ENGLAND: THE OTHER WITHIN

Lithic collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum

Alison Petch,
Researcher 'The Other Within' project

One of the more surprising discoveries during the statistical analysis of the composition of the collections carried out as part of the ESRC funded Relational Museum project was the overwhelming numerical domination of weapons and especially tools, and most particularly stone tools and weapons. This categorisation includes not only all forms of stone tools, but also arrow-heads, spear-heads, club-heads, axes and gunflints. It encompasses both archaeological objects (that is, historical or pre-historical artefacts, mostly obtained from amateur or professional archaeological digs) and ethnographic artefacts (that is, still in use by the culture that made them when they were collected in the field).

Global lithic collections
There were a total of 48,968 stone tools collected between 1884 and the end of 1945 out of a total of 179,765 artefacts of all kinds. By July 2005 there were 79,331 out of a total of 289,429. That is, over a quarter of all the objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum in July 2005 were stone tools. Taking lithics as a whole there were a total of 94,154 in July 2005, a third of all artefacts were tools and weapons made of stone.

Lithics had obviously been acquired throughout the Museum’s history but here is a graph showing a detailed breakdown of the pattern of acquisition for every decade of the Museum's history.

The stone tools and weapons were acquired from all over the globe:

	Lithics July 2005	All objects as at July 2005	Lithics as a % of overall collections from that continent
Africa	25,497	86,324	29.5
Americas	4,488	28,061	15.9
Asia	14,341	69,113	20.7
Australia	16,293	18,975	85.8
Europe	28,355	68,246	41.5
Oceania	2,696	20,491	13.1
Unknown	202	1,728	11.6

Some continents are over-represented in the stone tool collections (Australia and Europe) as opposed to the collections seen as a whole, and others are under-represented (the Americas, Asia and Oceania).

European archaeological stone tools and weapons

Country	Total number of stone tools and weapons	Arch.	Ethno.	Arch. or Ethno.
Albania	63	0	62	1
Belgium	212	205	7	0
Bosnia Herzegovina	42	0	42	0
Cyprus	5	5	0	0
Czech Republic	1	1	0	0
Denmark	450	446	2	2
France	3,408	3,331	77	0
Germany	84	63	0	21
Greece	57	57	0	0
Hungary	10	10	0	0
Iceland	19	18	1	0
Ireland	37	37	0	0
Italy	306	267	22	17
Malta	29	29	0	0
Montenegro	4	0	4	0
Norway	36	28	8	0
Poland	13	13	0	0
Portugal	2	0	2	0
Russia	2	2	0	0
Serbia	1	0	1	0
Spain	50	22	20	8
Sweden	74	74	0	0
Switzerland	180	171	9	0
UK	22,956	22,058	586	312
UK or Ireland	289	288	1	0
Ukraine	1	0	1	0
Vatican City	8	0	8	0
Europe, not exactly provenanced	123	103	20	0

Please note that some artefacts are provenanced to more than one European country and there is therefore an element of double-counting in the table above which cannot be avoided. There are no stone tools or weapons from Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Gibraltar, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco, The Netherlands, Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia. Note that some items were provenanced as coming either from the UK or from Ireland but not clearly from either so a separate category has been created for these. It will be seen how the UK stone tools dominate the European collections of stone tools and weapons in the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Unfortunately relatively little detailed cataloguing has been carried out of the European stone tools but the following data gives an idea of the sort of categories of types of things included:

Type of object	Number of European objects
Stone arrow-heads	1,173
Stone spear-heads	37
Stone arrow-heads or Spear-heads	57
Stone club heads	4
Gunflints	580
Stone axe-heads	1,322
Unspecifically classified stone tools	25,182

Although museum staff had always been aware of the large number of lithics in the collections, stone tools and weapons had never physically dominated the displays of collections as they appear to do statistically. There appears to have been relatively few specific displays of stone tools and technology in the museum’s history (though there were some in the now dismantled hunter and gatherer displays up to the late 1990s at the Balfour Building (now closed) curated by Ray Inskeep). There also used to be an exhibition of stone tool technology in the Upper Gallery of the main Museum, probably based on that created by Francis Knowles before 1950, but that has now been dismantled.

