Pitt Rivers Museum - University of Oxford

© Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford 2008
Address:
Pitt Rivers Museum
South Parks Road
Oxford, OX1 3PP
Phone: +44 (0) 1865 270927
Fax: +44 (0) 1865 270943
E-mail:
Website:
prm@prm.ox.ac.uk
www.prm.ox.ac.uk
Front cover:
Traces made by visitors discovering the Museum court by torchlight during ‘In a Different
Light’, an evening event held on 19 May 2007. From a photograph taken by Rob Judges.
Back cover:
Charles Obewa (left) with his son, holding a framed copy of Evans-Pritchard’s photographic
portrait of his father Ezekiel Onyango (taken in 1936), presented to them by Gilbert Oteyo on
behalf of the Museum in February 2007. Framed copies of a number of Luo photographs
from the Museum’s collections were produced as part of a project—organized by Oteyo and
Christopher Morton, in collaboration with the National Museums of Kenya and Luo
community organizations—to mount a series of local exhibitions in western Kenya. From a
photograph taken by Gilbert Oteyo.

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
amongst the widest possible public
Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum as of 1 October 2006
The Vice Chancellor (Dr John Hood)
The Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research, Academic Services and University Collections)
(Dr E. McKendrick)
The Assessor (Dr K. Andreyev)
Dr J. Landers (Chairman)
Ms J. Vitmayer (Horniman Museum)
Ms C. Dudley, OBE (Head of South East Hub & Hampshire Museums Service)
Dr C. Ardouin (The British Museum)
Dr M. Spence (Head of Social Sciences Division)
Professor J. Kennedy (Oxford University Museum of Natural History)
Dr C. Brown (Ashmolean Museum)
Professor J. Mack (University of East Anglia)
Professor C. Gosden (Institute of Archaeology)
Professor H. Whitehouse (ISCA)
Dr J. A. Bennett (Oxford University 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 2006 to 31 July 2007,
presented it as its report to Congregation

CONTENTS
Director’s Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Access ........................................................................................................................... 3
Display ......................................................................................................................... 7
Collections Management and Care .............................................................................. 8
Research and Scholarship ........................................................................................... 11
Financial Success ....................................................................................................... 14
Annex A: Overview of the Museum .......................................................................... 16
Annex B: Acquisitions ............................................................................................... 17
Annex C: Staff List .................................................................................................... 18
Annex D: Staff Activities ........................................................................................... 20
Annex E: Staff Publications ....................................................................................... 26
Annex F: Museum Seminars ..................................................................................... 31
Annex G: James A. Swan Fund ................................................................................. 32
Annex H: Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum ............................................................ 32

