PITT RIVERS MUSEUM ANNUAL REPORT 2005-6

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 among the widest possible public.

Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum as of 1 October 2005
The Vice-Chancellor (Dr John Hood) The Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Planning and Resources) (Dr W. D. Macmillan) Dr J. Landers (Chairman) The Assessor (Dr Frank Pieke) Ms J. Vitmayer (Horniman Museum) Professor N. Thrift (Life and Environmental Sciences) Professor J. Kennedy (Oxford University Museum of Natural History) Dr C. Brown (Ashmolean Museum) Professor D. Parkin (ISCA) Professor B. Cunliffe (Institute of Archaeology) Professor B. J. Mack (British Museum) Dr J. A. Bennett (Museum of the History of Science)
Dr M. O’Hanlon (Pitt Rivers Museum, Secretary) Dr H. La Rue (Pitt Rivers Museum)

The Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum, having received from the Director the following report for the period 1 August 2005 to 31 July 2006, presented it as its report to Congregation.

DIRECTOR’S INTRODUCTION
Much of the Museum’s intense activity during the reporting year was focused on, or affected by, the construction of the £8,000,000 extension. As I write at the close of the year, the fine new building is externally complete (see front cover) while its interior is a hive of activity as the contractors, Sir Robert McAlpine, press to complete it to schedule. The construction process, the attendant dislocation to already busy programmes, the decanting (sometimes to less than satisfactory transit accommodation), and budget shortfalls have all made deep calls on the goodwill, energy, and flexibility of everyone involved without exception. I would like to take the opportunity here to thank them all: contractors, architects, consultants, and particularly Museum staff, especially the Administrator who has borne the principal co- ordinatory burden. But the end is now very much in sight, and we will then have the basis for an exceptional facility for collections-based teaching and research established at the heart of a unique ethnography museum whose public facilities will also have been substantially enhanced.

Despite the continued closure of the Museum’s two upper galleries as a result of the building work, the number of visitors the Museum received over the year increased once again, from 169,000 to nearly 185,000. As is suggested in the body of the report, this may in part reflect the way in which we are increasingly working with our sister institution, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. We have jointly achieved national publicity through the ‘Guardian Family Friendly Museums Award’ at the end of last year and, more recently, from the Take One Museum television programme, which was shown in January on BBC4, and repeated in April. Our self-denying ordinance to restrict the number of loans we made while so fully occupied with building works also faltered, and we made a record number. These included a loan of twenty highly important artefacts to Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in Polynesia, 1760–1860 at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts and, of no less importance, a ‘Raven Transformation’ mask made by the famed Haida artist Charles Edenshaw to the Vancouver Art Gallery’s exhibition Raven Travelling, of which it was the centrepiece. Other loans were made to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, and more locally to the Ashmolean. I am most grateful to my colleagues in the Museum’s collections, conservation, and technical sections for sustaining so heavy a loans programme while so fully committed on other fronts. Their workload has made all the more valuable Michael Palin’s generous support of technician Chris Wilkinson’s post, which has allowed him to focus on the formidable amount of redisplay work required by the effects of the new building on the old.

Our capacity to display and enhance the Museum’s collections, to service loans, and to do much else beside is also heavily dependent on our success in bidding for grants from such wonderful sources as the Designation Challenge Fund (DCF) and the Department of Culture Media and Sport / Wolfson Foundation Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund. Over the course of the year we brought to a successful conclusion one major DCF project (devoted to enhancing the documentation and display of 20,000 artefacts on the Museum’s lower gallery) and were successful in our application for a further one. Entitled ‘Cutting Edge’, this new innovative £100,000 project will present fresh viewpoints and reveal hidden histories in the Museum’s rich arms and armour collections in the upper gallery. We were also successful in a bid to DCMS/Wolfson for a £30,000 grant for new signage and way-finding aids; the imminent handover of the new extension making development of a comprehensive orientation scheme especially urgent. The Museum’s entitlement to bid for these grants hinges on our being officially recognized as adhering to ever-higher professional standards. With my colleagues Julia Nicholson and Kate White, therefore, I spent much time preparing the Museum’s application for Accreditation, the successor standard to Registration; and I am pleased to report that, as a result, full Accreditation was duly granted to the Museum on 28 November 2005.

One of the principal advantages of the Museum’s new extension will be the capacity to conduct on the main site (rather than in out-stations as at present) the research projects for which the Museum’s staff have been so successful in attracting funding. It was thus very heartening over the course of the year to hear news of two further successes. The first was that of Chris Gosden and Hélène La Rue, who were awarded £370,000 by the ESRC for their project ‘The Other Within: An Anthropology of Englishness at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, with Alison Petch as the nominated researcher. This is a complement to the ‘Relational Museum’ project (also funded by a major ESRC grant), which was brought to a successful conclusion during the reporting year with the submission of a monograph to Oxford University Press. The second success was Mandy Sadan’s in being awarded one of the British Academy’s highly competitive postdoctoral fellowships for her project ‘Economies of Ethnicity: Material, Visual and Oral Cultures and the Formation of Ethnic Identities in the Burmese Colonial and Postcolonial State’. We trust that Dr Sadan’s project, which will commence in January 2007 in the new extension, will be a magnet for further initiatives—whether in the form of teaching, research, or public events—over the three years of her award. The Museum’s two other main research projects—the Arts and Humanities Research Council- funded projects on the Museum’s Tibetan and Southern Sudanese collections moved towards their respective completions over the course of the year. Both have strong website components and both were greatly aided not only by the efforts of the project staff themselves but also by the hard work and creativity of ICT staff Haas Ezzet and David Harris.

The entirety of the Museum’s operations, including its capacity to bid for and run research grants like those described above, is underpinned by the major funding that the Museum receives from the AHRC’s core-funding stream. As I noted in my introduction to last year’s report, it was crucial that the Museum’s bid for core funding for the triennium 2006–9 be as strong as possible. We were delighted to hear that our application was graded A+ and that, in a very tight funding round with a fixed ‘pot’ and a greater number of applicants, the Museum was awarded £686,500 per annum, an increase of 11% on the 2005 grant of £618,000. In an uncertain funding world, light-touch AHRC core-funding has been at once a pillar of support and the stable platform from which to launch bids for other funding. We very much hope that the proposed transfer of the award of these funds back to the Higher Education Funding Council for England will neither reduce the level of funding nor the dependability that is so necessary when so many other sources of funding are less predictable.

A second exceptionally valuable source of funding is that which the University’s museums as a whole receive from the governmental programme ‘Renaissance in the Regions’. We were very pleased to learn at the start of the year that the 2006–8 business plan submitted by the South-East Hub (of which the University’s museums are one part) had been accepted. This will substantially increase the level of funding the University’s museums jointly receive to mount programmes to meet the various targets and objectives specified in the business plan. Hub funding has promoted valuable new relationships with our partners in the South-East Hub (Hampshire County Council Museums Service, Brighton and Hove Museums, and Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust) and much closer working among the University’s museums themselves. Immensely welcome though the enhanced funding is, we always have to remember that it is exclusively for fresh initiatives (especially for attracting new and under-represented audiences), not to support the always rather precariously funded core museum operation.

We know that attracting and comfortably accommodating a broader and a more numerous range of visitors demands a second phase of building work, this time to the Museum’s entrance. In particular, we would like to restore the original view of the court by removing the 1960s temporary exhibition gallery at the foot of the entrance stairs. Doing so will improve visitor orientation and ease congestion, which would further be improved by establishing a platform at the entrance from which a broader set of stairs descends into the court. We also hope to use the opportunity to improve the Museum’s environment on which the new extension has already had a marked beneficial effect through shielding the Museum’s south wall from the sun. The scheme will require an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, on which we have already done a good deal of preliminary work. Lottery Fund applications require a substantial partnership contribution from the applicant institution, and I am delighted to say that the University has agreed to fund for two years a development officer post to work towards this goal, and then towards funding for joint projects with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

The new development officer has yet to take up post, but I would like to close by welcoming new members of staff who have done so, and extending congratulations to others, some of whom are also leaving. After an interregnum kindly covered by my colleague Jeremy Coote, the position of Head of Photograph, Manuscript, and Film collections has been filled by Chris Morton, who will hold the position on a part-time basis in tandem with his Career Development Fellowship. (As it happens, Dr Morton had earlier served on the Museum’s AHRC-funded Sudan project, just as Dr Sadan had served on the Tibet project. Moreover, Dr Rachael Sparks, who also served on the Sudan project was appointed to the post of Lecturer and Keeper of Collections at the Institute of Archaeology, University of London. Such successes demonstrate how the research grants the Museum receives also serve as the basis for sound training and career development.) I would also like to welcome Imogen Crawford-Mowday who has already proved an able successor to Dr John Hobart in the trying post of serving as my Executive Research Assistant. We offer the warmest congratulations to Professor Chris Gosden on his appointment as the University’s Professor of European Archaeology and to Peter Mitchell on his professorship by distinction; and we will be very sorry to lose them both to the University’s Institute of Archaeology at the start of the next academic year. We must also offer double congratulations to Clare Harris, first on her Readership by Distinction and secondly on her award of a British Academy / Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship for 2006–7. Unlike her colleagues who are leaving the Museum, however, we do get Dr Harris back again after her fellowship; in the meantime her position will be filled by Dr Elizabeth Cory-Pearce who takes up post at the start of the 2006 academic year and whom we also warmly welcome.

ACCESS
This year members of the Museum’s access team continued to provide advice concerning relevant aspects of the new extension. They also managed the public and press announcements relating to the ongoing closure of the galleries and developed plans for the opening and public launch of the new building in 2007. In addition, Kate White (Marketing and Visitor Services Officer) played a key role in developing the Museum’s plans to turn the entrance into the Museum from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) into a more accessible space. This project is now in the development stages and it is hoped that an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) will be submitted shortly. If successful, the project will commence in 2008 and will provide a fully accessible entrance to the Museum, a platform lift, and an information point. The project is also intended to allow for the relocation of the Museum’s education space, provide improved environmental controls, and restore something of the original architectural aesthetic lost during the 1960s with the creation of the temporary exhibition space. The access team also created an Audience Development Plan and fed this into the HLF project-design to enable the proposed project to provide the best possible amenities for the Museum’s widening audience needs.

The Museum continues to do everything it can to increase the percentage of visitors from the various ‘target’ local audiences whom it receives ‘Renaissance’ funding to attract. It is not always easy to do this, however, especially against the background of rising visitor numbers coming from further afield. For instance, in November, ‘Story Lab’ provided three Saturdays of storytelling in the Pitt Rivers and OUMNH. Funded by ‘Evolving City’ (Oxford Inspires’ city-wide programme) it enabled the museums to commission three new science- based stories linking the collections. These were written and told by professional story- tellers; family activities developing the science themes were also offered. These afternoons were well attended and enjoyed, but despite targeted marketing they failed to attract significant numbers of new visitors from the targeted groups. However, the stories and linked trails have been printed for family use on Sundays and will continue to be used for outreach projects.

