact made on arrival by the dense display of cases. Case-location was tested by members of the Oxford Access Group using hand-propelled and motorized wheelchairs and a scooter. The lighting on the new stairs was assessed and adjusted, and the new platform lift was similarly tested and necessary changes to the design set in train. A mark of Peter Quinn’s confidence in the way we had gone about things was that he went on to organize meetings at the Museum for external working groups, where the improvements to access came under expert scrutiny.

Events
A new weekend activity was launched after the reopening: Saturday Spotlight, a series of events to be held on the third Saturday of every month, aimed at adults. It focuses on the Museum’s collections and displays, and on their contemporary relevance. The wide-ranging programme for the first six months was launched with a discussion between curator Christopher Morton and photo journalist Carolyn Drake, focusing on the Museum’s special exhibition of her work. More than sixty people attended, filling the lecture theatre, and setting the standard for the rest of the series. Other sessions have been held on the newly established Clore Learning Balcony, which can accommodate a seated audience of about forty-five and is equipped with PowerPoint and microphone technology. With an excellent view over the court, this has proved an inspiring location. In the reporting year, the programme included talks on the East Oxford Archaeology project by David Griffiths and on the Museum’s new Australian Aboriginal art displays by Helen Adams, along with a hands-on look at textile production by Susan Griffiths. The programme has already won some dedicated regulars and will be continued as a complement to the Museum’s family-friendly activities.

The Museum did not participate, as it has done in previous years, in the European Nuits de Musée late-night event in May, since it followed so soon after the reopening. However, a small but remarkable event took place at the end of June, provided by Kemanak, a group of three Javanese performers. There was no time for advance publicity, so visitors were treated to a largely unexpected presentation of traditional songs and ceremonial dances slowly and precisely executed amongst the displays—and indeed amongst the audience, finished off with a shadow-puppet performance on the lawn outside.

Collecting Box
The Museum’s signature collecting box, featuring the ‘Anthropologists Fund-Raising Ritual’ was taken away by its maker, Tim Hunkin, for a thorough overhaul at the end of ten years of constant use. New parts were installed and it was returned in time for the reopening.

ICT
The Museum’s web resources attracted more than 1.19 million visitors from 156 countries in 2008–09, up 155,000 (+15%) on the previous year. Many changes and additions to the Museum’s website took place to reflect the reopening programme, encompassing new exhibitions listings, events, education trails, and activities.

During the year, the ESRC-funded project ‘The Other Within: Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum’ was completed. One feature of note in this project is the use of advanced mapping functionality to illustrate the collection of English objects over time by county. A number of research projects with associated web presences commenced this year, including ‘Haida Material Culture in British Museums: Generating New Forms of Knowledge’, ‘Ecologies of Modern Heritage: Studying the Cultural and Material Environments of Recent Historical Change’, and ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum’. In addition, the joint museums and collections education website attracted more than 110,000 visitors, with a revamped site launch in summer 2009. Summary descriptions of the Museum’s manuscript collections are also now available via the website.

The Museum’s new information point offers live access to the collections database, allowing front-of-house staff to search for information on behalf of visitors. This encourages visitors to carry out their own research at home using the online database accessed through the website. A new version of the collections database has been developed, tested, and launched. It affords a greatly enhanced interface with more coherent access to the collections online, in addition to the facility for a free-text search of the content of all fields simultaneously. The photograph collection database has also been enhanced, with the development of new layouts in which for the first time images can be incorporated within the records. A new workflow was introduced this year for the storage of digital assets generated by the Museum’s photography studio.

Infrastructural changes during the year included the setting up of a fresh in-Museum data network and the implementation of a new thermal-imaging visitor-counter system. A new shop network has been established, linked to the back-office computer in the Museum’s extension. The new audio-visual equipment on the Clore Learning Balcony now allows illustrated talks to take place in the Museum. Wireless access points were installed in the galleries and the extension, affording full network coverage in all the public and research areas of the Museum. This system will provide wireless access for all members of the University as well as visiting researchers. General IT support and advice was given to Museum staff and visiting researchers throughout the year. Time has also been spent drawing up the IT budgets for various projects, installing new hardware, and implementing a trickle- down strategy to ensure effective use of the Museum’s IT stock (which relies on successful grant applications to secure new computers with which to replace older ones).

DISPLAY
Permanent Displays
In late summer 2008 work on the new display on the south wall of the lower gallery devoted to painting materials and techniques was completed. This features paints and pigments, palettes and paintboxes, as well as paintings on various media from all over the world, including a large selection of painted eggs from Eastern Europe. In July 2008 the Museum closed to the public in order to commence ‘Phase 2’, the entrance redevelopment and associated work. This entailed the ‘decanting’ of the contents of twenty-nine display-cases in the court and lower gallery and the assessment, packing, transport, and storage of more than 5,000 artefacts. On the lower gallery, three newly commissioned cases were installed in the area of the new Clore Learning Balcony. With advice from former member of staff and honorary curator Howard Morphy, a number of Australian paintings previously on display elsewhere in the gallery were integrated with other artworks, objects, photographs, and maps to create an updated display on Australian Aboriginal art. Additionally, one of the reinstated free-standing ‘number 9’ cases was reinstalled on the Balcony and dedicated to the display of artefacts made from recycled materials, most of which had previously featured in the Museum’s special exhibition Transformations: The Art of Recycling (2000–2002). At the opposite end of the gallery, the longstanding display of material collected on Captain Cook’s famous voyages to the Pacific was dismantled in order to prepare for the loan of some sixty items to a major exhibition. A small display of pieces not included in the loan was mounted at one end of the case.

In the court, four new cases with state-of the-art automatic glass doors and steel inner frames were installed to flank the new entrance platform. To fill them, more than a hundred artefacts were selected from the reserve collections to illustrate the well-known ‘Pitt Rivers’ themes of ‘Human Form in Art, ‘Animal Form in Art’, and ‘Geometric Form in Art’, complementing older displays nearby. The majority of decanted display cases in the court were ‘recanted’ or reinstated with a few minor changes, such as the removal of some ‘satellite’ cases that would otherwise have restricted access to wheelchair users. A new selection of recent accessions, illustrating the varied sources from which the Museum receives donations, was installed in the ‘Recent Collections’ case in the court.

Following the Museum’s reopening on 1 May 2009, staff effort was diverted to the permanent displays in the Museum’s upper gallery, with a view to preparing it for reopening to the public on 1 May 2010. Decorative gravel, which had been used in some cases in the early 1990s, had proved to harbour pests and had to be removed. In addition, fresh interpretative material was installed in many of the weaponry displays, and work commenced on selecting, preparing, and researching objects from the Museum’s collection of firearms for a major new display planned for the west end of the gallery. The new display will incorporate most of those firearms that were previously on display in the court, as well as a number of items from the reserve collections, including several one-of-a-kind experimental models made especially for General Pitt-Rivers.

Special Exhibitions
The closure of the galleries to permit redevelopment of the entrance meant that no temporary exhibition was installed for most of the year, the long gallery and special exhibition gallery being used for the storage of museum cases. With the reopening of the galleries in May, however, a display was mounted in the archive case on the first floor: Across the Caucasus: Photographs and Manuscripts from the John F. Baddeley Collection comprised a selection of Baddeley’s photographs, notebooks, and publications, including a fine album of photographs taken in Chechnya. After visiting Russia for seven months in 1879, Baddeley (1854–1940) had become the St Petersburg correspondent of the (London) Standard and began a life-long relationship with the Caucasus region, travelling widely and writing important books on its history. The display involved considerable design challenges, to solve which the Museum benefited from expert advice from colleagues at the Bodleian Library.

On 14 May a new temporary exhibition, Carolyn Drake: Photographs of Central Asia, opened in the long gallery, with a private view attended by the photographer, staff, students, and other guests. Carolyn Drake, who flew from Istanbul for the opening of the exhibition, which explored the everyday effects of environmental, social, and economic change in post- Soviet Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, also presented a seminar in the Friday lunchtime seminar series at the Museum, as well as participating in the first Saturday Spotlight. The prints for the exhibition were all produced by the Museum from Drake’s digital photographs, and will be accessioned into the collections.
As part of the ongoing programme of artists’ interventions in the galleries, an installation by Gérard Mermoz, entitled Objects in Performance, was installed by the artist in two cases on the lower gallery, accompanied by minor interventions in other cases elsewhere on the lower gallery and in the court. The installation opened on 12 June 2009 and is scheduled to close on 11 January 2010. Mérmoz’s work reinterprets sixteenth and seventeenth-century ‘cabinets of curiosity’ in a contemporary vein, presenting artefacts as actors on a stage rather than as captive museum objects.

COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT AND CARE
Reserve Collections
Work by collections, conservation, and technical services staff to upgrade the conditions in the Museum’s offsite repositories continued as time allowed. Given the demands of the redevelopment project, no major improvements were carried out. However, as opportunities presented themselves staff were able to make a series of minor improvements in accordance with the practices and procedures developed in recent years.