DIRECTOR’S INTRODUCTION
This reporting year was one of enormous activity, considerable achievement, and great
sadness. The frenetic activity, of course, surrounded the construction of the Museum’s new
£8,000,000 extension, which was completed during the year—and into which almost all staff
had moved by the end of it. Indeed, pressure on space elsewhere within the University meant
that an advance guard of staff moved into the new extension well before it was fully
complete. I am very grateful to those colleagues for their equanimity in coping with noise, the
comings and goings of workmen and—how can I put this while still making clear our
rigorous adherence to health and safety regulations?—the odd trailing cable and less than
fully completed section of flooring.
One of the more complicated aspects of building the new extension was the creation of
its intersection with the ‘old’ galleries, this breakthrough area being the last part to be
completed. It was, however, wonderful to see for the first time the fresh views into the
galleries from the new extension, and to be reminded that the latter is not only a wonderful
new space for teaching and research but is itself an integral part of the Museum. At the same
time, a good number of the displays around the intersection with the new extension—on all
three floors—had to be dismantled during the construction works. Even with the energetic
efforts of the Museum’s technical services team, it will take a good many months to restore
them fully.
A further call on staff time associated with building the new extension was created by
the need to move the collections of musical instruments and archaeological materials from
the Balfour Galleries and the house at 60 Banbury Road, premises that the Museum had
agreed to relinquish in return for the final tranche of funding needed to complete the new
extension itself. Additional space for these collections has been found close to the Museum’s
main site, but the careful packing of thousands of musical instruments and tens of thousand
of flints for transport to a new location was a major task, especially when done against the
clock. I am especially grateful to the Museum’s collections staff, in particular to my
colleagues Heather Richardson, Marina de Alarcón, and Zena McGreevy, for their devotion
to this task, and for their insistence that this should be treated not as a mere removal job, but
taken as an opportunity to upgrade the storage conditions and location records of these
important collections, which as a result will soon be not only closer to hand but also more
readily accessible for staff and visitors.
The new extension is an exceptional facility, and it has been heart-warming to see its
visitor research areas starting to come into operation, led by my colleagues Chris Morton and
Philip Grover, who spent a good deal of time installing the Museum’s photograph and
manuscript collections in the environmentally controlled repositories in the new extension.
However, the new extension is not the final word so far as the need to renew the Museum’s
buildings goes. Its completion throws into relief the inadequacy of the Museum’s entrance,
with its obstructing 1960s exhibition gallery, which both blocks the entrance vista and
confuses navigation within the building. The Museum’s environment has also long needed
improving; no less do we need a dedicated in-gallery teaching space. I noted these
shortcomings in my introduction to the previous annual report and also our intention to apply
to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to remedy them. An application for £1,000,000 towards
the £1,417,000 estimated costs of the project was submitted in January and I am delighted to
be able to report that we heard in June that our application had been successful.
In the last nine years, we have re-roofed the Museum, moved the textile repository and
conservation laboratory three times, dispersed ourselves to allow the construction of the new
extension, and now regathered ourselves in it. In an ideal world, we would now have had a
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period of normal running. But I felt that the combination of continually rising visitor numbers
(up again this year, despite the closure of galleries, to 196,000) and the declining amount of
Heritage Lottery funding available (as the full costs of the Olympics emerge) meant that we
should not delay a Lottery application. I am very grateful to all my colleagues for their
preparedness to undertake this further major project in what will have been a decade of
renewal for the Museum. The HLF award itself is a real tribute to the Museum and to its staff
and supporters, and to our commitment to serving as a welcoming and accessible face of the
University, as well as a centre for innovatory scholarship and teaching. The award is also a
valuable external endorsement at a time when we will shortly need to compete again for two
major, external funding sources—that is, ‘Hub’ funding from the government’s Renaissance
programme and ‘core funding’ from the Arts and Humanities Research Council—which
together provide the Museum with £1,000,000 annually. Indeed, the insecurity of funding for
major university museums was highlighted by a recent parliamentary report to which the
Ashmolean’s director and I both gave evidence over the course of the year.
Preparing the HLF application was itself a major undertaking. It entailed extensive
research and public consultation (which substantiated the necessity for the work), and the
compilation of lengthy supporting documents running into hundreds of pages, including
reports from our architects, mechanical and electrical engineers, and cost consultants. I would
like to acknowledge with gratitude the exceptional efforts made by everyone involved,
especially the core team who pulled the bid together: my executive research assistant Imogen
Crawford-Mowday; the Museum’s access and public relations manager, Kate White; the
(then) development officer, Lois Sketchley; the Museum’s administrator, Cathy Wright—
who somehow managed to do this as well as so much else; and Kate Gardner, whose flair as a
designer gave the finished application an appearance to match its content. I would also like to
thank here our HLF case officer, Sarah Tebbot, who was both encouraging and critical as
appropriate.
The HLF award is also conditional upon our finding nearly £500,000 in partnership
funding. With the help of generous trusts and foundations, we have already made a
substantial start (the details technically fall in the 2007–08 reporting year and will be
gratefully acknowledged then), but there is a good deal more still to do before the works start.
Here, as always, I know that we will be able to count on the valued support of the Museum’s
Friends and their Patrons. At this stage, it appears that the necessary building work will
commence in July 2008 and that we will have to close the galleries for at least part of the
duration of the works. Full details will of course be announced and advertised on the
Museum’s website well in advance, and as soon as they are firm.
This award was not the only one the HLF made to the Museum this year. A second,
‘Young Roots’ award was made to Andrew McLellan and Suzy Prior to enable them to make
films around the Museum with sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds, teaching them about heritage
as well as vocational skills. This form of innovative outreach is one of many undertaken by
the Museum’s education section in particular and helps feed into the targets set by the ‘Hub’,
which funds the Museum’s education service as a whole. Enhanced ‘Hub’ funding this year
also allowed us to increase the Museum’s opening hours by a further twelve per week, in
addition to making a number of other staff appointments. We were also able to welcome as a
‘Hub’-funded trainee Nicola Tettey, with us for two years while she also undertakes a
Master’s degree in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Full details of ‘Hub’
support through the Renaissance programme are provided later in this report, a testament to
the work of my colleague John Hobart, who efficiently co-ordinates all the ‘Hub’-funded
activities undertaken by the University’s museums as a whole.
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Other grant-funded work continued or was completed during the course of the year.
Three major research projects—those on the Museum’s Tibetan and Southern Sudanese
collections (both funded by the AHRC) and the ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’
project—successfully concluded during the year. However, ‘concluded’ is in fact quite the
wrong word, since each project has created a major innovative website, each of which
continues to attract tens of thousands of ‘hits’ from unique virtual visitors. The number of
visitors to the Museum’s main website was also massively up again, this time by 55% to
819,000. This is a real tribute to the work done by David Harris on the research-project
websites and by the Museum’s ICT Officer Haas Ezzet, who also took on the major task of
ensuring that the electronic components of the new extension’s IT, telephone, and security
systems all talk to each other. The Museum’s other two major grant-funded projects—
‘Cutting Edge’ and ‘The Other Within’, on the Museum’s weaponry displays and English
collections respectively—continued to make progress over the course of the year with the aid
of the committed staff who work on and oversee them.
I noted at the outset this had also been a year of great sadness. Tragically, and
unexpectedly, our colleague Hélène La Rue, curator of the Museum’s music collections, died
in July 2007. Hélène had been a member of staff of the Museum since 1980 and a pioneer of
the Museum’s efforts to reach out to families and communities—something that is now
recognized as a core part of the Museum’s activities but was distinctly unusual for a
university museum at the time she originally proposed it. Hélène’s warm, calm, and
sympathetic personality hid both a mischievous sense of humour and an uncomplaining
approach to the demands of her ‘portfolio’ post: she was also curator of the Bate Collection
of Music, and a lecturer in the two University schools of Music and Anthropology, as well as
being a Fellow of St Cross College. The fact that her death occurred in the midst of the
packing of the music collections, for which she was responsible, ready for their move to a
new repository, only added to the sense of untimely loss felt by all her colleagues. Obituaries
appeared in the Independent newspaper and in the Oxford Times, while others are in
preparation, and we are now seeking an appropriate way to remember her within the
Museum. We were no less saddened by the death of Norman Weller—recently caretaker at
the Museum’s research centre at 64 Banbury Road—so cruelly shortly after his retirement in
October 2006.
More cheerfully, and finally, I would like to welcome all new staff, not least Dr Dan
Hicks who joined the Museum right at the close of the year as lecturer-curator in archaeology
in succession to Professor Chris Gosden.
ACCESS
Once again, the Museum’s access team worked at high pressure this year. As mentioned
above, Kate White played a lead role in the preparation of the Museum’s successful bid to the
HLF. She also worked extensively in collaboration with the education team to create a
‘Lifelong Learning and Audience Development Policy, 2006–9’, including action plans for
the next three years, which was submitted as part of the HLF grant application.
Another sizeable project for the access team was the improvement of the Museum’s
orientation and signage, supported by an award (reported last year) from the DCMS/Wolfson
Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, whose generosity has enabled many capital
improvements to the Museum in recent years. Holmes Wood Consultancy were selected to
design a signage system embracing both the Pitt Rivers and Oxford University Museum of
Natural History (OUMNH). News of the HLF award, along with other significant work now
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planned for the front of the OUMNH, made it necessary to reconsider initial plans for maps
and signs at the entrance to the Pitt Rivers. The signage project will now progress in two
phases, the first dealing with the new extension and its south entrance. The second phase,
tackling directional signage on the street and through the OUMNH and the Pitt Rivers
entrances, as well as the full Museum gallery plan, will be completed later in 2008, once the
knock-on effects of the HLF-funded restoration of the Museum’s entrance have been fully
worked out.
Marketing
The Museum received extensive publicity through the press over the reporting year. Museum
events continued to be listed on a wide range of local and national websites as well as in the
local press. Free advertising using the web has increased as more people use the internet to
seek out information on cultural activities and attractions. We also continued to use e-
marketing to promote events, and for the first time sent e-invites for a Museum event and a
private view.
Front-of-House
There were considerable staff changes to front-of-house, reception, and the museum shop
during the year. Derek Stacey was appointed deputy head attendant and has been assisting
Brian Winkfield in the daily running of front-of-house. In addition, after many years’ service
on the shop, Shirley Careford moved to take on the role of Museum receptionist, including
such administrative tasks as managing school and lecture bookings.
On 1 May, the Museum’s opening hours were extended by an additional twelve hours a
week, so that the Museum is now open to the public from to 10 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. from
Tuesdays to Sundays (and on Bank Holiday Mondays) and from 12.00 to 4.30 p.m. on
Mondays. Staff also worked very hard to ensure that the lower gallery—which had been
closed during the construction of the new extension—was reopened for Easter 2007. The
Museum’s attendants have an enviable reputation for presenting an especially friendly and
helpful public face: they continue to attract laudatory comments in the Museum’s visitors’
book and have done an excellent job at explaining to visitors the closures that construction of
the new extension made necessary.
Education Services
There were a number of additions and changes to the Museum’s education service during the
year. The service continued to be led by Andy McLellan, assisted by Isabelle Carré and
Menaka Rambukwella, but in January Becca McVean returned from maternity leave, whilst
in May Menaka left to take up a post at Manchester Museum (to be replaced early in the next
reporting year by Melody Vaughan). The section’s ‘core’ staff draws on the support of a
number of cross-museum posts, also funded through the Renaissance programme: Flora Bain
(assisted by Lorna Stevenson) harnessed the efforts of the hundreds of volunteers on whose
help we draw, Susan Birch continued to develop community projects, while Adrian Brooks
developed art resources and workshops for secondary schools. In addition, the volunteer
guiding service continued to deliver programmes for primary schools. Here we would
especially like to thank Jean Flemming, Frances Martyn, Rosemary Lee, Alan Lacey, Linda
Teasdale, Margaret Dyke, Anne Phythian-Adams, and Sukey Christiansen for generously
giving the time that makes this possible.
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Despite the construction work and consequent gallery closures, the provision to schools
and booked education groups flourished. Over the course of the year, 24,624 people visited as
part of booked educational groups, a rise of 12% on the previous year. Of these, 8,222 (33%)
were primary school pupils, 9,038 (37%) came from secondary schools, 2,074 (8%) from
tertiary education, and 5,290 (21%) from language schools. More than 9,600 children
(accompanied by adults) participated in family activities during the weekends and school
holidays. Every Sunday, ‘Family Friendly Fun’ sessions were run in conjunction with the
OUMNH, offering ‘backpack’ activities, colouring sheets, and ‘sorting boxes’. ‘Pitt Stops’
and other activities on the first Saturday of every month and during school holidays
continued to grow in popularity, with activities based on such themes as ‘Museum Magic’
and ‘Drums to Didgeridoos’. Again, many of these sessions were run in conjunction with our
colleagues in the OUMNH. In addition, 9,211 adults participated in on-site educational
activities, demonstrating the Museum’s commitment to expanding provision of lifelong
learning for all.
Meanwhile, the list of educational projects and new initiatives continued to grow.
Supported by a £5,000 grant from Creative Partnerships, and a £25,000 grant from the
Heritage Lottery Fund, film-making projects formed a leading part of our outreach work this
year. Other creative art projects included working with ten artists and fourteen year-six
classes from East Oxford to decorate two marquees as part of Oxford’s ‘InTentCity’ festival,
a partnership project with Pegasus Theatre and Fusion Arts. Another aspect of ‘InTentCity’
involved working with teenagers from Blackbird Leys to create films inspired by the
Museum, which were then projected on to the ‘InTentCity’ tents.
The music education programme also went from strength to strength over the course of
the year. A highlight was the weekly gamelan club at St Andrew’s School, which culminated
in a performance by the group at the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall in London in June.
Music workshops for special needs, primary, and secondary schools also continued through
the year, and several GCSE music study days were held in conjunction with the University’s
Bate Collection.
Throughout the year education staff continued to provide cross-museums training for
volunteer guides, museum staff, and education officers in the South Midlands Museum
Federation.
Events and Activities
Aside from the enhanced programme mounted by the education service, the museum held a
range of special events through the year. The largest of these was the latest in what is now
becoming a regular summer evening opening. Entitled ‘In a Different Light’, and run in
conjunction with colleagues in the OUMNH, this year’s event, held on Saturday 19 May,
attracted an unprecedented 3,000 visitors to the two museums over the course of the evening.
Indeed, the apparently endless ranks of visitors who marched relentlessly into the museums
when the doors were opened at 7.00 p.m. made some staff wonder whether the advertising
had not succeeded too well. The evening’s entertainment included masked dances by monks
from the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in Tibet, performances by gamelan, kora, and tabla
musicians, screenings of rare films (including animation and the Son of Kong (1933)), and a
new mix of hands-on activities inspired by the collections. Visitors had the opportunity to
explore the Pitt Rivers Museum’s galleries by torchlight (see cover image), a hundred visitors
being admitted every half hour. Despite the crowds, indeed partly because of them, the event
had a unique atmosphere of enjoyment and relaxation, with families, young people, and
adults continuing to flock into the museums until late in the evening. The palpable feeling of
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goodwill towards the two museums amongst the thousands who attended is always
immensely rewarding for the staff who work so hard to make the event a success. Moreover,
our perception that this is so is not entirely subjective. The two museums were jointly
awarded first place in the Museum and Galleries Month commendation scheme, the national
competition that recognizes such events.
On 23 June the Museum contributed to both ‘Opening Doors Opening Minds’ and
‘Architecture Week’ by hosting behind-the-scenes tours of the new extension. The tours
traced the path of a new acquisition, participants learning how an object might be acquired
and its course through conservation, documentation, and photography to eventual display and
use in an education programme.
During the year Kate White submitted a project proposal entitled ‘Behind the Façade’
as part of Oxfordshire County Council’s application to the Arts Council for ‘Oxfordshire
Reflections’ a strand of the year-long celebrations entitled ‘Faces of Oxfordshire 2007’. In
May we learned that the application had been successful, with £8,900 being made available
to Oxford University’s museums. The project will bring together four community groups
with a range of disabilities to work behind the scenes in the University’s museums with
artists brook & black and the Oxford University museums community education officer.
Together they will create pieces for exhibition in the museums in December 2007.
Visitor Figures
Despite the closure of the upper gallery throughout the reporting year, and the closure of the
lower gallery until Easter, the Museum recorded yet another increase in visitor figures for the
year: a 6.7% rise to 196,410. Month-by-month figures paralleled those of 2005–6 until May,
when the extended opening hours—allied to the reopening of the lower gallery—boosted
attendances. The number of visitors to the website also continued to grow (see below).
ICT
Visitors to the main website and associated research projects exceeded 1,000,000 during the
reporting period. Visitor numbers to the main website increased by 55%, to more than
819,000 (2.5 times the figure for 2005–6), while the percentage of visitors who bookmarked
the site was also up by 80% over the period. The Museum’s website continues to expand,
with updates and additions to most of its sections. A major overhaul of the site has
commenced with a view to full implementation in the coming year.
The website component of the AHRC-funded project ‘Recovering the Material and
Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’ was completed during the
year. This provides public access to the records for, and images of, more than 1,200 objects
and 5,000 historic photographs from the Museum’s collections along with supporting
bibliographical, biographical, and cultural resources and links to relevant literature. By the
end of the reporting year, the site had been accessed by 96,000 unique visitors. In December,
The Tibet Album (a product of the AHRC-funded project ‘Tibet Visual History, 1920–1950’)
also went live, making available a searchable, multi-layered, and interactive ‘living’ resource.
Users are now able to browse images and work with a fully integrated historical baseline
from which they can develop their own albums within the resource. By the end of the
reporting year, the site had attracted more than 50,000 visits. The site won the ‘Ox Talent’
2007 award for innovative use of IT in teaching and learning at the University of Oxford. In
addition, work continued on creating the website output for the ESRC-funded project ‘The
Other Within’, on which project progress reports are already available.
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In other developments, the University’s joint Museums and Collections education
website continued to attract more visitors. In addition, ‘Artefact’, the University museums’
art education website underwent further development, with a formal launch scheduled for
early 2008.
Development of the Museum’s collection management system continued with software
and hardware updates in late 2006. The collections management server system software was
also upgraded, followed by a ‘roll-out’ to client machines. New web-accessible layouts for
the collections databases were also created.
The ICT infrastructure for the new extension was commissioned. This utilizes a new
1Gb FroDo connection to the University network. Both data and voice connection are
CAT5E based, affording greater flexibility and potential for future development in terms of
voice-over internet protocol. The communications room in the new extension houses new
data switches that take advantage of the faster network, as well as affording a greater number
of connections. It also houses the Museum’s collections, projects, and file-sharing servers. A
hard drive-based CCTV and door swipe-entry system linked to central servers have also been
installed. A building management system has also been established to afford remote network
access to the University’s Estates department.
DISPLAY
Permanent Displays
The major change to the Museum’s permanent displays during the year was the dismantling
of those in the Music Makers gallery on the Banbury Road site. These had been first opened
to the public in 1986 and, with their use of then state-of-the-art technology, had continued to
provide visitors with an entertaining and informative introduction to music-making around
the world, as well as an inspiring context for music classes and performances. Necessitated
by the arrangements for developing the new extension, the dismantling of the music displays
(as with the hunter-gatherer and archaeological displays some years ago) was a sad but
unavoidable moment in the history of the Museum’s development.
During the building works, a number of display cases at the main site had had to be
dismantled to accommodate the intersection with the new extension on all three levels. This
year all the dismantled cases were reinstated and a number extended. In addition, with
support from the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, a number of
new cases were installed in the lower gallery. Preparations to mount new displays in the
reinstated, extended, and new cases had begun in 2005 and a number of new displays were
completed during the year.
In the court a new series of displays devoted to masks was installed, featuring examples
from the north-west coast of America (including many from the Museum’s important
collection of Haida art), from Melanesia, and from Asia (including a selection from the
Museum’s important set of Noh theatre masks). These displays have already proved very
popular with visitors. On the south side of the lower gallery, new displays devoted to ball
games and miniature weapons were installed, while preparations for a new display devoted to
showshoes and skates, and another devoted to paints and painting, were also well advanced
by the end of the reporting year. In the upper gallery, preparations were made for extending
the display of Polynesian clubs along the south wall, as well as for the development of a
major new firearms display at the west end.
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Special Exhibitions
Treasured Textiles: Cloth and Clothing Around the World, which opened in May 2006 and
was reported on last year, was originally scheduled to close in April 2007 but has now been
extended until June 2008. It continues to attract great interest.
With the opening of the new extension, the Museum found itself with two special
exhibition areas, for a short time at least. Community Music and Dance, the inaugural
exhibition in the new special exhibition gallery, opened in April 2007. Bringing together the
distinctive traditions of Javanese gamelan and English Morris, the exhibition was curated by
Hélène La Rue with the assistance of a number of colleagues from across the Museum’s
different departments. The exhibition includes a Javanese gamelan, on loan from the Music
Faculty, musical instruments and a Morris outfit from the Museum’s own collection, along
with a second Morris outfit loaned by a local side. These materials are complemented by
large images, including contemporary photographs from Java, historic images of Morris sides
and contemporary images of Morris sides taken by the Museum’s assistant photographer
Suzy Prior. The exhibition also provided an opportunity to present some of the first fruits of
the ESRC-funded project ‘The Other Within’ on the Museum’s English collections. The
opening of the exhibition was celebrated on 1 May with performances by the Headington
Quarry and Eynsham Morris, along with a performance by the Oxford Gamelan Society.
COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT AND CARE
Reserve Collections
Work by collections and conservation staff to upgrade the conditions in the reserve
collections continued as time allowed. The major focus, however, was on the removal of
material previously housed at 64 and 60 Banbury Road and in the Balfour Galleries.
The photograph and manuscript collections, held at 64 Banbury Road since 1994, were
removed to a temporary holding area in September 2006 pending their removal to new
facilities in the new extension. After a difficult eight months, during which access to the
collections was severely restricted, the final move was completed in May 2007. The new
repositories consist of three environmentally controlled rooms, to house film and negative
material, photographic prints, and the manuscript collections in appropriate conditions. A
combination of newly purchased and reused supplementary shelving from the Balfour
Galleries now means that adequate space is given to the collections, as well as providing
room for future growth.
From early 2007, collections and conservation staff worked with Hélène La Rue to plan
the move of the music collections from 60 Banbury Road to a new repository adjacent to the
main museum. The displays in the Music Makers gallery had to be dismantled and, along
with the contents of the music store at 60 Banbury Road, packed ready for removal to the
new repository. A new locations system was devised and material boxed according to
musical instrument type. At the same time, information about the Music Makers display was
recorded and the instruments’ records updated and enhanced. The development of a refined
locations system means that staff will be able to access the collections much more easily and
efficiently in the future. In preparation for the move and their new permanent location,
objects were packed in acid-free materials. Individual boxes were made for large or otherwise
problematic instruments. A total of 5,944 musical instruments were prepared for removal to
the new repository.
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At the same time as this work was proceeding, collections staff were also preparing the
Museum’s flint and related collections for removal to the new repository. With a team of
short-term staff and volunteers, collections staff sorted, bagged, and reboxed some 100,000
items. It was not possible, as part of this process, to document each individual item, but major
steps were taken to improve the storage and accessibility of the collections. In addition, nonstone
material—such as pottery, bone, glass, etc.—that had previously been stored with the
stone was separated out and prepared for removal to more suitable locations.
Acquisitions
Each year the Museum receives an extraordinarily wide variety of material by donation.
Among the more remarkable donations to the collections this year were: a collection of Gisu
circumcision regalia from Uganda, from the anthropologist Suzette Heald, along with a series
of twenty drawings by Gisu children collected by Amelia Breedt; four albums of photographs
from Sudan compiled by district administrator Percy Coriat in the 1920s, donated by Douglas
Johnson; and a collection of 9,000 photographs and slides, along with a number of films,
compiled during the Anglo-Colombian Recording Expedition of 1960–61 by the donors
Brian Moser and Donald Tayler. A full list of the Museum’s acquisitions during the year is
given in Annex B.
Loans
There were four new loans this year, two to overseas institutions and two to United Kingdom
institutions, the number of objects loaned totalling twenty-five. In April an early wampum
strip (collected in Virginia before 1656) was loaned to the Jamestown–Yorktown Foundation,
Williamsburg, Virginia for the exhibition The World of 1607, marking the 400th anniversary
of the first permanent English settlement in North America; it was returned in July. In May a
ceremonial sword or ada (part of the Dumas-Egerton collection) and an ivory door-bolt were
loaned to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna for the exhibition Benin: Kings and
Rituals, Court Arts from Nigeria. The exhibition closes in September 2007, but the loaned
objects are due to travel with the rest of the exhibition to three other venues. In May, nineteen
amulets from the Hildburgh collection were loaned to the Wellcome Trust: Wellcome
Collection, London for the ‘permanent’ exhibition Medicine Man; they are due to be returned
in May 2012. In June, a human heart in a lead case, a dried bull’s heart pierced with nails and
thorns, and a set of playing-cards were loaned to the Wellcome Trust: Wellcome Collection,
London, for the exhibition The Heart; they are due to be returned in September 2007.
A number of outstanding loans were returned during the year. In August, twenty
Polynesian artefacts, including a number from the Museum’s two ‘Cook-voyage’ collections,
that had been on loan 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, were
returned. In September, the ‘Raven Transformation’ mask made by Charles Edenshaw, which
was a key component of the exhibition Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art at the
Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, was returned to take a prominent place in the new
permanent display of masks in the court. Also in September, fifteen Hindu religious figures
that had been loaned to the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam for the exhibition Dealing with the
Gods: Rituals in Hindu Religion were returned to permanent display in the court. In
November, a Neolithic stone axe with original wooden handle from Carrickfergus in County
Antrim was returned from the Ulster Museum, Belfast, where it had featured in the ‘Early
Ireland’ gallery since October 1996. Finally, in February 2007, a Morris dancer’s costume
9

