Progress Reports Index

Progress Report 6: April - end August 2012

2012-05-01T15:24:15+00:00

This is the final progress report of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project.

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This progress report records activity during this six month period of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project.

Much of the final six months has been spent writing the monograph which is (one of) the major outcomes of the project. A first draft was completed in April 2012 but now the serious work began, discussing, re-arranging, re-wording, editing, researching and revising. A date for the publication of this monograph has not yet been set, but information will be added to the website as this becomes clearer.

Jeremy continued his year of working on the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project 'full-time'. He had written a successful application to the University's Fell Fund for a new research project, involving the researcher and himself, to run from September 2012 for one year. This project will look at the early years of museum anthropology at Oxford, particularly concentrating on the archival holdings of the University for Acland, Rolleston and Tylor among others. Jeremy was also supposed to be considering and revising the several outputs drafted by Alison during the last six months.

Sue Johnson's second exhibition of works related to Cambridge University Library's catalogue of Pitt-Rivers' second collection continued until June 2012. After the exhibition closed it was still possible to purchase copies of Sue's images, see here.

The project was exceedingly lucky to get more new volunteers / interns to work with the project: Christa Gray, and Farah Qureshi who worked on transcribing the library catalogue (this work will be completed by the end of 2012). Peter Rivière continued to do interesting research which was disseminated via the website.

On 21 April 2012, Alison Petch gave a 'spotlight' talk in the Museum to visitors on London, Oxford, Farnham: the collections of Pitt-Rivers. A week later she led a question and answer session for the Education guides of the Museum on Pitt-Rivers collection and the early history of the Pitt Rivers Museum.

At the end of May 2012 Alison Petch led a group of Pitt Rivers Museum Friends, including many of the students from the M.St course at the museum and other members of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project team, on a visit to many of the places associated with Pitt-Rivers including Sandroyd School (better known to us as Rushmore), Larmer Tree Gardens and a visit to the exterior of Farnham Museum. The group also visited the Pitt-Rivers' displays at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, kindly hosted by Adrian Green and toured its current exhibition, appositely about Cranborne Chase (and well worth the visit on its own). Two weeks later Rachel McGoff and Alison Petch returned to the area to visit Pitt-Rivers' memorial at Tollard Royal and take some photographs which are available on this site.

Between August and October 2012 a new temporary display of objects related to one of Pitt-Rivers' most famous set of objects - the set of paddles that he used to show the evolution of design in Evolution of Culture - was shown in the Lower Gallery of the Pitt Rivers Museum. The exhibition was organized by Jeremy Coote and the exhibition labels were prepared by Alison and Jeremy. The displays were designed by Alan Cooke and Chris Wilkinson, Pitt Rivers Museum technicians.

There was a display of newly acquired manuscript and photographic collections illustrating Pitt-Rivers' life and work between his childhood and his death in 1900 in the Archives case on the Lower Gallery entrance area adjacent to the lift in the main Museum from 10 September 2012 until January 2013. The display was designed by Adrian Vizor, another PRM technician, and co-curated by Jeremy and Chris Morton, Curator of Photographic and Manuscript Collections.

The project website continued to attract new visitors. There was a new monthly record for RPR website visitors of 5,000 in July 2012, almost double that at the same month in 2011 and beating the previous monthly record (set in February 2012) by 11%. More than 60,000 visitors have visited the website since figures began to be kept (November 2009). It is hoped that the number of figures will continue to rise after the project has been completed, especially once the database interface was changed (during August 2012). After that each of the objects from the founding and second collection listed there will generate specific google-searchable urls / webpages meaning that searches on specific objects / types of objects anywhere in the world will find objects from these collections in the search results. It is hoped this will greatly increase footfall to the site. We have had consistently good (unsolicited) feedback from users about the site though no specific feedback has been actively sought. Judging by the correspondence that all research team members have received, generated by the content of the website, the placing of raw data onto a website is a very effective way of reaching fellow scholars with useful information to share.

Alison spent the final weeks of the project tweaking and enhancing the project website. Although new contributions from the team and other researchers continued to be received throughout the period in question (and will continue to do so after the end of the project, to a lesser extent) all new data will continue to be added to the website so that the website can continue to be a vibrant and changing reflection of scholarship about Pitt-Rivers, his life and work.

AP April - August 2012

Progress Report 5: September 2011 - April 2012

2011-10-18T12:37:04+00:00

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This progress report records activity during this six month period of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project.

The final year of the project began at the beginning of September 2011. During this year the core project team intends to concentrate on writing the project monograph, and also complete other outcomes.

Alison investigated the Pitt-Rivers' workbooks WORK 39/1-16 held by the National Archives, copies of which can be downloaded here, and added content to this website from the workbooks where this seemed appropriate. Rather to her surprise there was a section relating to the photography course taken by Tomkin, discussed here, which alluded to the photography of objects which was extremely relevant to the consideration of why the CUL catalogue of the second collection was so well illustrated.

Jeremy started his year of working on the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project 'full-time'. He concentrated on ensuring that he was familiar with all the necessary reading in September and October whilst also thinking about the overall shape of the monograph and the draft proposal to the prospective publisher, drafting future applications to obtain grants further the research, and preparing text for Sue Johnson's 2012 exhibition etc etc.

During September and October 2011 Alison worked on a number of different aspects of final writing-up. She drafted two /three publications (which may be published by the Pitt Rivers Museum) of some of Pitt-Rivers's seminal works together with one (or possibly two) volumes of selected writings by others about Pitt-Rivers in his publications. Aside from Bowden's biography there have been few full-length publications about Pitt-Rivers recently and many of the shorter publications by the project team and others are disseminated through a myriad of sources. It would be helpful to museum visitors and today's scholars to make these publications more accessible. It is also believed that there would be a market for a publication of Pitt-Rivers writings, tentatively titled 'Evolution, Material Culture and Museums'. This should hopefully include two lectures by him which have never been published before which are held by the Salisbury and Wiltshire Museum Pitt-Rivers papers. The contents of all these volumes need to be considered in much more detail and also discussed with the original publishers / copyright holders before the final decision to publish can be taken. Further progress on these publications may not be possible before the end of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project, because of other priorities.