Acquisitions
As usual the Museum received a wide range of material by donation during the year. Among the more remarkable donations of photographs were a number of fine fieldwork collections, including two relating to southern Sudan: Patti Langton’s photographs taken among the Larim/Longarim in 1979–1980 and André Singer’s photographs of the installation of the Shilluk reth (Ayang Aney Kur) in 1975. These two collections build upon other recent acquisitions from Southern Sudan, their donation demonstrating the benefits to collections development of the web resources that the Museum has made available. Other notable field collections acquired during the year included photographs taken by Nicholas J. Allen in Nepal and Kinnaur (Himachal Pradesh), between 1969 and 1983, and photographs taken by Peter Worsley in Groote Eylandt (Australia) in 1952–3. Several albums were purchased by the Museum in the course of the year, including an especially fine collection of mounted prints by J. Mulac of Prague taken at Emil Holub’s ethnographic exhibition there in 1892. A full list of the Museum’s acquisitions is given in Annex B.

Loans
There were two new loans during the year, one to an overseas institution and one to a United Kingdom institution. In February 2009, eleven photographic portraits, sixteen cartes-de- visite, four watercolours of Tasmanian aborigines by Thomas Bock, and an oil portrait of Maori chief Ngairo Rakai Hikuroa by Gottfried Lindauer (thirty-two pieces in total) were loaned to the Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, Connecticut, for its installation of the exhibition Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts. The exhibition closed in May. In June the same objects were loaned to the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge for its own highly successful installation of the same exhibition.

In September 2008, twenty Polynesian artefacts loaned in June to the Musée du quai Branly, Paris for the exhibition Polynésie: arts et divinités, 1760–1860 were returned. In January 2009, an Afro-Portuguese ivory saltcellar loaned in November 2007 to the National Maritime Museum for its ‘Atlantic Histories’ display was returned.

In addition, a great deal of work was carried out during the year by collections and conservation staff to prepare for the loan of more than sixty objects from the Museum’s Cook-voyage collections to a major multi-venue exhibition opening in Bonn in August 2009 and then travelling to Vienna and Bern through 2010. Cataloguing

As in previous years, a substantial amount of work was done on cataloguing collections and on enhancing existing database records. During the course of the year, 3,488 new entries were added to the Museum’s object database (compared with 2,466 in the previous year) and 284,579 enhancements were made to existing records (compared with 21,922 in the previous year). This increase in the number of enhancements is due in large part to the work carried out as part of the project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum: Defining Research Priorities, 2010–2020’. Over the year, 22,202 new entries were added to the Museum’s photograph database (compared with 5,575 in the previous year) and 14,832 enhancements were made to existing records (compared with 10,118 in the previous year).

Much work was devoted to cataloguing and digitizing the photograph and manuscript collections. The section benefited this year from the secondment of four gallery staff (Fernando Calzada, Alan Davis, Derek Stacey, and Beth Munro) for the duration of the Museum’s closure. Between them they catalogued a large number of photographs and several large manuscript series, and digitized many thousands of photographs. In addition, Elin Bornemann completed the cataloguing of the Tayler/Moser collection, amounting to some 7,600 records. In January/February 2009 Linda Mowat was employed to enhance the Museum’s database records for more than 1,000 Australian photographs, as part of a project being run by Jane Lydon and Lynette Russell of Monash University (Melbourne) entitled ‘Aboriginal Visual Histories: Photographing Indigenous Australians’, funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project).
The Museum was particularly grateful to volunteer Fusa McLynn who transcribed and translated the Japanese inscriptions on a number of the objects in the Basil Hall Chamberlain collection, which comprises more than 800 objects (mostly paper amulets, but also some maps, pictures, and wooden amulets). Ms McLynn’s work has added greatly to the Museum’s records for this important collection. The Museum was also pleased to supply the Department of Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum with copies of the Museum’s thesauruses for materials and processes for adaptation for their new database system.

Conservation
Unsurprisingly, the primary focus for the conservation department this year was the entrance redevelopment project. Conservation staff worked closely with the project manager to ensure the safety of the collections. Weekly reporting of shock and vibration levels allowed staff to shape the demolition and construction methods, while dust-monitoring helped determine the extent of protection required. The HLF-funded team did an excellent job of decanting, packing, and relocating artefacts prior to the start of building work on 1 September. Work included the major task of removing and cleaning all the paddles and related objects on open display in the rafters of the lower gallery to allow air-transfer grills to be fitted into the floor above. Conservation and technical services staff also worked closely with Vertigo, a company specializing in the mounting of large artefacts at high-level, to ensure the safe relocation of Salama, the outrigger canoe, to its new position above the Clore Learning Balcony. Once the building work had been completed, conservators and the move team deep- cleaned the Museum and the objects on open display, before the display-cases were repositioned and the objects safely reinstalled. Between February and April 2009 the environment in the Museum was monitored closely to check on the performance of the new environmental-control plant installed in the court. Generally speaking, the plant is performing well, although we will not have a full picture until it has been running through a full year of seasonal changes.

Building projects are recognized as making for particularly vulnerable times for any institution, so it was timely that in October 2008 conservation staff organized two training days on emergency response and salvage for all staff on the call-out cascade. The training was given by Jane Henderson (Professional Tutor in Conservation in the Cardiff School of History & Archaeology at Cardiff University), who specializes in emergency response training. The Emergency Planning committee was also reconvened during the year and the emergency plan updated to take account of all the new building works.

The building project created several new display areas, and conservation worked closely with colleagues in collections and technical services to prepare the new exhibits in time for the reopening. Among the artefacts worked on were those installed in the new displays on Australian Aboriginal art, human, animal and geometric form in art, and recycling. In total, 700 objects were worked on in conservation in the course of the entrance redevelopment project. The removal of the firearms display in the court also provided the opportunity for the entire collection of firearms to be safety- and condition-checked by Martin Hinchcliffe from the National Army Museum, in collaboration with collections and conservation staff. Nearly 2,000 firearms and accessories were checked.

From May 2009 conservation staff were focused on two projects: the preparation of Haida objects for a major research visit in September 2009 and the preparation of objects collected on Captain Cook’s famous Pacific voyages for a major loan in August 2009. Some 224 Haida objects were conserved and/or condition checked, primarily by Kate Jackson, and sixty-three Cook-voyage objects were conserved and/or checked, primarily by Jeremy Uden.

Despite this being a particularly busy year, an active loan programme has also been maintained with conservators couriering the return of objects from Musée du quai Branly, Paris, the National Maritime Museum, London, and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. The loans to Yale and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, required external conservation expertise: paper conservator Rennison Hall prepared mounts, while Sarah Allan from the National Trust assisted with the development of a new condition reporting procedure for two-dimensional material and with packing advice.

Routine pest-management procedures by conservation staff continued. The use of pheromone traps to attract male clothes moths resulted in the discovery of a potentially devastating infestation in the Naga display in the upper gallery. One textile had been quite seriously attacked, but the remaining objects were removed and frozen before the problem could spread. Conservation also began to work with colleagues in the OUMNH to combat the museums’ shared moth problem. During the year conservation also worked with the University Safety Office to find ways of testing for pesticide residues in the collections, including testing for levels of mercury vapour.
All this left little time for research. Conservation staff did, however, participate in two AHRC-funded ‘research clusters’. The first, coordinated by colleagues at University College London is looking at ‘Conservation’s Catch-22’, that is, the potential conflicts between providing access to collections and preserving them; while the second, coordinated by colleagues at the University of Bradford, focuses upon the identification and conservation of ivory. Conservation staff also worked with a group of Italian researchers interested in the metallic composition of several Japanese swords in the collection. The purchase of a polarizing light microscope in the later part of the reporting year should enable some in- house pigment identification in the future.

Conservation staff continued to promote their work through participation in the Museum’s ‘Making Museums’ programme in June 2009, hosting the E-curator workshop for researchers from University College London in September 2008, and hosting the Oxford Conservators Group Christmas meeting in December.

Time and space to host conservation internships was limited during the year, but Emma Hibbert from the University of Lincoln completed a seven-week internship in September 2008. The Institute of Conservation’s HLF-funded intern Andrew Hughes left at the end of October 2008 to take up the post of Senior Conservator at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. In June 2009 Alison Wheeler commenced a two-day a week volunteership, assisting primarily with mount making and packing objects for loan. Permanent conservation staffing was also supplemented at various times by Charlotte Ridley and Jennifer Kern, two former conservation interns who formed part of the collections move team.

Technical Services
As with the Museum’s other departments, work associated with the entrance redevelopment project dominated technical services’ year. Many of the cases in the Museum court had to be protected by cladding. Technicians also moved artefacts that were too heavy for the collections move team to move, although the technicians themselves needed the assistance of Oxford Exhibition Services to shift the exceptionally heavy Nigerian house posts, which had previously flanked the Museum’s entrance, to their new location in the Balfour Library and to lower some of the suspended boats. After the contractors had vacated the site, the case protection had to be removed and the craft resuspended in their original positions.