that had been on loan to the Museum of Oxford since 1978 was returned for inclusion in the
Museum’s Community Music and Dance exhibition.
Cataloguing
As in previous years, a substantial amount of work was done on cataloguing collections and
on enhancing pre-existing databases. This year much of this work was carried out as part of
the preparations for moving collections from the Museum’s Banbury Road properties to the
new extension and other repositories. Over the year, 1,977 new entries were added to the
Museum’s object database and 123,058 enhancements made to existing records, the high
number of the latter reflecting, amongst other things, work carried out by Alison Petch on the
database, as part of the externally funded ‘Englishness’ project. Over the course of the year,
638 new entries were added to the photograph database and 20,441 enhancements made to
existing database records.
Conservation
As for so many other of the Museum’s sections, this was an exceptionally busy year for
conservation staff. The conservation studio in the new extension was opened in January 2007,
with much of the furniture recycled from the previous studio in the Balfour Galleries on
Banbury Road. The environmental monitoring system, from Hanwell, which had been used
for more than ten years in the Museum and Banbury Road sites, was updated to include more
data loggers to ensure that the environmental plant in the new extension is delivering the
temperature and relative humidity required. The fine-tuning of the equipment—in
consultation with the University’s Estates Office, which is responsible for running the
environmental plant—continues. Monitoring of shock, vibration, and dust levels in the
Museum finished as the building work came to an end. As it turned out, vibration levels were
less during building work than they are normally during visits by schoolchildren and the
general public. However, rises in the general level of dust were recorded. In addition, there
were several unanticipated incursions of dust from an unsuspected under-floor pipe leading
into the Museum. All 1,700 objects removed from display pending the construction of the
new extension were checked and, where necessary, conserved to display standards. The
galleries, as well as many of the items on open-display in the court, were given a ‘deep’
clean.
Unwelcome visitors, in the form of clothing moths, were a problem this year,
particularly for many of the textile objects on display. The number of moths found on the
traps in the case containing North American clothing was sufficient to justify implementing
the Museum’s full pest-management procedure, which involved removing all the clothing
from the display, freezing it, and thoroughly checking each item before returning the material
to the case. All displays with similarly vulnerable materials were checked each week. The
Museum is not alone in suffering from this problem, and it is now thought that the incidence
of clothes moth, which has escalated throughout the UK in recent years, may be connected to
climate change.
Conservation staff spent much time over the course of the year preparing the musical
instrument and stone tool collections for removal from Banbury Road to a new repository in
the Inorganic Chemistry building. The new repository had to be carefully redesigned to
accommodate these collections, with their unique conservation demands. The space will also
include study facilities for researchers. The conservation team also submitted extensive data
relating to the environmental component of the Museum’s bid to the HLF. As usual,
10

conservation staff dealt with the conservation aspects of the Museum’s national and
international loans.
Even in such a busy year, training and the hosting of interns were not neglected.
Following external assessment, both Heather Richardson and Gali Beiner became accredited
conservators (ACR) through the Institute of Conservation. Novelette Aldoni Stewart from
University College London spent three months at the Museum as an M.Sc. intern, during
which she worked particularly on one of the boats on display in the court. An application to
the HLF for a training internship in ethnographic conservation, to commence in the next
reporting year, was successful.
Designation Challenge Fund
The Museum’s series of projects supported by the Designation Challenge Fund continued in
this reporting year with the start of ‘Cutting Edge: Revealing Hidden Stories in a Cross-
Cultural Collection of Arms and Armour’. Focused on the arms and armour collections on
display in the upper gallery, the project has documentation, research, and interpretation
components. Outputs from the project will include new collections based fact-sheets, a web
gallery, improved text and captions in parts of the weaponry displays, audio-guide entries,
and record-level enhancements to the catalogue databases. The project is being overseen by
Julia Nicholson and Kate White and, as usual, benefits enormously from additional efforts
from staff in all the Museum’s sections. The ‘Cutting Edge’ project is scheduled to end in
March 2008 and its outcomes will be reported on in more detail next year.
Andrew Mills took up the post of Research Officer in October 2006, his task being to
undertake in-depth research on the objects on display in preparation for use by the
Interpretation Officer, the latter post being filled by Helen Adams in January 2007. Also in
January, Linda Mowat returned to the Museum as Senior Project Assistant to oversee the
cataloguing aspect of the project, to which Elin Bornemann and Sian Mundell were seconded
from the collections section. By the end of the reporting year, 6,974 artefacts had been
examined and their associated records checked and enhanced. In addition, the cataloguing
team have taken more than 3,000 photographs with a high-quality digital camera for use on
the web gallery and as a permanent digital resource.
A major component of the Interpretation Officer’s work involved consultation with
stakeholders in order to produce new interpretive materials that are meaningful, relevant, and
accessible. Formative evaluation, over a seven-month period, included more than fifty
questionnaire-based consultations and fifteen focus groups. The focus groups were selected
to represent the Museum’s current users and potential new audiences drawn from outreach
sessions. The new audiences included local community groups, family groups, specialist
interest groups, students, partner museums, and disability groups. The content of the sessions
included guided tours, object handling, terminology testing, thematic discussions, and text
and audio evaluation, as well as such group activities as ‘thought-showers’.
RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
The Museum’s staff continue to contribute to numerous research projects both 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.
11