In addition, Alison drafted the first rough draft of the monograph based upon her research and arranged in sequence to fit the overall shape of the monograph agreed with Jeremy. This was considered in detail by Jeremy and Alison and Jeremy agreed how the re-writing and addition material should be structured and written. Jeremy began work on the draft chapter for the publishers.

Alison also drafted papers with Jeremy for the Journal of the History of Collections, the Journal of Museum Ethnography, and Pacific Arts and African Arts. It is hoped that all of these papers can be completed in the remaining months together with the monograph.

Sue Johnson's second exhibition of works related to Cambridge University Library's catalogue of Pitt-Rivers' second collection opened on 24 January 2012. The booklet for Sue Johnson' exhibition was written by Jeremy Coote with Sue. It is lavishly illustrated with Sue's paintings and is for sale in the museum shop. Sue travelled from America to attend the exhibition's official opening, which was also attended by a wide cross-section of Sue's and RPR associates. The exhibition has featured as one of the Oxford Times' highlights of the week. It is possible to purchase copies of Sue's images, see here.

Whilst Sue was in England, Jeremy, Alison and Sue travelled to Cambridge University Library to examine the 9 volumes of the catalogue in detail. They were fortunate enough to be offered work space where they could discuss the volumes in the manuscripts reading room, which enabled them to make several new discoveries about the illustrations. Jeremy and Alison intend to carry out one last trip to see the volumes where they hope to have the advice of CUL conservation staff about how the volumes were constructed (whether the drawings were done on separate sheets of paper and then bound, or drawn into already bound books).

Jeremy Coote has been in regular contact with Anthony Pitt-Rivers throughout the project, he has been very helpful in loaning and donating Pitt-Rivers' related material. He donated a large number of workbooks of Pitt-Rivers, notes of his reading, and other interesting scholarly notebooks. Amongst these, the project team was most excited to find the earliest documentation for the founding collection that has been identified to date--a list of the weapons collections as at August 1862, he also donated two new photographic portraits of his ancestor. He loaned three photo albums of the Rushmore estate and Farnham Museum. The project team is profoundly grateful to Anthony Pitt-Rivers for his generosity in loaning and donating items to the museum for the project team to examine.

The Cambridge University Library manuscript department scanned and sent copies of the library catalogue for Pitt-Rivers, which is very useful for seeing what works he read and was influenced by.

It is hoped that a second project workshop will be arranged and held between January and June 2012, its theme is still uncertain.

The project was exceedingly lucky to get 3 new volunteers / interns to work with the project:

Venya da Silva, a M.Phil student from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology who helped proofread and also began research on a collection of Sri Lankan figures from the founding collection.

Kathy-Anne Hughes (known as Gabrielle) a Rhodes Scholar in Art History, who helped complete the proofreading and who began research on the Canadian objects in the founding collection, specifically two model canoes.

Martha Ellis Leach from the History of Art Department undertook to look at the the Pitt-Rivers family art catalogue.

An old volunteer very kindly resumed work for the project in her final year. Rachel McGoff researched into the Oriental collections of Pitt-Rivers, which will the subject of her third year undergraduate thesis and also (hopefully) will prepare several web pages for the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers website.

Peter Rivière continued to do interesting research which will be disseminated via the website.

AP October 2011-March 2012

Report about MEG Conference 2011

2011-05-11T15:04:06+00:00

This report was written by Jenny Walklate on behalf of the Museum Ethnographers Group and can also be found on the MEG blog, and website, see here. We are grateful to MEG for allowing us to reproduce it.

MEG Conference 2011 “Objects and Words”

By Jenny Walklate
School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester

It is hard to believe that it has been a year since The Museum of Rural Life welcomed MEG to Reading, and that this time last year I was a first time conference presenter and new PhD student still trying to find my feet. Having found the whole experience initially terrifying, but ultimately immensely enjoyable and fulfilling, I was excited to have the opportunity to attend once more, but wondered what difference a year would have made, in the world of MEG as well as my own. Would this conference, held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, prove that MEG could weather the storms and vicissitudes of contemporary life, and build upon the conferences that have come before? I certainly hoped so.

There was no need to worry. The organization of proceedings was second to none, for which we must thank Alison Petch, Jeremy Coote, and the various session chairs. The catering from Morton's was wonderful, if rather ironically mislabelled, and the staff at the Museum were highly accommodating. The Pitt Rivers, a microcosm of museal history which is itself filled with worlds, is highly individualistic and innovative in its outlook and approach to museological activity. Thus it provided the perfect setting for this group of diverse individuals to come together to discuss words, things and ideas, surrounded by the dreaming spires of a place already host to almost infinite possibilities. The first MEG conference of 1975 was held here, and organised largely by the much missed Peter Gathercole, whose death in the last year gives the location of the conference a singularly bittersweet appropriateness.

But MEG is an organization able to mourn the loss of a part of its history, whilst still retaining a faith in its future. Though it has seen other traumas, including the hacking of its website, and faces, along with other cultural institutions, future financial uncertainty, this conference proves that the organization has the capacity to weather such storms. It seems hopeful, then, that the conference saw the launch of the organization's new identity and web presence. Conference packs, banners, and publicity materials, designed by Z3, will allow MEG to retain a sense of professional selfhood which will see it in good stead for the future. Plus, it's pretty. The website, for which we must thank Chris Wingfield and Dan Burt will encourage the online community surrounding MEG to grow, and for new participants to develop their voices. I hope to see the Facebook statistics increase even more rapidly than they did in the two days we were there. At the time of writing, it has been 'liked' 80 times, and I think you'll agree that that's not bad.