During the construction period, work began on preparing the displays that would be installed in the cases wrapped round the new entrance platform, and also in the cases flanking the Clore Learning Balcony. John Simmons attended several project meetings, visited the project architects Pringle Richards Sharratt in London, and accompanied the Estates project manager to Ghent to check on the production of the new cases in the Meyvaert factory. Chris Wilkinson and Alistair Orr completed the displays of painting techniques and materials in the lower gallery. They also constructed mock-up cases in the Blackwood Room (appropriated for this purpose), crafted the necessary fittings, and outfitted the cases with the selected artefacts, to make the process of dressing the real cases as smooth as possible. Adrian Vizor constructed a further mock-up case in the west end of the upper gallery to work on displaying Australian Aboriginal paintings and artefacts in new cases on the lower gallery. Jon Eccles worked on the new ‘Recycling’ display in the lower gallery and on the archive display case outside the entrance to the new extension on the first floor. John Simmons also installed a new selection of artefacts in the ‘Recent Collections’ case in the court, ready for the opening. Chris Wilkinson and Alistair Orr replaced all the glass in the cases for the prospective new firearms displays in the upper gallery with tougher laminated glass, while John Simmons oversaw the installation of an in-case alarm system and new locks. Adrian Vizor installed new interpretative texts and labels in the armour and sword cases in the upper gallery.
During the year, technical services staff provided support for their colleagues in conservation and collections when needed, including the occasional emergency, such as Chris Wilkinson’s prompt action when summoned in the early hours of a December morning to cope with water ingress in one of the offsite repositories. He also accompanied curatorial staff to Farnham and Reading to collect new donations. John Simmons arranged for the loan to the Bodleian Library of some of the Museum’s special exhibition cases for a display in the Proscholium, with Chris Wilkinson overseeing their installation. John Simmons also supervised a work-experience student for one week and, along with Adrian Vizor, transported the automated collection box to Southwold in Suffolk for repair. A new dust collector was installed in the workshop, replacing the one brought from 60 Banbury Road.

Staff training undertaken during the year included the emergency planning and response day-courses held at the Museum, Adrian Vizor’s attendance at the woodworking fair at the NEC, Alistair Orr’s attendance at a manual-handling course at the Ashmolean Museum, and John Simmons’s and Adrian Vizor’s attendance at a Safety Office seminar about LEV equipment. Alistair Orr successfully applied for a display technician post at the Bodleian Library. He left us at the end of May. Our thanks go to him for some sterling work and we wish him well for the future. The post vacated by Alistair Orr was filled by Alan Cooke whom we were delighted to have rejoin us on 20 July.

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

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

The major 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 the late Hélène La Rue from the Economic and Social Research Council, was completed successfully in March 2009. The aims of the project were 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 was to use the Museum’s collections, with their connected documentation, to illuminate the modern construction of Englishness. The changing structure of the English ethnographic collections was analysed, focusing on the counties of Essex, Somerset, Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, and Greater London. Archival resources were used to provide rich contextual information about the artefacts and the people who collected them. A major outcome of the project is a website, which contains a wealth of resources, including a number of ‘object biographies’ and other articles by members of the project team and associated scholars and students. A scholarly book is also in preparation.

With funding of £116,325 from the John Fell OUP Research Fund a new project entitled ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the  Pitt Rivers Museum: Defining Research Priorities, 2010–20’ began work in April 2009. The project aims to characterize the range and research potential of the Museum’s world archaeology collections. Led by Dan Hicks and Jeremy Coote, a team of researchers—including Alice Stevenson, Alison Petch, and Matt Nicholas—is working with a specialist panel of archaeologists (with an international range of regional and period expertise). Through ongoing catalogue and desk-based research, and a series of research visits to the collection, the project will lead to the publication on the Museum’s website of a report that will set out the nature, scope, and significance of the collections, and define future priorities for archaeological research at the Museum. The project will enhance the understanding of the archaeological collections and the history of archaeology at the Museum, enrich the information about archaeological objects held in the Museum’s electronic database, and increase the accessibility of the collections and their documentation as a resource for research. By setting out a series of priorities developed through collaboration with the specialist panel, the project will lay the necessary foundations for the future development of new research focused on the archaeological collections of the Museum.

In March 2009 work began on a new project funded by a grant of £104,748 from The Leverhulme Trust. Entitled ‘Haida Material Culture in British Museums: Generating New Forms of Knowledge’ the project has created an International Research Network whose participants include The British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Haida Gwaii Museum, and members of the Haida Nation. Additional support for the project has been provided by the John Fell OUP Research Fund. The project is led by Laura Peers. The project researcher is Cara Krmpotich. The Museum’s collections include a Haida totem pole and approximately 300 other Haida objects. Historically, thousands of artefacts were collected from Haida people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including totem poles, which are among the most iconic artefacts in museum collections. However, there is relatively little specialist knowledge about these collections in the UK, and Haida people have had little access to them. The major outcome of the project will be a visit by more than twenty members of the Haida First Nation from Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) in British Columbia to the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum to research nearly 700 artefacts. Artists, youth, researchers, language teachers, and musicians from the community and staff from the museums will use these historic artefacts to study manufacturing and artistic techniques, to recover memories and vocabulary, and to reconnect people with objects made by their ancestors more than a century earlier. Haida knowledge about the artefacts, and their on-going significance within the community, will be added to museum records. Other outcomes will include a book charting the project and its findings and a follow-up visit by Pitt Rivers and British Museum staff to Haida Gwaii to discuss these issues more widely with members of the Haida Nation. A detailed archive of the project, including photographs and records from both collections, will be deposited at the Haida Gwaii Museum.

During the year the Museum was also a partner in the project ‘Ecologies of Modern Heritage: Studying the Cultural & Material Environments of Recent Historical Change’ funded by a grant of £30,000 from the AHRC/EPSRC’s ‘Science and Heritage’ programme to Dan Hicks and colleagues at Exeter University and the English Heritage Science Advisory Group. This ‘Research Cluster’ focuses on the cross-disciplinary study of modern heritage by employing the concept of heritage ecologies to facilitate new collaborations in their interpretation and representation. ‘Ecologies of Modern Heritage’ brought together leading researchers—from engineering, ecology, microbiology, and conservation to planning, anthropology, archaeology, and the creative arts—and engaged with a range of stakeholders from outside higher education, including the professional heritage sector. One of the aims of the workshop was to facilitate new collaborations in cross-disciplinary heritage research. To further this aim, participants in the workshop formed small research teams and engaged in exploratory fieldwork activities at Bletchley Park.  This location was selected to facilitate these interactions and collaborations as it is an iconic and internationally recognized historic site of the recent past. Reconciling intangible heritage, the international historic significance and contemporary cultural and economic values of the site, with the demands of conservation and management of the material fabric of collections, buildings, and landscapes is a current and pressing challenge for Bletchley Park Trust, and one that is shared by many other heritagestakeholders.Thefirstworkshopwasattendedby‘coregroup’membersandtook placeatBletchleyParkonThursday2andFriday3April2009.Thesecondworkshoptook place at Bletchley Park on Monday 6 and Tuesday 7 July and was attended by ‘core group’ members and invited specialists. A concluding ‘Forum’ was hosted by the Open University on Wednesday 8 July 2009. This was attended by the steering committee, the ‘core group’, representatives of the Trustees of Bletchley Park, and an invited and self-nominated audience. The day focused on exploring the potential future research plans as identified by the four groups during the two workshops and on discussions relating to broader issues relevant to researchers and practitioners of science and heritage.

The Museum was also pleased to collaborate with the French-government funded research project ‘Projet Jade’ by providing three stone axes for non-destructive spectroradiometric analysis at the British Museum in November 2008.

Research Visitors
There were 241 recorded research visits to the Museum during the year requiring the retrieval of objects, photographs, and/or manuscripts from the reserve collections. Of these, 100 were to the object collections and 141 to the photographic and manuscript collections, representing a significant increase in research demand on this section from the previous year. This increase is likely to be due to the raised profile of the photograph collections through its current programme of exhibitions, as well as the high profile of its web resources. The figure for object collections decreased this year, as a consequence of collections’ staff absorption in producing new displays prior to the Museum’s reopening in May.

The total number of recorded research enquiries was 1,501. Of these, 1,171 were by email, 72 by post, 185 by phone, and 73 in person. For example, Philip Grover dealt with 68 separate orders for reproductions of material in the photograph and manuscript collections, as well as around 200 enquiries relating to research visits and photographic services, all of which entailed lengthy correspondence and administration. This increasingly means that essential basic curatorial work on the collections is being put to one side as urgent commercial and scholarly requests for reproductions are researched and serviced. This represents a double-edged sword in terms of making collections more accessible via the internet, since administrative demands on all sections have increased as a result, with no increase in staff capacity.
Of particular note among the visits to the object collections this year was one by Professor Itaru Chijiwa of Kokugakuin University, Tokyo to view more than 300 Japanese amulets donated by Basil Hall Chamberlain in the late nineteenth century. The information obtained during this visit has enhanced the database entries for those objects that were examined, as well as equipping staff with the necessary knowledge to continue to improve the entries for the amulets that were not viewed. The programme of visits by the experts contributing to the new project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum’ began late in the year, when Museum staff also began preparing for the visit in September 2009 by twenty-two members of the Haida Gwaii community as part of the project ‘Haida Material Culture in British Museums: Generating New Forms of Knowledge’.