English stone tool collections
Stone tools are an important and sizeable part of the overall Pitt Rivers Museum's collections, and what is true for the collections as a whole is also true for the English collections in the Museum. Stone tools represent over a quarter of the entire collections in the Museum and over one in three of every English object is a stone tool (actually 39.4 per cent). Here are the most important counties in descending order:

County	number of stone tools only	% of all English stone tools (15,786)
Oxfordshire	3,242	20.5
Suffolk	1,999	12.6
Wiltshire	1,832	11.6
Bedfordshire	1,612	10.2
Surrey	1,150	7.2
Hampshire and Isle of Wight	1,109	7
Kent	963	6.1
All Sussex	940	5.9
Norfolk	614	3.8
London [Greater]	491	3.1
All Yorkshire	482	3
Devon	369	2.3
Dorset	193	1.2
Somerset	166	1
Essex	160	1

There are also objects from Berkshire, Bristol, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Greater Manchester, Hertfordshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Middlesex, Northamptonshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire but these form less than one per cent of the English stone tool collections in the Pitt Rivers Museum each.

NB this table does not include stone weapons or stone tools or weapons (where use is not certain)

Note that this information was prepared post 2005, at the start of the Other Within research project.

Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers' stone tool collection

93 per cent of Pitt Rivers' archaeological collections donated to the University of Oxford were from Europe. Around half of these were excavated or field collected by him.

Looking just at stone tools and weapons (that might be archaeological or ethnographic ie that might have been made historically or more or less contemporaneously with the collection):

Total number of definite stone tools donated by PR = 2,877
Total number of definite stone weapons donated by PR = 231
Total numbers of items that might have been either weapons or tools made from stone donated by PR = 1,611
Total number of definite stone tools donated by PR from England = 1,435
Total number of definite stone weapons donated by PR from England = 26
[Statistics produced from live PRM collections management database as at 3.11.2008]

From which it can be seen that nearly half of all stone tools donated by Pitt Rivers are from England, but that only just over a tenth of stone weapons donated by Pitt Rivers are from that country. Of the 1,435 stone tools from England, 839 are thought to have been excavated or field collected by Pitt Rivers (more than half).

The quality of the stone tools and weapons collection documentation
Almost all museum objects are acquired with some accompanying documentation. The quality of this documentation obviously varies: it is the experience of the Pitt Rivers Museum that usually the quality depends largely upon whether the item has been obtained directly from the field collector (or, for many of the stone tools and weapons, the archaeologist) or via a secondary collector (that is, a dealer or another source). Another factor which also generally affects the quality of accompanying documentation is the period when the object was acquired, the most recently acquired objects generally (but not always) being better and more fully documented.

In general, stone tools are amongst the worse catalogued types of objects in the collections. There are a good number of collections which just give a vague provenance (or maybe even a more detailed one, though most often lacking stratigraphical precision) and then say something to the effect of 'A number of stone tools / flakes / flakes or cores'. For all these uncertainly numbered objects guesstimates have had to be added to the statistics and it is these that are used to get the figures given above (together with other properly accessioned stone tools). This means that some figures connected with stone tools are at best an estimate and at worse a complete guess that might be wholly inaccurate. This should be borne in mind when drawing any firm conclusions from the figures. A good number of the poorly provenanced or documented stone tools come from secondary collectors but some come from amateur archaeologists, and in others the reason for the uncertainty is due to the fact that detailed cataloguing of the collections has not yet been carried out. Many of the earliest collected stone tools were of course collected prior to the archaeological discipline being established and when expectations of fully documented objects (of any kind) are sure to be dashed.

Although there is some latitude in the level of documentation which makes an object useful to modern day visitors or researchers, it is true to say that the better a museum object is documented the more useful it is. On this criterion alone, many of the stone tools would sadly fail the test.