'The Pitt Rivers Museum derives its name and its method of arrangement
from its founder, Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt
Rivers'
[Blackwood, 1970: frontispiece]
This is a brief outline of the Pitt Rivers Museum's history in Oxford from 1884 when the founding collection first arrived, until the present day (late 1990s) when there are nearly half a million objects. This section consists of quotations from several Museum publications which are on sale from the Museum bookshop and by mail-order (see bibliography for further information). Copyright for these is still held by the Museum and permission to quote them again should be obtained from the Museum.
Quite quickly after the Pitt Rivers collection had transferred from the Bethnal Green branch to the main South Kensington Museum in 1878, Pitt Rivers became anxious to find a permanent home for it 'where it could be shown to advantage and enlarged as opportunity might arise, so in 1883 he offered the collection in its entirety to the University of Oxford. He made two stipulations, which were incorporated in the Deed of Gift. The first was that a building should be provided to house the collection and not used for any other purpose; the second, that a person should be appointed to lecture on the subjects of the Museum. The University accepted the offer, a constructed a large building adjoining the University Museum on its eastward side. This is still our main building, though the collections have far outgrown it. The other stipulation was met by the appointment of Edward Burnett Tylor, who thus became the first Lecturer in Anthropology in Britain and, incidentally, was the first ethnologist to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society' (Blackwood, 1970:10).
'Construction on the building began in the summer of 1885. It was the work of the Dublin-based architect T.N. Deane, whose father had provided the basic designs for the University Museum [to which the PRM is attached]. There were endless discussions about how to keep the costs down and the final result is sound, if inevitably pedestrian. The most interesting feature, architecturally, is the cast iron work which was very much a pioneering development of the time, as witnessed in the Crystal Palace and the great railway stations. The problem of the early years must have been truly daunting. The 15,000 [now thought to be 20,000 or so] objects in the founding collection arrived in Oxford before the completion of the building work and had to be stored in various scattered locations. Important new material was already being added by such donors as Heinrich Schliemann, E.H. Man and Arthur Evans ...' (Cousins, 1993:9) '
'There being, at the time of [Pitt Rivers'] offer, no ethnological department in the University (and man being a mammal!) the collection was put in charge of Professor H.N. Moseley, Head of the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy. Moseley asked one of his lecturers, Walter Baldwin Spencer, and Henry Balfour, both recent graduates in Zoology, to help with the task of packing the collection at South Kensington and unpacking it on its arrival at Oxford early in 1884. Shortly afterwards, Spencer left [to go to Australia where he would become one of the best known of all Australian anthropologists,] ... Balfour continued to help in the arrangement in its new home, and acted as Assistant to Tylor until, in 1891, at Tylor's suggestion, he was elected Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum'. (Blackwood, 1970: 11)
Construction on the museum building started in the early summer
of 1885 and was completed by the end of 1886. To supervise the
work in London and Oxford, Moseley depended upon Walter Baldwin
Spencer (later to become a famous anthropologist and zoologist
in Australia) and Henry Balfour. Initially Balfour was engaged
for a year to:
'assist .. in arranging and labelling the Pitt Rivers Anthropological
Collection for about a year ... making little drawings, writing
and typing on very neat labels, writing catalogue descriptions,
arranging things in cases, mending and patching and cleaning,
helping a carpenter fix things on screens, looking up objects
of all kinds in illustrated books, Cooks travels etc ...'
(Pitt Rivers Archives, Balfour collection, Letter from HN Moseley
to H Balfour dated 11th October 1885)
Not only had all this wealth of material to be organised, catalogued and put on display, but Balfour had to achieve this without any proper space in which to work on the collections, no such provision having been made in the original design. At first the Lower Gallery served as his office, design studio and workshop while the other sections of the displays were opened to the public as they were more or less completed. By 1888, the Upper Gallery was open in the afternoons, the Court followed in 1890 and finally the Lower Gallery in 1892... Although [Pitt Rivers] formally opened the museum in April 1891 he took little interest in it after that date. (Cousins, 1993:10)
'... [The Museum's] teaching activities [are] an integral part of the University Department of Ethnology and Prehistory [now School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography]. (Blackwood, 1970:14)
In the eighty-five years of its existence [until 1970] the Museum's collections have increased from approximately fifteen thousand specimens in the General's original gift [now thought to be more like 20,000], to well over a million [recent audits have suggested that this total is a gross over-estimate, the total number of objects, including photographs and manuscripts in the Archives, is more likely to be around half a million] ...
[One of the earliest and most important transfers from another department of the University of Oxford to the PRM was that of part of the Ashmolean Museum's holdings] In 1886 the then Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, wishing to concentrate on Archaeology, and needing space for exhibition and expansion, decided, with the concurrence of the University authorities, to transfer to the Pitt Rivers Museum all the Ashmolean's ethnological exhibits, with certain important exceptions such as the Tradescant collection. It was thus that [the Museum] obtained the Cook collection, consisting of a number of specimens from the Pacific Islands collected during Captain Cook's second voyage (1772 - 1775) ... Another large donation was the c17,000 amulets and charms given by the Wellcome Collection in 1985.
Throughout its history, the Museum has followed the arrangement
initiated by its Founder, with some modifications dictated by
experience and the growth of the collections. The kind of information
to be obtained from this system was thus explained by T.K. Penniman
in his Annual Report to the University for the academic year 1952-1953:
'The arrangement of large collections by subjects, with the areas
in which objects are found as sub-groups within them, the original
idea of General Pitt Rivers, sometimes displays the geographical
variation of an art or industry, or the diffusion of an art or
a technique over a wide area, or the origin and development of
an instrument, process, art or industry, and on occasion may simply
set out a complete technical process in the areas in which it
is found, or, again, show a classification of all forms which
a particular instrument or object may take.' (Blackwood, 1970:
14 - 16)
The main museum record-keeping system has always centred on the accessions register in which all incoming artefacts have been entered, together with the name of the collector, donor and/or vendor and associated documentation. These registers were begun as soon as the founding collection reached the Museum. The need to index the information was soon recognized, and the work of compiling comprehensive Regional and Subject card indexes was undertaken by Penniman and his colleagues during ... the Second World War ... Some earlier indexes were incorporated, including E.S. Thomas's beautifully illustrated cards for the Naga collections from [India].... The card index, now contained in 473 file drawers, occupied most of Beatrice Blackwood's working days from 1939 until her death in 1976 and is still, despite the introduction of [computerised] data retrieval system in 1986, in daily use by museum staff ... The Museum finally entered the computer age in 1986. All new accessions, including Archives, are now entered in a database and gradually the older collections are also being added. Beatrice Blackwood's classification [published under the title The Classification of Artefacts in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford], with minor amendments, still provides the basis of the terminology. The benefits in terms of information retrieval and cross-referencing are already evident. (Jones, 1991: 9 - 11)
Questions are sometimes asked about the scope and range of the collections. The Museum takes the world for its province, and for its period, from the earliest times to the present day, excluding the results of mass production.' (Blackwood, 1970:15 - 16) 'The Pitt Rivers Museum has always made a practice of collecting 'ordinary, and typical specimens', although it also possesses many objects of rarity, beauty, and value. Again, and as a corollary of this, it has always exhibited far more specimens in a showcase than modern museum technique would consider necessary or desirable. As a teaching Museum we have always maintained that students should see enough in any exhibition to enable them to make up their own minds about it, rather than a few special objects picked out for them. To some visitors, this gives an impression of over-crowding, but most like it. The remark has often been made to members of the staff: 'I enjoy coming here, because I always find something I haven't seen before.' ... (Blackwood, 1970:8)