Visitors to the collections also included June Northcroft Grant, a niece of Maggie Papakura, better-known as Makereti, along with Makereti’s biographer Paul Diamond. They were accompanied by a documentary film crew, who worked with staff over a number of days in October, including filming them in conversation with Mrs Grant about the objects, photographs, and manuscripts donated by Makereti. Another notable visitor to the photograph collection was Namgyal Lhamo Taklha, the sister-in-law of the Dalai Lama, who visited on 30 April. She was introduced to the Museum’s extensive Tibetan photograph collections and the ‘Tibet Album’ website, and was presented with a framed copy of a photograph of her grandfather Tsarong taken by Frederick Spencer Chapman in 1937.

In March the Museum hosted Pius Cokumu, a lecturer in the History Department at Maseno University in Kenya. During his time at the Museum, Cokumu worked particularly with Christopher Morton, who continues to pursue a long-term research project on Luo visual and material histories, but was also able to spend time with other Museum sections, as well as consulting the collections, and taking part in a workshop on east African visual and material history projects hosted by the Museum on 11 March, which also benefited from the attendance of another Luo scholar, Juma Ondeng. The visit was a considerable success, and led to a proposal to establish a formal link between the Museum and Maseno University, in order to collaborate on the establishment of a Luo resource centre, to make information about museum collections available to local people. This link was later formalized in a letter from Stephen G. Agong, Acting Principal of Bondo University College.

In May/June the Museum was also pleased to host a visit from Professor Dr John T. Agberia of the Department of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, holder of the University of Oxford Titular Fellowship of the Association of Commonwealth Universities for 2009. During his time at the Museum, he pursued a personal research programme in ‘Museum Organization and Curatorial Engagements’, drawing on the Museum’s resources—including staff, library, and other facilities—to reflect on recent and current developments in museological practice.

Teaching and Examining
The Museum’s research and scholarship shapes and influences the teaching that members of staff carry out as part of their University duties. Staff continued to teach on the University’s undergraduate degrees in Archaeology and Anthropology, Human Sciences, and History of Art and Visual Culture; on the M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography; and variously for M.Sc., M.Phil. and D.Phil. students in Social Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, History of Art, Archaeology, and African Studies. During the year, Museum staff gave 50 lectures and 186 seminars and tutorials. Details of teaching and examining carried out by members of staff are given in Annex D: Staff Activities, and of their publications in Annex E. In addition, during the year Museum staff attended seventeen conferences and numerous workshops and training days, delivered eleven conference papers, and hosted visits from many visiting scholars and academics.

Balfour Library
The Balfour Library continued to settle into its new location in the extension. During the year, retrospective conversion of the records for the library’s periodical holdings on to Oxford University’s online union library catalogue (Oxford Libraries Information System or OLIS) was begun. Total book loans rose again, to 8,919 (from 7,770 in 2007–8).

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

Capital and Curatorial Grants
The entrance refurbishment project, which started in August 2008, was funded by a range of grants, all of which we are delighted to acknowledge here. The major grant of £999,500 was from the Heritage Lottery Fund for ‘Taking the Past into the Future: Constructing Twenty- First Century Links between the Pitt Rivers Museum and its Public’. The Clore Duffield Foundation generously provided £121,713 as partnership funding for the entrance refurbishment project and in support of the Museum’s education and outreach programme. The DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund generously provided £128,000 for ‘Showcasing the Pitt Rivers Museum’s New Entrance’, partnership funding for the entrance refurbishment project supporting the purchase of new cases. The Museum is also grateful to the following for their partnership funding for the entrance refurbishment project: the Oxford University Estates Directorate (£50,000), the Monument Trust (£30,000), Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey (£20,000), the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum (£10,000), the Diana Parker Trust (£5,000), Philip and Jude Pullman (£5,000), the Idlewild Trust (£3,000), the Charlotte Bonham-Carter Charitable Trust (£2,000), the Golsonscott Foundation (£2,000), the Bartlett Taylor Charitable Trust (£500), and Country and Eastern (£250).

Other grants received during the year included: £25,000 from the van Houten Fund towards the costs of replacing lighting in the lower and upper galleries; £5,000 from the William Delafield Trust, in support of work on the Wilfred Thesiger collection of photographs and the prospective centenary exhibition in 2010; and £2,000 from the Diana Parker Trust, towards the work of the Museum. In addition, £5,000 was received from the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, £1,500 from the Ernest Cook Trust, and £1,000 from the PF Charitable Trust, all for ‘Hands on Music in Museums’ in support of music education at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments.

Research Grants
Dan Hicks applied successfully to the Institute of Field Archaeologists for a £15,300 workplace training bursary (funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund). The bursary was awarded to Matt Nicholas for a one-year training programme in museum archaeology, which began on 1 April 2009. He was also successful with an application, jointly with Dr Caitlin DeSilvey of Exeter University and English Heritage Science Advisory Group, to the AHRC/EPSRC’s ‘Science and Heritage’ programme for a grant of £30,000 for the project ‘Ecologies of Modern Heritage: Studying the Cultural & Material Environments of Recent Historical Change’. With Jeremy Coote, Dan Hicks was also successful in an application to the John Fell OUP Research Fund for a grant of £116,325 for the project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum: Defining Research Priorities, 2010– 2020’, which began work on 1 April 2009. In turn, Jeremy Coote was successful with an application to The Leverhulme Trust for a grant of £248,000 for the project ‘Rethinking Pitt- Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector’.
We reported last year on the success of Laura Peers’s application to The Leverhulme Trust for an International Networks Grant of £104,748 for the project ‘Haida Material Culture in British Museums: Generating New Forms of Knowledge’. Work on the project, which began in March 2009, is also being supported by a grant of £7,518 from the John Fell OUP Research Fund. Laura Peers was also successful with an application, jointly with Alison K. Brown of the University of Aberdeen, to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a grant of £183,000 for the project ‘Our Ancestors Have Come to Visit: Kaahsinooniksi Aotoksisaawooya—Reconnections with Historic Blackfoot Shirts’.

Renaissance
During 2008–9 the Museum benefited from £318,667 of funding from Renaissance, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council’s programme to transform England’s regional museums. Since 2002, central government investment has begun to reverse the decline in the country’s major regional museums: increasing visitor numbers, improving standards, developing collections, and supporting new ways of working. The Oxford University museums (the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of the History of Science ) form one quarter of the South East Renaissance Hub, alongside Hampshire County Museums and Archives Service, The Royal Pavilion, Libraries, and Museums, Brighton and Hove, and Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust. Much of the work carried out this year has been concentrated on gaining approval from the MLA for the proposed continued use of Renaissance funding in the Pitt Rivers Museum to support education, interpretation, and exhibition development costs. Following discussions with MLA, the funding stream and its proposed use was agreed for a further two years, to the end of March 2011. Over this reporting year, Renaissance funding has supported three education officer posts, to deliver the school and public education programme, as well as posts devoted to the display and interpretation of the new exhibition cases associated with the entrance development project, and additional staff training.

Museum Shop and Other Trading Activities
The Museum shop closed in July 2008, in advance of the galleries shutting, to allow preparation time for work associated with the entrance redevelopment project. During the closed period staff took advantage of training opportunities. Elizabeth Webb was awarded a short internship at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and was also able to work briefly at the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum. Beverly Stacey worked for two weeks in the busy retail environment of the OUP Bookshop on the High Street. Beth Munro was temporarily redeployed to work with the Museum’s photograph and manuscript collections. Before reopening, a heritage retail consultant was engaged to assist in the design of the shop and advise on stock, and a new shop manager employed to prepare the shop and staff for reopening. In the three months after reopening the shop had a period of successful trading, making a net contribution of £10,479.
The sale of images and reproduction fees continued throughout the year. A fee of £25,025 was negotiated for the use of images from the Wilfred Thesiger collection in the proposed Dubai Metro project. However, current procedures for making images available for sale are less efficient than they might be, especially in the use of staff time, and will be overhauled during the 2009–10 financial year. Fresh equipment and consumables to support the work of the Museum’s photographer and staff in the photograph and manuscript collections were purchased over the course of the year, from sums earned from the sale of images and reproduction fees. The entrance redevelopment project did not allow funds to be generated over the year from Museum hire. Opportunities to improve this potential income stream will be investigated over the coming year.