It is clear that raising the Museum’s profile amongst traditionally non-visiting sectors requires a sustainable strategy and funding. With this in mind, a new leaflet about the Museum, plus fliers for events and exhibitions, were designed and distributed using a new mailing list reflecting the hub’s priorities for audience development. Plans are also being made to develop e-marketing over the coming year. Meanwhile, this year several pieces of in-house audience research were carried out in addition to the Museums, Libraries, and Archives Council’s MORI survey undertaken in November. The ‘demographic/satisfaction’ questionnaire, based on previous annual surveys, continued throughout the year, with the kind help of volunteers Britta Schilling, Aimee Payton, and Cathy Baldwin. Feedback was gathered at the three big events held at the Museum (see below), and street research was carried out on behalf of all the University’s museums at the Cowley Road Food Festival in July (which showed that many residents know and love the Museum). Lastly, an extensive piece of research, involving interviews with visitors in the Museum, was undertaken through the summer of 2006 to provide evidence in support of the proposed application to HLF.

Unfortunately, the planned final evaluation of the ‘What’s Upstairs?’ DCF project, had to be cancelled due to the complete closure of the gallery as a consequence of the building works. However, based on the four structured discussions conducted with members of the public at the outset, and the experience gathered from the ‘Court’ project, Bryony Reid was able to complete her strategy for the lower gallery, creating 103 case texts, 17 fact sheets, an online gallery (with images of 213 objects), and 40 new audio tracks.

Education Services
Despite the restrictions of the ongoing building work, the Museum’s education service continued to grow over the year. More schoolchildren than ever before took part in workshops delivered by education staff in the Museum, either as tours, handling sessions, or as specially designed projects. The volunteer guiding service delivered taught sessions based around national curriculum subjects. Although Joan Shaw retired after more than twenty years’ service to the Museum’s educational work Jean Flemming, Frances Martyn, Rosemary Lee, Alan Lacey, Margaret Dyke, Linda Teasdale, Suki Christianson, and Ann Pythian-Adams continued to deliver a broad range of tours. As Becca McVean (Education Officer) was on maternity leave, hands-on workshops for schools and families were delivered by Andy McLellan, Menaka Rambukwella, and Isabelle Carré, with significant support from Joy Todd (Cross-Museum Volunteer Coordinator), Susan Birch (Cross-Museum Community Education Officer), and the education staff in the OUMNH. These efforts were supplemented by the efforts of 169 volunteers and the volunteer guides, without whose help the education service would soon grind to a halt.

In May and June, education staff from the Pitt Rivers and the OUMNH delivered outreach sessions to 330 year-6 children in Blackbird Leys, Rosehill, and Littlemore in the fourth season of the ‘Making Museums’ project. Each class then received full-day visits to the two museums to learn about the processes involved in identifying, conserving, and displaying objects. The project concluded with the pupils creating their own museums in their classrooms, which were subsequently visited by parents, museum staff, and local education authority advisors.

Of the 20,433 educational visitors, arriving as pre-booked groups, more than 9,000 took part in taught sessions, 1,600 of these in June alone. During the weekends and school holidays, more than 10,000 children (each accompanied by an adult) attended family activities. Over the August bank-holiday weekend the ‘Drums to Didgeridoos’ session was extremely popular, being attended by 712 people, while 438 children made musical instruments.

Meanwhile, the list of projects and new initiatives continued to grow, with the education service working during the year with such diverse organizations as Creative Partnerships, Young Roots, the Oxford Literary Festival, the Oxon Music Centre, Open Door, Oxford Brookes PGCE students, the University Admissions Office, and the Cowley Road Carnival. Educational outreach sessions, to Oxfordshire schools, involved 942 children over the year in a combination of ‘Making Museums’ and gamelan-based sessions.

Visitor Numbers
Despite the closure of the lower and upper galleries throughout the year, visitor numbers rose to 184,134 (8.9% up on the previous year). This may well reflect the increasingly successful way in which the Pitt Rivers and OUMNH are working together and the national publicity that they have jointly received, in particular that surrounding the ‘Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award’ at the end of last year and, more recently, the Take One Museum television programme, which was shown in January on BBC4 and repeated in April. This programme, which featured both museums, was shot in real time, without editing. This new, challenging approach required a good deal of planning and rehearsal for both staff and film crew, but Andy McLellan proved his skills as a natural communicator working alongside presenter Paul Rose.
A total of 654 booked groups visited during the year, an increase of 8% from 607 in 2004–5. However, the number of constituent individuals declined from 21,308 to 20,433, the 4.3% reduction reflecting the targeted marketing of smaller primary school groups during the closure of the lower and upper galleries. A total of 261 booked groups (an increase of 13% from 2004–5), comprising 6,988 children and students, received a taught workshop or a trail, an additional 2,117 also receiving a short talk.
This represents a rise in taught groups and taught individuals from 7,685 to 9,105.

The number of visitors to the website was 528,408 (an increase of 62% on the previous year). The large increase in virtual visitors reflects the quality of the website, the range of new projects available on-line, and the ever-increasing popularity of the Museum.

Events and Activities
Overall, the Museum continued to strengthen community participation through educational outreach, in-house ‘Family Friendly’ activities, and such events as ‘Drums to Didgeridoos: Music from around the World’ in which families designed and made drums and the infamously loud ‘pittriversaphone’. The ‘Family Friendly’ sessions were held in the Museum on the first Saturday of each month from 1.00 to 4.00 p.m., and during every school holiday. All such activities continued to be free.
In May two joint events were organized for ‘Museums and Galleries Month’. The first was part of a family-friendly ‘Victorian Welcome Weekend’ in which all the University’s museums participated. Staff from the Pitt Rivers and the OUMNH dressed up in appropriate costume and presented a range of Victorian activities, the most successful being the opportunity to have a ‘family portrait’ taken, in Victorian style, which could then be emailed home. Guided tours around the Museum, led by the Museum’s Friends, shed light on various Victorian aspects of the collections. More than 1,000 visitors came and the feedback was very enthusiastic. ‘In a Different Light 2006’ was the title of a bigger, better version of the previous year’s late night opening, linked to the European-wide ‘Nuits des Musées’. Ben Arps provided a magnificent shadow-puppet performance lasting three-and-a-half hours, accompanied by music from the Oxford Gamelan Society. Family activities were offered for the first two hours, after which the evening extended to 11.00 p.m. to accommodate a more adult audience arriving later. Feedback has shown that the choice of activities is an important element in the success of this evening. This year, there were films and ‘bugs and minerals’ in the OUMNH and, in the Pitt Rivers, the new textiles exhibition, the art installation Aerial Wish by Naoko Miyazaki, and visits by torchlight. These torchlight visits were necessarily for limited numbers and were strictly timed; 800 people were able to experience the Museum in this way. These evening events have proved extraordinarily popular for local residents of all cultures, ages, and tastes, generating a truly exciting atmosphere. This year, 2,400 people, double the previous year’s number, visited the two museums taken together.

During the construction of the new extension, a ‘topping out’ ceremony was held, attended by the Vice-Chancellor and Mr Gavin McAlpine. The ceremony started with a short trumpet fanfare played on copies of the original Beale trumpet, lent by the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments. (The maker, Simon Beale, was Cromwell’s trumpeter and played at both his installation and state funeral. The Beale, made in 1667, is a ‘Luck’ the blowing of which brings good fortune; traditionally, it should be sounded at all important moments in English history.) A piper then led the way to the top floor where a section of concrete was laid and an evergreen bough nailed to a beam.

ICT
The number of unique visitors to the Museum’s website grew again, from 326,000 in 2004–5 to 528,000, an increase of a remarkable 62% (more than doubling in two years), while the percentage of visitors who bookmark the site more than tripled over the period. The website continues to expand, with updates and additions to most of its sections. News of special exhibitions, projects, and events continue to be provided, as well as information for visitors concerning the new extension and the impact of building work.

The Museum’s ‘remote desktop’ infrastructure was updated during the year to allow ICT support access remotely whilst staff are scattered over a number of sites. In addition, the ICT officer rolled out auto-updating anti-virus software across all the Museum’s networked machines and installed a new projects server. Other developments included creating a 2.8TB increase in RAID storage to accommodate the many thousands of digital images being generated during routine museum work and externally funded research projects. A new network for the relocated textiles repository was created to allow staff working there to have remote access to the Museum’s databases; the Museum’s network now extends to a seventh site. A joint website for the education services of the University’s museums and collections has been set up at <www.museums.ox.ac.uk>, hosted on Network Systems Management Service courtesy of the University’s Computing Service. The art education website ‘Artefact’, created by Simon Packard, continued to be progressed by David Harris and the education departments of the University museums. In preparation for the move of all staff into the new extension, the ICT officer drew up the ICT infrastructure design and specification for the new building to account for voice and data, wired and wireless technologies.

Significant updates were made in Autumn 2005 and Spring 2006 to the Museum’s collections databases; these have facilitated faster access and allowed for more complex searches. Additions to the Museum’s website during the year included seventeen new collections-based fact-sheets and a gallery of more than 200 objects from the lower gallery, both of these additions being products of the DCF-funded ‘What’s Upstairs?’ project. The education pages were reorganized, as were the events listings pages and the Friends’ pages. The website for the ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’ project was launched during the year at <http://history.prm.ox.ac.uk>, as was Congo Journey, a site devoted to photographs taken in the 1900s by Robert Hottot, at <http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/congojourney>. A working, ‘pilot’ version of the website for the AHRC-funded ‘Southern Sudan’ project was also made available at <http://southernsudan.prm.ox.ac.uk>. Work on the website for the AHRC-funded ‘Tibet’ project was well-advanced by the end of the year, and work on the site for the ESRC- funded ‘Englishness’ project was begun at <http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/Englishness>.

DISPLAY
Permanent Displays
Though as yet unseen by the Museum’s visitors, a significant amount of work was carried out during the year on the permanent displays, especially in the lower gallery. In particular, a number of fixings that had been identified as problematic during the DCF ‘What’s Upstairs?’ project were replaced. All the featherwork in the cases along the east wall of the lower gallery was removed, conserved, and then redisplayed with new fixings and new labels. Similarly, the beadwork in the cases at the east end of the lower gallery overlooking the court was also removed from display, conserved, and redisplayed with new fixings and labels. Some examples were considered too fragile to be redisplayed and were replaced with appropriate alternatives. In addition, a new display of religious beads was mounted in this area. Enhancements were also made to the displays of bags and ornament-making techniques on the north side of the lower gallery, several previously undisplayed bags being added.