Research Projects
Research continues to be 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.
‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological
Resource’, 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. The project focused on the Museum’s collections from an area of central
importance for anthropology in general, and British anthropology in particular, through the
work of a number of people including Oxford anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Each of
the 1,200+ objects and 5,000+ photographs in the collection was recatalogued, with detailed
descriptions and transcripts of existing documentation, and digital images of all objects were
created. During the reporting year, further cataloguing work was carried out, and the website
completed. The project came to an end in October 2006, by which time all the material
created, including related biographical and cultural databases, was available online.
The research project ‘Tibet Visual History, 1920–50’, funded by a grant of £238,000 to
Elizabeth Edwards and Clare Harris (and Richard Blurton of the British Museum) from the
Arts and Humanities Research Council, began in May 2004. Mandy Sadan, Krystyna Cech,
and Gabriel Hanganu continued working on the project until October 2006. The project
continued to attract researchers to the Museum with interests in various aspects of Tibetan
studies and the completed website, which was launched in late 2006, has been received with
great enthusiasm, particularly in the Tibetan exile community in India and in Lhasa, Tibet. It
is anticipated that the website will be launched publicly in May 2008.
The research project ‘The Other Within: An Anthropology of Englishness at the Pitt
Rivers Museum’, funded by a grant of £370,500 to Chris Gosden and Hélène La Rue from
the Economic and Social Research Council, began work in April 2006. The three-year project
aims to analyse the collections of the museum, together with the history and motives of the
people making the collections, 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. Researcher Alison Petch
was joined on the project by Chris Wingfield in September 2006.
Research Visitors
There were 191 recorded research visits to the Museum during the year requiring retrieval of
material from the displays or reserve collections. Of these, 139 were to the object collections
and 52 to the photographic and manuscript collections (the latter totalling 65 study days).
While the number of research visits to the object collections increased slightly (from 107),
the number of visitors to the photographic and manuscript collections decreased (from 115).
12

Given the difficulties consequent on relocating the collections twice in the year, this was to
be expected. The total number of recorded research enquiries dealt with by Museum staff was
2,079. Of these, 941 were received by email, 554 by phone or in person, and 584 by post or
fax. These figures represent a slight decrease in comparison to the previous year (when the
total was 2,268).
Research visitors frequently provide important information on the Museum’s
collections, either during their visits or in later reports and publications, copies of 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 Robin Torrence (Principal Research Scientist at the Australian
Museum, Sydney) to provide an obsidian stemmed tool (PRM 1938.36.1154), collected for
the Museum by Beatrice Blackwood in Papua New Guinea in August 1937, for Raman
spectroscopic analysis by Elizabeth Carter (Professional Officer in Vibrational/Electronic
Spectroscopy at the University of Sydney) at the Analytical Centre at the University of
Bradford. This non-destructive technique allows the analyst to ‘characterize’ the material and
thus, it is hoped, to identify its geological source and thus provide clues to related social
interactions.
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 and Anthropology, Geography, Human
Sciences, and History of Art and Visual Culture; 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 year, Museum staff
gave 110 University lectures and 220 seminars and tutorials. Details of the teaching and
examining carried out by members of staff are given in Annex D: Staff Activities.
In addition, during the year, Museum staff produced thirty-four scholarly publications
(six based on the Museum and its collections), twenty other publications (all of which were
based on the Museum and its collections), attended twenty-five conferences and numerous
workshops and training days, delivered sixteen conference papers, received 217 visiting
researchers and academics, and dealt with numerous collections-related enquiries.
Balfour Library
For the Library the year was dominated by the reorganization required following the move
into the new extension in November. Core books and works on general subjects are now sited
on the ground floor, with periodicals and area studies books located in open-access stacks on
the first floor. In Eric Edwards’s absence due to ill health, the Library was greatly helped in
this reorganization by temporary assistance from Alan Davis and John Todd.
PADMAC
The PADMAC Unit (for the study of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic artefacts from deposits
mapped as clay-with-flints in the UK, and of Palaeolithic artefacts and associated deposits in
a Middle Eastern (Arabian) context) continued to be located at 60 Banbury Road until the end
of the year when responsibility for it was transferred to the Institute of Archaeology.
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PADMAC 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 an 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 from
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 developed and deployed 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 expanded its research in the Middle East (United Arab Emirates), in
collaboration with the antiquities directorates of Sharjah, Ras al Khaimah, and Abu Dhabi.
The focus of the unit’s work is the continued investigations of the Upper Pleistocene (Middle
Palaeolithic) stone-tool manufacturing site discovered in Sharjah and other associated sites.
An interim report was presented at the Seminar for Arabian Studies held at the British
Museum in July 2007. This included analysis of the artefacts by Dr Sarah Milliken
(PADMAC unit associate). The Sharjah site represents the first clear evidence of Upper
Pleistocene (Middle Palaeolithic) presence in the United Arab Emirates and is of great
importance in clarifying early man’s ‘southern route’ between Africa and the Far East. The
unit also continued its investigations in southern England with fieldwalking at Dummer
Clump, near Basingstoke, Hampshire, in preparation for excavation in late 2007.
FINANCIAL SUCCESS
The Museum continued to enjoy success in obtaining the external project and research grant
funding so crucial to its financial health.
Project Grants
As noted above, in June 2007 the Museum was awarded £1,000,000 by the Heritage Lottery
Fund (HLF) for the entrance redevelopment project. A further £25,000 was awarded by the
HLF for the Museum’s ‘Young Roots’ film-making project. The PADMAC Unit received
full funding for its annual costs from Oxford Strategic Consulting Ltd.
Research Grants
The following grants were obtained during the year. Laura Peers was awarded $2,000 by the
Government of Canada for research on the nineteenth-century artist Peter Rindisbacher. She
also received a grant of £7,500 from the British Academy for the pilot project ‘Digital Access
for First Nations Heritage in UK Museums’. The Museum is also grateful to the Latin
American Centre and Dr Malcolm Deas for the award of £500 from the Roger Brew
Memorial Fund towards the costs of conserving the Brian Moser / Donald Tayler collection.
14

Renaissance in the Regions
During the reporting period the Museum also benefited from £93,544 of funding from
Renaissance, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council’s programme to transform
England’s regional museums. Since 2002, central government investment has begun to
reverse the decline in the country’s major regional museums: increasing visitor numbers,
improving standards, developing collections, and supporting new ways of working. The
Oxford University museums (Pitt Rivers, Ashmolean, Natural History, and History of
Science) form one quarter of the South East Renaissance Hub, alongside Hampshire County
Museums and Archives Service, The Royal Pavilion, Libraries, and Museums, Brighton and
Hove, and Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust.
In the south-east, Renaissance has funded a number of regional initiatives including
some with Oxford University, many of which are delivered through the Museum, Libraries,
and Archives Council (MLA) South East. Among the key programmes of wider benefit have
been: the funding of the museum development officer network, which provides advice,
support, training, and grants to smaller museums; the establishment and funding of a staffplacement
scheme so that museum staff can gain experience and training within other
museums in the region; setting up a ‘skills bank’ for museums to call upon for advice and
support; piloting a new ‘family friendly’ marketing initiative in the Thames Valley, which is
now being expanded across the south-east; arranging specialist training in the conservation
and storage of archival collections; and organizing, buying and training teams in the use of
emergency response units in each sub-region to react in case of fire or flood. More than 90%
of the museums in the south-east have drawn on one or more of these resources since their
inception two years ago.
Within the Thames Valley region, Oxford University museums play a leading role in
the delivery of the Renaissance vision. This envisages: increased numbers of visits from
diverse sectors of society, especially from schoolchildren; increased virtual and physical
access to collections; improved training for staff; and better care and interpretation of
collections. To meet these ends, the University museums have used their Renaissance award
to fund a range of posts and activities including: a registrar’s assistant to help get more loans
into other museums; education officers to deliver services to schools, family, community, and
adult education establishments; collections conservators; IT officers, to increase virtual
access to collections; exhibition technicians, administrative, and organizational staff.
At the Pitt Rivers Museum, funding has focused on the education service, with three
staff being supported out of Renaissance funds. The exhibition programme has also received
support, with funding for a technician and a photographer, as well as ‘seed-corn’ funding for
the Community Music and Dance exhibition. Renaissance funds have also been used to
extend Museum opening hours and to meet the travel expenses of invited representatives of
source communities to visit the Museum to study collections and teach Museum staff about
their cultural heritage. It is hoped that the programme will continue to be funded in the future
so that the Museum can build on what has been achieved already to provide an increasingly
high-quality service to schools, visitors, and researchers. Continuing Renaissance will also
enable the University museums to carry on contributing to the development of regional
museums through the programmes funded by Renaissance and run by MLA South East.
Positive Action Trainee
In April 2007 the Museum welcomed its first positive action trainee, Nicola Tettey. The
Positive Action Scheme is a long-term programme being run nationwide by the Museums
15

Association and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. It offers part-time training
over two years to people from minority ethnic communities who are under-represented in the
museum workforce. It is hoped that through this training programme the national museum
workforce can come to better represent the diverse audience that museums serve. Nicola
spent her first year working in a number of different sections of the Museum, learning how
they function and receiving introductory training. Alongside this training programme Nicola
is studying for a Masters in Museum Studies through Leicester University.
Museum Shop and other Trading Activities
The Museum Shop reported a 55% increase in income compared with the previous year.
Although it still operated at a loss, this was a significant improvement, due largely to the
rationalization of staffing levels, increased input from other members of the administration
team, and an improvement in the turnover of stock. Unfortunately, due to space limitations
the shop is still unable to capitalize on increased visitor numbers. Plans for the closure and
subsequent relocation and refurbishment of the shop as part of the larger remodelling project
for the Museum’s entrance will be implemented during 2008.
A concentrated effort to sell the vast bulk of the Museum’s publications stock was
successfully implemented this year, raising £5,837, whilst the sale of photographic images
and reproduction fees continued to provide a steady income (£6,800) that supported a small
proportion of the salary for the post of assistant photographer. Unfortunately there is little
opportunity to increase the revenue from this activity in the near future, as it places a heavy
demand on hard-pressed collections and photographic staff.
Once the new extension was fully functioning, it was possible once again to offer the
Museum for hire as a venue for external events from January 2007. This year, external hiring
provided an income of £520. Income through the collecting box increased a little from £5,493
in 2005–6 to £6,933. These very welcome donations were used to support the salary of an
education officer.
ANNEX A
OVERVIEW OF THE MUSEUM
The Pitt Rivers Museum is an ethnographic and archaeological museum of international
importance with approximately 200,000 visitors a year. Entered through the Oxford
University Museum of Natural History in Parks Road, it is acknowledged to be a cultural
artefact in its own right, distinguished for the density of its displays and for their arrangement
by artefact category and function rather than by cultural area. It is open to the public from
10.00 a.m to 4.30 p.m. from Tuesdays until Sundays, and from noon until 4.30 on Mondays.
The Museum is also a noted centre of research with a strong role in the University’s teaching
of anthropology and archaeology. It has some fifty staff.
The Museum takes its name from General Pitt Rivers, who in 1884 donated a large
ethnographic and archaeological collection, numbering some 20,000 artefacts, to the
University of Oxford. The collection has since been extensively added to and today numbers
some 445,000 artefacts (295,000 objects, 150,000 historical photographs), making its
holdings in its field second in size only to those of the British Museum. The Museum also
holds some sixty collections of manuscripts. The Museum’s Balfour Library specializes in
cultural anthropology and museology.
16