ACQUISITIONS
Donations to the Museum
Helen Adams (a rug, from Afghanistan; 2009.4); Nicholas J. Allen (a collection of negatives and slides relating to fieldwork carried out in Nepal and the Western Himalayas in 1969– 1971 and in the early 1980s; 2008.115); John Agberia (an oil painting by Nigerian artist Michael Agwu; 2009.47); Linda Babb (items of Tibetan national dress purchased by the donor in Lhasa; 2008.96); Marcus Banks (bow tie and bands worn by the donor whilst a Proctor of the University of Oxford; 2008.133); Paul Baxter (a small collection of objects acquired during his fieldwork in Kenya in the 1950s; 2008.139); Oxfam (a bound typescript, illustrated with original photographs, by Kingsley Roth, entitled ‘A Note on Some Decaying Arts in Fiji’; 2009.34); Philip Henry Blyth (a bag from Mizoram in India; 2009.42); John Cammack (a sharktooth dagger from Kiribati; 2009.31); Peter Carey (objects collected by Raymond Hutcheson Pelly between 1910 and 1942 in Burma; 2008.136); Sue Cavanna (a pot used for water and palm wine from Equatorial Guinea; 2008.132); Nicky Clarkson (an album of photographs by J. Mulac of an exhibition of ethnographic objects held in Prague in 1897; 2009.113); Eleanor Clutton-Brock (a pair of moccasins decorated with quillwork and jingles, from North America; 2009.43); Elizabeth Duncan (two embroidered caps from Pakistan; 2008.111); Elizabeth Edwards (a ‘cannibal fork’ from Fiji; 2008.138); Sarah Lane Fox-Pitt (two strings of prayer beads, a pony halter, and a rope from Tibet; 2008.134); J. Gardner and D. Gardner (photograph albums and papers from India, Tibet, and Pakistan, collected and compiled by the late Henry Baker; 2009.41); Judy Goldthorpe (two photograph albums relating to Tibet compiled by Sir Evan Nepean, and his camera; 2008.129); Chris Guthrie (a collection of photographs taken by Chris and Jane Guthrie in Tibet in the 1940s; 2009.112); Susan Hanley (a kachina doll, from North America; 2008.140); Paul Hurwood (two tiles from Uzbekistan and a prayer wheel from Nepal; 2008.137); Mary-Claire Jones (a reel of colour film shot in India by Major Peter Hailey; 2009.45); the Trustees of the Estate of Hélène La Rue (a collection of toys and musical instruments from Europe and Asia; 2009.46); Lesley Le Claire (a diviner’s satchel, from South Africa; 2009.1); George C. McGavin (two palm-frond hats from Papua New Guinea and a length of palm fibre rope from Tunisia; 2008.112); Alison Redmayne (an album of photographs taken during a visit to Russia in 1931 and several albums of photographs of Portugal during the 1950s; 2009.7); Heather Richardson (a metal paintbox for watercolour paints, from England; 2008.118); Lorraine Rostant (Japanese clothing collected in the mid 1980s; 2009.33); André Singer (approximately 1,000 transparencies taken at the installation of the Shilluk reth Ayang Aney Kur in Southern Sudan in 1975; 2009.6); Richard Saumarez Smith (photographs, notebooks, and sound recordings made by Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith during an expedition to Colombia in 1965; 2008.113); Pru Stokes (a souvenir Easter ‘biscuit’ from Biddenden, Kent; 2009.21); Sarah Tavner (two bark skirts and one leaf skirt from western New Guinea; 2009.3); Jana Valencic (a collection of twenty-eight colour prints relating to the Slovenian kozolec or hay-drying rack held by the Museum; 2008.131); Miki Van Zwanenburg (a Sepik carved board, from Melanesia, and two temple door-panels and an effigy, from Singapore; 2008.135); Chris Wingfield (a roll of sewelling from Scotland; 2008.114); Felicity Wood (a collection of Asian textiles from the collection of Sheila Paine; 2008.116); Peter Worsley (bark-paintings, from Australia, and a collection of photographs taken during his field research on Groote Eylandt, Australia in 1952–3; 2009.2, 2009.10).

Purchases
Two tablets of Reckitts Blue (2008.104); textiles from the Sheila Paine collection (2008.117); an album of photographs relating to Baptist Missionary Society activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the early 1950s (2009.8); an album of hand-tinted prints of photographs taken in Japan circa 1890–1900 (2009.9).

Donations to the Library
The Balfour library was grateful to receive donations and bequests from the following individuals and institutions: the Ashmolean Museum; Anne Best; Marla Berns; Adam Butcher; Marieke Clarke; Jeremy Coote; Henry Drewal; Elizabeth Edwards; Foundation La Fontana; Philip Grover; Clare Harris; Alan Roderick; Hugh Macleod; Jacob Krekhovetsky; Lady Margaret Hall; Latin American Centre Library; Rosemary Lee; Eunice Meadows; Peter Micklethwait; Peter Mitchell; Christopher Morton; Musée d’ethnographie, Neuchâtel; Nova Scotia Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage; Veronica Passalacqua; Craig Richardson; Laura Rival; Tim Rogers; Stéphen Rostain; the Sackler Library; Kees Schinkel; Frederic A. Sharf; Aad Versteeg; Whanganui Regional Museum; and Peter Worsley.

Staff Activites (INCLUDING TEACHING AND EXAMINING)
Helen Adams continued to hold the post of Special Projects Officer funded by the Renaissance in the Regions scheme. Her main duties involved working with the collections and technical services departments to select, research, and interpret objects for new and refreshed permanent displays. Ahead of the Museum’s reopening she assisted with the redisplays of North American material and new accessions in the court and with new displays on painting and techniques and Australian Aboriginal art on the lower gallery. She also began work on the selection and interpretation of objects for the major new firearms displays being prepared for the upper gallery. In connection with this, she set up an online diary to report on the progress of the new displays. She gave a ‘work in progress’ paper at the Museum Ethnographers Group’s annual conference in Bristol in April and presented a drop-in talk at the Museum’s reopening event in May. She responded to a number of enquiries stimulated by the Museum’s online ‘Arms and Armour’ virtual gallery and gave talks to groups of adults and young people visiting the Museum. She completed her City and Guilds Award in Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector.

Jeremy Coote continued to carry out research into the history of the Museum’s collections, particularly those from Polynesia, and to contribute to a number of internet discussion lists, particularly those devoted to Captain Cook and African arts. He continued to serve as Editor of the Museum Ethnographers Group’s Journal of Museum Ethnography, as an associate member of the research group Anthropologie, Objets et Esthétiques of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, as a member of the Scholarly Advisory Board for the Southern Sudan Cultural Documentation Center at Brandeis University, and to participate in the Sudan Programme series of lectures and conferences at St Anthony’s College, Oxford (sponsored by the Middle East Centre and the African Studies department). In February he couriered a major loan to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. In April he attended the Museum Ethnographers Group’s annual conference, hosted by Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. As part of the preparations for his new research project ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector’ (2009–2012), he participated in a workshop held at the Department of the History of Art in May 2009 on ‘Darwin and the Arts, 1859–2009: Discourses on the Origin, History and Nature of the Arts after Darwin’. He hosted a visit from Professor Dr John T. Agberia of the Department of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, holder of the University of Oxford Titular Fellowship of the Association of Commonwealth Universities for 2009. He refereed grant applications for funding bodies and papers for academic journals. He gave talks about the Museum and its work to visiting groups. In Trinity term he convened, with Christopher Morton, the Museum’s seminar series. He supervised one doctoral student, served as assessor for others, and supervised undergraduate projects in History of Art and Visual Culture.

Philip Grover continued to manage and supervise research visits to the photograph and manuscript collections. He supplied images for publications and for exhibitions in London, Abu Dhabi, and Yale, as well as for two major exhibitions of Naga culture in Basel and Zurich. He completed a survey listing of the manuscript collections, which was published on the Museum’s website; and he also worked with scholars from the University of Melbourne on a project to catalogue the Museum’s Westlake Papers. In September he visited the Natural History Museum to study the Anti-Locust Research Collection; and during the same month attended the ‘Hidden Oman’ event organized by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). He liaised closely with the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage on a major project to renovate Jahili Fort in Al Ain, providing images from the Museum’s Thesiger Collection for a permanent installation ‘Mubarak bin London: Wilfred Thesiger and the Freedom of the Desert’, which opened in December 2008. He continued to edit, with Christopher Morton, an illustrated volume, to be titled ‘Wilfred Thesiger in Africa’, which will be published in 2010 to accompany the Museum’s special exhibition marking the centenary of Sir Wilfred Thesiger’s birth. In December he was invited to participate in an open day at the RGS, where he met colleagues from other museum and archive collections; and in March he attended a workshop run by the Oxford Internet Institute that appraised the success to date of ‘Humanities on the Web’. In May he co-curated (with Christopher Morton) the exhibition Carolyn Drake: Photographs of Central Asia, the first solo exhibition of the World Press Photo award-winning photographer. He also co-curated Across the Caucasus: Photographs and Manuscripts from the John F. Baddeley Collection, a display of original material in the archive case on the first floor of the new extension. In June he couriered, with Christopher Morton, a major loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Clare Harris continued to act as Course Director for the degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (M.Sc. and M.Phil.) and as Director of Studies for Archaeology and Anthropology at Magdalen College. She taught students at all levels: from undergraduate students in Archaeology and Anthropology, Human Sciences, and the History of Art to postgraduates in the School of Anthropology. She acted as supervisor for five doctoral students and as a mentor for other staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum and in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. She ran the ‘Cultural Representations’ lecture series over two terms and contributed lectures to this series and several others in the Anthropology and History of Art departments. With Inge Daniels, she taught and examined a graduate option course on ‘Objects in Motion’. In Michaelmas Term she convened the Museum’s research seminar and in Hilary Term co-convened with Laura Peers the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology’s departmental seminar, for which a number of leading experts on material culture from the United Kingdom and abroad were brought to Oxford. She served as assessor for the confirmation of status for a number of doctoral students and examined a number of doctoral dissertations. She served on a number of committees at the Museum, in the School of Anthropology (including the Management Board), at the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, and at Magdalen College. In June she gave an invited paper at a conference on ‘Colonialism and Collecting’ at Hong Kong University where she presented some of the results of the Museum’s ‘Tibet Album’ project on British colonial-period photography. She stopped over in Beijing to visit an exhibition on Tibet and some of the galleries that exhibit contemporary Tibetan and Chinese art as part of her ongoing research on these topics. She represented the Museum at meetings in Brussels and Leiden of the EU- funded project on the future of ethnographic museums. At the latter she gave an invited paper on ‘Collecting the Contemporary’. She also gave a public talk about the history of the Museum during the reopening weekend in May 2009. She continued to conduct research on Tibetan collections in the United Kingdom and abroad, to host a number of research visitors, and to assist in the acquisition of new collections. At the end of the year she completed the first draft of her next book, provisionally entitled ‘The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics and the Representation of Tibet’.