Through the year, much work was carried out in preparation for the redisplay of cases emptied or dismantled as a result of the new build, and to fill the new cases that will be installed thanks to a grant from DCMS/Wolfson. Among these displays are the mask cases in the court and the skis and skates, ball games, and painting cases in the lower gallery. This work has involved research and selection, conservation, design, preparation of mounts, and label-writing. New cases have also been built and are ready for installation.

Special Exhibitions
The special exhibition programme was restricted again this year because of the ongoing building works. The photographic case remained inaccessible as did the case in the lower gallery that is often used for temporary exhibitions and installations. Nevertheless, the special exhibition Wilfred Thesiger’s Iraq, 1949–1958: Photographs of Travel remained in place until April 2006 and continued to be very popular with a wide range of visitors to the Museum.

The ‘Thesiger’ exhibition was followed by Treasured Textiles: Cloth and Clothing Around the World, which opened on 20 May 2006. Celebrating the inventiveness and vibrancy of patterning to be found in textiles and clothing, Treasured Textiles is divided into four main sections focusing on techniques used to create visual effect: weaving, printing and painting, dye-resist, and stitching. Exhibits range from Macedonian costume elaborately decorated with gold-coloured braid, to striking indigo-dyed adire cloth from Nigeria. The textiles and clothes featured have been selected from the reserve collections. Although these have always been accessible to visiting researchers, this is the first time that many of them have been on public exhibition. A particular highlight is the women’s clothing made in Mexico and Guatemala in the 1930s. Gloriously decorative in colour and design, the patterning was developed through hand weaving with additional ornament in brocade, embroidery, and appliqué. Treasured Textiles is scheduled to close on 22 April 2007.

Despite all the difficulties under which Museum staff were operating during the year, there was an enthusiastic response to the proposal for an installation in the Museum space by artist Naoko Miyazaki. Her Aerial Wish, which opened on 21 May 2006, is a site-specific work consisting of three ‘staircases’ made of white paper, too small and light for human feet but not for visitors’ imaginations. While reminiscent of architectural elements, they are fragile, free, and fantastical and designed to conceptually link the ground floor court with the temporarily inaccessible galleries. Aerial Wish will continue into the next reporting period.

COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT AND CARE
Reserve Collections
Work by collections and conservation staff to upgrade the conditions in the reserve- collections repositories continued as time allowed. The new location system was fully implemented at Osney and bays and shelving relabeled accordingly. The repacking of the barkcloth and metal vessels collections was completed so that all such objects are now clearly numbered and labeled and their location and condition recorded on the Museum’s database. Work began on the repacking of non-metal vessels and the basketry collections. The opportunity provided by the need to move one section of the reserve collection of spears was used to number each object and to add location details and condition reports to the database. Material retrieved from the reserve collections for the AHRC-funded ‘Southern Sudan’ project was returned. In total, the locations of some 5,000 objects in the Osney repository were added to the database during the year, constituting a significant improvement to the Museum’s management of its collections and its ability to make collections available quickly and efficiently to staff, students, and visiting researchers. Much more work remains to be done, but the new systems are now tried and tested and significant steps have been taken to improve this aspect of the Museum’s work. In addition, a hoist was installed on the upper floor at Osney and staff were trained to use it.

A major project this year was the removal yet again of the textile, head, and footgear collections, this time from the excellent facility at 60 Banbury Road to a temporary new repository off Keble Road, pending the creation of a single repository for all the Museum’s reserve collections. Collections and conservation staff used the opportunity provided by the need to pack the collections for removal to check the documentation, some 4,600 records being enhanced during this process.

Acquisitions
Each year the Museum receives an extraordinarily wide variety of material by donation This year the donations to the Museum included a costume from Tahiti, barkcloths from Tonga, a calendar from Nigeria, and a football from Malawi. Donations to the photograph and manuscript collections included photographs and papers relating to Hamo Sassoon’s field researches into iron-working in Nigeria (donated by his daughter, Meredith Sassoon) and the twenty-eight photographic prints used to produce the illustrations in E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s famous Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (donated by the publishers, Oxford University Press). A list of all the Museum’s acquisitions during the year is given in Annex B.

Loans
The Museum’s loans programme is a particularly valuable part of its work, providing further access to its collections, both in the United Kingdom and abroad, as well as assisting other museums in developing their institutions and audiences. In many cases, the inclusion of material in exhibitions elsewhere also results in the objects becoming the subject of further research and publication and in consequence being reinterpreted and recontextualized. This year this was particularly true for the material loaned to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, the Metropolitan Museum, and Vancouver Art Gallery, all of which featured in accompanying publications and, in the case of the Vancouver Art Gallery in particular, in extensive related publicity.

There were five new loans (of a total of seventy-nine artefacts), three to overseas institutions and two to United Kingdom institutions. In December 2005, fifteen Hindu artefacts, all normally on display in the Museum, were loaned to the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam for the exhibition Dealing with the Gods: Rituals in Hindu Religion; they are to be returned in September 2006. In January 2006, forty votive offerings, figures, and other pilgrimage-associated material were loaned to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, for the exhibition Pilgrimage: The Sacred Journey; they were returned in April. In April 2006, items of Tibetan lamellar armour, a helmet, and a sword, dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, were loaned to the Metropolitan Museum, New York for the exhibition Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armour of Tibet; they were returned in July. In May 2006, twenty Polynesian artefacts, including a number from the Museum’s two ‘Cook- voyage’ collections, were loaned to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia for the exhibition Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in Polynesia, 1760–1860; they are to be returned in August. In June, Charles Edenshaw’s highly important ‘Raven Transformation’ mask, normally on display in the Museum’s court, was loaned to Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia for the exhibition Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art; it is to be returned in September. One outstanding loan was returned during the year. A Tahitian breast ornament and a Maori hei-tiki, from the Banks and Forster ‘Cook-voyage’ collections respectively, loaned to the National Archives, Kew for the exhibition Captains, Pirates and Castaways: Battles and Voyages of Nelson, Cook and Bligh, were returned in November 2005.

In addition to these loans, high-quality digital images of fourteen pencil drawings by Arthur Evans, ten early nineteenth-century lithographic prints, and a photographic album were supplied to the BildMuseet, Umeå University, Sweden for the exhibition Saami Culture: Peoples of the North. Unfortunately, an application to borrow the original materials was withdrawn due to the high costs of transport.

The Museum was also pleased to learn during the year that the Captain Cook Memorial Museum (CCMM) in Whitby had won the Yorkshire Tourist Board ‘White Rose Award’ for the best visitor attraction with under 100,000 visitors. The application was based almost entirely on the CCMM’s activities and events in 2004 during which the museum hosted Curiosities from the Endeavour, an exhibition devoted to the Banks collection of material from Cook’s first voyage. With its catalogue and associated events, the exhibition—which had been researched, prepared, designed, and installed by Pitt Rivers Museum staff Jenny Peck, Heather Richardson, Chris Wilkinson, and Jeremy Coote—featured strongly in the application. The Museum is delighted that its efforts played a part in securing the award for the Captain Cook Memorial Museum.

Cataloguing
Work continued on re-cataloguing a number of important collections throughout the year. Much of this work was carried out as part of externally funded research projects and is reported on below under the heading ‘Research and Scholarship’.

In total, 42,325 enhancements were made to the objects database; this is an increase of 6.7% on the previous year when 39,683 enhancements were made. Almost 50% of these were made by the Museum’s registrar Alison Petch in her regular ‘cleaning data’ work. In addition, 1,189 new entries were added during the year. This is a significantly lower figure than the 3,920 in the previous year, reflecting the lower number of new accessions during the year, which is in itself a consequence of the disruptions caused by the building works. An exceptional 229,895 enhancements were made to the photograph database during the year, five times the 46,142 made in the previous year. This large number is a result of the extensive ‘cleaning’ work carried out by Jocleyne Dudding as she brought this database much closer into line with the object database. In addition, 7,611 new entries were added during the year (in fact, 8,011 new entries partially offset by the deletion of 1,400 superseded entries). This is a much lower figure than the 55,959 in the previous year, which was however an unusually large figure consequent upon the incorporation of the high number of new entries produced during the Thesiger project. Overall, the figures for new entries and enhancements can be expected to fluctuate significantly from year to year as a result of the unpredictablility of new acquisitions and the major impacts of externally funded research projects.

A good deal of cataloguing work in the photograph collections continued to be carried out under the auspices of the ‘Southern Sudan’ project; this work being responsible for the majority of the new entries and some 1,200 enhancements during the year. Continuing work on the collections in the ‘Tibet’ project is not yet reflected in the figures provided above as the records will not be incorporated into the main database until the end of the project in October 2006. In addition, in preparation for the removal of the collections to the new extension, a major project was carried out to record the precise shelf and drawer location for every item in the collections. This work will make the move enormously more efficient and safe than it would have been otherwise and, of course, has in the meantime increased the accessibility of the collections as a whole.

Conservation
As work on the new building progressed, conservation staff continued to contribute material recommendations and environmental data as well as information on standard conservation requirements for a new museum building. Shock and vibration monitoring continued in the Museum itself, the data showing remarkably little disturbance from the building site. Dust monitoring also continued, recording increased dust falls in June/July.

During the year staff conserved 782 objects, taking photographs where appropriate, and inputting treatment details to the collections database. All the objects selected for display or redisplay were conserved to display standard, as were all the objects loaned to other institutions during the year. In all, conservation staff contributed 1,703 enhancements to the databases.

As usual the Museum received more requests for internships in ethnographic conservation than could be managed. Despite the difficulties caused by the building works and related demands on staff time, two interns were accommodated during the year. Charlotte Ann Ridley from the University of Lincoln spent six weeks at the Museum working on the featherwork being prepared for redisplay in the lower gallery. Amy Drago from University College London spent six months at the Museum, during which time she worked on a variety of objects being prepared for display, loan, or for return to the reserve collections.

The Museum’s conservation staff continued to provide training and information to Museum staff and others during the year. Five handling and collections-care sessions for Museum staff were run during the year. In addition conservation staff received twenty-four visits from school groups and twenty-two from tertiary student groups. A total of 44 visiting researchers (30 from overseas and 14 from the UK) were also received.