Moving on from technological and artistic wizardry, it's time to focus on the academic business of the conference itself. Day one was filled with language, 'Old,' 'Collectors',' and 'Curators'' Words providing the three session groupings for a highly stimulating set of discussions. Sally Ayres showed how we should use multiple sources from which to glean our words, that these were often translations of the words of others, and that from these words we can gain information not only regarding objects but of those writing about them. In the presentation of stunningly beautiful South African rock paintings, Patricia Davidson highlighted the limitations of labelling, and interpretation, particularly with objects which are so enigmatic and ambiguous. This ambiguity was picked up in the mistaken identities and false inscriptions of the Australian Toas so enjoyably articulated by Philip Jones. Philip's paper formed a perfect segue into the second session 'Collector's Words,' for Katjia Muller also proved that errors, accidental and deliberate, have a significant impact upon how the collection items, and collectors themselves, are understood, and that we have to use multiple sources if we are to gain as full an image of a collection as possible. As Ann French's discussion of the collection of Greek embroidery by Dawkins and Wace indicated, the influences which build collections also build the words written around them, and the institutional treatment of historic words complicates this situation further. Furthermore, as Ana Rita Amaral's pot lids and Vibha Joshi's cloths showed, objects can act as 'words,' if this term is understood as meaning 'tools for communication.' At this point I began to wonder what this conference was about, for the very notion of what a word is was becoming obscure and problematic.

Katy Barrat's numismatic paper in 'Curator's Words' highlighted this difficulty once more, but also showed how personality and institutional change can be evidenced in the written record. This action of the institution, according to Chris Wingfield, is a tool of the carceral archipelago, creating a written cage of interpretation for imprisoned objects. Potentially, then, the day might have ended with a negative view of the power of words, but fortunately a brighter end came with Ken Teague, who showed us how the stories which words and objects create together, are magical. He regaled us with the puppeteer's story 'Alexander Has Horns,' highlighting the reiteration of objects, concepts, ideas and dreams across cultures and across time, so significantly apparent in the relation of stories. I, for one, know of a similar Welsh tale, 'King March Has Asses Ears.' Cross cultural translation, transition, and communication, then, were the perfect notes with which to end the first day, in a museum so filled with linkages and networks.

Wondering round the Pitt Rivers during the day is a magical enough experience, but during the reception on the first evening, the knowledge that outside dusk was giving way to night added another, ethereal quality to a space already home to shadows and ghosts. For those of us who didn't, sadly, attend the conference dinner at Quod, the reception provided the perfect time to reflect, to integrate, and to talk, and it sent me home in the perfect frame of mind to pontificate about my own paper.

The next day proved to be a packed one, for not only was the AGM filled with events – the launch of the website and new brand, and the retirement and election of the MEG chair, the JSTOR archive and SSN funding updates – but the presentations of the day were also intense and deep, incorporating 'Works in Progress and Short Reports,' and 'New Words.' In the 'Short Reports,' the 'Stories of the World' projects presented by Tabitha Cadbury and Helen Mears, echoed yesterday’s final paper, showing cross cultural linkages and communications, and encouraging the development of new thoughts and inscriptions surrounding objects and collections. The relationship of objects and words remained, though, a murky one, for Tsai Tsan-Huang noted that objects can be used to retell, and recreate histories and thus augment the written record. Tabitha also highlighted that words have not just a conceptual power, but in the case of spells and activation instructions, can be seen as objects of power in their own right. This notion of power was also picked up in Chiari De Cesari's presentation, in which the need to move beyond official narratives and investigate the words and objects of forgotten, less written, and less positive histories came to the fore. But these institutions of power can also be understood through the words which are written by them, as Caroline Cornish's paper on the Kew Totem Pole indicated. These words can also be used to develop new linkages, and new educational possibilities, such as in the Effective Collections Project in the Eastern Counties in which Len Pole is involved.

Finishing with 'New Words' seems appropriate, although my need to rush off created a certain level of anxiety around presenting a paper this late in the day, and regret that I was unable to stay and discuss it more. I certainly enjoyed the discussions which I did manage to become involved in. The session as a whole was most enjoyable and highly stimulating. Elizabeth Crooke illuminated the social and political contexts which surround objects and words in a highly moving paper regarding the display of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, questioning how museums do and should relate trauma, which and whose words they should use. The notion of who was speaking and how that speech is performed was once more highlighted by Alana Jelinek, in a paper which encouraged the use of art to correct mistaken assumptions about objects and to show the museum as the interpretable and polyvocal space it is. In this session again, then, the object-word relationship was complicated, with Alana’s use of objects, media, and the concepts and spaces between as words. Finishing off the papers, Francois Lauwaert used Chinese calligraphy and brush painting to remind us all that words themselves can be objects, and that their display, particularly when left untranslated, is also intensely problematic.

But these problems, I think, present opportunities as much as they do challenges. I believe that we should go forward with a positive attitude towards the difficulties and joys illustrated by this conference’s deconstruction of existing notions regarding the nature and relationships of words, objects and artefacts. Though I was not present for the final discussion, I have no doubt that it generated such a sense of positivity, of future possibility. These two days showed how complicated these things we call words are, and how vital they and their interpretation remains, even, if not especially, in a world predicated upon things. I would like to leave you with an open field of exploration, not a definitive ending. For words mutate, change their forms and accrue palimpsestual layers of meaning. This conference has invited all those who attended, and who may experience its fall out, to enjoy the potential of a diverse multiverse of words and things. These are my own words, and I do hope you have others to add.

Progress 4: April - August 2011

2011-04-05T07:56:59+00:00

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This progress report records activity during this six month period of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project.

On 14-15 April 2011 the Museum Ethnographers Group annual conference was held at the Pitt Rivers Museum organized on the group's behalf by Alison Petch and Jeremy Coote. The meeting was very successful, an account can be read here and here. Much of the discussion at the conference was extremely relevant for the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project.

On 5 May 2011 Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum [S&SWM] loaned the Pitt-Rivers papers in their collections to the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford in order to help research. The project team is most grateful to Adrian Green, the Museum's Director, and Jane Ellis-Schon for their support and to the Trustees for agreeing the loan. The papers were first researched and partially transcribed for this site (see primary documents in menu to the right) by Alison Petch. Rachel McGoff then scanned the manuscript collection starting with the L[etter] series and moving on to the B series. Loredana Burt kindly volunteered to transcribe the Thompson catalogue of the Pitt Rivers papers from S&SWM (effectively the full catalogue relating to the P & B series).