The Museum now has one main site of operations—the original galleries and
interconnected new extension—but still has an undesirable number of satellites where its
study collections are held. The principal one is at Osney, but the textile collections remain
stranded in inconvenient storage in Keble Road while the music and stone tool collections
will be nearer at hand once refurbishment of space in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory
adjacent to the Museum is complete.
ANNEX B
Donations to the Museum
ACQUISITIONS
Suzette Heald (a set of well-documented Gisu circumcision regalia collected by the donor
during her fieldwork in the Mbale District of Uganda in the 1960s, along with a series of
twenty drawings by Gisu children collected by Amelia Breedtt; 2006.93); the Vice-
Chancellor, John Hood (an engraved ceremonial tankard and trowel presented to him at the
topping-out ceremony for the Museum’s new extension on 9 February 2006; 2006.78);
Douglas Johnson (four albums of photographs from Sudan compiled by district
commissioner Percy Coriat in the 1920s; 2007.34); the Estate of the late Bent Juel-Jensen (a
mixed collection of ethnographic objects, including a stringed instrument, a model canoe, and
a harpoon; 2007.40); Chris Morton (six photographic prints from India collected by Margaret
Ross in 2005; 2006.73); Brian Moser and Donald Tayler (9,000 photographs and slides, plus
related films, compiled by the donors during the Anglo-Colombian Recording Expedition of
1960–61; 2007.68); Oxford City Council via M. Saunders (a pair of figure-skates and a pair
of hockey-skates, from Oxford, for the new display in the lower gallery; 2006.77); Angela
Rackham (a Hausa-made mat made of palm leaf, from Nigeria; 2006.92); Patricia Roberts
(twenty-nine film negatives from Tibet, compiled in 1916 by Brigadier Michael Rookherst
Roberts; 2006.88); Meredith Sassoon (ethnographic and archaeological objects from the
personal collection of her late father Hamo Sassoon, mainly from West Africa, especially
Nigeria; 2006.80); Mary Spear (five albums of photographs from Australia and Nigeria,
dating from 1910 to 1920, compiled by William Henry Freer Hill; 2006.79); John Tyman
(1,000 photographs relating to his fieldwork among the Inuit of Canada and Sawos of
Torembi, Papua New Guinea, compiled by the donor between 1980 and 1990; 2007.47);
Eleanor Waterhouse (a piece of barkcloth from Polynesia, thought to be previously owned by
George Marsden Waterhouse; 2006.76).
Donations to the Library
At the end of the year the Balfour Library received a large bequest from the library of Hélène
La Rue, which will be reported on in more detail in the next annual report.
In addition the Library was grateful to receive donations from: Ross Bowden, Michael
Byrne, the Computing Laboratory Library, Jeremy Coote, Elizabeth Cory-Pearce, A. B.
Davidson, Mark Dickerson, the Geography and the Environment Library, Philip Grover,
Robert Joost Willink, Jonathan King, Juha Komppa, Kiprop Lagat, Rosemary Lee, Ildiko
Lehtinen, Peter Micklethwait, David Mills, Chris Morton, Leah Niederstadt, Veronica
Passalacqua, Laura Peers, Alison Petch, Suzy Prior, Peter Rivière, the Sackler Library, Tsan-
Huang Tsai, the Tylor Library, Kate White, Liz Yardley, and David Zeitlyn.
17

ANNEX C
STAFF
(part-time staff are indicated by * and staff on fixed-term contract by +)
Director
Access/Public Relations
and Visitor Services
Administration
Michael O’Hanlon
Imogen Crawford Mowday (Executive Research Assistant)+
Kate White (Access and Public Relations Manager)
Kate Gardner (Front of House Manager & Marketing Assistant)
Shirley Careford (Receptionist; from October 2006)
Cathy Wright (Administrator)
Antigone Thompson (Assistant Administrator)
Caretaker Norman Weller† (retired October 2006)
Collections
Conservation
Jeremy Coote (Joint Head of Collections Management)*
Julia Nicholson (Joint Head of Collections Management)*
Chris Morton (Head of Photograph & Manuscript Collections)*
Marina De Alarcón (Senior Curatorial Assistant)
Zena McGreevy (Curatorial Assistant)
Philip Grover (Curatorial Assistant; from October 2006)
Elin Bornemann (Cataloguing Assistant; from January 2007)+
Sian Mundell (Cataloguing Assistant; from January 2007)+
Birgitte Speake (Head of Conservation)
Heather Richardson (Conservator)
Gali Beiner (Conservator)+
Curators Chris Gosden (also University Lecturer; to September 2006)*
Clare Harris (also University Lecturer; on research leave)*
Hélène La Rue† (also University Lecturer; died in service)*
Peter Mitchell (also University Lecturer; to September 2006)*
Laura Peers (also University Lecturer)*
Elizabeth Cory-Pearce (also University Lecturer)+
DCF Project Team Helen Adams (Interpretation Officer; from January 2007)+
Andy Mills (Researcher; from October 2006)+
Linda Mowat (Senior Project Assistant; from January 2007)*+
Development Lois Sketchley (November 2006 to June 2007)
Education &
Widening Access
Andrew McLellan (Head of Education)+
Isabelle Carré (Education Officer)*+
Adrian Brooks (OU Museums Art Education Officer)+
Becca McVean (Education Officer)*+
Meneka Rumbukwella (Education Assistant; to May 2007)+
18

Englishness Project
Alison Petch (Project Researcher)+
Chris Wingfield (Project Researcher; from September 2006)+
Fellows Mandy Sadan (British Academy; from January 2007)+
Chris Morton (Career Development)*+
Front of House
Brian Winkfield (Head Attendant)
Gallery Attendants Derek Stacy (Deputy Head Attendant; from February 2007)
Fernando Calzada
Alan Davis*
George Kwaider*+
Peter Stimpson*
Gemma Jones (from May 2007)*+
Julie Miller (from May 2007)*+
Hub
ICT
Library
John Hobart (OU Hub Manager)+
Haas Ezzet (Head of ICT)
David Harris (ICT Projects Officer)*+
Mark Dickerson (Librarian)
Eric Edwards (Library Assistant)
Museum Shop Shirley Careford (Manager; to September 2006)
Elizabeth Webb (Manager)
Manuela Herrera (Assistant; to May 2007)+
Beth Munroe (Assistant; from May 2007)+
Beverly Stacy (Assistant; from May 2007)+
PADMAC
Photography
Julie Scott-Jackson (Director)+
Malcolm Osman (Museum Photographer)
Suzy Prior (Assistant Photographer)+
Positive Action Trainee Nicola Tettey (from April 2007)+
Technical Services
John Simmons (Head of Technical Services)
John Todd (Technician)*
Chris Wilkinson (Palin Technician)
Adrian Vizor (Technician)
Alan Cooke (Technician)+
Jon Eccles (Technician)
Tibet Project Mandy Sadan (Project Manager/Researcher; to October 2006)+
Krystyna Cech (to October 2006)*+
Gabriel Hanganu (to October 2006)*+
19

ANNEX D
STAFF ACTIVITIES (INCLUDING TEACHING AND EXAMINING)
Gali Beiner completed her survey and analysis of archaeological metals in the Museum’s
collections and gave a presentation on her research to a forum of representatives from
Oxford’s museums. She attended the annual meeting and AGM of the metals section of the
Institute of Conservation (ICON). During the course of the year she also visited fellow
conservators at the Wellcome Trust, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Royal
Armouries in Leeds to discuss methods for use in specific projects. In May, she was advised
that she had been awarded a grant by the Anna Plowden Trust to attend the triennial meeting
of the ICOM-CC Metal Working Group in Amsterdam in September 2007. In June she
organized a workshop on conservation of photographic materials under the tutorship of Susie
Clark (ACR). During the year she underwent professional accreditation with ICON.
Imogen Crawford-Mowday began the year by compiling the Museum’s annual report for
2005–6 and its financial report to the AHRC for 2001–6. She coordinated the Museum’s
application to the Heritage Lottery Fund and since the announcement of its success in June
she has worked on raising the matching funding required for the project. Early in 2007 she
acted as project manager for the Community Music and Dance exhibition, working closely
with its curator Hélène La Rue and the exhibition team.
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 final stages of
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 Council’s
Resource Enhancement Scheme; the project was completed on schedule in October 2006. In
September he attended ‘Mbili’, the second colloquium of the Eastern Africa Visual
Traditions group, held at the British Museum, at which he spoke about the ‘Southern Sudan’
project. In December he attended the public conference ‘Pacific Islands’, also held at the
British Museum. In April he was a participant in the conference ‘The History of British
Archaeology at Oxford’ at Wolfson College, Oxford. In May he attended the Museum
Ethnographers Group annual conference ‘Objects of Trade’ at the National Maritime
Museum and delivered a paper on ‘Joseph Banks’s Brass Patus’. He served 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 2008. Throughout the year he continued his researches into the history of the Museum’s
early collections, as well as contributing regularly to a number of internet discussion lists,
particularly those devoted to African arts and Captain Cook. He refereed grant applications
for the National Science Foundation (USA) and other funding bodies, as well as reviewing
papers for academic journals. He continued to serve on the committee of the Museum
Ethnographers Group and as Editor of the Group’s Journal of Museum Ethnography, 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 a group of anthropologists and museum curators from the Solomon Islands and to students
from the universities of Manchester and Oxford. He supervised one doctoral student, served
as assessor for the confirmation of status for others, and supervised undergraduate
dissertations in Archaeology & Anthropology and History of Art. He examined a doctoral
thesis for the University of Oxford.
20