Dan Hicks had as a major focus this year the project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeological Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum’, which will lead to the publication of a research priorities document for the Museum’s archaeological collections. From October 2008 he co-mentored (with Jeremy Coote) Matt Nicholas, who joined the Museum on a one- year training programme in museum archaeology, funded by an IFA/HLF workplace bursary. His research in the field of modern heritage developed through two further funded projects. His project ‘Ecologies of Modern Heritage’ convened two workshops on interdisciplinary approaches in heritage science at Bletchley Park, in partnership with English Heritage and the Bletchley Park Trust. Thanks to a pump-priming grant of $7,800 through a Stahl Endowment Grant (University of California, Berkeley) to himself and Laurie Wilkie for field- and archive-based work on the history of modern heritage in London and New York City, he carried out a first season of a new programme of fieldwork during July 2009. In June he submitted to Oxford University Press (OUP) the manuscript for a volume, edited with Mary C. Beaudry, to be entitled ‘The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies’. He reviewed manuscripts for OUP, Antiquity, Oxbow Books, and the Journal of Social Archaeology. He continued to work on his single-authored volume on transatlantic historical archaeology for Cambridge University Press. He joined the editorial board of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology (Springer). He sat on the committee of the Gerald Avery Wainwright Near Eastern Archaeology Fund and the grants committee of the World Archaeological Congress, and reviewed scholarship applications for St John’s College, Oxford and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He was elected to the AHRC Peer Review College, on which he will serve until 2012. He sat on doctoral committees at Boston University and the University of the West of England. He was re-elected as an honorary Research Fellow in Archaeology at Boston University. He gave a series of invited lectures, including a paper in a plenary session of the Society for Historical Archaeology conference in Toronto in January 2009, where he also acted as discussant for a session on indigenous archaeology. He gave a discussion paper at the third meeting of the ‘Material Geographies’ workshop series funded by the Royal Geographical Society. He gave a paper at the Oxford University Anthropological Society’s centenary conference ‘What’s the Matter with Anthropology?’ in May 2009 at St Hugh’s College. With a small grant from the Astor Travel Fund, he hosted a research visit to Oxford by Professor Mark Leone of University of Maryland, College Park. He co-convened a session on the theme of ‘Archaeological Ontologies’ at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Southampton University in December 2008. He gave talks at St Cross College and to the Marlow Archaeological Society, and lectures at the Museum to groups from Leicester University, Bristol University, and the Royal College of Art.

Kate Jackson couriered the return of a loan from the National Maritime Museum, London in February 2009. In April, she attended the conference ‘Going Green: Toward Sustainability in Conservation’ hosted by the British Museum. In June, she participated in a one-day workshop ‘Building a Departmental Image Collection’ in Bristol. She took up the post of Secretary of the ICON Ethnographic Group, for which she is now helping to organize events. She also served as the Museum’s representative on the committee of the Oxford Conservators Group and helped organize their annual Christmas seminar hosted by the Museum. In preparation for the major collaborative Haida research visit in September 2009, she spent a week at the British Museum in July working with their collections and conservation teams.

Christopher Morton continued to hold the dual post of Head of Photograph and Manuscript Collections (60%) and Career Development Fellow (40%) The high level of demand from researchers and commercial licensees on the work of the collections continues to make managing this section on a part-time basis problematic. He completed the editing of two book manuscripts, ‘Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame’ (co-edited with Elizabeth Edwards), to be published by Ashgate in January 2010, and ‘Wilfred Thesiger in Africa’ (co-edited with Philip Grover), to be published in May 2010 by HarperCollins. He also published a further research article on Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer photography. He continued to make preparations (via a steering group composed of relevant staff members) towards the major exhibition ‘Wilfred Thesiger in Africa: A Centenary Exhibition’, due to open on 3 June 2010, and co-curated the exhibitions Carolyn Drake: Photographs of Central Asia and Across the Caucasus: Photographs and Manuscripts from the John F. Baddeley Collection, which both opened in May. He worked closely with the four staff members seconded to the section for the duration of the Museum’s closure, managing the cataloguing and digitization of a large number of collections. In March he hosted a visit by the Kenyan scholar Pius Cokumu, noted elsewhere in this report, and organized the associated workshop on East African projects. He arranged a talk by historian Jeffrey Green in January entitled ‘A Revelation in Strange Humanity: Six Congo Pygmies in Britain 1905–1907’. He co-convened the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series in Trinity Term with Jeremy Coote. He continued to contribute lectures to both the Material Anthropology & Museum Ethnography and Visual Anthropology degrees, and continued to supervise one doctoral student, who returned from fieldwork in September. In June and July he worked closely with Haas Ezzet and IT consultant Dan Burt on producing new versions of the photograph collections database that will incorporate images for the first time. Siân Mundell took over the post of Curatorial Assistant managing and supervising research visits to the Museum’s object collections (following Zena McGreevy’s secondment to the Ashmolean Museum). Following a research visit focused on the large collection of Japanese amulets from the Basil Hall Chamberlain collection, she continued to work on improving their storage and the Museum’s records. As part of this work, from January 2009 she supervised the work of volunteer Fusa McLynn who has been transcribing and translating the amuletic texts. With Julia Nicholson, she co-curated four new displays in the court.

Julia Nicholson continued to oversee the Museum’s loans programme and to serve as chair of the Museum’s Documentation Committee. A major part of her work this year was devoted to curating the four new permanent displays in the cases flanking the new platform, for which she worked with Sîan Mundell and Chris Wilkinson to create displays that echoed and complemented the well-known displays in the court on ‘Human Form in Art’, ‘Animal Form in Art’, and ‘Geometric Form in Art’. Drawing on the Museum’s very successful special exhibition from 2000, Transformations: The Art of Recycling, she also curated a new permanent display on ‘Recycling’, working with Elin Bornemann and Jon Eccles to create a vibrant new display adjacent to the Clore Learning Balcony. Following the reopening, she gave a number of talks to visiting groups on the themes of these new displays.

Michael O’Hanlon was occupied largely by fund-raising and administrative matters over the course of the year: within the Museum, in connection with Phase 2 of the Museum’s redevelopment, and fund-raising for it; within the University, in connection with a wide range of University working groups and committees; and beyond the University, in connection with the Renaissance programme, oversight of which has become more demanding as the level of funding awarded has risen, and with the University Museums Group’s national committee. He represented the Museum at meetings in Paris and Brussels of the EU-funded project on the future of ethnographic museums. He continued to teach on an occasional basis for the degree in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and examined a doctoral thesis for the University of Cambridge.

Laura Peers completed the process of enhancing the Museum’s database records following the major research visit to the Museum by members of the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures in 2008. She also started a Museum 3.0 discussion group on technology, source communities, and distance issues (entitled ‘Projects Linking Source Communities and Museums across Distance?’ at <http://museum30.ning.com/forum/ topics/projects-linking-source>). Towards the end of the year she began to prepare for the major research visit by members of the Haida Nation, which included arranging for all the Haida objects in the Museum’s collection to be photographed, thus providing a significant enhancement to the Museum’s records. These photographs have also been made publicly available on a Flickr site. She also set up an invited-member Facebook site for the Haida project to plan the visit and to do follow-up work. In Hilary Term she co-convened with Clare Harris the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology’s departmental seminar.

Alison Petch continued to work as Registrar and as a Researcher on the ESRC-funded ‘The Other Within’ project, focusing in particular on ensuring that the project website fully reflected the work carried out. This project was completed in March 2009. In April 2009, she began work on the project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum’, compiling statistical overviews of the collections for the visiting experts and other members of the project team and researching the various sources of the collections. With Chris Wingfield she co-convened the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series in Hilary Term. She presented a number of papers: ‘Total Immersion or Paddling? The Different Models of Fieldwork in Victorian Anthropology’ at the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar in January; ‘Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, the Pitt Rivers Museum and Folklore’, at ‘Collecting Folklore’ the annual conference of the Folklore Society in April; and ‘From the Homogeneous to the Heterogeneous: Categorising the Pitt-Rivers Collection in London, Oxford and Farnham’, at ‘Past versus Present’ a conference organized by the North American Victorian Studies Association and the British Association for Victorian Studies, held at Churchill College, Cambridge in July. In Bristol in April she attended the annual conference of the Museum Ethnographers Group, which she currently chairs, where she chaired a session and the AGM. In her role as Registrar, she continued to monitor the main collections management databases and to instruct new members of staff in their use. She contributed to University teaching by participating with Dan Hicks in one session of the ‘Material Culture and the Anthropology of Things’ seminar series and with Laura Peers in a session about museum databases and collections management data for the Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography course.