The S&SWM PR papers are a wonderful resource and have greatly enhanced the research work. Transcription, scanning, cataloguing and research took about three months of full-time work (and 3 people) to complete as there are over four thousand letters and many documents to read and digest, copy and cross-reference. Please note that this collection is not closed to other research visitors but all approaches to see the Pitt Rivers papers must, in the first instance, be directed at the S&SWM via museum@salisburymuseum.org.uk or Telephone: + 44 (0)1722 332151. This work was coincidentally completed on the last day of August 2011.

On 9-10 May 2011 Jeremy Coote attended the Mellon Foundation funded Sawyer seminar series on 'Human Creativity: ecologies and practices of invention', 2010/2011. Professor Chris Gosden (Oxford, Institute of Archaeology, co-PI for Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project) and Sarah Whatmore coordinated a series of activities and events involving international visiting scholars and Oxford academics from philosophy to neuroscience working collectively through the mediations of 'objects' selected from the University's museum collections. Again this work fed into the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project.

In May 2011 discussions began regarding the Museums and Galleries Histories Group's 2012 conference which may be held at the Pitt Rivers Museum and organized by Jeremy Coote and Alison Petch, again on a theme close to the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers research. After some discussion it was mutually agreed that it would not be worthwhile the Rethinking team organizing the conference for MGHG as it would constrict the topic of discussion and cause much extra work during the final year of the project when Jeremy and Alison would be hard at work producing the monograph based on the first two year's research. However, the Rethinking team intend to hold at least one or two more invitee-only workshops about the art of cataloguing and other themes during the final year.

The project's student volunteers (Rachel, Jasmine and Jozie) continued to work on the project, completing (hopefully) the proof-reading of the catalogue transcriptions. Rachel, a final-year undergraduate at Hertford College in 2011-12 is going to base her final thesis on the Pitt-Rivers collections, concentrating on the Asian component.

Chris Morton wrote up his research into the photographic collections of Pitt-Rivers, see the relevant web pages on this website under Articles.

Katharine Burt finished the herculean task of typing again Bill Chapman's 1981 thesis, Ethnology in the Museum, now available via the RPR website [see menu on the right]. We are very grateful to her for her hard work over several months and to Bill for allowing the thesis to be made available in this way.

Dan Burt was finally able to start implementing a large series of additions and changes to the website from May 2011 including a revamp of the databases and an additional (passworded) catalogue for the art collection.

Several new object biographies were written or solicited from researchers in contact with the project including Yannis Galanakis of the Ashmolean Museum, Lucy Shipley of the University of Southampton and Marion Uckelmann of Exeter University. The project team is very grateful to all the contributors to the site for associated researchers.

Alison Petch and Jeremy Coote, May 2011 - August 2011.

Rethinking Pitt-Rivers' colloquium

2010-11-05T11:57:43+00:00

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'The Many Faces of General Pitt-Rivers': A Workshop of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers Project

25 March 2011

Introduction

This workshop was for invited participants only.

The colloquium had two major aims:

to provide the ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ team with the opportunity of reporting on the project to scholars with a specialist interest in the General; and
to provide a forum for debate and discussion about the connections between the many different aspects of his life and career.

The major aim of the workshop was to foster discussion and debate between Pitt-Rivers scholars and thanks to the participation of everyone this was more than achieved. Jeremy introduced the project and also spoke about Pitt-Rivers' interest in oghams, showing the oghams in the founding collection at the same time. Through the day there were talks about some aspects of Pitt-Rivers' life and work to spur on discussion - these talks looked at the beginning of his collection in the 1850s (Petch), his Army career and its influences (Bowden), how he acquired his collections (Rivière), his Egyptian collection and visit to Egypt in 1881 (Stevenson) etc. Two of the key points which were discussed were how important rapidly-evolving Army technology and his Army career were to the development of Pitt-Rivers as a thinker and collector and the way the founding collection was inspired by the idea of series, and the second collection might have been by aesthetics. The discussion was summed up by Chris Gosden.

After the workshop concluded the participants visited the exhibition of the paintings inspired by Pitt-Rivers' second collection by Sue Johnson, on display in the Museum's Lower Gallery and enjoyed a glass of wine. Sue had previously explained how she had created the work and what had inspired her.

The whole day was very successful and the project team are very grateful to everyone for their support and enthusiasm.

Invited Participants:

Mark Bowden, Richard Bradley, Dan Burt, William R. Chapman, Jeremy Coote, Jane Ellis-Schön, Christopher Evans, Haas Ezzet, Chris Gosden, Adrian Green, Dan Hicks, Sue Johnson, Frances Larson, Arthur MacGregor, Christopher Morton, Alison Petch, Colin Renfrew, Anthony Pitt-Rivers, Peter Riviére, Nathan Schlanger, Alice Stevenson, Michael Thompson, Hermione Waterfield, Christopher Wingfield.

Rachel McGoff, Jasmine Aslan, Sria Chatterjee, Charlotte Lintern and Jozie Kettle were also invited to attend.

On the day apologies were received from Richard Bradley, Dan Burt, Bill Chapman, Arthur Macgregor and Colin Renfrew.

Conclusion

This was the first scholarly meeting to be organized in association with the ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ project. We hope to organize at least two more meetings in the next year or so: one on collecting in the second half of the nineteenth century, thus providing an opportunity to compare and contrast Pitt-Rivers’s activities with those of his key contemporaries; and another, inspired by the illustrated catalogue of Pitt-Rivers’s ‘second’ collection (see here for details) on the ‘art of cataloguing’.

Alison Petch, February 2011, updated after the workshop on 5 April 2011.