Elizabeth Cory-Pearce continued her research on the Museum’s Maori collections,
developing a number of conference papers, forthcoming publications, and prospective
funding applications. She responded to enquiries relating to the Museum’s Maori and Pacific
collections, and received one national and one international research visitor. In August 2006,
she conducted comparative research in museums and communities on Canada’s west coast,
funded by a Sir Ernest Cassell Award. In May she gave a paper at the joint American
Ethnological Society / Cultural Anthropology Society of Canada conference at the University
of Toronto on the Makereti collection, colonial museology, and subaltern scholarship. In June
she attended a conference on ‘Comparative Museology’ at the History of Art Department,
University of Oxford. In July she delivered a paper, entitled ‘Body Arts, Body Parts and the
Limits of Embodiment’, on the Museum’s Robley collection and toi moko (Maori tattooed
preserved heads), at the Royal Anthropological Institute’s annual film festival and conference
at the University of Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology. She gave lectures
and tutorials in the series ‘Introduction to Anthropological Theory’, ‘Social Analysis and
Interpretation’, and ‘Cultural Representations, Beliefs and Practices’, and contributed to the
core lecture series ‘Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology’. She also gave lectures
and tutorials in the Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography core course, ‘Cultural
Representations’, and the ‘Research Methods in Material Anthropology and Museum
Ethnography’ series. She contributed to the ‘Research Methods in Visual Anthropology’
sessions, and to the ‘Ethnographic Film’ series for the Visual Anthropology degree. She gave
tutorials in anthropology to first- and second-year undergraduate students in the Human
Sciences, and lectured on ‘Anthropological Approaches to Art’ in the History of Art
department. With Laura Peers, she convened the Museum’s seminar series in Material
Anthropology and Museum Ethnography in Hilary Term, and gave a seminar in the series.
She acted as assessor for four confirmations of status, supervised two M.Phil. students, and
examined coursework, dissertations, and exam scripts for the undergraduate and graduate
degrees. She served as Director of Studies for Archaeology & Anthropology at Magdalen
College.
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. Much of
her time this year was devoted to packing the music collections and preparing for their
removal to a new repository. She continued to coordinate the Museum’s redisplay
programme, selecting objects and preparing texts in collaboration with colleagues, and to
liaise with Thames Valley Police concerning the security of the Museum’s firearms
collection. In November 2006 she attended the two-day conference ‘Don’t Panic: Dealing
with Hazardous Materials in Museum Collections’, organized by the Care of Collections and
Metals sections of the Institute of Conservation, at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. In
May 2007 she attended a symposium at Brighton Museum on the material and visual culture
of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Also in May she couriered a loan to the Museum für
Völkerkunde in Vienna for the exhibition Benin: Kings and Rituals, Court Arts from Nigeria.
Kate Gardner continued to have overall responsibility for the Museum’s front-of-house, but
also took on the role of marketing assistant. She assisted Kate White with access matters and
Museum events, developed an e-mail database, promoted the Museum through various
media, and designed the Museum’s printed materials. She attended training on developing
audiences and the use of targeted marketing. She continued her studies for the diploma course
of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
21

Haas Ezzet continued to represent the University museums’ IT staff at meetings of the
Committee for Museums and Scientific Collections (CMSC) and, in turn, to represent the
CMSC at meetings of the University’s Information Communication and Technology
Committee (ICTC).
Clare Harris spent the reporting year on research leave, funded by the award of a British
Academy / Leverhulme Trust senior research fellowship, during which she worked on a book
provisionally entitled ‘The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics and the
Representation of Tibet’. She made research trips to Scotland, India, China, and Tibet, gave
lectures at the University of Vienna, and presented a paper at the International Association of
Tibetan Studies conference in Bonn. Following the completion of the ‘Tibet Visual History’
project in October 2006, she gave several talks about the project’s website.
Dan Hicks joined the staff of the Museum, from the University of Bristol, in the closing days
of the reporting year as Lecturer-Curator in the Archaeology of the Modern Period, in
succession to Professor Chris Gosden. He is focusing his initial efforts on making
preparations to survey the Museum’s archaeological collections and to submit a range of
grant applications to fund research on them.
John Hobart continued to work across the four University museums, overseeing the use of
Renaissance funding and advising on cross-museum policy and planning. During the
reporting year much of his time was spent carrying out advocacy in preparation for the
announcement of the government’s comprehensive spending review in the autumn, which
will precede a new round of Renaissance funding. He continued to serve on the University
museums’ education committee as well as to attend meetings of the Committee for Museums
and Scientific Collections, and reported to other committees and panels as required. He also
continued to serve on the Thames Valley Museum Group (and its sub-committees for
strategy, grants, marketing, and learning), on Oxfordshire Museums Council (and its strategy
group, the Oxfordshire Museums Joint Working Group), and the Audience Development
South East committee.
Hélène La Rue continued to work on the Museum’s music collections as time allowed,
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. In addition to extensive teaching commitments in both music and anthropology, she
continued to lead, with Chris Gosden, the ESRC-funded ‘The Other Within’ project on the
Museum’s English collections, curated with colleagues Community Music and Dance—the
first special exhibition in the gallery in the new extension, and worked closely with
collections and conservation staff in planning and preparing for the packing and removal of
the music and sound collections from Banbury Road to the new repository. She died in
service on 13 July 2007 aged fifty-five.
Zena McGreevy continued to manage and supervise research visits to the Museum’s object
collections throughout the year. In addition, she managed a team of contract and volunteer
staff to sort, correctly identify, and develop a new locations system for the Museum’s
collections of stone tools and related material in preparation for their removal to a new
repository. She also worked with Adrian Vizor to complete the redisplay of the ‘Miniature
Weapons’ and ‘Ball Games’ cases on the Museum’s lower gallery. In November 2006 she
couriered the return to the Museum of a long-term loan to the Ulster Museum in Belfast. In
22

March 2007 she attended the Museums Association conference ‘Crowded House: Rethinking
Stored Collections’, hosted by the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, and in
July she attended a training course on ‘Object Handling and Packing’, also organized by the
Museums Association. In June she provided advice to National Museums Scotland about its
Australian collections and its proposed new displays.
Andrew McLellan continued to manage the Museum’s ever-expanding education service. He
contributed to the collaborative process of developing a joint education service across the
University’s museums. In addition to his regular teaching activities, he was much involved in
the planning for the Community Music and Dance exhibition and in the development of the
Museum’s film-making projects.
Chris Morton continued to hold a dual post as Career Development Fellow and Head of
Photograph and Manuscript Collections. He continued to pursue his research on the
Museum’s collections as time allowed. As part of his fellowship he organized, with Gilbert
Oteyo, a series of community exhibitions of the Museum’s photograph collections in western
Kenya (see back cover). He contributed two lectures to the ‘Cultural Representations’ lecture
series, supervised an undergraduate dissertation in Archaeology & Anthropology, and coconvened
the Museum’s Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography seminar series in
Michaelmas and Trinity terms; with Gilbert Oteyo he presented a paper in the latter series on
the community exhibitions project. In July he attended a two-day conference, organized by
MLA and UNESCO at the Museum in Docklands, on museum collaboration, where he was
able to develop links with African museum professionals and to discuss potential future
research projects on the Museum’s collections.
Julia Nicholson continued to oversee the Museum’s loans programme, updating and
developing the Museum’s loan agreement documents and overseeing arrangements for the
eight loan movements during the year. She also continued to serve as chair of the Museum’s
Documentation Committee. From October 2006 she was again heavily involved in the
Museum’s latest Designation Challenge Fund project ‘Cutting Edge’, overseeing the
recruitment and management of the project team and working alongside Kate White to linemanage
the project’s Interpretation Officer. She gave a number of talks about the Treasured
Textiles exhibition to members of, amongst other organizations, the Lace Guild, the Textile
Society Collectors Group, and the Oxford Asian Textiles Group.
Michael O’Hanlon continued to be occupied with the administrative work entailed in running
the Museum. He oversaw submission of the successful bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund,
continued to serve on the strategy group of the University’s Academic Services and
University Collections Group, the committee of the University Museums Group UK, the
management team of the South East Hub, and as vice-president of the Paul Raymaekers
Foundation. He gave evidence to the parliamentary select committee on museum funding. He
continued, although with reduced involvement, to contribute to teaching in Archaeology &
Anthropology.
Laura Peers served on the Board of Governors of the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the
Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures, founded by Professor Ruth Phillips, Carleton
University, to make Great Lakes artefacts and knowledge about them accessible to scholars,
and to form new research partnerships between Native communities and museums. She also
collaborated on the related database project. She continued to serve on the Department of
23

Media, Culture and Sport’s Human Remains Advisory Group and advised the National
Maritime Museum on its ‘Atlantic World’ gallery redevelopment. She presented a number of
conference papers, including: ‘On the Treatment of Dead Enemies…’, at the 2007 Garrod
Seminar, Cambridge University Department of Archaeology; and ‘Finding Long-Lost
Relatives (Making the Absent Present): On the Potentialities of Ethnographic Collections in
Ireland’ and ‘The Globe in a Glass Case: Ethnographic Collections in Ireland’, both at the
Anthropological Association of Ireland conference held in Belfast, 11–12 May 2007. She
obtained a grant of $2,000 from the Government of Canada for research into the nineteenthcentury
artist Peter Rindisbacher. She was also awarded a grant of £7,500 from the British
Academy for the pilot project ‘Digital Access for First Nations Heritage in UK Museums’.
She convened the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series in Material Anthropology and
Museum Ethnography, with Chris Morton, and continued to tutor, lecture, and examine
undergraduates in Archaeology & Anthropology as well as graduate students in Material
Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and in Visual Anthropology.
Alison Petch continued work as a researcher on the ESRC-funded project ‘The Other Within:
The Anthropology of Englishness’ and continued to serve as the Museum’s Registrar. She
also assisted with packing part of the English stone tool collections, which provided a good
opportunity to review these collections more closely for the ‘Other Within’ project. As in
previous years, she provided training for new members of staff and volunteers on the
collections management databases. She also contributed to the series of introductory talks for
the graduate students in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. She was elected
to serve as a member of the committee of the Museum Ethnographers Group. She visited a
number of museums and collections during the year: for example, in November 2006 she
studied the Spencer and Gillen collections at Manchester Museum, while in June 2007 she
provided advice to National Museums Scotland about its Australian collections and its
proposed new displays. In April 2007, with Chris Wingfield, she gave a seminar in the
Museum’s lunchtime series on the ‘Other Within’ project. In May she presented a paper at
the Museum Ethnographers Group annual conference at the National Maritime Museum
entitled ‘Commercial Gain? The Relationships between Ethnographic Collectors, Dealers and
Auction Houses: A Case Study’.
Heather Richardson assisted with conservation and artefact-handling training for Museum
staff and students and supervised conservation interns. Following external assessment in
October 2006, she became an accredited conservator (ACR) through the Institute of
Conservation in March 2007. In November 2006 she attended the two-day conference ‘Don’t
Panic: Dealing with Hazardous Materials in Museum Collections’, organized by the Care of
Collections and Metals sections of the Institute of Conservation, at Birmingham Museum and
Art Gallery. In April 2007 she attended a one-day seminar ‘Responding to Climate Change’.
In June she attended a three-day course on the ‘Preservation and Conservation of
Photographs’ hosted by the Museum. In November 2006 and May 2007 she attended two
training days as part of the Emergency Response Unit for the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire,
and Oxfordshire region. In February 2007 she was invited to join the Board of Trustees of the
Leather Conservation Centre.
Mandy Sadan took up a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College in October 2006. In
January 2007 she commenced a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the
Museum. Her project, for which she has been awarded a grant of £211,116, is entitled
‘“Economies of Ethnicity”: Material, Visual and Oral Cultures and the Formation of Ethnic
24