Designation Challenge Fund: ‘What’s Upstairs?’ Project
Following the success of the DCF-funded ‘Court Project’, the Museum successfully applied to the Designation Challenge Fund for a project to carry out similar work in the upper floors of the Museum. The application was successful and ‘What’s Upstairs?’, focused on the displays and reserve collections housed in the lower gallery, began in September 2004. In this reporting year, the project team continued to work in the lower gallery. By the end of the project in March 2006 the artefact team, comprising Linda Mowat as Senior Project Officer, Elin Bornemann, Naomi Bergmans and Eleanor Cooper, had examined and improved catalogue records for more than 42,900 artefacts—a remarkable achievement! This success was achieved despite the difficulties of working in what was, in effect, part of a building site that could only be accessed via scaffolding steps. After purchasing a high-quality digital camera the artefact team also took 23,290 digital images of individual objects to create a significant new resource for Museum staff and researchers. All such externally funded projects depend on the support of permanent Museum staff and the success of the ‘What’s Upstairs?’ team was greatly assisted by ICT, technical, collections, and conservation staff, without whose efforts the project could not have been so successful.

A more public-orientated component of the ‘What’s Upstairs?’ project focused on the production of new interpretation for the displays on the lower gallery. Bryony Reid led this work as Senior Project Officer (Interpretation). Having developed a strategy reflecting the interests of existing visitors and identifying new ways of responding to the needs of the target audiences (young adults aged 16 to 24, and young families), Bryony and Kate White organized focus groups to give insights into visitors’ needs and preferences. By the end of 2005 Bryony had trialled and written 105 short in-case texts and researched, written, and illustrated with the new digital images seventeen downloadable fact sheets. These were made available in the Museum and downloadable from the website. Working with Haas Ezzet she developed a new on-line virtual gallery for the lower gallery and, in collaboration with Hélène la Rue and Kate White, she produced forty new entries for audio tours. Orientation developments also progressed with the installation of individual case headers and a numbering system to aid case identification for all cases on the lower gallery.

The success of ‘What’s Upstairs?’ has clearly been recognized by the Designation Challenge Fund who agreed to meet in full the application for a further similar project focused on the arms and armour collections in the Museum’s upper gallery. This project, entitled ‘Cutting Edge’, will begin in October 2006.

RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
Members of the Museum’s staff continue to be involved in many varied research projects within and outside the Museum. An indication of the range of research carried out during the year can be gleaned from the entries in Annex D: Staff Activities, Annex E: Staff Publications, and Annex F: Museum Seminars.

Research Projects
Research is an integral part of many aspects of the Museum’s work, ranging from that carried out with the aid of externally funded projects to the detailed investigations that are carried out as part of accessioning procedures and cataloguing (see above). Much of the Museum’s activity in this area was again focused on the projects funded by major research grants successfully applied for in recent years that enable the institution to stay at the cutting edge of contemporary, particularly collections-based, research. This section outlines just some of the major research carried out by Museum staff during the year.

In October 2002 Chris Gosden and Mike O’Hanlon were awarded £326,000 by the Economic and Social Research Council for the ‘Relational Museum’ project. The three-and- a-half-year project, which was completed in April 2006, explored the history of the Museum’s collections between 1884, when the Museum was founded, and 1945, the start of the post-colonial period. This year the work of the project team, including project director Chris Gosden, project researchers Alison Petch and Frances Larson, and the ICT projects officer David Harris, focused on completing the project website and preparing a monograph for submission to Oxford University Press. The website provides detailed information about the history of the Museum from before its foundation in 1884 to the present day (though with a focus on the period up to 1945) and about its collections and staff. The site also provides access to the detailed statistics produced during the research project, which show where the collections came from, what types of artefacts were included, and information about the individuals who contributed to the development of the Museum’s collections.

Another major research project, funded by a grant of £224,668 to Jeremy Coote and Elizabeth Edwards from the Resource Enhancement Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, began on 1 October 2003. Entitled ‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’, the project focuses on the Museum’s rich collections from an area of central importance for social and cultural anthropology in general, and British anthropology in particular, through the work of a number of individuals including especially the Oxford anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard. During the lifetime of the project each of the 1,200+ objects and 5,000+ photographs in the collection is being catalogued or recatalogued, incorporating detailed descriptions and taking full account of existing documentation, and digital images of all objects are being created. At the end of the project, now scheduled for October 2006, the material created, including related biographical and cultural databases, will be made available online. During this reporting period, further digitization and cataloguing of material from the photograph collections was carried out by Alex Nadin and a working version of the website piloted by David Harris.

Research also continued throughout the year on the ‘Tibet Visual History, 1920–50’ project funded by a grant to Elizabeth Edwards and Clare Harris from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. There were a number of staff changes during the year. Project researcher Tsering Shakya left in October 2005 to take up a post at the University of British Columbia and was replaced by Krystyna Cech. Dr Cech has focused on the photograph collections of Harry Staunton and Hugh Richardson and has helped to develop ideas about how images can be mapped in the project website. Gabriel Hanganu joined the project as Technician in November 2005 and, as well as inputting to the development of the website, has worked across all the collections that are to be included in the final site, optimizing images that had already been scanned and making high-quality scans of those objects remaining to be processed. Mandy Sadan continued to work across all the collections within the project, developing the databases for web output and building a number of related databases that will extend the scope of the resource when it goes online. She also worked on the Lhasa album belonging to Hugh Richardson and the Arthur Hopkinson collection, both of which are in the collections of the British Museum, which is an official collaborator on the project. She also completed work on the Museum’s collections of material from Frederick Spencer Chapman, Sir Charles Bell, and Evan Nepean. ICT projects officer David Harris produced a wireframe development website and has consulted with a number of user groups. Members of the project team gave presentations of their work at two seminars in Oxford. The project continued to attract researchers to the Museum with interests in various aspects of Tibetan studies and indications are that the completed website will be a highly popular and valuable resource when completed. The new website is due to go live at the end of 2006.

Also during the year, the Economic and Social Research Council awarded £370,500 to Chris Gosden and Hélène La Rue for their project ‘The Other Within: An
Anthropology of Englishness at the Pitt Rivers Museum’. Following on from the ‘Relational Museum’ project, ‘Englishness’, which began in April 2006 and is scheduled to end in March 2009, will analyse the collections of the museum, together with the history and motives of the people making the collections (who were often heavily involved in such institutions as the Folklore Society) 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 is to use the Museum’s collection, with its connected documentation, to illuminate the modern construction of Englishness. The changing structure of the English ethnographic collections will be analysed, focusing on the counties of Essex, Somerset, Yorkshire, and Oxfordshire, and on Greater London. Archival resources will be used to provide rich contextual information about the artefacts and the people who collected them.

Research Visitors
There were 222 recorded research visits to the Museum during the year requiring retrieval of material from the reserve collections. Of these, 107 were to the object collections and 115 to the photographic and manuscript collections (222 study days). The total number of recorded research enquiries dealt with by Museum staff was 2,268. Of these 1,252 were received by email, 876 by phone or in person, and 140 by post or fax. These figures represent a decrease of 30% in research visits and 13% in research enquiries on the previous year. These changes are probably due to the continuing closure of the lower and upper galleries, the continuing dispersal of collections staff in outstations, and the extended period during which the post of Head of Photograph and Manuscript Collections remained unfilled. These figures are expected to return to previous, and higher levels, once collections staff are established in the new extension.

Research visitors frequently provide important information on the Museum’s collections, either during their visits or in later reports and publications, which they are required to supply for the Museum’s Balfour Library. From time to time the Museum is also able to accommodate requests for samples for analysis. This year the Museum was able to accede to a request from Pangiota Manti of Cardiff University for samples for analysis as part of her doctoral research into the original appearance and manufacture of Ancient Greek helmets.

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. Museum staff continue to teach on the University’s undergraduate degrees in Archaeology & Anthropology, Human Sciences, Modern History, and Geography; 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 reading Social Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, History of Art and Visual Culture, Archaeology, Music, and African Studies. During the course of the year, Museum staff gave 146 University lectures and 416 seminars and tutorials. Details of the teaching and examining carried out by individual members of staff are given in Annex D: Staff Activities.

Balfour Library
The Balfour Library continued to reside in the Old Boys’ School on George Street throughout a busy year but will be relocated in Michaelmas 2006 to a purpose-built space within the new extension. Over the course of the year the library adopted automated circulation, allowing for self-issue of books and remote renewals. Staff also attended training for VTLS, the system due to replace the University’s OLIS system in the near future. A new full-time Library Assistant, Eric Edwards, joined the library early in the year and helped in rearranging the book collections in preparation for the move to the new extension. Following stocktaking, new arrangements were made for the shelving of antiquarian and rare books.

PADMAC
The PADMAC Unit, for the study of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic artefacts from deposits mapped as Clay-with-flints, is located at 60 Banbury Road and continues to be administered through the Museum. It is a multi-disciplinary, geo-archaeological unit specializing in geology, sedimentology, pedology, Palaeolithic artefact technology, landscape archaeology, spatial analysis, and geophysics. The unit offers students and researchers the opportunity to investigate geo-archaeological processes implicated in the retention, over geological time, of high-level in situ Palaeolithic sites on Karstic landforms, particularly the Chalk Downlands of southern England, and the genesis, variability, and distribution of the associated (English) deposits mapped as Clay-with-flints. Also investigated by the PADMAC Unit are Palaeolithic sites found in similar high-level contexts in both continental Europe and the Middle East. In many instances, these high-level sites represent the earliest evidence of human occupation—in Britain from around 600,000 to 40,000 years ago, and in the Middle East considerably earlier. Included in the field investigations undertaken by the unit are geophysical surveys employing resistivity, magnetometry, and magnetic susceptibility techniques. GPS, microtopographic, and photogrammetry survey techniques are also deployed and developed in order to identify and map subtle landscape features for inclusion in the unit’s GIS databases. Where appropriate this geophysical data is made available to local archaeological groups.

This year, the Unit extended its research to the Middle East, with support from the antiquities directorates of Sharjah and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Riyadh in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Following investigations in February 2006 (funded by Etisalat, the UAE telecommunications company) a new discovery of the first Upper Pleistocene (almost certainly Middle Palaeolithic) stone-tool manufacturing site in Sharjah was presented at the Seminar for Arabian Studies in July. This site represents the first clear evidence of Upper Pleistocene presence in the UAE and is of great importance in clarifying early man’s ‘Southern Route’ between Africa and the Far East. In June, the unit carried out investigations of Lower Palaeolithic surface finds near Riyadh in KSA at the invitation of Dr Alsharek of the National Museum of Saudi Arabia, funded by the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC). The unit has also continued its investigations in southern England with an excavation at Dickett’s Field, near Alton in Hampshire, and fieldwalking at Dummer Clump, near Basingstoke, Hampshire. In addition to investigating the geomorphological processes implicated in the retention of stone-tools in Dickett’s Field, the excavation enabled the development of specific photogrammetry techniques to be applied in the UAE as part of the unit’s investigations in November 2006.