Heather Richardson continued to promote the work of the conservation department to visitors and to conduct object-handling sessions for staff and students. She supervised two conservation interns and one volunteer. Much of the year was spent ensuring the safety of the collections during the entrance redevelopment project and coordinating the conservation of objects selected for new displays. In early 2009 she undertook a six-day course at the Oxford Learning Institute and in June was awarded an Introductory Certificate in Management through the Chartered Management Institute. She also attended ‘Going Green’, a one-day seminar at the British Museum looking at sustainability in conservation, and a one-day seminar on risk management for museum collections in Birmingham. In May she presented a paper entitled ‘The Changing Face of Conservation at the Pitt Rivers Museum’ at the thirty- fifth annual conference of the Canadian Association for Conservation of Cultural Property in Vancouver (with financial assistance from the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Anna Plowden Trust). With Marina de Alarcón, she couriered the return of a major loan from Paris. She continued to serve as Honorary Treasurer of the Leather Conservation Centre.

Alice Stevenson joined the Museum in April 2009, from University College London, to take up the post of Researcher in World Archaeology on the project ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum’. In this role she began to co-ordinate a series of research visits by external specialists in various areas of archaeological expertise and contributed research into the profile of the museum’s archaeology collections, with particular reference to Egypt, for which she began to write a comprehensive account. During the year she gave talks to the Poynton Egypt Group, the Sussex Egyptology Society, and the Society for the Study of Ancient Egypt. In June she presented at the ‘Early Egypt’ study day at Birkbeck (University of London) and also welcomed a group of visiting curators from Egypt to the Museum as part of a British Museum programme. She continued to volunteer for the Egypt Exploration Society as a transcriber for their oral history project and by coordinating advertising for the Society’s bulletin Egyptian Archaeology. In Hilary Term she was elected to a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellow at St Cross College.

Antigone Thompson studied for and achieved an NVQ level 4 in accounting and was elected to the membership of the Association of Accounting Technicians.

Jeremy Uden continued to carry out practical conservation work towards the Museum’s new displays and for a busy loans schedule. During November he worked closely with Martin Hinchcliffe from the National Army Museum on the Museum’s collection of firearms and accessories. Also in November he couriered three stone axe-heads to the British Museum for analysis. In March he attended a workshop on Risk Management. In April he attended a seminar on ‘gap-filling’ for textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In May he couriered the return of a major loan from the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. During the year he served on the steering committee of a group based at Bradford University that aims to coordinate research into ivory. In relation to this he attended a workshop on ivory trading in June at the Horniman Museum. Also in June, he attended a seminar on ‘Conservation’s Catch 22’ at University College London, as well as attending a collections management trade fair in London.

Kate Webber attended a tourism familiarization tour, organized by the Tourist Information Centre and also attended several courses organized by the University, including ‘Introduction to Illustrator’ and ‘Dealing with Stress in Your Teams: A Course for Managers’. In November she attended a ‘Marketing for Fundraising’ day course for museums in the region. She completed the last unit of a Chartered Institute of Marketing course.

Kate White was fully occupied over the course of the year in assisting and advising on the public aspects of the entrance redevelopment project, and in the Museum’s successful re- opening. Pressures created by the reopening schedule and staff absences limited the time she had to pursue other aspects of her work, beyond undertaking the training offered to all staff on emergency response and child protection, attending the Museum & Heritage Show and associated seminars in May 2009, and attending a brief ‘Introduction to Podcasting’ session run by Oxford University Computing Services in June.

ST AFF PUBLICATIONS
Publications relating directly to the Museum’s collections are indicated by [*].
Helen Adams, ‘Iconic Additions to an Iconic Museum’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 64 (February 2009), p. 1. [*]
Helen Adams, ‘Old Faces, New Contexts: Romanian Images and Identity’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 64 (February 2009), p. 2. [*]
Isabelle Carré, ‘Gongs in the Proms’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 63 (October 2008), p. 5.
Jeremy Coote (collaborator), Cypriote Art in the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, by Vassos Karageorghis (in collaboration with Evanthia Baboula, Jeremy Coote, Marina de Alarcón, and Euphrosyne Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou), Nicosia: A. G. Leventis Foundation / Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2009). [*]
Jeremy Coote (with Marina de Alarcón), ‘A Brief History of the Ancient Cypriote Collections’, in Cypriote Art in the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, by Vassos Karageorghis (in collaboration with Evanthia Baboula, Jeremy Coote, Marina de Alarcón, and Euphrosyne Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou), Nicosia: A. G. Leventis Foundation / Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2009), pp. 15–20. [*]
Jeremy Coote (with Jill Salmons), ‘Mermaids and Mami Wata on Brassware from Old Calabar’, in Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora (African Expressive Cultures), edited by Henry Drewal, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press (2008), pp. 258–75. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Analysing the Activities of a 19th Century Collector’, The Leverhulme Trust Newsletter (April 2009), p. 8. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘New Collections’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 65 (June 2009), p. 5. [*]
Marina de Alarcón (collaborator), Cypriote Art in the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, by Vassos Karageorghis (in collaboration with Evanthia Baboula, Jeremy Coote,
Marina de Alarcón, and Euphrosyne Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou), Nicosia: A. G. Leventis Foundation / Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2009). [*]
Marina de Alarcón (with Jeremy Coote), ‘A Brief History of the Ancient Cypriote Collections’, in Cypriote Art in the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, by Vassos Karageorghis (in collaboration with Evanthia Baboula, Jeremy Coote, Marina de Alarcón, and Euphrosyne Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou), Nicosia: A. G. Leventis Foundation / Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2009), pp. 15–20. [*]
Eric Edwards, ‘Are These Jack’s Magic Beans?’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 63 (October 2008), p. 5. [*]
Eric Edwards, ‘A Fisherman’s “Lucky Stone” from Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, Northumberland’ and ‘The Miners’ Safety Lamp’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of England: The Other Within—Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2008–), online at <http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/>. [*]
Clare Harris, ‘The Creation of a Tibetan Modernist: The Painting of Gonkar Gyatso’, in Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader (Sensory Formations Series), edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Kaushik Bhaumik, Oxford and New York: Berg (2008), pp. 351–58. [Anthologized publication of material first published in 1999.]
Dan Hicks (with Gustav Milne, John Shepherd and Robin Skeates), Excavating the Archives: Archive Archaeology and the Higher Education Sector (Guidelines for Teaching and Learning, no. 7), London: Higher Education Funding Council for England (2009).
Dan Hicks (with Nigel Jeffries, Alastair Owens, Rupert Featherby, and Karen Wehner), ‘Rematerialising Metropolitan Histories? People, Places and Things in Modern London’, in Crossing Paths or Sharing Tracks? Future Directions in the Archaeological Study of Post- 1550 Britain and Ireland (The Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology, Monograph 5), edited by Audrey Horning and Marilyn Palmer, Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer (2009), pp. 323– 49.
Dan Hicks (with Andrea Bradley, Victor Buhli, Graham Fairclough, Janet Miller, and John Schofield), ‘Change and Creation: Historic Landscape Character, 1950–2000’, in The Heritage Reader, edited by Graham Fairclough et al., Abingdon: Routledge (2008), pp. 559– 66. [Anthologized publication of essay first published in 2004.]
Dan Hicks, Review of Stone Worlds: Narrative and Reflexivity in Landscape Archaeology, by Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton, and Chris Tilley (Walnut Creek, Calif, 2007), in American Antiquity, Vol. 74, no. 3 (2008) pp. 590–91.
Dan Hicks, Review of The English Landscape in the Twentieth Century, by Trevor Rowley (London, 2006), Landscapes, Vol. 8, no. 1 (2008), pp. 86–90.
Cara Krmpotich, ‘The Haida are Coming!’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 65 (June 2009), p. 3.
Kate Jackson, ‘New Views at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, ICON News, no 22 (May 2009), pp. 17–20. [*]
Kate Jackson, ‘Ingenious Intervention’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 64 (February 2009), p. 4. [*]
Zena McGreevy, ‘Stoolball: A Traditional English Game, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of England: The Other Within—Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2008–), online at <http://england.prm.ox. ac.uk/englishness-Stoolbat.html>. [*]
Andy McLellan, ‘The Pitt Rivers Education Service is Shut...’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 63 (October 2008), p. 4. [*]
Christopher Morton, ‘Fieldwork and the Participant-Photographer: E. E. Evans-Pritchard and the Nuer Rite of gorot’, Visual Anthropology, Vol. 22, no. 4 (2009), pp. 252–74. [*]
Michael O’Hanlon, ‘Foreword’, in Cypriote Art in the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, by Vassos Karageorghis (in collaboration with Evanthia Baboula, Jeremy Coote, Marina de Alarcón, and Euphrosyne Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou), Nicosia: A. G. Leventis Foundation / Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2009), p. 7. [*]
Laura Peers (with Alison K. Brown), ‘Colonial Photographs and Postcolonial Relationships: the Kainai–Oxford Photographic Histories Project’, in First Nations, First Thoughts: The Impact of Indigenous Thought in Canada, edited by Annis May Timpson, Vancouver: UBC Press (2009), pp. 123–44. [*]
Laura Peers, ‘On the Treatment of Dead Enemies: Indigenous Human Remains in Britain in the Early Twenty-First Century’, in Social Bodies, edited by Helen Lambert and Maryon McDonald, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books (2009), pp. 77–99.
Laura Peers, ‘“Almost True”: Peter Rindisbacher’s Early Images of Rupert’s Land, 1821– 26’, in Art History, Vol. 32, no. 3 (June 2009), pp. 516–44.
Alison Petch, ‘Votive Rags from St Helen’s Well, Thorp Arch near Boston Spa, West Yorkshire’, ‘A Dorset Hag Stone’, ‘Tankard and Trowel: Topping-Out at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, ‘One Catalogue Card and Four Photographs of the Aran Islands, Ireland’, ‘Henry Balfour in the Upper Gallery (1998.267.94.4)’, and ‘Casts of English Bell Marks’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of England: The Other Within—Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2008–), online at <http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/>. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Documentation of Artefacts in the Pitt Rivers Museum’, ‘English Folklorists’, ‘“A Science of Methods”: Ethnology, Ethnography, Anthropology—and Other Disciplines’, ‘Ethnographic Survey of the United Kingdom’, ‘Oxfordshire Artefacts’, ‘Pitt Rivers and Archaeology in England’, ‘English Artefacts Purchased for the Founding Collection and Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884–2008’, ‘Scrimshaw at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, ‘PRM Teaching Introduction’, and ‘The Study of Technologies and Materials at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, in the ‘Themed Articles’ section of England: The Other Within—Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2008–), online at <http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/>. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘The Changing Face of Conservation and the Pitt Rivers Museum’, in CAC 35th Annual Conference and Workshop, Vancouver 2009, no place: Canadian Association for Conservation, pp. 15–16; online at <http://www.cac-accr.ca/english/e-CAC- publications.asp>.
Imogen Simpson-Mowday, ‘Caul: A Sailor’s Charm’, in the ‘Object Biographies’ section of England: The Other Within—Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2008–), online at <http://england.prm. ox.ac.uk/englishness-sailors-charm.html>. [*]
Alice Stevenson, ‘Mace’, in UCLA Encyclopaedia of Egyptology, edited by Willeke Wendrick, Los Angeles: Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California at Los Angeles (2008); online at <http://escholarship.org/uc/item/497168cs>.
Alice Stevenson, ‘The Predynastic Cemeteries of Abydos’, Egyptian Archaeology, no. 34 (Spring 2009), pp. 25–6.
Melody Vaughan, ‘Making Totem Poles: A True Family Activity’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 63 (October 2008), p. 4. [*]
Chris Wingfield, ‘Estella Louisa Michaela Canziani (1887–1964)’ and ‘Finding the Key: The Parsons Collection’, in the ‘Themed Articles’ section of England: The Other Within— Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2008–), online at <http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/>. [*]

