The Pitt Rivers Museum Upper Gallery Displays (weaponry displays, including shields)
Shields from the Molucca Islands, on display in the Upper
Gallery, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
The Upper Gallery of the Museum has always been used to display weapons of various kinds. It first opened in 1888 when visitors could attend in the afternoons only. There is a photograph of Henry Balfour sitting in the Upper Gallery that shows these early displays, the weapons hang in single layers against the wall and are arranged in series. Another extant photograph that shows the early weapons displays is a portrait of Henry Balfour and the first students to study in the Museum:
The weapons displays appeared to change little from the time Balfour had first arranged them until 1974 when work started on new displays for the north side of the Gallery. During the 1970s the Gallery was disrupted by the need to provide additional storage for musical instruments. In 1989-90 it was first agreed that there should be a major refurbishment of the south and part of the west sides of the Gallery. This exercise has just been completed in May 1995.
Funding for the improvements was obtained from a variety of sources, the Museums and Galleries Improvements Fund (the joint Wolfson/OAL Initiative [administered by the Museums and Galleries Commission]), Hulme Fund, Rhodes Trust, Rudolf Wolff Trust, Michael Marks Trust, Donald Kahn and Michael Palin's Playhouse benefit performance. Small sums were also obtained from other sources. A total in excess of £100,000 was eventually obtained and used to purchase materials, provide a new lighting system, carpet the circulation spaces and fund additional members of staff to carry out the curatorial/research, technical and conservation work associated with the new displays.
The museum has always carried out its work with the minimum of staff since the days of Balfour and his two paid assistants. Although staffing levels have improved slightly since those days, a project of the size of the Upper Gallery refurbishment would have placed intolerable burdens on staff without additional support. To give an idea of the additional workload, the total length of the cases in which the new displays are sited is eighty metres and it constitutes nearly half of the total Upper Gallery display area.
By February 1991 it had been agreed that spears and harpoons, clubs, shields and a separate case of hunting and fishing material should be displayed. A revised stone technology display, a separate display of Naga shields and a revamp of the existing display of Naga spears were also included. A new display of an assortment of Naga weapons, on the stairs leading to the Gallery, acts as a visual introduction to the displays was also provided.
It had also been agreed that there should be two cultural displays on the South Side of the Gallery, which showed objects from particular cultures in context: one for Naga material, the other for Nuer and Dinka. This was a change to the predominantly typological displays that had previously been shown in the Gallery but not a new development in the Museum as a whole as there were other displays which were broadly arranged on a cultural or geographical basis - for example, the Bunyoro case in the Lower Gallery or the North American clothing case in the Court.
Objects collected in the Naga Hills by J.H. Hutton and J.P. Mills (amongst others) form probably the largest single cultural collection in the Museum. Photographs taken in the Naga Hills by U.V.G. Betts and Mrs M. Ganguli which were used to illustrate the case. Although there is a great number of Naga objects elsewhere in the Museum this case allows a wide selection of objects to be shown, including weapons.
The Nuer and Dinka of the Southern Sudan are among the most studied peoples in Africa. The Nuer, in particular, are closely linked in the many peoples' mind with E.E. Evans-Pritchard, whose object and photograph collections are held by the Museum. Besides the use of some photographs of Evans-Pritchard, permission was obtained to display some more recent photographs taken in the area by Stephen and Alison Cobb during the 1980s. Together with the Evans-Pritchard objects, a more recent collection of Nuer and Dinka objects by Miss Patti Langton, with some donated by Major Powell Cotton and others, were shown.
Because the Pitt Rivers Museum has now accessioned around half a million objects and has less than 4000 sq. m of public space available for display (excluding the Balfour Building), there has always been immense pressure on space. Although the cases allocated to each type of weapon and each cultural area might initially seem large, it was, in fact, only possible to show a small selection of the total Museum collection in each case. An example of this might be the spear case. Spears are difficult to display densely as, almost by definition, they are all long but thin. However, the spear display (which includes spear- throwers, spear-heads, archaeological specimens, harpoons etc) has a total of 263 objects displayed in a total display case area of 35 sq m. There are at least 3,500 spear- and harpoon-related items in the collection, which gives an idea of the number that could not be fitted into the display and are still in the Museum store.
Problems were exacerbated, for all of the weapon displays, by the fact that they span the circulation space and each include a large wall case, shallow desk cases and a thin vertical display over the desk cases. The wall cases are over sixty centimetres deep and therefore favour a layered display whereas the vertical and desk cases are shallow and cannot be used to display bulky objects. The potential height of many of the wall cases was reduced to provide much needed storage space. Each case suited a different shaped object but this did not always match the available material! For the spear case the shape of almost all the objects was fairly uniform, only the length varied considerably. This made the selection and display of them very difficult. The longest spear selected was over three metres, the shortest a little under a metre. In the end the spears and harpoons were mainly displayed in the wall case whilst the shallow desk and vertical cases were used to display spear-heads, spear-throwers, and archaeological artefacts and shorter spears.
The actual selection and display work followed fairly standard museum practice. The objects were selected from the reserve store (where all such weapons were then located) using the following criteria:-
a) to illustrate all types of the weapons, as permitted by the scope of the collections;
b) to select items from all areas of the world;
c) to highlight any strengths of the collection.
The objects were then brought back to the Museum, numbered and documented where necessary, photographed and sent to Conservation. At least 80% of the selected artefacts required documentation. A companion guide for the Upper Gallery was prepared (Petch 1994). The Upper Gallery displays are complemented by a selection of prints of photographs from the Museum's Archives showing weapons and hunting and fishing from Australia, New Guinea, Central Asia and Nagaland.
Australian shields on display in the Upper Gallery of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
The above section is based upon part of a talk given by Alison Petch to the Museum Ethnographers' Group, and later published in Journal of Museum Ethnography (Petch 1996).