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

Project Grants
In August 2006 the Museum was awarded £30,000 from the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund for a project to improve signage, including the pathway into the Museum through the OUMNH. The PADMAC Unit received full funding from Oxford Strategic Consulting Ltd; additional project funding was received from Etisalat (United Arab Emirates) and SABIC (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia); the Unit also received funding from Fission Group and OSC for the purchase of photogrammetry software as well as database and web services.

Renaissance in the Regions
The Museum benefited from £53,483 of funding from ‘Renaissance in the Regions’ to support the roles of the Education Officer, Andy McLellan, and the University museums’ new Hub Manager, John Hobart, as well as from the Museum’s share in the cross-museum Art Education Officer and from a certain amount of back-filling funding.

Research Grants
The following new research grants were obtained during the year: Mandy Sadan was awarded £217,109 from the British Academy for a project, to be based in the Museum, entitled ‘Economies of Ethnicity: Material, Visual and Oral Cultures and the Formation of Ethnic Identities in the Burmese Colonial and Postcolonial State’; Chris Gosden and Hélène La Rue were awarded £370,545 from the Economic and Social Research Council for the project ‘The Other Within: an Anthropology of Englishness at the Pitt Rivers Museum’.

Museum Shop and other Trading Activities
The Museum shop and its staff had a further frustratingly difficult year. Despite increased visitor numbers, the total shop income of £59,000 failed to meet expenditure of £79,000. Shop staff worked very hard to make the reduced shop space appealing and exciting by introducing new stock and displaying it in a professional and enticing manner. A complete review of the shop’s overheads is now planned for discussion early in the next reporting year.

The sale of publications did not contribute significantly to the Museum’s finances despite the publication of a new ‘souvenir guide’ and the long-awaited booklet on the ‘Many Shots’ robe. Unsurprisingly, given the disruption of the building works and the consequent lack of suitable facilities, income from facilities hire continued to be low, at £1,500. An increase in this income stream is anticipated once the building works are complete. Sales of photographic prints returned to normal levels (£4,365) after the closure of the exhibition showcasing William Thesiger’s photographs. The income from this stream continues to partially support the salary of a Photographic Assistant. Finally, income from the collection box remained steady at £5,493, an increased figure that only just reflects the rise in visitor numbers.

ACQUISITIONS
Donations to the Museum
Anonymous (twenty-four historic photographs from India, Indonesia, Egypt, and elsewhere; 2005.136); Bernard Carré (a cloak from India; 2006.71); William Delafield (fifteen colour prints relating to Wilfred Thesiger; 2006.61); Peter Haxworth (a printed cotton calendar from Nigeria; 2006.72); Geraldine Hobson (a portrait of J. P. Mills; 2005.135); Rosemary C. Money (seventeen items collected by her grandfather, Dennis Mills, during his service with the China Inland Mission; 2005.134); April Murphy (a woman’s costume from Tahiti; 2006.3); Oxford University Press (twenty-eight black-and-white photographic prints published in E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande; 2005.111); Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford (three barkcloths from Tonga and a Lunda mask; 2006.68); Ellie Rogers (football from Malawi made of recycled materials; 2006.4); Meredith Sassoon (her late father Hamo Sassoon’s collection of negatives, transparencies, prints and papers, mainly related to his research into metalworking in Nigeria; 2005.113); Felicity Wood (a willow berry basket made by English basket-maker Joanna Gilmour; 2005.112; a collection of material for processing raw cotton, from Indonesia; 2005.114).

Donations to the Library
The Balfour library was grateful to receive books from: Altaf Salem Al-Ali Al-Sabah, Philip Batty, Joshua Bell, Yuri K. Christov, Audrey Colson, Jeremy Coote, William J. Dewey, Mark Dickerson, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gilcrease Museum, Chris Gosden, Harris Manchester College Library, Tony Hayward, Beatrix Heintze, Herri Musikaren Txokoa, Adi Inskeep, Iziko: Museums of Cape Town, Juha Komppa, Sonia Konya, Rosemary Lee, Amber Lincoln, Arthur MacGregor, John Mulvaney, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Michael O’Hanlon, Laura Peers, Richard Reigler, Barry Reynolds, the Sackler Library, Andrew Sherratt, Sónia Silva, the Slovenski etnografski muzej, Patricia Snelson, Kasia Szpakowska, Christine Stelzig, the Tylor Library, Michael Vickers and Pamela Wace.

STAFF ACTIVITIES (INCLUDING TEACHING AND EXAMINING)
Gali Beiner continued her research into the Museum’s archaeological metalwork collection, conducting XRF (X-Ray diffraction) analysis in collaboration with Oxford University’s Institue of Archaeological Research. Amongst other work, she prepared the Tibetan arms and armour for loan to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. She continued to prepare for submitting her application for accreditation to the Institute of Conservation in 2007.

Jeremy Coote continued to support a number of Museum-based research projects, as well as directing, with Elizabeth Edwards of the University of the Arts, London, the project ‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’, funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board’s Resource Enhancement Scheme. Throughout the year he continued his researches into the history of the Museum’s early collections, which this year involved visits to archives and collections at the Ashmolean Museum and Hatchlands Park (the Cobbe Museum). In September he attended ‘Anthropology at Oxford, 1905–2005: A Centenary Conference’, held at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. In January he attended an MDA training course on ‘Copyright Essentials’. In May he attended: the annual conference of the Pacific Arts Association (Europe), held at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Sainsbury Research Unit (SRU) for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia; the workshop ‘Polynesian Collections and Museums, Research, Exhibitions and the Future’, also held at the SRU; and ‘Feeling the Vibes: Dealing with Intangible Heritage’, the Museum Ethnographers Group annual conference, held at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. He served as an expert commentator for the online web resource ‘James J. Ross Archive of African Images, 1800–1920’ and as a participating scholar for ‘Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and the African Atlantic World’, an exhibition to be curated by Henry Drewal for the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History in 2007. Through the year he contributed regularly to a number of internet discussion lists, particularly those devoted to African arts (‘H.Afr.Arts’) and Captain Cook. He refereed grant applications for funding bodies and papers for academic journals. He continued to serve as editor of the Museum Ethnographers Group’s Journal of Museum Ethnography (as well as being Chair of its editorial board) and as an associate member of the research group ‘Anthropologie, Objets et Esthétiques’ of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He gave talks about the Museum and its work to students from the universities of Bournemouth, Manchester, and Oxford. With Chris Morton he convened the Museum’s seminar series in ‘Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography’ in Hilary Term. He supervised one doctoral student, served as assessor for the confirmation of status for three others, and supervised two undergraduate dissertations in Archaeology & Anthropology and History of Art. He examined a doctoral thesis for the University of East Anglia.

Marina de Alarcón continued to manage key aspects of the Museum’s collections work, including accessioning new acquisitions, dealing with uncatalogued historical material, developing new locations indexes for reserve collections, and administering loans. She co- ordinated the Museum’s extensive redisplay programme, selecting objects and preparing texts in collaboration with colleagues.

Chris Gosden continued to sit on the editorial boards of World Archaeology (as executive editor), Archaeology in Oceania, and Ethnograpisch-Archäologishe Zeitschrift. He also served as a member of the Research Assessment Exercise sub-panel for Archaeology. During July 2006 he excavated (with Gary Lock) at the Romano-British site of Marcham in south Oxfordshire. During 2006 he gave a paper at a conference on the ‘History of Mind’ in Oslo, Norway and was a member of the International Advisory Committee for the Humanities Institute of Ireland. He was also engaged in writing up the results of the ‘Relational Museum’ project with Frances Larson and Alison Petch. He continued to direct a project on late Iron Age and Romano-British art, and with Hélène La Rue was awarded an ESRC grant for the project ‘The Other Within: An Anthropology of Englishness at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, which began in April 2006. He continued to serve as Chair of the School of Archaeology. He gave lectures and tutorials in ‘Material Culture, Art, and Society’, ‘The Nature of Archaeological Enquiry’, ‘Landscape Archaeology’, and ‘Material Culture in Melanesia’ and supervised fourteen graduate students in archaeology and anthropology. He was an examiner for the Final Honours School in Archaeology and Anthropology and Chairman of Examiners for the M.St. and M. Phil. degrees in Archaeology. He acted as external examiner for the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge. He examined five doctoral theses.

Clare Harris continued to direct (in collaboration with Elizabeth Edwards, of the University of the Arts, London, and Richard Blurton, of the British Museum) the AHRC-funded project ‘Tibet Visual History, 1920–1950’. She also continued to serve on the editorial board of the journal Art History, as a member of the MLA-funded Specialist Subject Network for the Himalayas and Tibet, on the advisory board of the International Association of Ladakh Studies, and on the international committee of Mechak (an organization devoted to the promotion of contemporary Tibetan art). This year she was also invited to join the board of trustees for a new cultural centre in Leh, Ladakh (Western Himalayas). She co-convened two conferences: with Gonkar Gyatso she convened ‘Dialogues with Artists: Contemporary Art from Tibet’ at Asia House London in November; and, with Wiliam Rea, she convened ‘Art History and Others’ for the Association of Art Historians conference in Leeds in March 2006. For the Asia House event she gave a lecture on Tibetan art and modernity to an audience that included seven artists from Lhasa; she then hosted their visit to Oxford and the Museum. Amongst other visitors she was honoured to host a visit from Michael Palin, who continues to support the Museum in many ways. In October she presented a paper at the ‘Museums and Communities’ conference at the Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre in Bangkok. In March 2006 she was an invited speaker at an Oxford Alumni event in New York. She also gave seminars at the University of the Arts (London) and the British Museum and chaired a session at ‘Anthropology at Oxford, 1905–2005: A Centenary Conference’ in October 2005. Also in October she attended the Research Assessment Exercise workshop on exhibitions and curatorial work at Nottingham University. Throughout the year she acted as a reviewer for various organizations, including the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Williamson Trust in Cambridge. She was a member of the appointments panel for research positions at the Museum, for two University lectureships, and for Junior Research Fellowships at Magdalen College, as well as serving on a professorial board of the University. She examined three doctoral theses, two for University College London and one for the University of Northumbria, and served as assessor for several Oxford doctoral students. She continued to act as course director for the M.Sc. and M.Phil. in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and as Director of Studies for Archaeology and Anthropology at Magdalen College and gave tutorials and lectures for students taking various degree programmes, including Human Sciences and Art History, and at all levels in anthropology. She supervised undergraduate, M.Sc., M.Phil., and doctoral dissertations and one of her four D.Phil. students successfully completed her thesis during the year. As time allowed, she continued to conduct research on Tibetan material in museum collections in Britain (in particular at World Museum Liverpool and the British Museum, as well as at the Pitt Rivers) and abroad (at Tibet House, New York and in Germany) and worked with contemporary artists from Tibet. The volume she co-edited with Monisha Ahmed, Ladakh: Culture at the Crossroads, was published in November 2005 and sold out by July 2006. During the year the University granted her the title Reader in Visual Anthropology. She was also awarded a British Academy / Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship, which she will take up in September 2006.