Progress 3: September 2010 - March 2011

2010-09-02T08:19:41+00:00

Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Progress Report 3
September 2010 to end March 2011

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During this period detailed research into all of Pitt-Rivers' collections continued. Alison Petch reviewed the lives and work of similar collectors to Pitt-Rivers like John Lubbock, Augustus Wollaston Franks, and John Evans. She also looked at the kinds of issues that were being debated when Pitt-Rivers was working by an extensive survey of the papers of the Ethnological Society of London, the Anthropological Society (later Anthropological Institute) and the Archaeological Institute. Pitt-Rivers was a key member of all of these societies. It is important to contextualise the particularities of Pitt-Rivers' life. She also looked at Pitt-Rivers' collecting by decade, prepared two talks for the Friends of the PRM and MERL, Reading and a talk for the Friday seminar at the Pitt-Rivers Museum. For the RPR workshop in March 2011, she researched the beginnings of Pitt-Rivers' collecting in the 1850s; she hopes that this might form the basis of a paper or an article at a later date.

Alison added much new information and new articles to the website, concerning the past history of the founding collection, Pitt-Rivers' friends and colleagues etc etc. She also prepared a database of the Pitt-Rivers family's catalogue of General Pitt-Rivers' art collection at 1900, kindly loaned to the project for a short time. As a basis of the project team's research, Dan Burt also photographed the catalogue.

It is hoped that the databases incorporating the scanned images of the catalogue of the second collection and searchable transcriptions and a similar database for the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum will be made available, in an integrated form, to the public on this website. This has been subject to much discussion with Anthony Pitt-Rivers and Cambridge University Library.

Alison and Dan both worked on timelines for the site, building on all the dated activities outlined there and also the general events in England.

Jeremy Coote liaised with Sue Johnson, discussing displaying her art exhibition, which relates to the Pitt-Rivers' collections, in the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford from late January 2011. The exhibition was installed on 27 January 2011 by Jon Eccles in the Lower Gallery of the Museum. It is hoped that the exhibition will remain in place until May 2011 at least. On 16 February 2011 Sue was interviewed on BBC Radio Oxford about her work and the exhibition.

Peter Rivière began research into the Anthropological Institute's collection which was acquired by Pitt-Rivers and also began investigating his connections with the Royal United Services Institution and its collection. He also prepared web pages on the items obtained by Pitt-Rivers from auction houses.

Rachel McGoff continued working on proof-reading the Filemaker database, she had already completed two volumes before Christmas but volume 2 proved to be a very stiff task (being the longest and most complicated of the volumes) which would take a great deal longer to complete. Rachel was joined in December 2010 by Jozie Kettle, one of the MAME students in the Museum, who it is hoped will proofread 2 volumes. In January 2011 Corinna Gray joined the team to work for five weeks as an intern, she proofread 3 volumes and also worked on the Sotheby's sales catalogues provided by Anthony Pitt-Rivers which list some of the items sold from the 1950s on from Pitt-Rivers' second collection. Finally, Tamsin Aslan, another MAME student, also joined the team in January to proofread the final volume to be assigned.

Dan digitally photographed each of the five founding collection's accession books, prepared during the 1920s by E.S. Thomas at the Pitt Rivers Museum to incorporate them with the relevant Filemaker entries onto the RPR website. Amazingly, it took him less than a day to prepare raw shots of the five books, unfortunately he then had to work on them more intensively to get them ready for incorporation onto the site.

William Chapman wrote an excellent D.Phil thesis in 1981 about Pitt-Rivers' work, 'Ethnology in the Museum: A.H.L.F. Pitt Rivers (1827–1900) and the Institutional Foundations of British Anthropology, copies of the two volumes were lodged with the Bodleian and Balfour Libraries at the University of Oxford. However, access to other researchers was extremely limited and Bill very kindly agreed to allow the project team to improve access by re-typing the thesis into digital form and making it accessible via the project website. This was a very exciting development and the project team are very grateful to Bill for agreeing to this proposal and for sharing his data so freely. It is hoped that the digital version will be made available via the website by the end of this reporting period.

Chris Morton, Head of Photograph and Manuscript Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum has been doing exciting research into the photographs in the founding collection. It has been known for quite a long time that the founding collection contained photographs because they are listed in some of the primary sources used at the Pitt Rivers Museum, but very little else was known about them and they were effectively lost in the Museum. Chris has been trawling through the collections identifying the relevant images, and hopes to produce several outcomes about his discoveries. Dan has photographed these collections for future display on the website.

Jeremy has been working with students at the Department of the History of Art, University of Oxford, on research relating to the collections of Pitt-Rivers. It is hoped that this work will continue next year with the 2011-12 students.

Alison talked to two of the Pitt Rivers Museum technicians who were trained artists about the possibilities of exploring the techniques used by Pitt-Rivers' assistants to prepare the CUL catalogue. She was hopeful that one or two of them could work on producing something for the website which would show the way that the second collection catalogue drawings had been produced, to date this hope has not been realised.

It was hoped that a one-day workshop on one or more key aspects of the project could be held for the project team and invited guests during this period, a date being eventually set for March 2011. Further details of these plans can be found here. Both Jeremy and Alison prepared talks for the workshop, Alison on the beginnings of the Pitt-Rivers collections in the 1850s and Jeremy an introduction to the project and a separate talk about the oghams in the founding collection (and British Museum).

Alison and Jeremy attended the 150 years of Salisbury Museum Conference held at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum on 2-3 October 2010 where they gave a paper entitled 'Rethinking Pitt Rivers Project: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector'. The conference lasted two days and was extremely interesting throughout with a surprisingly large number of the papers relating to Pitt-Rivers, particularly his archaeological work on his own estate. In addition there was a very interesting paper about the Blackmore Museum and Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum which was useful context for the Pitt-Rivers' Farnham Museum of around the same time, and very close in location.

After the conference discussions began with Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum to see if it would be possible for them to formally loan the Pitt-Rivers manuscript collection to the Pitt Rivers Museum for a period of approximately a year. Not only would this much benefit the project, but it was hoped that the PRM could organize volunteer help to scan the collection so that eventually it could be made available via the web to the public. The possibility of preparing a paper about this collection for Antiquity jointly authored was discussed.

