Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884-1945

by Chris Gosden, Frances Larson

Overview

This book explores the early history of the Pitt Rivers Museum and its collections. Many thousands of people collected objects for the Museum between its foundation in 1884 and 1945, and together they and the objects they collected provide a series of insights into the early history of archaeology and anthropology. The volume also includes individual biographies and group histories of the people originally making and using the objects, as well as a snapshot of the British empire. The main focus for the book derives from the computerized catalogues of the Museum and attendant archival information. Together these provide a unique insight into the growth of a well-known institution and its place within broader intellectual frameworks of the Victorian period and early twentieth century. It also explores current ideas on the nature of relationships, particularly those between people and things.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199225897
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/09/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Chris Gosden has worked in the Pitt Rivers Museum since 1994 as a curator/lecturer, having previously held a lectureship at La Trobe University Melbourne. He has just been elected Professor of European Archaeology, Oxford. He has carried out fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Turkmenistan and various parts of Europe. He has published on museum collections, archaeology and colonialism and the links between archaeology and anthropology. He is currently starting a project on Englishness and one on late Iron Age art.

Frances Larson completed a D. Phil. on the collection of Sir Henry Wellcome, which she is now writing up as a book. She continues to carry out research on the history of anthropology, museums and material culture.

Table of Contents

1. What is a Museum? 2. Museum Ethnography: the Field Site and our Informants3. Participatory Anthropology: Museums as Emergent Entities4. Objects collect people: Past Perspectives on the Mind and the Material World5. Collecting Rhythms: Typological Methods in Archaeology and Anthropology6. Material Anthropology: Generating Knowledge in the Museum7. Beyond the Boundaries of the Museum: Disciplinary Reconfigureation at Oxford8. The Pitt Rivers Museum Stretched Out: Collecting in the Field9. Spatial Transformations: Representing the World at the Pitt Rivers Museum