Hélene La Rue continued to work on the Museum’s music collections as time allowed, contributing again to the development of the Museum’s new audio guide as part of the DCF- funded ‘What’s Upstairs?’ project, and responding to numerous research enquiries and hosting research visits. She continued to support the gamelan, tabla, and bagpipe sessions held at the Balfour Galleries throughout the year. During the year she was appointed to the Church Bell committee of the Council for the Care of Churches and the committee of the Galpin Society (for the Study of Musical Instruments). She served as assessor for the Ethnomusicology option in the Honours School for Music and as examiner for the Honours Moderations papers. In Michaelmas term she organized, with Laura Peers, the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series. Over the course of the year she delivered sixty-eight lectures, gave more than fifty tutorials, and supervised six D.Phil. students as well as examining doctoral theses for Goldsmiths College, University of London and the University of Surrey.

Zena McGreevy continued to organize and supervise research visits to the Museum’s object collections. During the year she contributed to a number of the Museum’s projects, including working with Julia Nicholson on the special exhibition Treasured Textiles: Cloth and Clothing Around the World and preparing material for the redisplayed cases devoted to ‘Ball Games’ and ‘Model and Toy Weapons’ on the lower gallery. In March she attended a ‘Volunteers in Museums’ training course, organized by the Institute for Advanced Volunteer Management. She also attended workshops on InDesign and Web Publishing, organized by Oxford University Computing Services. She served as editorial consultant for a book on weaponry, forthcoming from Dorling Kindersley.

Andrew McLellan continued to manage an expanding education service, and to represent education in all the University’s museums on the University’s Committee for Museums and Scientific Collections. Along with education officers from the Ashmolean, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and the Museum for the History of Science he continued the collaborative process of developing a joint education service across the museums.

Peter Mitchell continued to serve on the Council of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, of which he became Secretary, on the editorial boards of Antiquity, African Archaeological Review, Before Farming, Journal of African History, South African Archaeological Bulletin, Southern African Humanities, and World Archaeology, and as President of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists (SAfA). He gave seminars at Oxford and to local archaeological societies in Reading and Johannesburg, continued to act as an external examiner for the Department of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool, served as a session chairman for the 2006 meeting of the African Studies Association, and presented papers at three major international conferences: the World Archaeological Congress Inter-Congress, Osaka, Japan; the Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists, Pretoria, South Africa; and the Society of Africanist Archaeologists, Calgary, Canada. He was also able to conduct further fieldwork in Lesotho in order to record Bushman rock paintings there. He again organized the annual Archaeology & Anthropology Open Day and coordinated similar events in conjunction with the University-wide Science Open Days in June and September. He taught for the Honour Schools of Archaeology & Anthropology and Human Sciences, as well as supervising two graduate students for the M.St in World Archaeology and six doctoral research students in African archaeology. He acted as an assessor for both Honour Schools and for the M.St. in World Archaeology.

Chris Morton continued as Project Researcher on the ‘Southern Sudan’ project until October when he took up a HEFCE-funded three-year Career Development Fellowship at the Museum to carry out research on the field photography of E. E. Evans-Pritchard, also taking up an Adjunct Fellowship at Linacre College. As part of this Fellowship he developed a project with Gilbert Oteyo to carry out field research on photographs taken by Evans- Pritchard among the Luo of western Kenya and to organize a series of community exhibitions, due to take place in December 2006. In December he presented a paper at the Oxford Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology’s departmental seminar. In May he was a visiting lecturer at the London College of Communication and also presented a paper, jointly with Gilbert Oteyo, at the Museum Ethnographers Group conference in Birmingham. He contributed two lectures to the MAME series on ‘Cultural Representations’ and supervised a number of undergraduate students in Archaeology and Anthropology as well as one visiting student and a History of Art undergraduate working on African art. With Jeremy Coote he convened the Museum’s seminar series in ‘Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography’ in Hilary Term. In May he was appointed Head of Photograph and Manuscript Collections, a post he now holds jointly with his Career Development Fellowship.

Julia Nicholson continued to research and prepare texts on the Japanese Noh masks and other masks from Asia in preparation for their redisplay in the court. She also spent a considerable part of the year working on the Museum’s reserve collections of textile and costume, work that underpinned the Museum’s new special exhibition Treasured Textiles: Cloth and Clothing Around the World. In connection with this exhibition, she worked with Andy McLellan to support visits by teachers and schoolchildren to view material in the reserve collections and explore how it might feed into their creative work. In Autumn 2005, she co- ordinated the Museum’s successful submission to the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council for Accredited status. She also continued her involvement with the Museum’s Designation Challenge Fund project ‘What’s Upstairs?’, chairing the working group and managing the project team. Working with colleagues, she developed a successful application to the next round of the Designation Challenge Fund for ‘Cutting Edge’, a project involving research, interpretation, and cataloguing of the weaponry collections in the upper gallery. She also oversaw the Museum’s particularly busy loans programme. She continued to serve as Chair of the Museum’s Documentation Committee.

Michael O’Hanlon spent much of the year, like the previous one, in discussion and planning in relation to the Museum’s new extension, and in contributing to the preparation and running of the many grants awarded to the Museum. The three-year ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’ project, which he co-directed with Chris Gosden, was successfully concluded in the Spring. Along with the Ashmolean’s Deputy Director, Professor Mayhew, he continued to lead for the University in connection with the government’s ‘Renaissance in the Regions’ programme, and to sit on Academic Services and University Collections’ Strategy Group. He lectured on the postgraduate degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. His doctoral student Joshua Bell successfully submitted during the year. He served on the advisory panel for selecting the new Director of Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, continued to serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Material Culture, and accepted the vice-presidency of the Paul Raymaekers Foundation.

Laura Peers continued to work on the Museum’s collections from North America. In April 2006 a major product of this work was published: ‘Pictures Bring Us Messages’ / Sinaakssiiksi Aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa: Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation, written jointly with Alison Brown and members of the Kainai Nation. Launched on the Blood Indian Reserve, Alberta, at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, and at the Pitt Rivers Museum in April 2006, the book is the major product of a research project based on photographs taken by Beatrice Blackwood in 1925 and now held at the Museum. The project was undertaken collaboratively with the Mookaakin Cultural and Heritage Foundation of the Blood Tribe, and involved the signing of the first protocol agreement between a British museum and a First Nation. In November and December 2006 she travelled to Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia) to consult with Haida people about the redisplay of masks at the Museum and also to plan a visit by Haida representatives to Oxford in 2009. This research trip was funded by a grant from Oxford University’s Research Development Fund. She also commissioned a new mask from Haida master-carver Jim Hart (the current Chief Edenshaw), whose grandfather Charles Edenshaw carved the ‘Raven Transformation’ mask loaned to the Vancouver Art Gallery for the exhibition Raven Travelling during the year. (The V&A/National Purchase Fund is kindly providing matching funding for this purchase.) In Michaelmas term she organized, with Hélène La Rue, the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series. Her other teaching commitments included tutoring, lecturing, and examining undergraduates in Archaeology & Anthropology and graduate students studying Visual Anthropology and Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography.

Alison Petch continued to work as the Museum’s Registrar. In April 2006 the ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’ project, on which she had served as Project Researcher, came to an end. From April she began work as the Project Researcher on the related, and also ESRC-funded, ‘Englishness’ project, beginning her work by adding data from the relevant catalogue index cards to the database. During the year she provided advice about setting up collections- management database systems to the University’s Museum of the History of Science, Bristol Museum, and the Royal Anthropological Institute. She also refereed a paper for Antiquity and carried out a formal evaluation of the DCF-funded textiles project at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In September, she attended ‘Anthropology at Oxford, 1905–2005: A Centenary Conference’, held at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. In May she gave a presentation about the ‘Englishness’ project at ‘Feeling the Vibes: Dealing with Intangible Heritage’, the Museum Ethnographers Group annual conference, held at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. She continued to serve as a co-opted member on the committee of the Museum Ethnographers Group (MEG) and to provide advice on MEG’s Subject Specialist Network activities. She continued to provide training on the Museum’s collections-management databases for new members of staff and volunteers and provided a session for the new MAME students on the same subject.

Heather Richardson continued to assist with conservation and artefact-handling training for Museum staff and students, and to supervise conservation interns from other training institutions. In May 2006 she facilitated the conservation, and acted as courier, for twenty objects loaned to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, for the Pacific Encounters exhibition. In June 2006 she facilitated the conservation, and acted as courier, for the loan of the ‘Raven Transformation’ mask to the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada for the exhibition Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art. She continued to research North American material culture. She also continued to work towards becoming an accredited conservator under the Institute of Conservation’s accreditation scheme.

Julie Scott-Jackson continued as Director of the PADMAC Unit and supervised the unit’s fieldwork and research programmes. She continued as Palaeolithic geo-archaeological advisor and committee member of the Avebury Archaeological and Historical Research Group for the Avebury World Heritage Site (English Heritage) and as advisor to various local archaeological groups. She directed extensive programmes of fieldwork, including excavations, investigations, and geophysical surveys in Sharjah (UAE), Riyadh (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) and Dickett’s Field, Yarnhams Farm (Alton, Hampshire). Alongside post- excavation analyses, she continued work on a paper that addresses the geo-archaeology of the Palaeolithic site of Rookery Farm, Lower Kingswood, Surrey and a paper on spatial analysis of the Dickett’s Field artefact locations (submitted to Current Anthropology). She provided extracts from her ‘Gazetteer of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Artefacts Found in Relation to Deposits Mapped as Clay-with-flints on Chalk Downlands of Southern England’ to support the Solent Thames Archaeological Research Framework. She also supervised the work of D.Phil. student Alice Thomas, who successfully gained her doctorate during the year.