Identities in the Burmese Colonial and Postcolonial State, 1824–2004’. During the year she
co-founded the Asian Borderlands Research Network. She lectured to anthropology students
at the University of Aarhus, Denmark on ethnicity in Burma and co-organized a seminar
presentation by Professor Robert Anderson of Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, on
transitions from ‘Hot War to Cold War’ in the Burma/China/India region for the Centre of
South East Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Towards the end of
the year, the major focus of her work was on preparing for an extended period of fieldwork in
Thailand, Burma, China, and India from October 2007. During this work she will be making
research use of some of the Museum’s photograph collections, including in particular those
of G. E. Harvey.
Julie Scott-Jackson continued as Director of the PADMAC Unit and supervised the Unit’s
fieldwork and research programmes. She directed extensive programmes of fieldwork,
including excavations, investigations, and geophysical surveys in Sharjah (UAE), Abu Dhabi
(UAE), and Dummer Clump (Hampshire, UK). Alongside post-excavation analyses, she
worked on a paper that addresses the geo-archaeology of the Palaeolithic site of Rookery
Farm, Lower Kingswood, Surrey. She also provided further extracts from her ‘Gazetteer of
Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Artefacts Found in Relation to Deposits Mapped as Claywith-flints
on Chalk Downlands of Southern England’ to support the Solent Thames
Archaeological Research Framework. 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.
Birgitte Speake organized and supervised sessions on conservation and artefact handling for
Museum staff, conservation interns, and graduate students in Material Anthropology and
Museum Ethnography. She also oversaw the conservation section’s move into its new studio
in the new extension.
Antigone Thompson attended a training session organized by the Association of Cultural
Enterprises (Museum Publishing Forum) at the British Library. She also completed thirteen
Oxford University accountancy training courses.
Kate White continued to serve as a member, for a fourth term, of the Museums Association
Ethics Committee. As a member of the Museums Marketing Group (part of the Arts
Marketing Association), she helped to organize the Arts Marketing Association Museums
and Galleries annual seminar ‘Because We’re Worth It’ at Tate Modern. She continued to
build up the Museum’s links with the city of Oxford. She was invited to the city’s cultural
forum and participated in the cultural inspection workshops, part of the self-assessment of
cultural services by the city council. She also attended, as a stakeholder, the arts and cultural
development workshop run by Oxford Inspires, helping to shape the city’s cultural and
community strategies. During the year she also agreed to sit on the EU-funded European Arts
Management Programme Advisory Group led by Oxford Brookes University. Her continued
professional development included attending: ‘Getting Engaged, Museums Libraries and
Archives Working with their Communities’, an MLA seminar held at Pallant House;
‘Community Engagement’, training organized by MLA South East; an ‘Interpretation
Consultation Day’, at the Ashmolean Museum; ‘New Audiences, Different Research?
Moving into 21st Century Visitor Studies’, organized by the Visitor Studies group at the
British Library; and ‘Looking Back, Looking Forward’, organized by the Museums and
25

Galleries Disability Association. In early 2007 her job was retitled Access and Public
Relations Manager.
Cathy Wright continued to manage the construction of the new extension, the refurbishment
of the ICL (Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory) space as a repository for the Museum’s music
and stone tool collections, the refurbishment of other ICL space for joint use with the
OUMNH, and the preparation of plans for the HLF-funded remodelling of the Museum’s
entrance. In addition, she continued to manage the administration of the Museum, including
its finances, health and safety compliance, and personnel processes. As part of that
management, she attended a number of divisional and university-wide meetings as a
representative of the Museum. She also undertook additional training on new aspects of the
University’s finance system. As part of her management of the Museum’s trading activities,
she introduced a new policy covering the sale and reproduction of images to be implemented
in the new financial year. In collaboration with Kate White she began work on the Museum’s
new ‘way-finding’ project to provide improved signage and orientation for visitors to the
Museum. She assisted teaching and research staff in the preparation of grant applications to
research councils and the Director and other staff with grant applications to DCMS/Wolfson
and HLF. With the assistance of other Museum staff, and in collaboration with the
Oxfordshire Education Business Partnership scheme, she organized work-experience
placements for students from local Oxford schools and colleges. She produced and
maintained the Museum’s risk register and, as required by legislation, a number of health and
safety risk assessments, including a detailed fire risk assessment for the ‘In a Different Light’
event. She continued to be an Associate Member of the Association for Project Managers.
Chris Wingfield returned to the staff of the Museum in September 2006, joining the ESRCfunded
project ‘The Other Within: An Anthropology of Englishness’ as a project researcher.
His research has focused on the early publications of the Folk-Lore Society as well as the
Museum’s collections from Somerset and their connections with E. B. Tylor. He assisted in
the teaching of an optional paper for undergraduates and postgraduates on ‘Material Culture
and the Anthropology of Things’, run by Chris Gosden in Hilary Term. During the year he
presented a number of papers: at the conference of the European Association of Social
Anthropologists in Bristol, at the ‘Beyond Text’ conference in Manchester, at two meetings
of the Oxford University Museums Collections History Group, as well as (jointly with Alison
Petch) at the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series. He was also selected for the
‘NaMu’ workshop on National Museum Narratives at the University of Leicester (funded by
a European Union ‘Marie Curie’ grant), where he presented a poster relating to his research.
He also continued to serve as treasurer of the Museum Ethnographers Group and attended its
annual conference at the National Maritime Museum, as well as guest editing the conference
section of the 2007 issue of the group’s annual Journal of Museum Ethnography.
ANNEX E
STAFF PUBLICATIONS
Those publications relating directly to the Museum’s collections are indicated by [*].
Helen Adams, ‘The Cutting Edge’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford,
Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), p. 6. [*]
26

Gali Beiner, ‘Indian Mica Paintings’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford,
Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), p. 7. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Flints, Flakes, Adzes, Axes, and Cores’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 59 (July 2007), p. 9. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Lienhardt’s Photographs’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford,
Newsletter, no. 57 (November 2006), p. 10. [*]
Jeremy Coote, ‘Grave Figure. South-Western Sudan’, in Arts of Africa and Oceania:
Highlights from the Musée Barbier-Mueller, edited by Laurence Mattet, Geneva: Musée
Barbier-Mueller (2007), pp. 249, 391.
Jeremy Coote, Review of Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, a
new gallery at the British Museum, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 19 (March 2007),
pp. 135–41.
Jeremy Coote, Review of Mana: Ornament and Adornment from the Pacific, an exhibition at
the Cuming Museum, Southwark, London, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 19 (March
2007), pp. 156–60.
Jeremy Coote, Review of James Cook: Gifts and Treasures from the South Seas—The
Cook/Forster Collection Göttingen / Gaben und Schätze aus der Südsee—Die Göttinger
Sammlung Cook/Forster, edited by Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin and Gundolf Krüger (Munich
and New York, 1988), Pacific Arts, n.s., Vol. 6 (2007), pp. 41–6.
Elizabeth Cory-Pearce, ‘Locating Authorship: Creativity and Borrowing in the Writing of
Ethnography and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge’, in Creativity and Cultural
Improvisation (Association of Social Anthropologists Monographs, no. 44), edited by
Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold, Oxford: Berg (2007), pp. 127–49. [*]
Elizabeth Cory-Pearce, Review of Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and
Self, by Greg Dening (Philadelphia, 2004), Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 26, no. 4 (2006),
pp. 490–91.
Elizabeth Cory-Pearce, Review of Pasifika Styles, an exhibition at the University of
Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Journal of Museum Ethnography,
no. 19 (March 2007), pp. 160–65.
Eric Edwards, ‘Mermaids, Sirens or Goddesses?’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum,
Oxford, Newsletter, no. 57 (November 2006), p. 9. [*]
Eric Edwards, ‘Ancient Egyptian Dwarf God: Ptah Sokar’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), p. 4. [*]
Clare Harris, ‘British and German Photography in Tibet in the 1930s: The Diplomatic, the
Ethnographic, and Other Modes’, in Tibet in 1938–1939: Photographs from the Ernst
Schäfer Expedition to Tibet, edited by Isrun Engelhardt, Chicago: Serindia Publications
(2007), pp. 73–90.
27

Clare Harris, ‘The Buddha Goes Global: Some Thoughts towards a Transnational Art
History’, in Art History, Vol. 29, no. 4 (2006), pp. 698–720 (also in Location, edited by
Deborah Cherry and Fintan Cullen, Oxford: Blackwell (2007), pp. 166–88).
Clare Harris, ‘From Lhasa to London: Gonkar Gyatso’, in Art Asia Pacific, no. 50 (Fall
2006), pp. 110–13.
Clare Harris, ‘Encounters in Intercultural Spaces: Gonkar Gyatso and Peter Towse’, in Oh!
What a Beautiful Day: Peter Towse and Gonkar Gyatso’s Shared Visions, London, Rossi &
Rossi (2006), pp. 10–13.
Dan Hicks, ‘The Garden of the World’: An Historical Archaeology of Sugar Landscapes in
the Eastern Caribbean (Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology, 3; BAR
International Series, 1632), Oxford: Archaeopress (2007).
Dan Hicks (edited, with Mary C. Beaudry), The Cambridge Companion to Historical
Archaeology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006).
Dan Hicks (with Mary C. Beaudry), ‘Introduction: The Place of Historical Archaeology’, in
The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C.
Beaudry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006), pp. 1–9.
Dan Hicks (with Audrey Horning), ‘Historical Archaeology and Buildings’, in The
Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C.
Beaudry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006), pp. 273–92.
Dan Hicks, ‘From Material Culture to Material Life’, in Journal of Iberian Archaeology, nos
9/10 (2007), pp. 245–55.
Dan Hicks, Review of The Politics of Archaeology and Identity in a Global Context, by
Susan Kane (Boston, Mass., 2003), in Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 32, no. 3
(2006), pp. 665–7.
Dan Hicks (with Olivia Hicks), ‘Urban Ecologies of Hope’, in ‘Situations Papers: Responses
to Heather and Ivan Morison’s I lost her near Fantasy Island. Life has not been the same
(2006)’, part of the Situations website of the University of the West of England (2006), at
Hélène La Rue, ‘“Hello, Here’s Music, How Did That Get Here?” Presenting Music to the
Unsuspecting Museum’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 19 (March 2007), pp. 43–56.
[*]
Zena McGreevy, ‘Update on the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Museum Ethnographers Group
Newsletter (January 2007), [pp. 3–5]. [*]
Zena McGreevy (with Adrian Vizor), ‘Exciting Changes!’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 59 (July 2007), p. 9. [*]
28