Jane Ellis-Schon kindly provided details of the 100s of objects from Pitt-Rivers' second collection that are now in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum and Alison made some in-roads into matching them with the CUL catalogue.

Jeremy and Alison gave a talk at the Friday lunchtime seminar series at the Pitt Rivers Museum about the project on 28 January 2011. This included short presentations by Sue Johnson and Chris Morton.

Alison gave a talk about the project and its findings to date at a meeting of the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum on Wednesday, 23 February 2011 at 6.30 pm at the Museum. There were many interesting questions at the end of the talk from the Friends who were present.

Jeremy and Alison gave a talk about the project at the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading University, on 15 March 2011 at 4.30 pm. The occasion was very enjoyable with many interesting questions at the end.

Jeremy and Alison have also been very involved with organizing the next MEG conference to be held at the Pitt Rivers Museum on 14-15 April 2011, see here for more information.

Discussions began with Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum regarding the loan from them to the Pitt Rivers Museum of the Pitt-Rivers manuscript collection. This was not only to aid the progress of this project (for which support the project team is most grateful) but also hopefully to expedite the digitisation of the collection so that it can be made available to Pitt-Rivers scholars via the web and help the conservation of a fragile paper archive.

Alison Petch and Jeremy Coote

October 2010, updated regularly 2010-11; completed 5 April 2011.

Progress 2: March 2010 to August 2010

2010-03-09T09:44:57+00:00

Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Progress Report 2

March 2010 to end August 2010

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Transcription of the Cambridge University Library volumes continued during the first month or so of this period whilst volume 9's transcription was completed. The last few pages of this volume contain details of a large number of objects that are briefly described and not illustrated. It seems that the cataloguers were perhaps, by this stage, very behind in their accessioning and a decision was taken to 'batch update' the records. Transcription of all entries was finally completed on 20 April 2010 after the Easter break. A total of 16,685 entries were compiled for 20,415 objects in around 6 months. The mismatch is because some entries cover more than one artefact. See here for more information about numbers. This is only the first stage of the transcriptions. Proof-reading of these transcriptions is key to ensuring total accuracy. The project team were grateful that a volunteer with the project, Rachel McGoff, began work on this herculean task in early May 2010. The team are very grateful to Rachel, an Oxford University undergraduate, for volunteering with the project - her input is vital. Once all the transcriptions were completed the researcher commenced the much more complex research, analysing and comparing Pitt-Rivers collections throughout his life (statistically and by other research methods) and contextualising it with other information about nineteenth century collections and collecting.

After completing the first draft of the entries, Alison turned her attention to researching more than 900 individuals and institutions associated with both the founding collection and the second collection. She managed to find out a great deal of new information which was added to the People database (see menu on the right) and also to clean the database. This database will be enhanced throughout the project with new information that has been retrieved by the project team, or by information provided by visitors to the website. Dan Burt made the entries on the people database more amenable to google searches and it is now the hope of the project team that the general public's and fellow scholars random searches on the web for information useful to them might attract further information which can be added to the database. To this end viewers have been asked to send information to the project team at the project email,rpr@prm.ox.ac.uk (as they are in all such similar situations).

Work on the People database took Alison to 24 May when she began work on the statistics analysis (available via the statistics link on menu to the right). This statistical work was completed by the first week in June 2010. After that she transcribed some contemporary accounts of the museum displays at Bethnal Green, South Kensington and Farnham and Rushmore. She also transcribed some eye-witness accounts of Pitt-Rivers' collections and Pitt-Rivers own accounts of the reasoning behind his displays and their history. These can all be found by searching under the link 'Articles' on the menu to the right.

Alison also transcribed many primary source documents held by the Pitt Rivers Museum's manuscript collections regarding the founding collection, these can be found here. Finally, during this six month period, she wrote many articles for the articles section on Pitt-Rivers' staff's art-work, his estate at Cranborne Chase, and particular aspects of his two collections, see here for a full list of these articles. During August 2010 she tried to trace some of the objects that had been sold by Mrs Stella Pitt-Rivers between the 1960s and 1980s, which are listed in Sotheby's sale catalogues (a random selection of copies of which are held by the Balfour Library at the Pitt Rivers Museum, which were used for this purpose) and records from the Christie's website of past sales. The aim was to see the kinds of information that the auction houses gave, and also to see how many of the objects were illustrated by photographs (possibly the only public documentation now available about the majority of the items in the collection). This information was added to the database which will hopefully be available on this site. More than three hundred objects were identified by this process, which is a small fraction of the numbers of objects actually sold during this period. The project is primarily interested in the second collection whilst it was in the ownership of Augustus Pitt-Rivers (ie until 1900) but this later documentation can shed some light on other aspects of that collection.

Meanwhile Dan Burt, the website designer for the project, continued to work on refining the online database, including improving its search functions. Originally the team had wanted only to show the outside world what the catalogue looks like by producing a page-flipping digital book version. Very early on in the project Dan had refined the technical way of achieving this, after some experimentation he decided to use Filemaker Pro, coincidentally (but serendipitously) the software used to produce the transcription database in the first place. However, once this had been produced the team realised that they would be able to use this interface to be able to provide the public (eventually) with a way of searching the transcribed entries tied to the illustrations from the scans. This work to refine the search facilities carried on throughout the period covered by this progress report. The team is very grateful to Dan and to Haas Ezzet, the Museum's ICT officer for their technical support of the project. The work also included a clean-up and amendment of some of the entries, particularly to allow for those three hundred or so objects which appear on more than one page of the catalogue.

The database will be a crucial feature of the website when made public, as it will greatly improve services to other researchers. Jeremy Coote began discussions in July 2010 with representatives of the Pitt-Rivers family, Cambridge University Library and Lord Renfrew about putting the database on-line. The copyright situation for the catalogue volumes is not straight-forward as they are technically unpublished and we are very grateful to them all for their support and advice. When all the entries have been transcribed and checked, and the final tweaking of the interface has been completed, the project team hope to make this database and (suitably down-graded but still superb) scans available to the public on this site, subject to the agreement of the various interested bodies. It is hoped that this might be achieved by the end of 2010.