Birgitte Speake organized and supervised sessions on conservation and artefact-handling for Museum staff, graduate students on the Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography course, and conservation interns. She couriered the Museum’s loans to the Metropolitan Museum, New York and the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. She also continued researching how to improve the Museum’s environmental conditions. She gave an illustrated talk on the history of the Museum to members of the Oxford City Rotary Club

Kate White continued to serve as a member of the Oxford Cultural Marketing Group / Visitor Studies Group. As a member of the Museums Marketing Group (Arts Marketing Association), she helped to organize ‘Because We’re Worth It’, a museums and galleries marketing day in February at Tate Modern. During the year she was invited to join Oxford Brookes Arts Management Professional Advisory Group. She attended ‘Developing New Audiences: From Plans to Practice’ organized by the Visitor Studies group and completed her training for becoming a mentor for the Museums Association’s AMA. In her capacity as Marketing and Visitor Services Officer she produced guidance notes for artists wishing to submit proposals to exhibit in the Museum and worked on the Museum’s application for Accreditation and on grant applications to DCF and DCMS Wolfson. She also worked on the University museums’ contribution to a bid from Oxford Inspires to the Arts Council for ‘Oxfordshire 2007’. She was reselected to serve for a third term on the ethics committee of the Museums Association and was invited to join SEMLAC’s Diversity & Equality Group to contribute to the development of a diversity and equality action plan for the south-east region.

STAFF PUBLICATIONS Those publications relating directly to the Museum’s collections are indicated by [*].
Gali Beiner (with Birgitte Speake and Heather Richardson), ‘Conservation in the Front Line’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 54 (November 2005), p.10. [*]
Gali Beiner (with Ticca M. A. Ogilive), ‘Thermal Methods of Pest Eradication: Their Effect on Museum Objects’, The Conservator, Vol. 29 (2005–6) pp. 5–18.
Jeremy Coote, ‘“Marvels of Everyday Vision”: The Anthropology of Aesthetics and the Cattle-Keeping Nilotes’, in The Anthropology of Art: A Reader (Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology), edited by Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing (2006), pp. 281–301. [Anthologized publication of essay first published in 1992.]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Needed: Examples of Brass Trays from Calabar, Nigeria with “Mermaid” Figures’, ACASA Newsletter, Vol. 73 (Fall 2005), p. 15. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Pacific Encounters’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 55 (March 2006), p. 10. [*]
Jeremy Coote (with Lisa Harris), ‘Looking Backward, Looking Forward: An Introduction’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 18 (May 2006), pp. 3–5.
Alan Davis, ‘Horned Helmets and Symbolic Messages’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 55 (March 2006), p. 5. [*]
Jocelyne Dudding, ‘An Initial Report on a Recently Identified Set of Maori Portraits at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 18 (May 2006), pp. 115–24. [*]
Eric Edwards, ‘An Irish Bronze-Age Horn’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 54 (November 2005), p. 10. [*]
Chris Gosden, ‘Archaeology, Colonialism and    Material Culture’, Kokogak Kenkyu [Quarterly of Archaeological Studies], Vol. 52, no. 2 (September 2005), pp. 10–24.
Chris Gosden, ‘The Impact of Colonialism on Health and Fertility: Western New Britain, 1884–1940’, in Population, Reproduction and Fertility in Melanesia (Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality, Vol. 8), edited by Stanley J. Ulijaszek, Oxford: Berghahn (2006), pp. 53–66.
Chris Gosden, ‘Material Culture and Long-Term Change’, in Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, London: Sage Publications (2006), pp. 425–42.
Chris Gosden, ‘What Do Objects Want?’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 12, no. 3 (September 2005), pp. 193–211.
Chris Gosden (with Gary Lock and Patrick Daly), Segsbury Camp: Excavations in 1996 and 1997 at an Iron Age Hillfort on the Oxfordshire Ridgeway (Oxford University School of Archaeology, Monograph 61), Oxford: School of Archaeology, University of Oxford (2005).
Chris Gosden (with Gary Lock), ‘Introduction’, in Segsbury Camp: Excavations in 1996 and 1997 at an Iron Age Hillfort on the Oxfordshire Ridgeway, by Gary Lock, Chris Gosden, and Patrick Daly (Oxford University School of Archaeology, Monograph 61), Oxford: School of Archaeology, University of Oxford (2005), pp. 11–16.
Chris Gosden (with Elizabeth Edwards, Gary Lock, Andrew Watson, and Simon Callery), ‘The Segsbury Art Project’, in Segsbury Camp: Excavations in 1996 and 1997 at an Iron Age Hillfort on the Oxfordshire Ridgeway, by Gary Lock, Chris Gosden, and Patrick Daly (Oxford University School of Archaeology, Monograph 61), Oxford: School of Archaeology, University of Oxford (2005), pp. 32–41.
Chris Gosden (with Gary Lock), ‘[Creating History at Segsbury] The Excavations’, in
Segsbury Camp: Excavations in 1996 and 1997 at an Iron Age Hillfort on the Oxfordshire Ridgeway, by Gary Lock, Chris Gosden, and Patrick Daly (Oxford University School of Archaeology, Monograph 61), Oxford: School of Archaeology, University of Oxford (2005), pp. 43–112.
Chris Gosden (with Patrick Daly and Gary Lock), ‘[Creating History at Segsbury] Understanding Deposition’, in Segsbury Camp: Excavations in 1996 and 1997 at an Iron Age Hillfort on the Oxfordshire Ridgeway, by Gary Lock, Chris Gosden, and Patrick Daly (Oxford University School of Archaeology, Monograph 61), Oxford: School of Archaeology, University of Oxford (2005), pp. 124–32.
Chris Gosden (with Gary Lock), ‘Community and Landscape: The Creation of Segsbury, A New Place’, in Segsbury Camp: Excavations in 1996 and 1997 at an Iron Age Hillfort on the Oxfordshire Ridgeway, by Gary Lock, Chris Gosden, and Patrick Daly (Oxford University School of Archaeology, Monograph 61), Oxford: School of Archaeology, University of Oxford (2005), pp. 133–51.
Chris Gosden (editor), Race and Racism in Archaeology (Vol. 38, no. 1 (March 2006) of World Archaeology).
Chris Gosden, ‘Race and Racism in Archaeology: An Introduction’, World Archaeology, Vol. 38, no. 1 (March 2006), pp. 1–7.
Chris Gosden (editor; with Elizabeth Edwards and Ruth Phillips), Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Wenner-Gren International Symposium Series), Oxford: Berg (2006).
Chris Gosden (with Elizabeth Edwards and Ruth Phillips), ‘Introduction’, in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Wenner-Gren International Symposium Series), edited by Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips, Oxford: Berg (2006) pp. 1–31.
Chris Gosden (editor; with Eleanor Robson and Luke Treadwell), Who Owns Objects? The Ethics and Politics of Collecting Cultural Artefacts: Proceedings of the first St Cross–All Souls Seminar Series and Workshop, Oxford, October–December 2004, edited by Chris Gosden, Eleanor Robson, and Luke Treadwell, Oxford: Oxbow Books (2006).
Chris Gosden (unsigned; with Eleanor Robson and Luke Treadwell), ‘Introduction’, in Who Owns Objects? The Ethics and Politics of Collecting Cultural Artefacts: Proceedings of the First St Cross–All Souls Seminar Series and Workshop, Oxford, October–December 2004, Oxford: Oxbow Books (2006), pp. ix–xvii.
Frances Larson, ‘J. P. Mills: Ethnographer and Collector’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 55 (March 2006), p. 5. [*]
Frances Larson (with Alison Petch), ‘“Hoping for the Best, Expecting the Worst”: T. K. Penniman—Forgotten Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 18 (May 2006), pp. 125–39. [*]
Peter Mitchell (editor), Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), New York: Chelsea House (2006).
Peter Mitchell, ‘Christianity’, in North Africa, Vol. 1 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 44–5.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Copts’, in North Africa, Vol. 1 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 50–51.
Peter Mitchell, ‘French-Language Literature’, in North Africa, Vol. 1 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 62–3.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Jews’, in North Africa, Vol. 1 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 70–71.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Movies’, in North Africa, Vol. 1 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 78–9.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Funeral and Reliquary Art’, in West Africa, Vol. 2 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 52–3.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Movies’, in West Africa, Vol. 2 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 86–7.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Music and Musical Instruments’, in West Africa, Vol. 2 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 88–9.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Sculpture’, in West Africa, Vol. 2 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 92–5.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Tuareg’, in West Africa, Vol. 2 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 102–3.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Christianity’, in Southern Africa, Vol. 5 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 30–31.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Marriage and the Family’, in Southern Africa, Vol. 5 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 52–3.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Merina’, in Southern Africa, Vol. 5 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 54–5.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Textiles’, in Southern Africa, Vol. 5 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 90–91.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Political and Physical Africa’, in Nations and Personalities, Vol. 6 of Peoples and Cultures of Africa (6 vols), edited by Peter Mitchell, New York: Chelsea House (2006), pp. 4–7.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Why Hunter–Gatherer Archaeology Matters: A Personal Perspective on Renaissance and Renewal in Southern African Later Stone Age Research’, South African Archaeology Bulletin, Vol. 60 (no. 182; December 2005), pp. 64–71.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Managing of Scarce Resources: The Past Record, Present Situation and Future Prospects of Archaeological Resource Management in Lesotho’, in Safeguarding Africa’s Archaeological Past: Selected Papers from a Workshop Held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2001 (BAR International Series, 1454; Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology, 65), edited by Niall Finneran, Oxford: Archaeopress (2005) pp. 37–46.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Hunter-Gatherers and Farmers: A Report from the Recent WAC Inter- Congress in Osaka, Japan’, Before Farming: The Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter–Gatherers [online journal], issue 2005/4, article 4.
Peter Mitchell, Review of After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5,000 BC, by Steve Mithen (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 61, no. 4 (Winter 2005), pp. 539–40.
Peter Mitchell, ‘Rediscovering Africa’, in Origins: The Story of the Emergence of Humans and Humanity in Africa, edited by Geoff Blundell, Cape Town: Double Storey (2006), pp. 118–65.
Peter Mitchell (with Ina Plug and Geoff Bailey), ‘Spatial Patterning and Site Occupation at Likoaeng, an Open-Air Hunter–Gatherer Campsite in the Lesotho Highlands, Southern Africa’, in Integrating the Diversity of Twenty-First-Century Anthropology: The Life and Intellectual Legacies of Susan Kent (Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, no. 16), edited by Wendy Ashmore, Marcia-Anne Dobres, Sarah Milledge Nelson, and Arlene Rosen, Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association (2006), pp. 81–94.
Peter Mitchell (editor) Archaeology at Altitude (Vol. 38, no. 3 (September 2006) of World Archaeology).
Peter Mitchell, Review of Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000, by James C. McCann (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 32, no. 3 (September 2006) pp. 640–42.
Chris Morton, ‘The Anthropologist as Photographer: Reading the Monograph and Reading the Archive’, Visual Anthropology, Vol. 18, no. 4 (July–September 2005), pp. 389–405. [*]
Chris Morton, Review of Sahel: The End of the Road, by Sebastião Salgado (Berkeley, Calif., 2004), Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 79, no. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 175–7.
Chris Morton (with Philip Grover), Congo Journey: Photographs and Documents from Robert Hottot’ s Expedition to Central Africa, 1908–9, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2005), at <http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/congojourney>. [*]
Julia Nicholson, ‘Witch in a Bottle’, in Treasures of Oxfordshire, edited by Francesca Jones, Lauren Gilmour, and Martin Henig, Oxford: FAMOS (2004), p. 35. [Omitted from previous report.] [*]
Julia Nicholson, ‘Morris Dancer’s Costume, Headington, Oxford’, in Treasures of Oxfordshire, edited by Francesca Jones, Lauren Gilmour, and Martin Henig, Oxford: FAMOS (2004), p. 71. [Omitted from previous report.] [*]
Julia Nicholson, ‘Treasured Textiles’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 56 (July 2006), pp. 6–7. [*]
Julia Nicholson, Review of Batik: Design, Style & History—Featuring Selections from the Rudolph G. Smend Collection, by Fiona Kerlogue (London, 2004), Oxford Asian Textiles Group Newsletter, no. 30 (February 2005), pp. 25–7. [Omitted from previous report.]
Michael O’Hanlon, ‘Modernity and the “Graphicalization” of Meaning: New Guinea Highland Shield Design in Historical Perspective’, in The Anthropology of Art: A Reader (Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology), edited by Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing (2006), pp. 387–406. [Anthologized publication of essay first published in 1995.]
Michael O’Hanlon, ‘History Embodied: Authenticating the Past in the New Guinea Highlands’, in Population, Reproduction and Fertility in Melanesia (Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality, Vol. 8), edited by Stanley Ulijaszek, Oxford: Berghahn (2006), pp. 182–200.
Michael O’Hanlon, ‘100 Years of Anthropology’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 54 (November 2005), p. 9.
Michael O’Hanlon, ‘Restoring the Entrance to the Pitt Rivers’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 56 (July 2006), p. 5.
Laura Peers (with Alison K. Brown and Members of the Kainai Nation), ‘Pictures Bring Us Messages’ / Sinaakssiiksi Aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa: Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation, Toronto: University of Toronto Press (2006). [*]
Laura Peers, Review of Yeenoo dài’ k’è’tr’ijilkai’ ganagwaandaii / Long Ago Sewing We Will Remember: The Story of the Gwich’in Traditional Caribou Skin Clothing Project, edited by Judy Thompson and Ingrid Kritsch (Gatineau, Québec, 2005), Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 18 (May 2006), pp. 198–9.
Laura Peers (with Heather Richardson), Review of Caring for American Indian Objects: A Practical and Cultural Guide, edited by Sherelyn Ogden (St Paul, Minn., 2004), Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 18 (May 2006), pp. 196–8.
Alison Petch, ‘Counting and Calculating: Some Reflections on Using Statistics to Examine the History and Shape of Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 18 (May 2006), pp. 149–56. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Life in the Outback: Gillen’s Groundbreaking Anthropology in Alice Springs’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 55 (March 2006), p. 8. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘“The Happiest Years”: J. H. Hutton and the Nagas’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 54 (November 2005), p. 5. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘W. B. Spencer’s Life as an Anthropologist’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 56 (July 2006), p. 8.
Alison Petch, Review of Ways of Seeing, new ‘permanent’ exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 18 (May 2006), pp. 172–3.
Alison Petch (with Frances Larson), ‘“Hoping for the Best, Expecting the Worst”: T. K. Penniman—Forgotten Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 18 (May 2006), pp. 125–39. [*]
Heather Richardson (with Laura Peers), Review of Caring for American Indian Objects: A Practical and Cultural Guide, edited by Sherelyn Ogden (St Paul, Minn., 2004), Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 18 (May 2006), pp. 196–8.
Heather Richardson (with Birgitte Speake and Gali Beiner), ‘Conservation in the Front Line’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 54 (November 2005), p. 10. [*]
Birgitte Speake (with Heather Richardson and Gali Beiner), ‘Conservation in the Front Line’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 54 (November 2005), p. 10. [*]