Chris Morton, ‘Remembering the House: Memory and Materiality in Northern Botswana’,
Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 12, no. 2 (July 2007), pp. 157–79.
Julia Nicholson, ‘Treasured Textiles: Cloth and Clothing Around the World’, Journal for
Weavers, Spinners and Dyers, no. 219 (September 2006), pp. 20–23. [*]
Laura Peers, Playing Ourselves: Interpreting Native Histories at Historical Reconstructions
(American Association for State and Local History Book Series), Lanham, MD: Altamira
Press, Rowan & Littlefield Publishers (2007).
Laura Peers, ‘On Missionaries, Artists, Bears, and “Grandfathers”: Peter Rindisbacher’s
Paintings, John White’s Collection, and the Red River Ojibwa’, in Three Centuries of
Woodlands Indian Art: A Collection of Essays (European Review of Native American
Studies Monographs, 3), edited by J. C. H. King and Christian Feest, Altenstadt: ZKF
Publishers (2007), pp. 103–12.
Alison Petch, ‘Chance and Certitude: Pitt Rivers and his First Collection’, Journal of the
History of Collections, Vol. 18, no. 2 (2006), pp. 257–66.
Alison Petch, ‘Notes and Queries and the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Museum Anthropology, Vol.
30, no. 1 (Spring 2007), pp. 21–39. [*]
Alison Petch, Review of Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums,
by Ken Arnold (Aldershot, 2006), Museum Anthropology, Vol. 30, no.1 (Spring 2007), pp.
64–6.
Alison Petch, ‘Collections Research and the Web: Reflections on a Successful (Half-)Day’s
Work at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, in Museum Anthropology Weblog (2007), online at
. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Notes on the Opening of the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Journal of Museum
Ethnography, no. 19 (March 2007), pp. 101–12. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Paddy Cahill of Oenpelli’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford,
Newsletter, no. 57 (November 2006), p. 8. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Isolation and Anthropology: The Correspondence of Patrick Byrne’, The
Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), p. 8. [*]
Alison Petch, ‘Upholding the Law—Central Australian Style’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 59 (July 2007), p. 8. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘One Last Time with Feeling: The Final Move of the Pitt Rivers
Museum Conservation Department’, Icon News [The Institute of Conservation], no. 9 (March
2007), p. 3. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘Raven Travelling’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford,
Newsletter, no. 57 (November 2006), p. 9. [*]
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Heather Richardson, ‘Not So Friendly Visitors’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum,
Oxford, Newsletter, no. 57 (November 2006), p. 11. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘One Last Time with Feeling’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum,
Oxford, Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), p. 2. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘Restoration of the Noh Masks’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum,
Oxford, Newsletter, no. 59 (July 2007), p. 6. [*]
Heather Richardson, ‘Conservation of the Noh Masks’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 59 (July 2007), p. 6 [*]
Mandy Sadan (co-editor with François Robinne), Social Dynamics in the Highlands of
Southeast Asia: Reconsidering Political Systems of Highland Burma by E. R. Leach
(Handbook of Oriental Studies / Handbuch der Orientalisk, Section 3, Southeast Asia, Vol.
18), Leiden: Brill (2007).
Mandy Sadan, ‘Translating Gumlau: History, the “Kachin” and Edmund Leach’, in Social
Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering Political Systems of Highland
Burma by E. R. Leach (Handbook of Oriental Studies / Handbuch der Orientalisk, Section 3,
Southeast Asia, Vol. 18), edited by François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, Leiden: Brill
(2007), pp. 67–87.
Mandy Sadan (with François Robinne), ‘Preface’, in Social Dynamics in the Highlands of
Southeast Asia: Reconsidering Political Systems of Highland Burma by E. R. Leach
(Handbook of Oriental Studies / Handbuch der Orientalisk, Section 3, Southeast Asia, Vol.
18), edited by François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, Leiden: Brill (2007), pp. ix–xv.
Mandy Sadan (with François Robinne), ‘Postscript: Reconsidering the Dynamics of Ethnicity
through Foucault’s Concept of “Spaces of Dispersion”’, in Social Dynamics in the Highlands
of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering Political Systems of Highland Burma by E. R. Leach
(Handbook of Oriental Studies / Handbuch der Orientalisk, Section 3, Southeast Asia, Vol.
18), edited by François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, Leiden: Brill (2007), pp. 299–308.
Mandy Sadan, ‘Constructing and Contesting the Category “Kachin” in the Colonial and Post-
Colonial Burmese State’, in Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Burma (NIAS Studies in Asian
Topics, 39), edited by Mikael Gravers, Copenhagen: NIAS Press (2007), pp. 34–76.
Adrian Vizor (with Zena McGreevy), ‘Exciting Changes!’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford, Newsletter, no. 59 (July 2007), p. 9. [*]
Christopher Wingfield, ‘“Feeling the Vibes: Dealing with Intangible Heritage”—An
Introduction’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 19 (March 2007), pp. 9–20.
Cathy Wright, ‘Almost There’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Newsletter,
no. 58 (March 2007), p. 1.
Cathy Wright, ‘Lurking in the Garden’, The Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford,
Newsletter, no. 58 (March 2007), pp. 6–7. [*]
30

ANNEX F
MUSEUM SEMINARS IN MATERIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND MUSEUM ETHNOGRAPHY
13 October 2006: Led by Michael O’Hanlon (PRM) ‘Introduction to Current Projects at the
Pitt Rivers Museum’.
20 October 2006: Thomas Shaw (ex Fort Snelling Historic Site, Minnesota), ‘Dakota Sioux
Women’s Dress and its Cross-Cultural Development throughout the Nineteenth Century’.
3 November 2006: Marius Kwint (History of Art and Centre for Visual Studies, University of
Oxford), ‘Desiring Structures: Exhibiting the Dendritic Form’.
10 November 2006: Elizabeth Edwards (University of the Arts London), ‘Photography as
Public History in Britain, 1885–1918’.
17 November 2006: Sam Alberti (Manchester Museum, University of Manchester),
‘Constructing Disciplines in the University Museum’.
24 November 2006: Amy Staniforth (University of Bristol and British Empire and
Commonwealth Museum), ‘Returning Zinj: Popular and Museological Consumption of the
Objects and Landscapes of Human Origins’.
1 December 2006: Elizabeth Hallam (University of Aberdeen), ‘Material Cultures of
Anatomy: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives’.
19 January 2007: Elizabeth Cory-Pearce (PRM), ‘Anthropology Begins at Home? Makereti’s
Ethnographic Manuscripts at the Pitt Rivers Museum’.
26 January 2007: Andrew McLellan (PRM), ‘“Can We Film the Shrunken Heads?”:
Interpretation, Sound, and Filmscapes in the Pitt Rivers Museum’.
2 February 2007: Laura Peers (PRM), ‘Heritage and Healing: Exploring the Virtual
Repatriation of First Nations Material Culture’.
9 February 2007: Vibha Joshi (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of
Oxford), ‘Naga Textiles as Diasporic Objects in the Field and in Museums during and since
Colonialism’.
16 February 2007: Claire Warrior (National Maritime Museum), ‘Displaying Atlantic
Histories at the National Maritime Museum: The Development of a New Permanent Gallery’.
23 February 2007: Nicholas Thomas (Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology), Sean Mallon (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa), and Peter
Brunt (University of Victoria, Wellington, New Zealand), ‘Rethinking Indigenous Art
History in the Pacific’.
2 March 2007: Roger Sansi-Roca (Goldsmiths College, University of London), ‘Indexes and
Symbols: Candomble Altars and their Museographic Representation’.
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9 March 2007: Bruce Bernstein (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC), ‘Un-Tie the
Moorings, Re-Inventing and Re-Vitalizing the Museum Object’.
27 April 2007: Chris Wingfield (PRM) and Alison Petch (PRM), ‘The Other Within: An
Anthropology of Englishness’.
4 May 2007: Frank Korom (Boston University), ‘Bengali Scroll Painters and the Challenge of
Modernity’.
11 May 2007: Dean Sully (University College London), ‘Decolonizing Conservation,
Decolonizing Hinemihi, the Maori Meeting House at Clandon Park, UK’.
18 May 2007: Gilbert Oteyo (Oxford) and Chris Morton (PRM), ‘Exhibiting Photographic
Histories in Western Kenya’.
ANNEX G
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.
ANNEX H
FRIENDS OF THE PITT RIVERS MUSEUM
REPORT BY MARGARET DYKE (SECRETARY)
After the exuberance of the past two reports this one starts rather quietly. Despite the
limitations of the Narnia-style ‘wardrobe’ link between the old and the new, on 9 December
the Friends were able to use the new entrance in Robinson Close to gain access, via the food
and drinks tables, to the familiar, dimly lit Museum. This year the emphasis was on family
members, with an earlier starting time and entertainment provided by magician Uncle Wiggy,
who enthralled his young, and not so young, audience with his virtuosity. The highlight of the
Christmas raffle was the Giant Lizard Lamp of which Ander Parker is now the proud owner.
The evening was a happy, well-attended occasion—and someone was heard to say, ‘the
Friends do a good party’.
Barbara Isaac, the Programme and Events Secretary, organized a varied selection of
talks throughout the year. This began in September with a gallery talk by Julia Nicholson
who spoke to a group of Friends about the exhibition Treasured Textiles: Cloth and Clothing
Around the World. The first Wednesday talk was then, appropriately, ‘Textiles, Dress and
Identity in Kachchh District, Gujarat, India’, by Eiluned Edwards of the Victoria and Albert
32

Museum, London. Later in the month, Dr Diana Martin, of the Institute of Social and Cultural
Anthropology, talked on ‘Water Buckets, Baby Baths and Coffee Tables’. In November, Dr
Paul Oliver, from Oxford Brookes University, gave the first Friends talk in the new lecture
theatre on ‘Vernacular Architecture in the New Century’. The New Year began with Dr
Stephanie Dalley, of the Oriental Institute, on the subject of ‘The Hanging Gardens of
Babylon’. Valentine’s Day was celebrated with a fascinating talk on ‘Exploring Meaning in
West Polynesian Weapons’, given by Andrew Mills of the Museum. The final talk was in
March: ‘Acadie: The Archaeology of a Lost Colony in North-Eastern North America’, by
John Fowler from the Institute of Archaeology. In July, Barbara persuaded her daughter Dr
Gwyneira Isaac from Arizona State University, to give Friends an extra talk entitled ‘Tribal
Museums and Native American Knowledges’. Barbara is to be thanked for her commitment
and enthusiasm in arranging such a fascinating programme for the year.
On 23 May, the Beatrice Blackwood lecture was delivered by Marina Warner, writer,
critic, and professor of literature at the University of Essex. In ‘Dreams of Empire, Magic
Powers, Spirit Travel, Soul Theft’ she kept her audience enthralled with her expert
knowledge of the supernatural worldwide and through the centuries. Our thanks go to
Professor Mayer for hosting this event at the Said Business School, and to Rosemary Lee for
her impeccable organization.
As usual, throughout the year a faithful band of Friends continued to help at the
‘Family Friendly’ and ‘Pitt Stop’ sessions, and also to give support to the education service
guiding school groups around the Museum. On 19 May, numerous Friends were also
involved in helping with the main event of Museums and Galleries Month, when the Pitt
Rivers joined with the Natural History Museum to celebrate ‘In a Different Light’.
At the AGM on 20 June four new members were elected to Council: Terry Bremble,
Martin Burgess, Rosemary King, and Colin Langton. Sally Odd agreed to continue as
Treasurer. It was noted that the final payment of £7,500 pledged for the ‘Partnership with
Palin Appeal’ had been given to the Museum and that £1,000 had been awarded to Gilbert
Oteyo to enable him to continue his research in Kenya. The Membership Secretary Anna
Kingston-Jones retired earlier in the year and was replaced by Rosemary King, who will be
joined in January by Barbara Isaac. We are very grateful to Cathy Wright, who valiantly kept
the paperwork under control until a new Secretary was elected. Richard Briant, the Chairman,
thanked members of Council for their commitment and hard work during the year, before the
evening concluded with a passionate talk from Dr Laura Peers called ‘Seeking Knowledge,
Seeking Life: PRM Collections and First Nations Communities in Canada’.
By the end, a year that had started so quietly was gaining momentum. The Director was
able to tell us that the bid for a Heritage Lottery Fund grant to remodel and improve the
Museum’s entrance had been successful, and that subject to the usual conditions work should
start in 2008. This was closely followed by more good news, as we learned that the Friends’
Newsletter was runner-up in the British Association of Friends of Museums newsletter
competition (under 500 members category) for 2007. It is gratifying that our Newsletter finds
an appreciative audience beyond the membership for the three issues produced each year.
33