During March 2010 Jeremy and Alison visited the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum (S&SWM) in the Close at Salisbury. Jeremy had contacted S&SWM before the application for project funding was made to the Leverhulme Trust and they had been very supportive of the bid. The project team wished to discuss both visiting the Pitt-Rivers manuscript collections held by the Museum at some future date and also future collaborations. The team are very grateful to Jane Ellis-Schön, Collections Manager / Curator of Archaeology, and Adrian Green, Director of the Museum. The RPR team have agreed to speak at a conference to be held by the Museum later in 2010 to commemorate the anniversary of the Museum's founding. The team visited the existing Pitt-Rivers display in the Museum, visited the archives (which Alison had already researched at some depth as part of the Relational Museum project) and held extensive discussions with museum staff. In the summer, or early autumn, the team, with Peter Rivière (the research associate), hope to visit Rushmore (now Sandroyd School) and Farnham.

At the Museum Ethnographers Group Annual Conference held on 12-13 April 2010 Jeremy gave a talk about the project. As a consequence of the conference Rhianedd Smith, of Reading University, volunteered to look at the rural museums of England in the nineteenth century and also at the English ethnographic artefacts in Pitt-Rivers' second collection.

Peter Rivière has continued his own research relating to the project. He has been particularly interested in the various exhibitions in London from which Pitt-Rivers purchased objects. He has also been reviewing the Middle and South American ethnographic objects in the second collection and looking at links between the two Pitt-Rivers collections. He then turned his attention to the items in the second collection which had clearly identified field collectors and lastly has been looking at the various donors of objects to Pitt-Rivers.

Jeremy Coote started work on thinking about the structure of the project monograph and also reviewing in detail a small part of the founding collection - that collected by Admiral Denham during his voyages.

Several Pitt Rivers Museum staff contributed object biographies for which the team were most grateful. Alice Stevenson, a member of the Fell Fund project 'Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections at the PRM' agreed to work on the Egyptian collections from the founding and second collection. She completed an object biography about the wonderful flint knife now part of the British Museum's collections, available on this site.

Early in 2010 the artist and academic Sue Johnson, Professor of Art, Department of Art and Art History at St. Mary's College of Maryland had approached Jeremy Coote to explore the possibilities of working with the Pitt Rivers Museum. It had been agreed that it would be an excellent idea to work on material related to the Pitt-Rivers catalogue of his second collection and the founding collection. It is hoped that the final work can be exhibited in the Museum. The Team is also hoping to host a small exhibition during the life of the project about the second collection in the Pitt Rivers Museum; it is exploring the possibility of loaning one or two of the catalogue volumes now held by Cambridge University Museum, and maybe including one or two of the objects from the second collection whose whereabouts are known (some are held by the Pitt Rivers Museum, others might be loaned from private collectors). During a short preparatory research visit to the Museum in early summer, Sue began to look at the images in more detail, particularly the clues within them as to how they were created, and in what conditions. It is hoped that this research will throw much light into a badly documented aspect of the creation of the catalogue of the second collection.

Towards the end of this period it was agreed that Jeremy and Alison would co-convene the 2011 Museum Ethnographers Group's Annual Conference on the theme of Objects and Words: Writing On, Around, and About Things. The conference will be held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford on 14-15 April 2011. This is one of the themes which have come out of the research work to date for the project and so it will be very useful to have feedback from other scholars and museum ethnographers. During the final discussion at ‘Making Things’, MEG’s 2010 conference at the University of Reading’s Museum for Rural Life, there was an interesting if unresolved discussion about the point of analysing labels and catalogue entries. While some argued that the main point of such work was to throw light on original provenance and thus on indigenous purposes and meanings, others emphasized the value of a focus on old labels and texts for the analysis of museum practice. We envisage MEG’s 2011 conference as taking this discussion as its starting point and thus invite papers from museum ethnographers and others that focus on the analysis of the words written on, around, and about museum things; that is, inscriptions, labels, display texts, catalogues, and databases. We will be interested in papers that explore the role of words in the documentation, interpretation, and presentation of objects—both historically and in the present. If you are interested in attending the conference please go to the Museum Ethnographers Group website where you can see the call for papers from early November 2010 (submission by 7 January 2011), booking form from early January 2011 (bookings to be received by mid March 2011)

Alison Petch and Jeremy Coote

[Written April - August 2010]

Find out about the 'Rethinking Pitt-Rivers' project

2010-02-10T09:50:18+00:00

Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a 19th-Century Collector

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The project's principal applicant was Jeremy Coote, Chris Gosden was the co-applicant. Alison Petch is the Researcher on the project.

Ever since the completion of an earlier Leverhulme-funded project devoted to the founding collection of the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM), we have had three interrelated concerns:
• that we know so little about Pitt-Rivers’s collecting activities in general and about his ‘second’ collection in particular;
• that scholarly and popular understandings of Pitt-Rivers and his collections have been distorted by the existence of a museum in Oxford that bears his name but was never ‘his’ and is filled with other people’s collections;
• that scholarly and popular understandings of the PRM have been skewed by its nominal connections with a man of supposedly fixed ideas.

This project is designed to address these concerns. In particular, the project is designed to provide the scholarly community and the wider public with a detailed account and understanding of the collecting activities of Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (1827–1900). A scholarly database of all Pitt-Rivers’s collections will be created and made available online for the benefit of the research community and the wider public. This will then be used by the project team as the basis for researching and writing a grounded, narrative history of Pitt-Rivers’s activities as a collector. This will have his acquisitions at its core, but will provide an account of all his collections-related activities—as a lecturer, author, cataloguer, exhibiter, museum creator, thinker, and theorist.