MUSEUM SEMINARS IN MATERIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND MUSEUM ETHNOGRAPHY
14 October: Led by Mike O’Hanlon (PRM), ‘The Pitt Rivers Today: Projects, Research, and Future Visions’.
21 October 2005: Hélène La Rue (PRM), ‘“Blowing his Own Trumpet”: The Changing Meanings of a Seventeenth-Century Trumpet’.
28 October 2005: Laura Peers (PRM), ‘Alliances and Agencies: Wampum Belts in the Pitt Rivers Museum’.
4 November 2005: Travis Henline (Colonial Williamsburg), ‘A New Face at a Mythic Place: The American Indian Initiative at Colonial Williamsburg’.
11 November 2005: Roma Tearne (AHRC Research Fellow, Oxford Brookes), ‘“Happenings in a Museum”: Accessing the Imagination through Narratives in a Museum Context’.
18 November 2005: Clare Harris et al. (PRM), ‘Tibet Visual History: An Introduction to the Project’.
25 November 2005: Maruska Svasek (The Queen’s University, Belfast), ‘Moving Corpses: Emotions and Subject–Object Ambiguity’.
2 December 2005: Christopher Wingfield (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery), ‘After Gallery 33: 15 Years On’.
20 January 2006: Natasha Barrett (The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa), ‘The Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Programme’.
27 January 2006: Emma Martin (World Museum Liverpool), ‘Redevelopment at the World Cultures Gallery at the World Museum Liverpool: Commitments, Commissioning, and Communities’ .
3 February 2006: Vincent Collison (Formerly Heritage Officer / Cultural Centre Officer, Old Massett Village Council, Haida Gwaii; now Curatorial Assistant, Vancouver Art Gallery), ‘Repatriation and You’.
10 February 2006: Steven Hooper (Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania & the Americas, University of East Anglia),‘Pacific Encounters: Researching and Exhibiting Polynesian Art’.
17 February 2006: André Singer (Filmmaker and Creative Director, West Park Pictures), ‘Anthropology on TV: Entertainment versus Education’.
24 February 2006: Ferdinand De Jong (School of World Art Studies, University of East Anglia), ‘Heritage and Pilgrimage: Remembering Colonialism in Saint Louis, Senegal’.
3 March 2006: Gabriel Hanganu (PRM), ‘The Material Biographies of Post-Communist Religious Objects’.
10 March 2006: Ian Conrich (Roehampton University), ‘Images of the Maori: Early Visual Culture and the Tourist Trade in New Zealand’.
28 April 2006: Phillip Batty (Museum Victoria, Melbourne, Australia), ‘White Redemption Rituals: Reflections on the Repatriation of Aboriginal Secret–Sacred Objects in Australia’.
5 May 2006: Lucie Ryzova (St John’s College, Oxford), ‘Visual Practices and the Performance of Middle-Classness in Interwar Egypt’.
12 May 2006: William Chapman (University of Hawai’i), ‘Recent Work at Angkor: Conservation Practices in Cambodia’s Heritage Laboratory’.
9 May 2006: Keith Jamieson (Freelance Researcher / Woodland Cultural Centre), ‘Finding Dr Oronhyateka and the Lessons Learned: First Nations Community Curation’.

JAMES A. SWAN 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 MARGARET DYKE (SECRETARY)
The previous report ended with the news that the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Natural History Museum had won the ‘Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award 2005’, and it is very gratifying to start this one with another award. For in October 2005 the Friends received the ‘British Association of Friends of Museum’s Newsletter Award 2005’ in the ‘under 500 members’ category. Congratulations are thus due to the then editorial team led by Carol Quarini, as well as the present one under Adam Butcher. All this success was celebrated at the Christmas party in December, a splendid event hosted jointly by the Pitt Rivers and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. A large number of Friends, with their friends and families, enjoyed themselves to the background sound of music provided by the Casino Royale Steel Band.

The Programme and Events Secretary, Barbara Isaac, arranged an interesting and diverse selection of talks through the year. In October, Frances Larson gave a talk, postponed from March, on ‘Henry Wellcome’s Historical Medical Collection’. In November, Geraldine Hobson (J. P. Mills’s daughter) spoke about ‘J. P. Mills: Ethnographer and Collector’, followed later in the month by ‘The Art of the Japanese Sword’ by Colin Langton. The January programme started with a lecture on ‘Afro-Brazilian Capoeira in Rio de Janeiro: From Moral Disgrace to National Sport’ by Katya Wesolowski. Also in January was ‘The Mysterious Origin of the English Apple’ by Dr Barrie Juniper, followed in March and April respectively by ‘Recent Research in the Land of the Golden Fleece’ by Professor Michael Vickers and ‘Pursuing the Steppe Nomads of the Eurasian Bronze Age’ by Dr Natasha Shishlina. In May ‘Tea for Tibet’ was given by Paddy Booz, and the year’s programme ended with Dr Naama Goren-Inbar’s ‘Taming Rocks and Changing Landscapes’. Also in May there was a visit to the Museum’s reserve collections at Osney Mead and a gallery tour by Barbara Isaac entitled ‘Travel and the Art of Travelling: Collectors and their Collections in the Pitt Rivers Museum’. Furthermore, heavy rain did not deter a large audience from coming to hear Neil MacGregor (Director of the British Museum) give a fascinating talk in the Friends’ series of annual Beatrice Blackwood lectures, entitled ‘Collecting the Modern World’. Among much else he told us that the British Museum has large collections of cigarette cards, paper money, and modern posters. The Friends’ thanks are due to Professor Hopwood for generously hosting the evening at the Saïd Business School and to Rosemary Lee for organizing the event.

At the AGM in June the Treasurer, Sally Odd, confirmed that the Friends’ commitment to the ‘Partnership with Palin Appeal’ to raise £15,000 by January 2007 was already halfway towards meeting its target (exciting events are planned for the coming months to help raise the remainder). Amongst other business, Council was thanked for its hard work and the Minutes Secretary, Linda Teasdale, was re-elected; there were no retiring members this year. The meeting ended with a talk by Dr Chris Morton of the Museum on ‘Anthropological Photographs of the Sudan at the Pitt Rivers Museum’.

The Friends continue to support the Museum’s education service, volunteers helping with the ‘Family Friendly’ sessions on Sundays and the monthly Pitt Stops. A loyal band of Friends are involved in guiding school groups around the Museum and with holiday activities. Overall, this has been a challenging but exciting year. We eagerly await the coming year and especially the opening of the new building. The Membership Secretary, Anna Kingston-Jones, envisages that the building will be a great boost to the Friends’ continuous membership drive.