Characterizing the World Archaeology
Collections of the
Pitt Rivers Museum: Defining Research priorities, 2010-20
John Fell OUP Research Fund £116, 325
April 2009 to September 2010
This project aims to characterize the range and research potential of the
Museum’s world archaeology collections. Led by Dan Hicks and Jeremy Coote,
a team of six researchers will work with a Specialist Panel of archaeologists
(with an international range of regional and period expertise). Through ongoing
catalogue and desk-based research, and a series of research visits to the
collection, the project will lead to the publication on the Museum’s website
of a report that will set out the nature, scope, and significance of the
collections, and define future priorities for archaeological research at
the Museum. The project will enhance the understanding of the archaeological
collections and the history of archaeology at the Museum, enrich the information
about archaeological objects held in the Museum’s electronic database, and
increase the accessibility of the collections and their documentation as
a resource for research. By setting out a series of priorities developed
through collaboration with the Specialist Panel, the project will lay the
necessary foundations for the future development of new research focused
on the archaeological collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Photograph of excavations at Avebury
Stone Circle in 1922 (PRM collections)
1998.262.16.5
The Pitt Rivers Museum is renowned for its collections of Ethnography and World Archaeology. However, while some 35% of the Museum’s collections are archaeological (amounting to some 100,000 artefacts from more than 70 countries), these objects have too rarely been the focus of research in the Museum. The Museum’s archaeological collections range from Neolithic and Bronze Age materials from the Swiss Lake Villages exposed during the droughts of 1853/4 to the Acland collection of Peruvian mummified material; from African Stone Age material donated by Louis Leakey to artefacts from the tombs of the first kings of ancient Egypt; and from a corpus of Bronze Age Cypriot pottery to the early archaeological collections of General Pitt-Rivers himself.
Project Team: Dan Hicks, Jeremy Coote, Alice Stevenson, Matt Nicholas, Faye Cheesman and Alison Petch.