MUSEUM SEMINARS
17 October: Staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum, ‘Behind the Scenes at the Pitt Rivers Museum: Research and Other Projects’.
24 October: Layla Renshaw (University College London), ‘Memory, Materiality and Republican Mass Graves from the Spanish Civil War’.
31 October: Sarah Fraser (Northwestern University), ‘Photography and Anthropology in China’.
7 November: Brad Butler (Independent Filmmaker), ‘In Search of Structure’.
14 November: Michael McMillan (Middlesex University). ‘“A Living Room Surrounded by Salt”: Reflections on an Artist’s Residency in Curacao, Netherlands Antilles’.
21 November: Chris Evans (Cambridge Archaeological Unit), ‘Little Problems and Small Agencies: Darwin’s Archaeology’.
28 November: Patrizia Bassini (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford), ‘Identity Politics and Tibetan Dress Codes’.
5 December: Trevor Marchand (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), ‘The Social Politics of “Craft”’.
23 January: Alison Petch (Pitt Rivers Museum), ‘Total Immersion or Paddling? The Different Models of Fieldwork in Victorian Anthropology’.
30 January: Hilde Nielssen (University of Bergen), ‘James Sibree and Lars Dahle: Norwegian and British Missionary Ethnography as a Transnational and National Activity’.
6 February: Oliver Douglas (Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading), ‘Upstairs, Downstairs: The Materialization of Victorian Folklore Studies’.
13 February: Frances Larson (University of Durham), ‘The Politics of Theory at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1885–1900’.
20 February: Emma Cohen (Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, Oxford), ‘Animism and the “Tylorian Echoes” of Cognitive Anthropology’.
27 February: Katherine Cooper (University of Cambridge), ‘Hopelessly Entwined? Alpine Lake Dwellings and the Relationship of Anthropology to Archaeological Reconstructions of the Prehistoric Past in the Later Nineteenth Century’.
6 March: Sarah Byrne (University College London), ‘Rethinking the Relationship between Museums, Archaeology and Anthropology: Are Victorian Perspectives Valid Today?’.
13 March: Chris Wingfield (PRM), ‘Back to the Future? Locating and Re-locating England’.
1 May: ‘In and Out of Africa’ [showing of the classic documentary film about the African art market by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor, 1993].
8 May: Mira Sundara Rajan (Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia), ‘Moral Rights in Cultural Property’.
15 May: Carolyn Drake (Independent Documentary Photographer), ‘Photographs of Central Asia’.
22 May: Noel Lobley (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford), ‘Hugh Tracey and the International Library of African Music’.
5 June: Cara Krmpotich (PRM) and Laura Peers (PRM), ‘Haida Material Culture in British Museums: Generating New Forms of Knowledge—A Project Update
12 June: Christine Madsen (Oxford Internet Institute), ‘On Formats, Function, and Faith: What We Can Learn from Tibetan Digitization Projects’.
19 June: Elizabeth Willis (Museum Victoria), ‘Port Phillip Collecting: Encounters, Artefacts and Collectors in Victoria, 1835–1867’.

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 ADAM BUTCHER (CHAIRMAN)
A steady trickle of new members joined the Friends over the nine months that the Museum was closed during the year under review; contrary to fears, the number of subscriptions remained constant at around 300. The Council of the Friends approved a modest increase in the cost of subscriptions, the first for several years, to be phased in during 2009. The first- ever life member was signed up and, at the very enticing rate of £125, we hope for many more. The Friends’ ‘roll of honour’ was expanded to acknowledge distinguished and sustained support to the Museum and the Friends. Accordingly Deborah Kirkwood, Birgitte Speake, Felicity Wood, Cathy Wright, and Liz Yardley became honorary Friends.

A full programme of evening lectures continued with a typically varied range of topics—entertaining, erudite, personal, and even quirky by turn, and all deserving of bigger audiences than the usual turnout of fifteen to twenty-five people. As an addition to the monthly term-time lectures, we introduced the first of an occasional series of ‘Travellers’ Tales’, at which Friends present accounts of their own travels, followed by an informal supper. These have been successful and well supported, and we hope they will become a regular feature of our programme. The annual Kenneth Kirkwood Day is a highlight in the calendar, and Shahin Bekhradnia came up with another winner in March with ‘Magic Medicines: The Art of Healing’. Five lecturers provided talks on the theme with reference to Tibet, Central America, Bali, Tanzania, and China. The day was gratifyingly well attended and produced a worthwhile financial contribution to the Kenneth Kirkwood Fund.

The Friends’ Newsletter once again won the top award from the British Association of Friends of Museums in the category of associations with fewer than 500 members. The BAFM has to allow decent intervals between awarding us the prize, but there is no doubt that the reputation for quality of material and presentation established by contributors, editor, and designer make the Friends’ Newsletter a regular contender for honours.

Without access to the court or galleries, we could only invite limited numbers to a Christmas party in 2008, and we decided to give priority to newer members. As well as splendid refreshments, Friends provided a ‘Do-It-Yourself Alternative Museum’ with a multiple-choice quiz. This fell somewhat short of the scholarly and earnest standards of the Pitt Rivers, and while it seemed to gain approval as entertainment it was scarcely a substitute for the real thing. So the reopening of the Museum four months later was awaited with some excitement, and the actual event, presided over by Friends’ patron Sir David Attenborough, exceeded expectations.

The financial highlight of the year was the generous donation of more than £4,000 from the University Proctors’ fund, which brought receipts for the year to just over £13,000, in spite of a delay in receipt of the year’s gift aid refund. Sales of the Friends’ Cookbook since publication have exceeded 400 copies, and produced a cumulative surplus of £1,400. Expenditure came to £14,669, including the donation of £10,000 to the Museum’s development fund. The Friends also made a grant of £600 towards the cost of participation by the Museum’s Head of Conservation in a major event in Vancouver.

During the year Sally Odd, Linda Teasdale, and Margaret Dyke stood down as Treasurer, Minutes Secretary, and Secretary respectively. The Friends owe them a great debt of gratitude for service beyond the call of duty. We welcomed Laura Manifold (Treasurer) and Alison Boulton to the Council. We were also happy to announce that Felicity Wood agreed to become President. The organization and the activities of the Friends depend entirely on hundreds of hours of dedicated and unpaid work on the part of Council members and other supporters, and our heartfelt thanks are due to them all for another successful year.