The project’s main objective is to ‘rethink’ Pitt-Rivers, by exploring the full range of his collecting activities in greater detail and depth than has been attempted previously. To gain this objective, a series of other objectives must be achieved. The first is to gain a clear picture of his entire collections. This will be achieved through the creation of a comprehensive,scholarly, computerized, publicly accessible database of the entire collection, including digital images of the ‘Farnham’ manuscript catalogues. The database will be used to analyse statistically the entire collection to identify patterns and changes in Pitt-Rivers’s collecting behaviour. This work will enable the project team to test the hypothesis that Pitt-Rivers’s attitude to collecting and to the artefacts he collected changed fundamentally over time. This database and the statistical analyses will be at the heart of a project website that will also provide access to original and reprinted articles, progress reports, and links to related resources. In addition to creating the website, the project team will publicly disseminate the research findings through a workshop, a conference and related edited volume, academic papers, and a monograph.

AP [based on application to the Leverhulme Trust], September 2009

Progress 1: September 2009 - end February 2010

2010-02-10T09:48:39+00:00

This is the first of six progress reports, to be presented six-monthly. To find out more about the project go here.

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The project began on 1 September 2009. During a previous research project (also funded by the Leverhulme Trust [LT]) the same researcher (Petch) had prepared a database of all the items donated to the University of Oxford by Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers in 1884 as the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum. This database formed the basis for the Museum's collections management system which manages all the data for all the artefacts in its care, including the founding collection. This large database can be consulted here, though it is the intention of this project to make the data about the founding collection available via this site, in the long term.

The key to this new project was the catalogue, contained in nine volumes, of the artefacts Augustus Pitt-Rivers' acquired after 1880. These volumes, which had been held by the Pitt-Rivers family, are now part of the collections of the Cambridge University Library [CUL]. The first task was to scan the pages of these volumes so that detailed research could be carried out on them in Oxford. The LT, as part of its funding for this project, had funded the CUL's work in scanning the 3000 plus pages of catalogues to a very high standard. The project team is most grateful to the CUL's staff who produced such wonderful scans: Don Manning and Les (surname unknown). We are also grateful to Frank Bowles, Godfrey Waller and Dr Zutshi from the manuscripts department. The project team was lucky that the CUL staff were able to provide the scans very early in the project's life, which expedited the research work. The previous work on the founding collection formed the template for the database which was created to import data from the scans of the pages of the catalogue. An example of such a page is shown here. The textual pages of the catalogue were transcribed accurately into a new database and this data has been extrapolated and researched to compile a fully searchable and comprehensive database using Filemaker Pro.

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During the first six months of the project some 12,200 new records have been prepared by the researcher. These include the details of around 13,500 objects. She completed transcribing and undertaking preliminary research on the first three volumes of the catalogues by mid February. Volumes II and III are particularly large, and it is thought that these 3 volumes comprise roughly one half of the overall task of preparing the database. From volume 4 transcription became easier and quicker. This was mostly because fewer objects were recorded per page and the volumes had fewer pages. Descriptions had also become more standardized though sadly the high standards of documentation adhered to by Peacock (for the short period he worked on the catalogues) were lost in volumes 4 and 5 by the rather scattered and disorganized entries written by Waldo Johnson. Volume 4 was transcribed in a little over a week (it comprises some 238 pages in total and contains information about 681 objects) and this level of speed was sustained. During the remainder of February and all of March she transcribed volumes 4-9 except for the last twenty pages or so of volume 9 which comprise a large number of entries, without drawings, in list form (obviously a late attempt at batch input).

Although transcribing the entries has been a full-time task the researcher together with Dan Burt (the project web designer), Haas Ezzet (the Museum's Head of IT services, and Jeremy Coote (PI for this project) have prepared and made live this website for the project. It is the intention that this website will be added to and enhanced throughout the life of the project. One of the first things the researcher produced was a series of webpages about Pitt-Rivers life, including a biography, information about his residences, and a series of pages of the events that took place in each year of his life based upon the various biographies, a D.Phil thesis by Bill Chapman and the researcher's own research, see here for those.

Another major research resource that was made available during this period (though its contents will continue to be added to over the next few months while transcription continues) was a database which provided information about all the people associated with the founding collection and the second collection after 1880. This is available here. Currently this is a search-only resource available only via this website, so it does not appear when names are searched by outsiders via google, but once all the names have been added it is anticipated that the resource will be made more search engine friendly which will enable people who know more about the individuals listed than the researchers to send information. [This has subsequently happened]

In addition, a bibliography was made available based upon one produced by the researcher over the last ten years, which lists sources useful when studying Pitt-Rivers' life and collections.

The final resource, which has been provided in the first six months of the project, is that new object biographies have been written and presented on the site about some of the objects from the two collections. It is the intention of the project that students and staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and other interested parties be invited to write object biographies about things that interest them. This is based on the highly successful object biographies section of the previous research project worked on by the researcher, the Other Within project. As with all other aspects of the website, this section will hopefully increase greatly over the life of the project.

A section of the website was added to reflect the difficulties sometimes experienced by the researcher during transcription. Some entries do not contain textual descriptions, merely illustrations; and a very few of these illustrations are not clear enough, or are not known by the reseachers. It was agreed to establish a section called 'Mystery objects' to show these images and hope to find, via the web, people who are able to identify the type of object. Amazingly within hours of this resource being made live the research team had received its first response and we are very grateful to Ny Björn Gustafsson of Stockholm University for being so prompt. We encourage all visitors to the site to check this page regularly and help the work of the project directly.

The team looks forward very much to the next six months of the project when, hopefully, a brand new resource will become available - the full transcriptions and scans making the next stage of research much easier and providing a very valuable resource for other researchers. The team (Coote, Gosden and Petch) have also been discussing the proposed events associated with the project including the theme for the conference.

Alison and Chris Gosden had worked with Peter Rivière, Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology of the University of Oxford and Fellow Emeritus of Linacre College, Oxford, on the ESRC-funded Relational Musueum project, and Peter has been kind enough to volunteer to work again with the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project team.

Alison Petch and Jeremy Coote, Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford

31 March 2010